“That’s it for now,” Lucy says. “We’re working on cloning him. Going to create a copy of him in a petri dish so we know who it is,” she says drolly.

“I remember not so long ago waiting weeks, months for DNA.” Scarpetta rues those days, painfully reminded of how many people were brutalized and murdered because a violent offender couldn’t be identified quickly.

“Ceiling’s at three thousand feet, vis three miles,” Lucy says to Scarpetta. “We’re VFR. I’ll meet you at the airport.”

Inside Marino’s office, his bowling trophies are silhouetted against the old plaster wall, and there is an emptiness in the air.

Benton shuts the door and doesn’t turn on the light. He sits in the dark at Marino’s desk and for the first time realizes that no matter what he’s said, he’s never taken Marino seriously or been particularly inclusive. If he’s truthful about it, he’s always thought of him as Scarpetta’s sidekick—an ignorant, bigoted, crass cop who doesn’t belong in the modern world, and as a result of that and any number of other factors, is unpleasant to be around and not entirely helpful. Benton has endured him. He’s underestimated him in some departments and understood him perfectly fine in others, but failed to recognize the obvious. As he sits at Marino’s little-used desk and stares out the window at the lights of Charleston, he wishes he had paid more attention to him, to everything. What he’s needed to know is in his reach and has been.

The time in Venice is almost four o’clock in the morning. It’s no wonder Paulo Maroni left McLean, and now has left Rome.

“Pronto,” he answers his phone.

“Were you asleep?” Benton asks.

“If you cared, you wouldn’t be calling. What’s going on that you need to call me at this unseemly hour? Some development in the case, I hope?”

“Not a good one, necessarily.”

“Then what?” Dr. Maroni’s voice has an undercurrent of reluctance, or maybe it’s resignation that Benton hears.

“The patient you had.”

“I’ve told you about him.”

“You’ve told me what you wanted to tell me, Paulo.”

“What more could I help you with?” Dr. Maroni says. “In addition to what I’ve said, you’ve read my notes. I’ve been a friend and not asked you how that happened. I haven’t blamed Lucy, for example.”

“You might want to blame yourself. Do you think I haven’t figured out that you wanted us to access your patient’s file? You left it on the hospital network. You left file-sharing on, meaning anybody who could figure out where it was could get into it. For Lucy, yes, it would be no effort. For you, it was no mistake. You’re too smart for that.”

“And so you admit Lucy violated my confidential electronic files.”