It was like listening to the same intoxicating piece of music again and again, as she’d just done in the rain shower, every touch, every look, every accidental intention that resulted in a grazing of bodies that was so erotic and at the same time so moving because it really meant something. It wasn’t cheap. It wasn’t guilt-ridden or headed into shame. It felt perfectly right, and she simply didn’t believe it could be happening to her.

This was a dream she’d never known enough to have, because no part of her had ever feared or wanted it any more than she had nightmares about extraterrestrials or fantastic dreams about flying machines and race cars. Those didn’t exist or were real and within reach. Jaime Berger wasn’t an impossibility or a possibility that had ever crossed Lucy’s mind, although certainly during early encounters she’d felt a giddiness, a nervousness, on the rare occasions she’d been around her, as if she were being offered an opportunity to toy with a very large, undomesticated cat, like a cheetah or a tiger, that she would never be in the same room with, much less pet.

Lucy stood up inside the steam-filled shower, unable to see through the clouded glass, contemplating how best to have an open conversation with her aunt, to explain, to just talk.

She pushed open the door at the same time a shape moved in front of it, and steam dissolved around Mike Morales’s face. He smiled at her, a pistol pointed inches from her head.

“Die, bitch,” he said.

The door yielded to one blow of the battering ram and slammed against the wall.

Bacardi and a uniformed officer whose name she thought was Ben walked into the soft music of Coldplay as they entered apartment 2D and were confronted by Dr. Kay Scarpetta.

“What the hell?” Bacardi said.

Scarpetta was all over the walls. Posters, some of them from ceiling to floor, not poses but newsy photos of her on the set of CNN or walking through Ground Zero or in the morgue, preoccupied and unaware that someone was taking what Bacardi called a “thinking action shot.” Didn’t mean the person was doing something powerful, but he or she was doing it mentally.

“It’s like a freakin’ shrine,” said Ben, or whatever his name was.