“He did talk to her. In her apartment. Mind you, this is what he told me. And she told him he was bad for Drew, an unhealthy influence, and she would continue to advise her to stay away from him. He got increasingly distraught and angry as he told me all this, and now I see I should have known better. I should have come over here immediately, sat down with him. Done something.”

“What else happened with Dr. Self?” Scarpetta asks. “Drew went to New York, then left for Rome the next day. Barely twenty-four hours later, she disappeared and ended up murdered, quite possibly by the same person who murdered Lydia. And I’ve got to head to the airport. You’re welcome to come. If we have any luck, we’re going to need you anyway.”

“The airport?” He gets up from the bench. “Now?”

“I don’t want us to wait another day. Her body’s in worse shape every hour.”

They start walking.

“Now? And I’m supposed to go with you in the middle of the night, and I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Hollings puzzles.

“Heat signatures,” she says. “Infrared. Any thermal variation is going to show up better in the dark, and maggots can raise the temperature of a decomposing body as much as twenty degrees centigrade. It’s been more than two days, because when he left her house, I’m quite sure she wasn’t alive. Not based on what we found. What else happened with Dr. Self? Did Lupano tell you anything else?”

They’re almost to her car.

“He said he was extraordinarily insulted,” Hollings says. “She said very degrading things to him and wouldn’t tell him how to find Drew. After he left, he called Dr. Self again. This was supposed to be the greatest moment in his career, and she’d just wrecked it, and then the final blow. She told him Drew was staying with her, had been inside the apartment the entire time he was begging Dr. Self to undo what she’d done. I won’t be going with you. You don’t need me, and I, well, I want to check on Rose.”

Scarpetta unlocks her car as she thinks about the timing. Drew spent the night in Dr. Self’s penthouse, and the next day flew to Rome. The day after that, the seventeenth, she disappeared. The eighteenth, her body was found. The twenty-seventh, Scarpetta and Benton were in Rome investigating Drew’s murder. That same day, Dr. Self was admitted to McLean, and Dr. Maroni fabricated a file that was supposed to be notes he took when he saw the Sandman as a patient—something Benton feels sure is a lie.

Scarpetta slides behind the wheel. Hollings is a gentleman and isn’t going to leave until she starts the engine and locks her door.