“It would have been from the direction of an autopsy table. There are three of them in the autopsy suite, so maybe it was somebody there for another case. I promise I’ll think about it carefully, but not right now.”

All she could think about right now was talking to Oscar again and telling him the book wasn’t here. She could imagine his reply. They must have gotten hold of the CD. That would explain the thread on the floor outside his door. They had gotten in. That’s what he would say. She hadn’t mentioned the book or the hidden CD to Morales or Benton. She couldn’t tell them the book and CD were there, and she couldn’t tell them that they weren’t. She was Oscar Bane’s physician. What had gone on between the two of them, within reason, remained confidential.

“You got something to write with?” Lucy asked. “I’m giving you Dr. Elizabeth Stuart’s phone numbers. The dermatologist.”

“I know who she is.”

Lucy explained that the photograph was e-mailed to Terri Bridges on December 3, at around noon, from an Internet coffee shop across the street from Dr. Stuart’s office. She gave Scarpetta a cell phone number, and also a number for a time-share presidential suite at the St. Regis in Aspen, Colorado, and said Dr. Stuart always stayed there under her husband’s name, which was Oxford.

“Ask for Dr. Oxford,” Lucy said. “Amazing what people will tell you, but I didn’t pass along all this to anyone else. Jaime has this thing about going through legal channels, imagine? Anyway, can you ask Morales something for me and then tell Benton to call me?”

“I’m walking that way now.”

“I’m in the foyer of Terri’s brownstone, logged on to the wireless network, which is accessible to all the apartments,” Lucy said. “And it’s broadcasting, meaning it’s visible to anybody on it. There’s a device on it.”

Oscar’s home gym was in the master bedroom, his foil-tented bed in the midst of it, and Benton and Morales were talking.

“What is it you want me to ask him, exactly?” Scarpetta said.

She could see why Morales was popular with women and be-grudgingly respected but resented by just about everybody else, including judges. He reminded her of a couple of the star athletes on scholarship at Cornell when she was there as an undergraduate, these scrappy, supremely self-assured young men who compensated for their relatively small stature by being wiry and fast, brazen and outrageous. They listened to no one, had little regard for their team or coaches, and were intellectually lazy but scored points and were crowd pleasers. They weren’t nice people.

“Just ask him if he’s aware that there’s a camera,” Lucy was saying.

“I can answer that,” Scarpetta said. “He installed a surveillance camera on the roof. Marino knows about it. Is Jaime with you?”