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  “I don’t drink very much.” Nic instantly regrets the remark as her classmates groan.

  “Lordy, where’d you grow up, girlfriend, Sunday school?”

  “What I mean is, I really can’t because I have a five-year-old son . . .” Nic’s voice trails off, and she feels like crying. This is the longest she’s ever been away from him.

  The table falls silent. Shame and awkwardness flatten the mood.

  “Hey, Nic,” Popeye says, “you got his picture with you? His name’s Buddy,” he tells Scarpetta. “You gotta see his picture. A really ass-kicking little hombre sitting on a pony . . .”

  Nic is in no mood to pass around the wallet-size photograph that by now is worn soft, the writing on the back faded and smeared from her taking it out and looking at it all the time. She wishes Popeye would change the subject or give her the silent treatment again.

  “How many of you have children?” Scarpetta asks the table.

  About a dozen hands go up.

  “One of the painful aspects of this work,” she points out, “maybe the worst thing about this work—or shall I call it a mission—is what it does to the people we love, no matter how hard we try to protect them.”

  No heat lightning at all. Just a silky black darkness, cool and lovely to the touch, Nic thinks as she watches Scarpetta.

  She’s gentle. Behind that wall of fiery fearlessness and brilliance, she’s kind and gentle.

  “In this work, relationships can also become fatalities. Often they do,” Scarpetta goes on, always trying to teach because it is easier for her to share her mind than to touch feelings she is masterful at keeping out of reach.

  “So, Doc, you got kids?” Reba, a crime-scene technician from San Francisco, starts on another whiskey sour. She has begun to slur her words and has no tact.

  Scarpetta hesitates. “I have a niece.”

  “Oh yeah! Now I ’member. Lucy. She’s been in the news a lot. Or was, I mean . . .”

  Stupid, drunk idiot, Nic silently protests with a flash of anger.

  “Yes, Lucy is my niece,” Scarpetta replies.

  “FBI. Computer whiz.” Reba won’t stop. “Then what? Let me think. Something about flying helicopters and AFT.”

  ATF, you stupid drunk. Thunder cracks in the back of Nic’s mind.

  “I dunno. Wasn’t there a big fire or something and someone got killed? So what’s she doing now?” She drains her whiskey sour and looks for the waitress.

  “That was a long time ago.” Scarpetta doesn’t answer her questions, and Nic detects a weariness, a sadness as immutable and maimed as the stumps and knees of cypress trees in the swamps and bayous of her South Louisiana home.

  “Isn’t that something, I forgot all about her being your niece. Now she’s something, all right. Or was,” Reba rudely says again, shoving her short dark hair out of her bloodshot eyes. “Got into some trouble, didn’t she?”

  Fucking dyke. Shut up.

  Lightning rips the black curtain of night, and for an instant, Nic can see the white daylight on the other side. That’s how her father always explained it. You see, Nic, he would say as they gazed out the window during angry storms, and lightning suddenly and without warning cut zigzags like a bright blade. There’s tomorrow, see? You got to look quick, Nic. There’s tomorrow on the other side, that bright white light. And see how quick it heals. God heals just that fast.

  “Reba, go back to the hotel,” Nic tells her in the same firm, controlled voice she uses when Buddy throws a tantrum. “You’ve had enough whiskey for one night.”

  “Well, ’scuse me, Miss Teacher’s Pet.” Reba is careening toward unconsciousness, and she talks as if she has rubber bands in her mouth.

  Nic feels Scarpetta’s eyes on her and wishes she could send her a signal that might be reassuring or serve as an apology for Reba’s outrageous display.

  Lucy has entered the room like a hologram, and Scarpetta’s subtle but deeply emotional response shocks Nic with jealousy, with envy she didn’t know she had. She feels inferior to her hero’s super-cop niece, whose talents and world are enormous compared to Nic’s. Her heart aches like a frozen joint that is finally unbent, the way her mother gently straightened out Nic’s healing broken arm every time the splint came off.

  Hurting’s good, baby. If you didn’t feel something, this little arm of yours would be dead and fall right off. You wouldn’t want that, would you?

  No, Mama. I’m sorry for what I did.

  Why, Nicci, that’s the silliest thing. You didn’t hurt yourself on purpose!

  But I didn’t do what Papa said. I ran right into the woods and that’s when I tripped . . . .

  We all make mistakes when we’re scared, baby. Maybe it’s a good thing you fell down—you were low to the ground when the lightning was flying all around.

  NIC’S MEMORIES OF HER childhood in the Deep South are full of storms.

  It seems the heavens threw terrible fits every week, exploding in rageful thunder and trying to drown or electrocute every living creature on the Earth. Whenever thunderheads raised their ugly warnings and boomed their threats, her papa preached about safety, and her pretty blonde mother stood at the screen door, motioning for Nic to hurry into the house, hurry into a warm, dry place, hurry into her arms.

  Papa always turned off the lights, and the three of them sat in the dark, telling Bible stories and seeing how many verses and psalms they could quote from memory. A perfect recitation was worth a quarter, but her father wouldn’t pay out until the storm passed, because quarters are made of metal, and metal attracts lightning.

  Thou shalt not covet.

  Nic’s excitement had been almost unbearable when she learned that one of the Academy’s visiting lecturers was Dr. Kay Scarpetta, who would teach death investigation the tenth and final week of training. Nic counted the days. She felt as though the first nine weeks would never pass. Then Scarpetta arrived here in Knoxville, and to Nic’s acute embarrassment, she met her for the first time in the ladies’ room, right after Nic flushed the toilet and emerged from a stall, zipping up the dark navy cargo pants of her Battle Dress Uniform.

  Scarpetta was washing her hands at a sink, and Nic recalled the first time she had seen a photograph of her and how surprised she had been that Scarpetta wasn’t of dark Spanish stock. That was about eight years ago, when Nic knew only Scarpetta’s name and had no reason to expect that she would be a blue-eyed blonde whose ancestors came from Northern Italy, some of them farmers along the Austrian border and as Aryan in appearance as Germans.

  “Hi, I’m Dr. Scarpetta,” her hero said, as if oblivious that the flushing toilet and Nic were related. “And let me guess, you’re Nicole Robillard.”

  Nic turned into a mute, her face bright red. “How . . .”

  Before she could sputter the rest of the question, Scarpetta explained, “I requested copies of everyone’s application, including photographs.”

  “You did?” Not only was Nic stunned that Scarpetta would have asked for their applications, but she couldn’t fathom why she would have had the time or interest in looking at them. “Guess that means you know my Social Security number,” Nic tried to be funny.

  “Now, I don’t remember that,” Scarpetta said, drying her hands on paper towels. “But I know enough.”

  SECOND INSTAR.” Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.

  The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn’t quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.

  “That’s very good, Nic,” Scarpetta commends her.

  “Who invited smarty pants?” Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn’t nodding off into her plate.

  “I think Ni
c hasn’t been drinking enough and is having the D. T.’s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere,” says the detective with the shiny shaved head.

  The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.

  “And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field.” Nic wants to be funny but can’t escape the gravity of her mood. “See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta . . . ?”

  “Ah! At last she confesses.”

  “It’s second instar.” Nic knows she should stop. “Already shed its skin once since it hatched.”

  “Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?” the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.

  “Nic’s got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends,” someone else says.

  “I would if I needed to.”

  No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she’s dropping by the old folks’ home and checking on her relatives.

  “Bet Nic’s got a name for every maggot, fly, beetle and buzzard out there.”

  The quips and gross-out jokes continue until Reba drops her fork with a loud clatter.

  “Not while I’m eating rare steak!” she protests much too loudly.

  “The spinach adds a nice touch of green, girlfriend.”

  “Too bad you didn’t get no rice . . .”

  “Hey, it ain’t too late! Waitress! Bring this lady a nice bowl of rice. With gravy.”

  “And what are these tiny black dots that look like Maggie’s eyes?” Scarpetta lifts the vial to the candlelight again, hoping her students will settle down before they all get kicked out of the restaurant.

  “Eyes,” says the cop with the shaved head. “They’re eyes, right?”

  Reba begins to sway in her chair.

  “No, they’re not eyes,” Scarpetta replies. “Come on. I already gave you a hint a few minutes ago.”

  “Look like eyes to me. Little beady black eyes like Magilla’s.”

  In the past ten weeks, Sergeant Magil from Houston has become “Magilla the Gorilla” because of his hairy, muscle-bound body.

  “Hey!” he protests. “You ask my girlfriend if I got maggot eyes. She looks deep into these eyes of mine”—he points to them—“and faints.”

  “Exactly what we’re saying, Magilla. I looked into those eyes of yours, I’d pass out cold, too.”

  “They gotta be eyes. How the hell else does a maggot see where it’s going?”

  “They’re spiracles, not eyes,” Nic answers. “That’s what the little black dots are. Like little snorkels so the maggot can breathe.”

  “Snorkels?”

  “Wait a minute. Hey, hand that thing over, Dr. Scarpetta. I wanna see if Maggie’s wearing a mask and fins.”

  A skinny state police investigator from Michigan has her head on the table, she is laughing so hard.

  “Next time we find a ripe one, just look for little snorkels sticking up . . .”

  The guffaws turn to fits, Magilla sliding off his chair, prone on the floor. “Oh, shit! I’m gonna throw up,” he shrieks with laughter.

  “Snorkels!”

  Scarpetta surrenders, sitting back in silence, the situation out of her control.

  “Hey, Nic! Didn’t know you were a Navy SEAL!”

  This goes on until the manager of Ye Old Steak House silently appears in the doorway—his way of indicating that the party in his back room is disturbing the other diners.

  “Okay, boys and girls,” Scarpetta says in a tone that is slightly scary. “Enough.”

  The hilarity is gone as quickly as a sonic boom, the maggot jokes end, and then there are other gifts for Scarpetta: a space pen that can supposedly write in “rain, blizzards, and if you accidentally drop it in a chest cavity while you’re doing an autopsy”; a Mini Maglite “to see in those hard-to-reach places”; and a dark blue baseball cap embellished with enough gold braid for a general.

  “General Dr. Scarpetta. Salute!”

  Everybody does as they eagerly look for her response, irreverent remarks flying around again like shotgun pellets. Magilla tops off Scarpetta’s wine glass from a gallon paper carton with a push-button spout. She figures the cheap Chardonnay is probably made from grapes grown at the lowest level of the slopes, where the drainage is terrible. If she’s lucky, the vintage is four months old. She will be sick tomorrow. She is sure of it.

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING in New York’s Kennedy Airport, a security guard recommends that Lucy Farinelli remove her oversized stainless-steel Breitling watch, empty her pockets of coins and place them in a tray.

  It is not a suggestion but an order when she is asked to remove her running shoes, jacket and belt and place them and her briefcase on the conveyor that will carry them through the X-ray machine, where nothing but a cell phone, a hairbrush and a tube of lipstick will fluoresce. British Air attendants are friendly enough in their dark blazers and navy blue dresses with red and white checks, but airport police are especially tense. Although she doesn’t set off the doorframe-shaped scanner as she walks through in her athletic socks, her jeans hanging loose, she is searched with the hand scanner, and her underwire bra sets it off with a beep-beep-beep.

  “Hold up your arms,” the hefty female officer tells her.

  Lucy smiles and holds out her arms crucifixion-style, and the officer pats her down quickly, her hands fluttering under Lucy’s arms, under her breasts, up and down her thighs, all the way to her crotch—very professionally, of course. Other passengers pass by unmolested, and the men, in particular, find the good-looking young woman with arms and legs spread of keen interest. Lucy could care less. She has lived through too much to waste energy in being modest and is tempted to unbutton her shirt and point out the underwire bra, assuring the officer that no battery and tiny—very tiny—explosive device are attached.

  “It’s my bra,” she casually says to the startled guard, who is far more unnerved than her suspect. “Damn it, I always forget to wear a bra without wire in it, maybe a sports bra, or no bra. I’m really sorry to inconvenience you, Officer Washington.” She’s already read her name tag. “Thank you for doing your job so well. What a world we live in. I understand the terrorist alert is orange again.”

  Lucy leaves the bewildered guard and plucks her watch and coins out of the tray and collects her briefcase, jacket and belt. Sitting on the cold, hard floor, out of the way of traffic, she puts on her running shoes, not bothering to lace them. She gets up, still polite and sweet to any police or British Air employees watching her. Reaching around to her back pocket, she slips out her ticket and passport, both of them issued to one of her many false names. She strolls nonchalantly, laces flopping, deep inside the winding carpeted gate 10, and ducks inside the small doorway of Concorde flight 01. A British Air attendant smiles at her as she checks Lucy’s boarding pass.

  “Seat one-C.” She points the way to the first row, the bulkhead aisle seat, as if Lucy has never traveled on the Concorde before.

  Last time she did, it was under yet another name, and she was wearing glasses and green contact lenses, her hair dyed funky blue and purple, easily washed out and matching the photograph on that particular passport. Her occupation was “musician.” Although no one could possibly have been familiar with her nonexistent techno band, Yellow Hell, there were plenty of people who said, “Oh yes, I’ve heard of it! Cool!”

  Lucy counts on the dismal observation skills of the general masses. She counts on their fear of showing ignorance, on their accepting lies as familiar truths. She counts on her enemies noticing all that goes on around them, and like them, she notices all that goes on around her, too. For example, when the cus
toms agent studied her passport at great length, she recognized his behavior and understood why security is at a feverish pitch. Interpol has sent a Red Notice screaming over the Internet to approximately 182 countries, alerting them to look out for a fugitive named Rocco Caggiano, wanted in Italy and France for murder. Rocco has no idea he is a fugitive. He has no idea that Lucy sent information to Interpol’s Central Bureau in Washington, D.C., her credible tip thoroughly checked out before it was relayed through cyberspace to Interpol’s headquarters in Lyon, France, where the Red Notice was issued and rocketed to law enforcement all around the world. All this in a matter of hours.

  Rocco does not know Lucy, although he knows who she is. She knows him very well, although they have never met. At this moment, as she straps herself into her seat and the Concorde starts its Rolls Royce engines, she can’t wait to see Rocco Caggiano, her anticipation fueled by intense anger that will evolve into a nervous dread by the time she finally gets to Eastern Europe.

  ISURE HOPE YOU’RE NOT FEELING as bad as I am,” Nic says to Scarpetta.

  They sit inside the living room of Scarpetta’s suite at the Marriott, waiting for room service. It is nine a.m., and twice now Nic has inquired about Scarpetta’s health, her banality partly due to her flattered disbelief that this woman she admires so intensely invited her to have breakfast.

  Why me? The question bounces inside Nic’s head like a bingo ball. Maybe she feels sorry for me.

  “I’ve felt better,” Scarpetta replies with a smile.

  “Popeye and his wine. But he’s brought worse poison than that.”

  “I don’t know how anything could be worse,” Scarpetta says as a knock sounds on the door. “Unless it really is poison. Excuse me.”

  She gets up from the couch. Room service has arrived on a table wheeled inside. Scarpetta signs the check and tips in cash. Nic notes that she is generous.

  “Popeye’s room—room one-oh-six—is the watering hole,” Nic says. “Any night, just go on in with your six-pack and dump it in the bathtub. Starting around eight p.m., he does nothing but haul twenty-pound bags of ice to his room. Good thing he’s on the first floor. I went once.”