Scarpetta explained, “I think it’s possible he forced her to sit in the chair and watch herself in the mirror while he garroted her, and when she struggled—kicking violently—her legs struck the edge of the counter, causing the linear abrasions, the deep contusions on her thighs. Her knees struck the underside of the vanity so violently her patellae were shattered. If the underside of the vanity is unpainted plyboard, that would explain the splinters in the knees, and also the tops of her feet. As short as her legs are, her feet wouldn’t have reached the wall. They would have struck the underside of the drawer.”

“If you’re right,” Dr. Lester conceded, “it will have a bearing. If she was kicking and struggling that hard, and someone was making her sit and look in the mirror, that’s a different story.”

“An important question is what the bathroom was like when Oscar first got there and found the body,” Benton said. “Assuming his story is true.”

“I think we can get some measurements and figure out if his story is true,” Scarpetta said. “Depending on the chair. If Terri was sitting in it and Oscar was standing behind her, I don’t believe he could have pulled up high enough with the ligature to achieve the angle of the mark on her neck. But we need to go to the scene. We need to go there quickly.”

“First thing I’m going to do is outright ask him,” Benton said. “Maybe he’ll talk to me if he thinks new evidence has turned up and it’s in his best interest to cooperate. I’ll call the ward, see if he’ll be reasonable.”

Lucy was going through e-mail as Scarpetta explained over speakerphone why she wanted swabs from Terri Bridges’s orifices, and an entire chair, to be flown to the National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

“I have friends at Y-Twelve,” Scarpetta said to Berger, whose approval she wanted. “I think we could get a very rapid turnaround on this. Once they have the evidence, it’s just a matter of hours. The longest part will be vacuuming down the chamber, because that’s going to be slower than usual. The petroleum-based lubricant has a lot of moisture.”

“I thought they made nuclear weapons,” Berger said. “Didn’t they process the uranium for the first atomic bomb? You’re not suggesting Terri Bridges had connections that might have to do with terrorism or something like that?”

Scarpetta said that while it was true that Y-12 produced components for every weapon in the United States’ nuclear arsenal and also had the largest stockpile of enriched uranium, her interest in the place was because of its engineers, chemists, physicists, and especially its materials scientists.

“Are you familiar with their Visitec Large Chamber Scanning Electron Microscope?” she asked.

“I assume what you’re getting at is we don’t have one here,” Berger said.