“Tell me about it. Whenever I read accounts of my court testimony, I always wonder if someone else had been on the stand instead of me. My point is, first they drag Sparkes into it, and to be honest, I was about to think that maybe he had burned his own place and some girl. Probably for money, and to get rid of her because she knew something. Then, lo and behold, there are these two other fires in Pennsylvania, and two more people killed, and there’s the suggestion all of it’s related? And where’s Sparkes been during all this?”

She reached for her coffee.

“Excuse me, Dr. Scarpetta. I didn’t even ask. Can I get you some?”

“No thank you,” I said.

I watched the green light move across the gauge as the mercury level slowly climbed.

“I also find it odd that this psycho woman escapes from the loony bin in New York—what’s her name? Carrie something? And the FBI profiler guy in charge of that investigation suddenly ends up dead. I think we’re ready to go,” she said.

She turned on the electron beam and the video display. The magnification was set for five hundred, and she turned it down and we began to get a picture of the filament’s current on the screen. At first it looked like a wave, then it began to flatten. She hit more keys, backing off the magnification again, this time to twenty, and we began to get a picture of the signals coming off the sample.

“I’ll change the spot size of the beam to get a little more energy.”

She adjusted buttons and dials as she worked.

“Looks like our shaving of metal, almost like a curled ribbon,” she announced.

The topography was simply an enlarged version of what we had seen under the optical microscope moments earlier, and since the picture wasn’t terribly bright, this suggested an element with a lower atomic number. She adjusted the scanning speed of the live picture and took away some of the noise, which looked like a snowstorm on the screen.

“Here you can clearly see the shiny versus the gray,” she said.

“And you think that’s due to oxidation,” I said, pulling up a chair.

“Well, you’ve got two surfaces of the same material. I would venture that the shiny side was recently shaved while the other wasn’t.”

“Makes sense to me.”

The crinkled metal looked like shrapnel suspended in space.

“We had a case last year,” Chan spoke again as she pressed the frame store button to make photographs for me. “A guy bludgeoned with a pipe from a machine shop. And tissue from his scalp had a metal filing from a lathe. It was transferred right into the wound. Okay, let’s change the back scatter image and see what kind of X ray we get off that.”