The door I face opens onto a vaulted arched ceiling hung with alabaster chandeliers, and tables occupied by attorneys and rows of crowded public seating leading to Judge Joseph Conry, robed in black and perched up high on a bench that’s elevated like a throne before a backdrop of leather-bound law reviews. I feel his gravity from the far end of his courtroom as I follow gray carpet toward the witness stand, directly across from the jury box.

“Dr. Scarpetta.” The judge halts me from what feels like miles away. “You were supposed to be here an hour and fifteen minutes ago.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I reply, with appropriate humility, looking directly at him and avoiding Jill Donoghue standing at a lectern to my left. “And I deeply apologize.”

“Why are you late?”

I know he knows why, but I reply, “I was at a scene several miles south of the city in the Massachusetts Bay, Your Honor. Where a woman’s body was found.”

“So you were working?”

“Yes, Your Honor.” I feel eyes fastened to me like darts, the courtroom as still as an empty cathedral.

“Well, Dr. Scarpetta, I was here by nine o’clock this morning, as is required of me so I can do my job in this case.” He is hard and unforgiving, not at all the man I know from swearing-ins and retirements, from the unveilings of judicial portraits and the countless Federal Bar Association receptions I’ve attended.

Joseph Conry, whose name is frequently confused with the English novelist Joseph Conrad, is strikingly handsome, tall, with jet-black hair and piercing blue eyes, the black Irish judge with a heart of darkness, as he has been described, a no-nonsense brilliant jurist who always has treated me kindly and with respect. I wouldn’t call us personal friends. But I would say we are warmly acquainted, Conry always going out of his way to get me a drink and to chat about the latest in forensics or to ask my advice about his daughter in medical school.

“All of the lawyers and jurors were here by nine o’clock this morning, as required of them, so they can do their jobs in this case,” he is saying in the same severe voice, as I listen with growing dismay. “And because you decided to put your job first, we’ve been forced to wait for you, implying you’re obviously the most important person in this trial.”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor. I never meant to imply that.”

“You’ve wasted the court’s precious time. Yes, I said wasted,” he stuns me by saying. “Time wasted not just by you but also by Mr. Steward, because he doesn’t fool me when he malingers with a witness to buy you time to get here because you’re too busy or too important to obey an order of this court.”