I heard from him on Thursday, not long after I had been informed that Eddie Heath was dead.

“Kay Scarpetta?” Grueman’s voice came over the line.

“Yes.”

I closed my eyes and knew from the pressure behind them that a raging front was rapidly advancing.

“Nicholas Grueman here. I’ve been looking over Mr. Waddell’s provisional autopsy report and have a few questions.”

I said nothing.

“I’m talking about Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“What can I help you with?”

“Let’s start with his so-called almost tubular stomach. An interesting description, by the way. I’m wondering if that’s your vernacular or a bona fide medical term? Am I correct in assuming Mr. Waddell wasn’t eating?”

“I can’t say that he wasn’t eating at all. But his stomach had shrunk. It was empty and clean.”

“Was it, perhaps, reported to you that he may have been on a hunger strike?”

“No such thing was reported to me.”

I glanced up at the clock and light stabbed my eyes. I was out of aspirin and had left my decongestant at home.

I heard pages flip.

“It says here that you found abrasions on his arms, the inner aspects of both upper arms,” Grueman said.

“That’s correct.”

“And just what, exactly, is an inner aspect?”

“The inside of the arm above the antecubital fossa.”

A pause. “The antecubital fossa,” he said in amazement.

“Well, let me see. I’ve got my own arm turned palm up and am looking at the inside of my elbow. Or where the arm folds, actually. That would be accurate, wouldn’t it? To say that the inner aspect is the side where the arm folds, and the antecubual fossa, therefore, is where the arm folds?”

“That would be accurate.”

“Well, well, very good. And to what do you attribute these injuries to the inner aspects of Mr. Wadden’s “Possibly to restraints,” I said testily.

“Restraints?”

“Yes, as in the leather restraints associated with the electric chair.”

“You said possibly. Possibly restraints?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Meaning, you can’t say with certainty, Dr. Scarpetta?”

“There’s very little in this life that one can say with certainty, Mr. Grueman.”

“Meaning that it would be reasonable to entertain the possibility that the restraints that caused the abrasions could have been of a different variety? Such as the human variety? Such as marks left by human hands?”

“The abrasions I found are inconsistent with injuries inflicted by human hands,” I said.

“And are they consistent with the injuries inflicted by the electric chair, with the restraints associated with it?”

“It is my opinion that they would be.”

“Your opinion, Dr. Scarpetta’?”

“I haven’t actually examined the electric chair’ I said sharply.

This was followed by a long pause, for which Nicholas Grueman had been famous in the classroom when he wanted a student’s obvious inadequacy to hang in the air. I envisioned him hovering over me, hands clasped behind his back, his face expressionless as the clock ticked loudly on the wall. Once I had endured his silent scrutiny for more than two minutes as my eyes raced blindly over pages of the casebook opened before me. And as I sat at my solid walnut desk some twenty years later, a middle-aged chief medical examiner with enough degrees and certificates to paper a wall, I felt my face begin to burn. I felt the old humiliation and rage.