She retrieved a scalpel from a cart and snapped in a new blade. She began incising contusions on Terri’s knees, and could feel the broken patellae beneath the abraded skin. Each kneecap was fractured into several pieces—a typical injury in car accidents where knees impact the dashboard.

“If you’ll make sure I have electronic images of all x-rays,” she said.

She incised contusions on the thighs and discovered ruptured blood vessels more than an inch deep, all the way to muscle. Using a six-inch ruler as a scale, she got Benton to help with photographs, and she made notes on body diagrams she retrieved from cubbyholes above the counter.

With forceps, she removed splinters from the knees and the tops of the feet and placed them on several dry slides. Seating herself before the compound microscope, she manipulated light and contrast and moved the slide on the stage. At a magnification of 100X, she could see the tracheids, the water-conducting cells of the wood, and determine that areas of them had been roughly crushed at bondline surfaces where veneers had been glued together with a very strong adhesive.

The splinters had come from abrasively planed plyboard. She and Benton looked again at the eight-by- ten photograph of Terri’s nude body on the bathroom floor. In the background was the white marble countertop that included the built-in vanity and a small gold metal chair with heart-shaped back and black satin-upholstered bottom. On top of the vanity was a mirrored tray of perfumes, a brush, and a comb. Everything was perfectly neat and straight except for the oval mirror, and as Scarpetta looked closely at the photo and studied it under a lens, she confirmed that the edge of the countertop was squared off where the vanity was built in. It was sharp.

She looked through more photographs of the bathroom, taken from different angles.

“It’s all one unit.” She showed a photograph to Benton. “The counter built around the sink, cabinets, and the vanity with its drawer are one unit. And if you look here, this picture taken at floor level, you can see the counter has a white-painted plyboard back that’s against the tile wall. Very similar to desks built into kitchen counters. However, often with plyboard built-ins, the underside that’s not visible isn’t painted. It’s possible the underside of the vanity drawer isn’t, in other words. Microscopically, we can tell the splinters recovered from her knees and the tops of her feet are from unpainted plyboard. We need to go to the scene.”

Dr. Lester was behind them, looking on silently.