Scarpetta didn’t realize why she’d asked until the words were out. It was something she sensed, maybe had sensed it the first time she’d seen them together when Lucy was scarcely more than a child, at least in Scarpetta’s mind, practically a child. Berger was a good fifteen years older than Lucy.

Why did it matter?

Lucy certainly wasn’t a child.

She was explaining to Scarpetta that Berger and Marino had gone across the street to talk to a witness. She hadn’t been with them for a good half-hour.

Maybe it was the simple logic that a prosecutor as busy and important as Jaime Berger was unlikely to spend her evening inside a Greenwich Village loft watching a computer run a program. Anything Lucy discovered could have been relayed over the phone or electronically. While it was true that Berger was known for being hands-on and extremely energetic and fierce when it came to absorbing crime scenes in person and directing the evidence to be analyzed and quickly, and on occasion showing up at the morgue if there was an autopsy she wanted to see and Dr. Lester wasn’t the ME doing it, she didn’t watch computers. She didn’t pull up a chair in the labs and watch gas chromatography, microscopy, trace evidence examination, or low copy number DNA amplification in the works.

Berger gave marching orders and had meetings to go over the results. It bothered Scarpetta to think of Lucy and Berger alone in that loft for hours. Scarpetta’s uneasiness about it likely went back to the last time she’d seen them together, five years ago, when she’d appeared unannounced at Berger’s penthouse.

She hadn’t expected to discover Lucy there, confiding in Berger about what had happened in that hotel room in Szczecin, Poland, offering details that to this day Scarpetta didn’t know.

She’d felt she was no longer the center of her niece’s life. Or perhaps she had seen it coming, that one day she wouldn’t be. That was the truth, her selfish truth.

Scarpetta told Benton that Lucy needed to talk to him. He hesitated, waiting for a signal from her that she was all right.

“I’m going to check his cabinets,” she said, and that was her signal.

Benton should leave the bedroom so he could have a private conversation.

“I’ll be down the hall,” Benton said, entering a number on his cell phone.

Scarpetta could feel Morales watching her as she walked into Oscar’s bathroom. The more she saw of the way he lived, the more depressed she was by his obvious deteriorated mental state. Bottles in the medicine cabinet made it clear he believed his own nightmares, and the date on several prescription bottles validated the timeline, too.