Her breath fogs out as she removes a clipboard from a cart and fills in Unknown’s information and the time and date. Her frustration is as palpable as the cold. Despite her obsessive efforts, she doesn’t know where the little boy died, although she suspects it isn’t far from where he was found. She doesn’t know his exact age. She doesn’t know how his killer transported the body but hypothesizes it was by boat. No witnesses have come forward, and the only trace evidence she recovered is white cotton fibers assumed to be from the sheet the Beaufort County coroner wrapped him in before zipping him inside a pouch.

The sand and salt and bits of shells and plant debris in the boy’s orifices and on his skin are indigenous to the marshland where his nude decomposing body was facedown in pluff mud and saw grass. After days of using every procedure she can conjure up to make his body talk to her, he has offered but a few painful revelations. His tubular stomach and emaciation say he was starved for weeks, possibly months. Mildly deformed nails indicate new growth of different ages and suggest repeated blunt-force trauma or some other type of torture to his tiny fingers and toes. Subtle reddish patterns all over his body tattle to her that he was brutally beaten, most recently with a wide belt that had a large square buckle. Incisions, a reflecting back of skin, and microscopic analysis revealed hemorrhaging into soft tissue from the crown of his head to the soles of his little feet. He died of internal exsanguination—bled to death without externally shedding a drop—a metaphor, it seems, for his invisible and miserable life.

She has preserved sections of his organs and injuries in jars of formalin and sent off his brain and eyes for special examination. She’s taken hundreds of photographs, and notified Interpol in the event he’s been reported missing in another country. His fingerprints and footprints have been entered into the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) and his DNA profile into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS)—all of his information entered into the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children database. Of course, now Lucy is searching the Deep Web. So far, there are no leads, no matches, suggesting he wasn’t abducted, wasn’t lost, didn’t run away and end up in the hands of a sadistic stranger. Most likely he was beaten to death by a parent or some other relative, guardian, or so-called caregiver who left his body in a remote area to hide his or her crime. It happens all the time.

Scarpetta can do nothing more for him medically or scientifically, but she won’t give him up. There will be no defleshing and packing his bones in a box—no pauper’s grave. Until he’s identified, he will stay with her, transferred from the cooler to a time capsule of sorts, a polyurethane insulated freezer chilled to minus-sixty- five degrees centigrade. If need be, he can stay with her for years. She shuts the freezer’s heavy steel door and walks out into the bright deodorized hallway, untying her blue surgical gown and pulling off her gloves. Her disposable shoe covers make a quick, quiet whish on the spotless tile floor.