“Probably not much different than it was a hundred and forty years ago,” Scarpetta says, as Lucy descends another hundred feet.

“Where the African-American regiment, the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, was slaughtered,” Benton’s voice says. “That movie they made about it, what was it called?”

“You look out your side,” Lucy says to him. “Tell us if you see anything, and we’ll swoop around with the searchlight.”

“It was called Glory,” Scarpetta says. “Not the searchlight quite yet,” she adds. “It will interfere with infrared.”

The video screen displays mottled gray terrain and a rippled area that is the water, and the water glints like molten lead, flowing to the shore, breaking on the sand in scalloped white ruffles.

“I’m not seeing anything down here but the dark shapes of dunes and that damn lighthouse following us everywhere,” Scarpetta says.

“Be nice if they’d restore the beacon so people like us don’t crash into it,” Lucy says.

“Now I feel better.” Benton’s voice.

“I’m going to start working a grid. Sixty knots, two hundred feet, every inch of what’s down there,” Lucy says.

They don’t have to work the grid very long.

“Can you hover over there?” Scarpetta points to what Lucy just saw, too. “Whatever we just went past. That beach area. No, no, back that way. Distinct thermal variation.”

Lucy noses the helicopter around, and the lighthouse beyond her door is stubby and striped in infrared, and surrounded by the heaving, leaden water in the outer reaches of the harbor. Beyond, a cruise ship looks like a ghost ship with white-fire windows and a long plume from its stack.

“There. Twenty degrees to the left of that dune,” Scarpetta says. “I think I see something.”

“I see it,” Lucy says.

The image is white-hot on the screen in the midst of murky, mottled grayness. Lucy looks down, trying to position herself just right. She circles, going lower.

Scarpetta zooms in, and the shimmering white shape becomes a body, unearthly bright—as bright as a star—at the edge of a tidal creek that glints like glass.

Lucy stows the FLIR and flips a switch to turn on a searchlight as bright as ten million candles. Sea oats flatten to the ground and sand swirls as they land.

A black necktie fluttering in the wind of slowing blades.

Scarpetta looks out her window, and some distance away, in the sand, a face flashes in the strobes, white teeth grimacing in a bloated mass that isn’t recognizable as a woman or a man. Were it not for the suit and tie, she wouldn’t have a clue.

“What the hell?” Benton’s voice in her headset.

“It’s not her,” Lucy says, flipping off switches. “Don’t know about you, but I got my gun. This isn’t right.”