“I’ll explain more when I see you. I’m not expecting you to find anything. No expectations, Kay. I’m just asking you to come because it’s a very complicated situation. And Berger really wants you here.”

“Even though he might be gone by the time I get there.”

He detected the question she wasn’t going to ask. He wasn’t acting like the cool, unflappable forensic psychologist she had known for twenty years, but she wasn’t going to point that out. She was in the morgue and she wasn’t alone. She wasn’t going to ask him what the hell was wrong with him.

Benton said, “He definitely won’t leave before you get here.”

“I don’t understand why he’s there.” She wasn’t going to let that go.

“We’re not entirely sure. But in a nutshell? When the cops arrived at the scene, he insisted on being transported to Bellevue… .”

“His name?”

“Oscar Bane. He said the only person he’d allow to conduct the psychological evaluation was me. So I was called, and as you know, I left immediately for New York. He’s afraid of doctors. Gets panic attacks.”

“How did he know who you are?”

“Because he knows who you are.”

“He knows who I am?”

“The cops have his clothes, but he says if they want any evidence collected from him physically—and there’s no warrant, as I keep emphasizing—it will have to be you who does it. We hoped he’d calm down, agree to let a local ME take care of him. Never going to happen. He’s more adamant than ever. Says he’s terrified of doctors. Has odynephobia, dishabiliophobia.”

“He’s afraid of pain and taking his clothes off?”

“And caligynephobia. Fear of beautiful women.”

“I see. So that’s why he’d feel safe with me.”

“That part was supposed to be funny. He thinks you’re beautiful, and he’s definitely not afraid of you. I’m the one who should be afraid.”

That was the truth of the matter. Benton didn’t want her here. He didn’t even want her in New York right now.

“Let me make sure I understand. Jaime Berger wants me to fly there in a snowstorm, examine a patient on a prison ward who hasn’t been charged with a crime—”

“If you can get out of Boston, the weather’s fine here. Just cold.” Benton looked out his window and saw nothing but gray.

“Let me finish up with my Army Reservist sergeant who was a casualty in Iraq but didn’t know it until he got home. And I’ll see you mid-afternoon,” she said.

“Fly safe. I love you.”

Benton hung up, started tapping the down arrow again, then the up arrow, reading and re-reading, as though if he read the anonymous gossip column often enough, it wouldn’t seem so offensive, so ugly, so hateful. “Sticks and stones,” Scarpetta always said. Maybe that was true in grammar school, but not in their adult lives. Words could hurt. They could hurt badly. What kind of monster would write something like this? How did the monster find out?