“I’m afraid at present there’s no forensic lab on the planet that has a ten-ton microscope with a magnification of two hundred thousand X, and detectors for EDX and FTIR, energy dispersive X-ray detection, and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy,” Scarpetta said. “One-stop shopping to get the morphology, and elemental and chemical compositions, of a sample as small as a macromolecule or as large as an engine block. It’s possible I might want to put an entire chair in the chamber. But we need to see. I’m not going to ask Lucy if she’ll let us borrow her jet and have police fly evidence down to Tennessee and receipt it to one of my scientist friends in the middle of the night unless I’m sure there’s a reason.”

“Tell me more about the chair,” Berger said. “Why you think it’s so important?”

“From her bathroom,” Scarpetta said. “I believe she was sitting in it when she was murdered—a theory at this point that I can’t begin to verify without a hands-on examination. I have reason to believe she was nude when she was sitting on it, and since we know the lubricant is contaminated with an admixture of DNA, it may be contaminated with traces of other organic and inorganic substances as well. We don’t know what the lubricant originally was used for, where it came from, or what’s in it. But the LC-SEM might help tell us, and tell us quickly. I’d like to go to the scene, to Terri’s apartment, as soon as possible.”

“There’s an officer in her apartment around the clock,” Berger said. “So it’s not a problem getting you inside. But I’d like an investigator with you. I also need to ask you again if you had any prior connection to Terri or Oscar.”

“None.”

“We’re finding things on a computer from her apartment that make it appear you did. At least with her.”

“I didn’t. We’ll be finished up here in fifteen, twenty minutes,” Scarpetta said. “Then all we have to do is drop by Benton’s office to pick up a few things. If someone could meet us in front of the hospital.”

“How would you feel if that someone is Pete Marino?” Berger was deliberately bland.

“If what I’m considering might have happened to Terri Bridges is right,” Scarpetta said, and she was bland, too, as if she had been expecting Berger to suggest what she did, “we’re dealing with a sexual sadist who may have killed before. Possibly two other people in 2003. Benton’s gotten e-mails, the same ones you’ve seen, from Marino.”

“I haven’t looked at my e-mail in the past few hours,” Berger said. “We’re actually just getting started on Terri Bridges’s e-mail right now. Hers and Oscar Bane’s.”