“Well, if she was dead when the binding was removed and that’s when she was cut, she wouldn’t have bled, or at least not much,” Scarpetta said. “This was no game. There was too much pain for this to be a game.”

“Seems to me pain is the point of S-and- M.”

“No pleasure was derived from this pain,” Scarpetta said. “Except by the person inflicting it.”

The title page belonged to a revision dated about three weeks ago, December 10.

“A really big file that we’re far from completely recovering yet,” Lucy said. “But this partial chapter gives you the picture.”

She had spooled it into a text file, and Berger began reading to Lucy’s tap-taps of the down-arrow key:

… While I’ve got my hands in a dead body, I imagine how I could have killed the person better. With all I know? Of course I could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with

scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!

I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.

Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.

Never heard of either.

Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish

whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars.

And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.

How can you afford to drink such expensive

whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so

many people losing their homes and unable to fill their

cars with gas?

My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the finer labels—whether it’s a Chateau Petrus, a single-malt whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to your liver and brain.

So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t

as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve

never heard.

How many human livers and brains have you seen and

sectioned?

How about some other examples from the dark

side? What else do you say behind the scenes,

especially when you’re with your colleagues?

We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us

secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the

severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial.