Scarpetta should have asked. Dear God, why hadn’t she? All Morales had to do was show his badge, but even that hadn’t been necessary, most likely. He’d been here hours earlier. He was charming, persuasive, didn’t like to be told no.

Morales’s eyes looked around, his pupils dilated, and his latex-gloved hands dropped a small gym bag to the floor. He unzipped it. Inside were the retracted legs of a tripod and colorless nylon ties, and other items Scarpetta couldn’t discern, but it was the ties that caused her heart to pump harder. She knew what those ties could do, and she was afraid of them.

“Just let Jaime go and do what you want to me,” she said.

“Oh, shut up.”

As if he found her tedious.

In one snap, he lashed Berger’s wrists behind her first, and led her to the couch and pushed her down hard, making her sit.

“Behave,” he said to Scarpetta, and he lashed her wrists next, very tightly.

Instantly, her fingers contracted and the pain was terrific, as if something metal was clamped around her wrists, compressing blood vessels and biting into bone. He pushed her down on the couch, next to Berger, as a cell phone started ringing upstairs.

His eyes slowly moved from the cell phone he had removed from Berger’s grip to the gallery upstairs and the rooms beyond it.

The cell phone rang, then stopped, and water was running somewhere. And it stopped. And Scarpetta thought about Lucy the same time Morales did.

“You can stop this now, Mike. You don’t need to do this …” Berger started to say.

Scarpetta was on her feet and Morales shoved her hard, and she fell back onto the couch.

He bounded up the spiral stairs, his feet scarcely seeming to touch them.

Lucy toweled off her very short hair and breathed in a lungful of steam inside one of the nicest showers she’d been in for a while.

Greg’s. Glass-enclosed, with rain-forest showerheads, body jets, steam bath, surround-sound music, a heated seat if you wanted to just sit and listen to music. Berger had Annie Lennox in the CD player. Maybe it was a coincidence, since Lucy had played it last night in the loft. Greg and his whiskeys, and his fine things, and his barrister, and Lucy was baffled by a man who truly knew how to live but had chosen someone he could never do it with, all because of a slight genetic murmur.

Sort of like being one digit off in math. By the time you finished the long, complicated equation, you were light years from the answer, and you failed. Berger was the right person but the wrong answer. Lucy felt a little sorry for him but not for herself. For herself she felt a happiness that was indescribable, unlike anything she’d ever known before, and it seemed all she did was relive and relive.