“I don’t know why you’d want to be around him.” His feelings went flat, his voice hard.

“I didn’t say I wanted it. I said I wasn’t going to run from it. I’m not the one who ran like a coward. He did.”

“Hopefully my part in this will be over in a few days,” Benton said. “Then it’s NYPD’s responsibility. God knows I’m way behind at McLean. Only halfway through my research study, although I’m not sure about the journal article anymore. You don’t have to do the consultation at the damn morgue. Why should you pull Dr. Lester’s feet out of the fire again?”

“That’s not what you really want. For me to be a no-show? For me to walk off the job after Berger’s asked me to help? The last shuttle’s at nine o’clock. I’d never make it. You know that. Why are you talking like this?”

“Lucy could take you in her helicopter.”

“It’s snowing at home. The visibility’s probably two feet.”

She watched his face, and it was hard for him to keep his feelings out of his eyes, because he wanted her. He wanted her now, in his office, and if she knew what he was feeling, she would be repulsed by him. She would decide he’d spent too many years wallowing through every form of perversion imaginable, and had finally been infected.

“I keep forgetting the weather’s different there,” he said.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Then that’s the way it will be. You certainly packed as if you aren’t going anywhere.”

Her luggage was by the door.

“Food,” she said. “As much as you’d love to take me out for a romantic dinner tonight, we’re eating in. If we ever get home.”

They looked into each other’s eyes. She had just asked him the question she’d been wanting to ask but hadn’t.

He answered her, “My feelings about you haven’t changed. If you knew how I felt sometimes. I just don’t tell you.”

“Maybe you’d better start telling me.”

“I am telling you.”

He wanted her right then, and she sensed it, and she didn’t recoil. Maybe she felt the same way. It was so easy for him to forget there was a reason she was so polished and precise, that science was just the lead she looped around the neck of the wild animal so she could walk with it, so she could understand it and handle it. What she’d chosen to expose herself to in life couldn’t be more naked or primitive or powerful, and nothing shocked her.

“I believe a very important element in this case is why Terri Bridges was murdered in the bathroom,” she said. “And what makes us so sure she was?”