“I know what it’s for. You won’t find anything that shows I did anything to her. Finding her DNA means nothing. My DNA’s all over her apartment,” he repeated himself.

He sat very still while she used a plastic scraper to scrape under his nails, and she could feel his stare. She sensed his blue-green eyes like warm light as they touched her head and other parts of her, as if he was examining her while she was examining him. When she was done with the scraping and looked up at him, he was looking at the wall. He asked her not to watch while he plucked his own head hair, which she helped him place inside an envelope, and then his pubic hair, which went into another envelope. For someone so averse to pain, he didn’t flinch, but his face was tense and his forehead was beaded with sweat.

She peeled open a buccal brush, and he swabbed the inside of his cheek, and his hands trembled.

“Now please make him leave.” He meant the corrections officer. “You don’t need him here. I’m not talking with him here.”

“Doesn’t work that way,” the officer said. “It’s not your choice.”

Oscar was silent. He stared at the wall. The officer looked at Scarpetta, waiting to see what she was going to do.

“You know,” she decided, “I think we’ll be fine.”

“I’d rather not do that, Doc. He’s pretty keyed up.”

He didn’t seem keyed up, but she didn’t comment. What he seemed was dazed and upset, and on the verge of hysteria.

“What you mean is chained up like Houdini,” Oscar said. “It’s one thing to be in lockup. But I don’t need to be shackled like some serial killer. I’m surprised you didn’t roll me out in a Hannibal Lecter cage. The staff here obviously doesn’t know that mechanical restraints in psychiatric hospitals were abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. What have I done to deserve this?”

He raised his cuffed hands and was sputtering, he was so incensed.

“It’s because ignorant people like you think I’m a circus freak,” he said.

“Hey, Oscar,” the guard replied. “Here’s a news flash. You’re not in a normal psychiatric hospital. This is the prison ward you checked yourself into.” He said to Scarpetta, “I’d prefer to stay, Doc.”

“A freak. That’s what ignorant people like you think.”

“We’re fine,” she repeated to the officer, and she could understand why Berger was exercising caution.

Oscar was quick to point out anything he perceived as unfair. He was quick to remind everyone he was a little person, when in fact that wasn’t the first thing people probably noticed about him, unless he was standing. Certainly, it wasn’t what had caught her attention the instant she’d walked into the infirmary. His different-colored eyes had flashed at her, and seemed a more startling green and blue in contrast to the brightness of his teeth and hair, and although his features weren’t flawless, the way they fit together had invited her to stare, to study. She continued to wonder just what it was that Oscar Bane reminded her of. Perhaps a bust on an ancient gold coin.