Benton’s voice said he’d done the right thing, but the look in his eyes belied his certainty.

“This isn’t about doctor-patient confidentiality or your even being decent,” Scarpetta said. “You know what it’s about. Your reasoning is completely irrational because there’s no way he could work for Jaime Berger and I wouldn’t find out, eventually. Which is exactly what’s happened.”

She started flipping through the police report because she didn’t want to look at him. She felt someone behind her before the person spoke, and turned around, startled by the man in Benton’s doorway.

In his baggy gang clothing, thick gold chains, his hair in cornrows, he looked as if he’d just escaped from the prison ward.

“Kay, you and Detective Morales haven’t met, I don’t think,” Benton said, and he wasn’t particularly friendly about it.

“I bet you don’t remember, but we almost met once,” Morales said as he brazenly walked in and looked her over.

“I’m sorry.” Meaning she didn’t remember, and she didn’t offer to shake his hand.

“Last Labor Day weekend. In the morgue,” he said.

He had an unsettling energy that made her edgy and uncomfortable, and she imagined that whatever he did was thought out quickly and done in a hurry, and that it was his nature to dominate whatever he touched.

“A couple of tables away from where you were busy looking at that guy found in the East River, floating off the shore of Ward’s Island?” he said. “I can tell you don’t remember me. Question was whether he was tired of life and jumped off the footbridge, or someone hastened his journey to the Great Beyond, or maybe he’d had a heart attack and fell off the embankment. One of Pester Lester’s cases. Turns out, she failed to connect the dots—didn’t recognize the telltale fern-like pattern on his torso was—guess what? Arborization from being struck by lightning, which she had ruled out because she didn’t find any burns in his socks, the bottom of his shoes, shit like that. You used a compass to show his belt buckle was magnetized, which is typical in lightning strikes, right? Anyway, you wouldn’t remember me. Was in and out, grabbing a couple bullets that needed to go to the labs.”

He pulled an evidence form out of the back pocket of his half-mast voluminous jeans, unfolded it, and started filling it out, leaning over the desk, so close to her his elbow brushed against her shoulder as he wrote, obliging her to move her chair. He handed her the form and the pen, and she filled out the rest and signed it. Then he took the envelopes of Oscar Bane’s evidence and left.

“Needless to say,” Benton remarked, “Berger’s got her hands full with him.”

“He’s in her squad?”