“Not ever since. I didn’t start drinking or smoking pot until I was fourteen. Oh, I don’t know! I don’t want to go into another trance, Dr. Self! I can’t bear the memories! Or if it wasn’t real, now I think it is!”

“It’s just as Pitres wrote in his Lecons cliniques sur l’hysterie et l’hypnotisme in 1891,” Dr. Self said as the woods and lawn beautifully materialized in the dawn—a view that soon would be hers. She explained delirium and hysteria, and intermittently looked up at the crystal light fixture over Karen’s bed.

“I can’t stay in this room!” Karen cried. “Won’t you please trade rooms with me?” she begged.

Lucious Meddick snaps a rubber band on his right wrist as he parks his shiny black hearse in the alley behind Dr. Scarpetta’s house.

Intended for horses, not huge vehicles, what kind of nonsense is this? His heart is still pounding. He’s a nervous wreck. Damn lucky he didn’t scrape against trees or the high brick wall that separates the alley and old houses along it from a public garden. What kind of ordeal is this to put him through, and already his brand-new hearse is feeling out of alignment, was pulling to one side as it bumped over pavers, kicking up dust and dead leaves. He climbs out, leaving the engine rumbling, noticing some old lady staring out her upstairs window at him. Lucious smiles at her, can’t help but think it won’t be long before the old bag needs his services.

He presses the intercom button on a formidable iron gate and announces, “Meddicks’.”

After a long pause, which requires him to make the announcement again, a woman’s strong voice sounds through the speaker: “Who is this?”

“Meddicks’ Funeral Home. I have a delivery….”

“You brought a delivery here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Stay inside your vehicle. I’ll be right there.”

The southern charm of General Patton, Lucious thinks, somewhat humiliated and irked as he climbs back into his hearse. He rolls up his window and thinks of the stories he’s heard. At one time Dr. Scarpetta was as famous as Quincy, but something happened when she was the chief medical examiner…. He can’t remember where. She got fired or couldn’t take the pressure. A breakdown. A scandal. Maybe more than one of each. Then that highly publicized case in Florida a couple years back, some naked lady strung up from a rafter, tortured and tormented until she couldn’t take it anymore and hung herself with her own rope.

A patient of that TV talk-show shrink. He tries to remember. Maybe it was more than one person tortured and killed. He’s quite sure Dr. Scarpetta testified and was key in convincing the jury to find Dr. Self guilty of something. And in a number of articles he’s read since, she has referred to Dr. Scarpetta as “incompetent and biased,” a “closet lesbian,” and a “has-been.” Probably true. Most powerful women are like men or at least wish they were men, and when she started out, there weren’t many women in her profession. Now there must be thousands of them. Supply and demand, nothing special about her anymore, no-sirree- bob, women all over the place—young ones—getting ideas from TV and doing the same thing she does. That and all the other stuff said about her sure as heck would explain why she moved to the Lowcountry and works out of a tiny carriage house—a former stable, let’s be honest—which certainly isn’t what Lucious works out of, not hardly.