Snow was like a swarm of white gnats hitting the windshield, the wipers hypnotically useless. Traffic was slow but steady, Logan just a few minutes out.

“Bryce?” Scarpetta said in the tone she used when she was warning him to shut up and answer her question. “What big deal?”

“That disgusting online gossip column. Gotham Gotcha.”

She’d seen ads for it on New York City buses and taxicab tops, the anonymous columnist notoriously vicious. The guessing game of who was behind it ranged from a nobody to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was having great fun making mean-spirited mischief and money.

“Nas-ty,” Bryce said. “Now, I know it’s supposed to be nasty, but this is nasty below the belt. Not that I read such tripe. But for obvious reasons, I have you as a Google alert. There’s a photograph, which is the worst part. It’s not flattering.”

Kay Scarpetta 16 - Scarpetta

2

Benton leaned back in his desk chair, looking out at his view of ugly red brick in the flat wintry light.

“Sounds like you got a cold,” he said into the phone.

“I’m slightly under the weather today. Which is why I didn’t get back to you sooner. Don’t ask me what we did last night to deserve it. Gerald won’t get out of bed. And I don’t mean it in a good way,” Dr. Thomas said.

She was a colleague at McLean. She was also Benton’s psychiatrist. There was nothing unusual about it. As Dr. Thomas, who was born in the coal-mining hinterlands of western Virginia, liked to say, “Hospitals are more incestuous than hillbillies.” Practitioners treated one another and their families and friends. They prescribed drugs for one another and their families and friends. They fucked one another, but hopefully not their families and friends. Occasionally, they got married. Dr. Thomas had married a McLean radiologist who scanned Scarpetta’s niece, Lucy, in the neuroimaging lab where Benton had his office. Dr. Thomas knew Benton’s business, pretty much all of it. She was the first person he’d thought of some months back when he’d realized he had to talk to someone.

“Did you open the link I e-mailed to you?” Benton asked her.

“Yes, and the real question is who are you more worried about? I think the answer might be you. What do you think?”

“I think that would make me incredibly selfish,” Benton said.

“It would be normal to feel cuckolded, humiliated,” she said.

“I forgot you were a Shakespearean actor in an earlier life,” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I heard someone refer to anyone as cuckolded, and it doesn’t apply. Kay didn’t wander out of the nest and into the arms of another man. She was grabbed. Were I to feel cuckolded, it should have been when it happened. But I didn’t. I was too worried about her. Don’t say ‘the lady doth protest too much.’ “

“What I’ll say is when it happened, there wasn’t an audience,” Dr. Thomas said. “Perhaps it makes it more real when everybody knows? Did you tell her what’s on the Internet? Or had she already seen it?”