He sat down next to Berger and stuck his tongue between her lips and slowly rubbed the gun between her legs.

“Nobody would think of it,” he said to Scarpetta as he fondled Berger with the barrel of the revolver and she didn’t move.

“Nobody would,” Scarpetta said.

He got up and started pressing various silicone fingertips on the glass coffee table. He went to the bar, flicked open a glass door, and plucked out the Irish whiskey. He picked out a colorful tumbler that looked like hand-blown Venetian glass, and he poured whiskey into it. He left Oscar’s prints all over the bottle and the tumbler as he drank in gulps.

The apartment phone rang again.

Again, Morales ignored it.

“They have a key,” Berger said. “They hear something in this building and you don’t answer, they’ll finally come in. Let me answer it and tell them we’re fine. Nobody else needs to be hurt.”

Morales drank some more. He swished whiskey in his mouth and waved his gun at Berger.

“Tell ‘em to go away,” he said. “You try anything, everybody’s dead right now.”

“I can’t pick it up.”

Morales exhaled an exasperated breath as he came close and picked up the cordless phone and held it against her mouth and ear.

Scarpetta noticed tiny specks of red on his light-skinned face, like his freckles but not his freckles, and something moved inside her like plates of the earth sliding before a huge quake.

The pink line on the map on the PDA snaked, moving. Someone or something moving fast. Oscar.

“Please call an ambulance,” she said.

Morales mouthed Sor-ry, and shrugged.

“Hello?” Berger said into the phone he held. “Really? You know what? Probably the TV. A Rambo movie or something he’s got on. Thanks for your concern.”

Morales removed the phone from her drained face.

“Hit zero,” she said with no inflection. “To disconnect the intercom.”

He hit zero and dropped the cordless phone into its charger.

Marino touched the door with his index finger and pushed it open an inch as he slid his Glock out of a pocket in his leather jacket and the alarm-system chime sounded its warning tone that a door or window had been breached.

Marino swung himself around inside Berger’s penthouse, the pistol in both hands. He crept forward, and through an archway he saw the sunken living room that reminded him of a spaceship.

Berger and Scarpetta were on the couch, their arms behind their backs, and he knew by the looks on their faces that it was too late. An arm snaked up from behind the wraparound couch and poked a gun in the back of Scarpetta’s head.

“Drop it, asshole,” Morales said as he stood up.

Marino was pointing his Glock at Morales, who had a gun buried in the back of Scarpetta’s blond hair, his finger on the trigger.