“I want you to keep your eyes open and stay awake,” Scarpetta said. “You’re fine, but let’s just stay awake. I think I hear something. I think the rescue squad’s here. We’re going to the ER and we’ll do all those fun tests you like so much. X-rays. MRI. Tell me how you’re feeling.”

“I hurt like shit. I’m okay. Did you see his gun? I’m wondering what it was. I don’t remember seeing it. I don’t remember him.”

Scarpetta heard the door open downstairs, and the clatter and confusion of tense voices as the squad came in, and Marino hurried them up the stairs, all of them talking loudly. He stepped out of the way, looking at Lucy in her bloody bath sheets, then at the Glock on the floor, and he leaned over and picked it up. He did the one thing you never do at a crime scene. He held it in his bare hands and walked off with it, disappeared into the bathroom with it.

Two paramedics were talking to Lucy and asking her questions, and she was answering as they buckled her into the stretcher, and Scarpetta was so busy with that, she didn’t notice Marino had somehow ended up back downstairs, and was there with three uniformed officers. Other EMTs were lifting Morales’s body onto yet another stretcher, nobody bothering with CPR because he had been dead for a while.

Marino was dropping the magazine out of the Glock—Lucy’s Glock—it seemed, and clearing the chamber while an officer held a paper bag open. Marino was telling them about Berger remotely unlocking the apartment door and letting him in without Morales knowing. Marino was making up a story about him creeping as close as he could, then deliberately making a sound so Morales would look up.

“Giving me just enough chance to get off a round before he shot someone,” Marino lied to the cops. “He was behind the Doc with his revolver pointed at her.”

Berger was with them, and she said, “We were right here on the couch.”

“A hammerless thirty-eight,” Marino said.

He was pointing all this out, taking the blame, not the credit, for killing someone, and Berger was going along with it flawlessly. It seemed her new role in life was keeping Lucy out of trouble.