For the first time since Marino had attacked her last spring, Scarpetta found herself alone with him.

She set down her crime scene case outside the bathroom doorway in the master bedroom, and she and Marino both looked at the stripped mattress beneath a window that had draperies drawn across it. They examined photographs of what the bed had looked like when the police had arrived last night, and the soft, sexy clothing that had been laid out on top of it. There was an uneasiness between the two of them now that they were inches from each other, with no one else around and no one to overhear them.

His big index finger began tapping an eight-by- ten of the clothing on the perfectly made bed.

He said, “You think it’s possible the killer did this, like maybe he was going through some fantasy shit after the fact? Like maybe he was playing out a fantasy of her dressing up for him in red or something?”

“I doubt it,” Scarpetta said. “If that was his intention, why didn’t he do it? He could have forced her to dress any way he’d wanted.”

She pointed at the clothing on the bed in the photograph, and her index finger was smaller than his pinkie.

“The clothes are laid out the way they would be if someone extremely organized was planning what to wear last night,” she explained. “Just as she had set up everything else for the evening, with methodical deliberation. I think that’s how she went about her normal routines. She’d timed her dinner preparation, perhaps had taken the wine out a few hours earlier so it would be the temperature she wanted. She’d set the table and had arranged flowers that she’d bought at a market earlier in the day. She was in her robe, perhaps had just showered.”

“Did it look to you like she’d just shaved her legs?” he asked.

“There wasn’t anything to shave,” Scarpetta said. “That’s not how she removed her hair. She went to the dermatologist for that.”

Photographs made sliding sounds as he shuffled them around, looking for ones that showed the interior of Terri’s closets and drawers, which the police had not left in their original ordered state. He and Scarpetta started looking through socks and hose, under garments and gym clothes, everything jumbled up and in disarray from multiple pairs of gloved hands digging through them and sliding hangers around. The police had rooted through quite a variety of high-heel platform pumps and sandals with stiletto heels, rhinestones, chains, and ankle straps, in different sizes, ranging from three to five.

“Finding ones that fit is one of the biggest challenges,” Scarpetta commented, looking at the pile of shoes. “An ordeal, and I’m going to venture a guess she did a lot of her shopping over the Internet. Possibly all of it.”