No wonder Marino finally snapped. Yes, he was drunk and hyped up on hormones, and probably Shandy and Dr. Self helped drive him to it. But if Scarpetta had taken a good look at him all these years, she probably could have saved him from himself and prevented a violation that was hers, too. She violated him, too, because she wasn’t a truthful or trustworthy friend. She didn’t tell him no until he finally went too far, and she should have told him no some twenty years ago.

I’m not in love with you, and I never will be, Marino. You’re not my type, Marino. It doesn’t mean I’m better than you, Marino. It just means I can’t.

She scripts what she should have said and demands an answer to why she didn’t. He might leave her. She might lose his constant presence, as annoying as it sometimes is. She might inflict on him that very thing she has done such a fine job evading: personal rejection and loss, and now she has both and so does he.

The elevator doors open on the second floor, and she follows an empty corridor to a series of labs that are individually sealed off by metal doors and airlocks. In an outer room, she puts on a white disposable gown, a hairnet and cap, shoe covers, gloves, and a face shield. She passes through another sealed area that decontaminates with ultraviolet light, and from there she enters a fully automated lab, where DNA is extracted and replicated—and where Lucy, also in white from head to toe, said to meet her for reasons unknown. She’s sitting near a fume hood, talking to a scientist who is covered up, too, and therefore unrecognizable at a glance.

“Aunt Kay?” Lucy says. “I’m sure you remember Aaron. Our interim director.”

The face behind the plastic shield smiles and suddenly is familiar, and the three of them sit.

“I know you’re a forensic specialist,” Scarpetta says. “But I didn’t know you had a new position.” She asks what happened to the previous lab director.

“Quit. Because of what Dr. Self put on the Internet,” Lucy says, anger in her eyes.

“Quit?” Scarpetta asks, baffled. “Just like that?”

“Thinks I’m going to die and scuttled off to take another job. Anyway, he was a jerk, and I’d been wanting to get rid of him. Kind of ironic. The bitch did me a favor. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about. We’ve got lab results.”