“And do what?”

“I’ve been thinking about statistical genetics.”

“I still can’t believe no one’s doing it,” Lucy says. “The technology’s there. It’s been there. It’s all so stupid. Alleles are shared among relatives, and, as is true of any other database, it’s all a function of probability.”

“A father, mother, sibling would have a higher score. And we’d see it and focus on it. I think we should try it.”

“If we do, what happens if it turns out this little kid was killed by a relative? We use statistical genetics in a criminal case, and what happens in court?” Lucy says.

“If we figure out who he is, then we’ll worry about court.”

Belmont, Massachusetts. Dr. Marilyn Self sits before a window in her room with a view.

Sloping lawns, forests and fruit trees, and old brick buildings harken back to a genteel era when the wealthy and famous could disappear from their lives, briefly or for as long as needed, or in some hopeless cases, forever, and be treated with the respect and pampering they deserved. At McLean Hospital, it’s perfectly normal to spot famous actors, musicians, athletes, and politicians strolling the cottage-style campus, designed by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, whose other famous projects include New York’s Central Park, the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, the Biltmore Estate, and Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair.

It isn’t perfectly normal to spot Dr. Marilyn Self. But she doesn’t intend to be here much longer, and when the public eventually finds out the truth, her reasons will be clear. To be safe and sequestered, and then, as has always been the story of her life, a destiny. What she calls a meant-to- be. She’d forgotten Benton Wesley works here.

Shocking Secret Experiments: Frankenstein.

Let’s see. She continues to script her first show when she returns to the air. While in seclusion to guard my life, I unwittingly and unwillingly became an eyewitness—worse, a guinea pig—to clandestine experiments and abuse. In the name of science. It is as Kurtz said in Heart of Darkness—“The horror! The horror!” I was subjected to a modern form of what was done in asylums during the darkest days of the darkest times when people who didn’t have the proper tools were considered subhuman and treated like…Treated like…? The right analogy will come to her later.

Dr. Self smiles as she imagines Marino’s ecstasy when he discovered she had written back to him. He probably believes that she (the most famous psychiatrist in the world) was happy to hear from him. He still believes she cares! She’s never cared. Even when he was her patient in her less prominent Florida days, she didn’t care. He was little more than a therapeutic amusement, and yes (she admits it), a dash of spice, because his adoration of her was almost as pathetic as his besotted sexual obsession with Scarpetta.

Poor, pathetic Scarpetta. Amazing what a few well-placed calls can do.

Her mind races. Her thoughts are nonstop inside her room at the Pavilion, where meals are catered and a concierge is available, should one wish to go to the theater or a Red Sox game or a health spa. The privileged patient at the Pavilion gets rather much whatever he or she wants, which in Dr. Self’s case is her own e-mail account and a room that happened to be occupied by another patient named Karen when Dr. Self was admitted nine days ago.