When Morales had bounded up the stairs after the cell phone sounded up there, the ring tone a familiar one, Scarpetta had asked the question that would change eternity for her.

She’d said to Berger, “Is Lucy up there?”

Berger’s answer was her wide eyes, and then they heard the gunshot.

It had sounded like a metal door slamming shut, almost like the steel barrier doors at Bellevue.

And silence.

And now Morales was back, and at this point, Scarpetta no longer cared about anything in this world except Lucy.

“Please get an ambulance,” she said to him.

“Let me tell you what’s up, Doc.” He waved the pistol and was becoming more bizarre. “What’s up is your little superhero niece has a fucking bullet in her fucking head. You imagine the IQ I’m killing off this morning, whew.”

He picked up the unzipped gym bag and walked around the couch, to the front of it. Displayed on the PDA clipped to his low-riding jeans was a GPS track log, a heavy pink line snaking through a map of someplace.

He dropped the gym bag on the coffee table and squatted next to it. His latex-gloved hands reached inside the bag, and he pulled out a small pair of Brooks running shoes and a plastic Baggie containing the polyvinyl impressions Scarpetta had made of Oscar’s fingertips. The Baggie was greasy, as if Morales had oiled or lubricated the polyvinyl impressions. He balanced the revolver on his thigh.

He removed the impressions from the Baggie and slipped them over the fingers of his left hand, and that was the first time Scarpetta realized he was left-handed.

He held the gun with his other hand, and stood up and splayed his left hand with its freakish irregular white rubbery fingertips, and he grinned, his pupils so dilated it was as if he had black holes for eyes.

“I won’t be around to reverse the reverse of them,” he said. “These are reversed.”

Slowly moving his rubbery fingertips and enjoying himself.

“Right, Dr. Sher-lock? You know what I’m talking about. How many people would think of it?”

He meant that since the prints were from an impression, they would be reversed when they were transferred to a surface. Morales must have remedied that when he’d photographed the prints he’d planted on the light fixture in the tub at Eva Peebles’s apartment. Whoever photographed and lifted the prints in Berger’s apartment would discover a reverse-sequence arrangement, a mirror image of what was expected, and wonder how that could have happened. A fingerprints examiner would have to make adjustments, display different perspectives to make an accurate geometric analysis for a comparison of these planted prints with Oscar’s prints in IAFIS.

“You answer when I talk to you, bitch.” Morales got up and loomed so close Scarpetta smelled his sweat.