“Scarpetta,” I blurted into the receiver as my heart pounded the way it always did when I was startled awake.

“Kay, it’s me,” Benton said. “Sorry to call you this late, but I was afraid you were trying to reach me. Somehow the answering machine got turned off, and, well, I went out to eat and then walked the beach for more than two hours. To think. I guess you know the news.”

“Yes.” I was suddenly very alert.

“Are you all right,” he said, because he knew me well.

“I searched every inch of my house tonight before going to bed. I had my gun out and checked every closet and behind every shower curtain.”

“I thought you probably would.”

“It’s like knowing a bomb is on the way in the mail.”

“No, it’s not like that, Kay. Because we don’t know one is coming or when or in what form. I wish we did. But that’s part of her game. To make us guess.”

“Benton, you know how she feels about you. I don’t like you there alone.”

“Do you want me to come home?”

I thought about this and had no good answer.

“I’ll get in my car right this minute,” he added. “If that’s what you want.”

Then I told him about the body in the ruins of Kenneth Sparkes’s mansion, and I went on and on about that, and about my meeting with the tycoon on Hootowl Farm. I talked and explained while he patiently listened.

“The point is,” I concluded, “that this is turning out to be terribly complicated, if not bizarre, and there is so much to do. It makes no sense for your vacation to be ruined, too. And Marino’s right. There’s no reason to suspect that Carrie knows about our place in Hilton Head. You’re probably safer there than here, Benton.”

“I wish she’d come here.” His voice turned hard. “I’d welcome her with my Sig Sauer and we could finally put an end to this.”

I knew he truly wanted to kill her, and this was, in a way, the worst damage she could have done. It was not like Benton to wish for violence, to allow a shadow of the evil he pursued to fall over his conscience and heart, and as I listened, I felt my own culpability, too.

“Do you see how destructive this is?” I said, upset. “We sit around talking about shooting her, strapping her into the electric chair or giving her a lethal injection. She has succeeded in taking possession of us, Benton. Because I admit that I want her dead about as much as I’ve ever wanted anything.”

“I think I should come on home,” he again said.