“Fortunately, there are plenty of people in the world right now who love overtime. One of them, however, isn’t Dr. Lester. While I’ve got you, I’ll ask you directly and let Benton off the hook, unless he’s already said something. Would you mind looking at Terri Bridges’s body tonight? Benton can fill you in. Dr. Lester should be on her way in from New Jersey. Sorry to subject you to something so unpleasant, and I don’t mean the morgue.”

“Whatever’s helpful,” Scarpetta replied.

“I’m sure we’ll talk later. And we should get together. Maybe dinner at Elaine’s,” Berger said.

It seemed to be the favorite line of professional women like them. They would get together, have lunch, maybe dinner. She and Berger had said it to each other the first time they met eight years ago, when Berger was brought to Virginia as a special prosecutor in a case that was one of the most stressful ones in Scarpetta’s life. And they’d said it to each other last time they met, in 2003, when both of them had been concerned about Lucy, who had just returned from a clandestine operation in Poland that Scarpetta still knew very little about, except that what Lucy had done wasn’t legal. It certainly wasn’t moral. In Berger’s penthouse apartment here in the city, the prosecutor had sat down with Scarpetta’s niece, and whatever had gone on between them had remained between them.

Oddly, Berger knew far more about Scarpetta than almost anybody she could think of, and yet they weren’t friends. It was unlikely they would get together and do anything except work, no matter how many times they suggested lunch or a drink and meant it. Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths. Powerful women tended to be loners, because it was their instinct not to trust one another.

Scarpetta handed the receiver back to Benton.

She said, “If Terri were obsessive-compulsive, her body might offer a few hints. It seems I’ll have a chance to look for myself. Coincidentally.”

“I was about to tell you. Berger asked me earlier to see if you would.”

“Since Dr. Lester’s on her way back into the city, I guess I agreed to it before I knew about it.”

“You can leave afterwards, stay out of it,” Benton said. “Unless Oscar gets charged. Then I don’t know how it will involve you. That will be up to Berger.”

“Please don’t tell me this man killed someone to get my attention.”

“I don’t know what to tell you about anything. At this point, I don’t know what to think about anything. The DNA from Terri’s vaginal swabs, for example. Take a look.”