He looked like Marino, only in better shape but older, and on forced good behavior, as if he was taking the parole board on a drive.

He turned onto Third Avenue, toward Terri Bridges’s apartment, which was only a few minutes from the hospital.

Berger asked Scarpetta if she remembered Terri contacting her Charleston office last spring or early summer—or ever.

Scarpetta said no.

Berger fooled around with her BlackBerry and muttered something about Lucy’s opposition to paper, and then read an e-mail Terri had written to Berger last year, asking for assistance in contacting Scarpetta.

“July second,” Berger said. “That’s when she sent this e-mail to the Bermuda Triangle of New York City government’s general e-mail address, hoping it would get to me because she hadn’t been able to get to you. It appears she never got to either of us.”

“I’m not surprised, with a username like Lunasee,” Benton replied from the dark backseat while he looked out his window at the quiet neighborhood of Murray Hill, where so far Scarpetta had seen only one person out, a man walking a boxer.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the username was the Pope’s,” Berger replied. “But I didn’t get it. Question is, Kay, are you absolutely sure you don’t recall her calling your office in Charleston?”

“I’m absolutely sure I was never aware of it,” Scarpetta said. “But last spring and early summer my office was rather much of a Bermuda Triangle, too.”

She didn’t want to elaborate, not with Marino sitting directly in front of her. How was she supposed to talk about what it had been like for her after he disappeared without a word or a trace, and then Rose had gone into such a rapid decline that she no longer had the proud stubbornness to resist Scarpetta’s moving her and taking care of her, eventually spoon-feeding her, changing her gowns and sheets when she soiled the bed, and then the morphine and oxygen at the very end when Rose decided she’d suffered enough, and death was in her eyes?

How would Marino feel if he knew how angry Rose was with him for abandoning everyone in his life, especially her, when he knew she wasn’t long for this world? Rose had said it was wrong of him, and would Scarpetta please tell him that someday.

Rose had said, You tell him for me I’ll box his ears.

As if she’d been talking about a two-year- old.

You tell him for me I’m mad at Lucy, too, just mad as hell at both of them. I blame him for what she’s doing right now. Up there at Black-water or some training camp like that, shooting guns and kneeing huge men in the kidneys as if she’s Sylvester Stallone, because she’s too scared to be home.