I looked out at wind rocking Japanese maples in my yard and the incomplete stone wall that scarcely kept me from my neighbors. The telephone abruptly rang and I was reluctant to answer it.

“Dr. Scarpetta,” I said into the receiver as I watched Benton’s eyes sweep back down that red-penned page.

“Yo,” Peter Marino’s familiar voice came over the line. “It’s me.”

He was a captain with the Richmond Police Department, and I knew him well enough to recognize his tone. I braced myself for more bad news.

“What’s up?” I said to him.

“A horse farm went up in flames last night in Warrenton. You may have heard about it on the news,” he said. “Stables, close to twenty high-dollar horses, and the house. The whole nine yards. Everything burned to the ground.”

So far, this wasn’t making any sense. “Marino, why are you calling me about a fire? In the first place, Northern Virginia is not your turf.”

“It is now,” he said.

My kitchen seemed to get small and airless as I waited for the rest.

“ATF’s just called out NRT,” he went on.

“Meaning us,” I said.

“Bingo. Your ass and mine. First thing in the morning.”

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ National Response Team, or NRT, was deployed when churches or businesses burned, and in bombings or any other disaster in which ATF had jurisdiction. Marino and I were not ATF, but it was not unusual for it and other law enforcement agencies to recruit us when the need arose. In recent years I had worked the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and the crash of TWA Flight 800. I had helped with the identifications of the Branch Davidians at Waco and reviewed the disfigurement and death caused by the Unabomber. I knew from stressful experience that ATF included me in a call-out only when people were dead, and if Marino was recruited, too, then the suspicion was murder.

“How many?” I reached for my clipboard of call sheets.

“It’s not how many, Doc. It’s who. The owner of the farm is media big shot Kenneth Sparkes, the one and only. And right now it’s looking like he didn’t make it.”

“Oh God,” I muttered as my world suddenly got too dark to see. “We’re sure?”

“Well, he’s missing.”

“You mind explaining to me why I’m just now being told about this?”

I felt anger rising, and it was all I could do not to hurl it at him, for all unnatural deaths in Virginia were my responsibility. I shouldn’t have needed Marino to inform me about this one, and I was furious with my Northern Virginia office for not calling me at home.