“Not quite,” Benton says. “With all due respect to Lucy, I have access to a few bright people, too. Not as bright as she is, but they’ll do in a pinch. What you’re looking at is a file that’s been deleted and then recovered. It’s not the file you saw, the one Lucy found after tricking the system admin password out of Josh. That particular file was several copies removed from this. Several later.”

She taps the down arrow and reads. “It looks the same.”

“The text isn’t what’s different. It’s this.” He touches the file name at the top of the screen. “Do you notice the same thing I did when Josh first showed me this?”

“Josh? I hope you trust him.”

“I do, and for a good reason. He did the same thing Lucy did. Got into something he shouldn’t, and birds of a feather. Thankfully, they’re allies and he forgives her for duping him. In fact, he was impressed.”

“File name’s MSNote-ten- twenty-one- oh-six,” Scarpetta says. “From which I assume MSNotes are the initials of the patient and the notes Dr. Maroni made. And ten-twenty- one-oh- six is October twenty-first, two thousand six.”

“You just said it. You said MSNotes and the file name is MSNote.” He touches the screen again. “A file that’s been copied at least once, and inadvertently the name got changed. A typo. I don’t know how, exactly. Or maybe it was deliberate, so he didn’t keep copying over the same file. I do that sometimes if I don’t want to lose an earlier draft. What’s important is that when Josh recovered every deleted file pertaining to the patient of interest, we find the earliest draft was written two weeks ago.”

“Maybe it’s just the earliest draft he stored on that particular hard drive?” she suggests. “Or maybe he opened the file two weeks ago and saved it, which would have changed the date stamp? But I suppose that begs the question of why would he have looked at those notes before we even knew he had seen the Sandman as a patient? When Dr. Maroni left for Rome, we’d never heard of the Sandman.”

“There’s that,” Benton says. “And there’s the fabrication of the file. Because it is a fabrication. Yes, Paulo wrote those notes right before he left for Rome. He wrote them the very day Dr. Self was admitted to McLean on April twenty-seventh. In fact, several hours before she arrived at the hospital. And the reason I can say this with a reasonable degree of certainty is because Paulo may have emptied his trash, but even those deletions aren’t gone. Josh recovered them.”

He opens another file, this one a rough draft of the notes Scarpetta is familiar with, but in this version, the patient’s initials aren’t MS but WR.