“I won’t complain even one more time,” she said. “You’re absolutely right. It’s one thing to walk into the morgue. It’s another thing to be carried in.”

“You can complain all you want.”

“No, thank you,” she said, pulling his arm against her. “I’m all done.”

Lights from passing cars grazed the empty windows of Bellevue’s old psychiatric hospital, and across a side street from its iron gates was the blue-brick Medical Examiner’s office, where two white vans with blacked-out glass were parked along the curb, waiting to be sent on their next sad mission. Benton rang the buzzer as they stood in the cold on the top step at the entrance. He rang again and again, his patience fraying.

“She must have left,” he said. “Or maybe she decided not to show up.”

“That wouldn’t be as much fun,” Scarpetta said. “She likes to make people wait.”

Cameras were everywhere, and she imagined Dr. Lenora Lester watching them on a monitor and enjoying herself. Several more minutes, and just as Benton was determined to leave, Dr. Lester appeared behind the glass front door and unlocked it to let them in. She was wearing a long green surgical gown and round steel-rimmed glasses, her graying hair pinned up. Her face was plain and unlined except for the deep furrow that ran from the top of her nose halfway up her forehead, and her dark eyes were small and darted like squirrels dodging cars.

Inside the tired lobby, a photograph of Ground Zero filled most of a wall, and Dr. Lester told them to follow her, as if they had never been here before.

As usual, she talked to Benton.

“Your name came up last week,” she said, walking slightly ahead of them. “The FBI was here on a case. A couple agents, and one of their profilers from Quantico. Somehow we got on the subject of Silence of the Lambs, and I was reminded you were the head of the Behavioral Science Unit way back then. Weren’t you the main consultant for the film? How many days did they spend at the Academy? What were Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster like?”

“I was working a case somewhere,” he said.

“That’s a shame,” she said to him. “Back then Hollywood’s interest in us was rather refreshing. It was a good thing in many respects, because the public had such ridiculous stereotypes of what we’re like and what we do.”

Scarpetta refrained from saying that the movie hadn’t exactly helped dispel morbid myths, since the famous scene with the moth took place in a funeral home and not a modern autopsy suite. She didn’t point out that if anyone fit the unfortunate Grim Reaper stereotype of a forensic pathologist, it was Dr. Lester.