“I’m not attempting to make the point that a little person could or couldn’t have done anything,” Scarpetta replied.

Unlike most people, she was always polite enough to stop typing, to unglue her eyes from her computer screen when she talked to someone.

“But he couldn’t have,” Bacardi said. “And I don’t mean to keep interrupting like Old Faithful going off, but I just had to get this out and make sure all of you are hearing me. Okay?”

She looked around the room.

“Okay,” she answered herself. “My lady, Bethany, was almost six feet tall. Now, unless she was lying down, there’s no way someone four feet tall could have garroted her.”

“I’m simply pointing out she was garroted. Basing that on the photographs you’ve shown me and the autopsy findings I’ve reviewed,” Scarpetta patiently said. “The angle of the marks on her neck, and the fact there are more than one of them, et cetera. I’m not saying who did or didn’t do it—”

“But that’s what I’m saying. I’m saying who did or didn’t. Bethany didn’t kick or struggle, or if she did, by some miracle she didn’t scrape or bruise herself. I’m telling you, someone normal size was behind her, and both of them were standing up. I think he raped her from behind while he was doing it, because that’s what got him off. And same thing with Rodrick. The kid was standing up, and this guy was behind him. The advantage the perp had in my cases is he was big enough to control them. He intimidated them into letting him bind their hands behind their backs. It doesn’t appear they struggled with him at all.”

“I’m trying to remember how tall Rodrick was,” Benton said, and his hair was very messy, his face covered with stubble that reminded Lucy of salt.

Two all-nighters, back-to- back, and he looked like it.

“Five-foot- ten,” Bacardi said. “One hundred and thirty-six pounds. Skinny and not strong. And not much of a fighter.”

“We can say all of the victims have one thing in common,” Benton then said. “I should say all of the victims we know about. They were vulnerable. They were impaired or at a disadvantage.”

“Unless the killer’s Oscar,” Berger reminded everybody. “Then the odds change. I don’t care if you’re a skinny kid on oxys. You’re not at a disadvantage, necessarily, if your assailant is only four feet tall. And I hate to keep saying it, but unless there’s another logical explanation for how his fingerprints turned up at Eva Peebles’s crime scene? And prints made by a size-five women’s shoe, a Brooks Ariel? And Oscar just happens to wear that exact same shoe, and he buys it in a size-five women’s?”