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  “Only once in ten weeks?” Scarpetta watches her closely, probing.

  When Nic returns to Louisiana, she will face the worst homicide cases she may ever have in her life. So far, she hasn’t said a word about them, and Scarpetta is concerned about her.

  “When I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins,” Scarpetta offers as she pours coffee, “I was one of three women in my class. If there was a bathtub full of beer anywhere, I can assure you I was never told. What do you take?”

  “Lots of cream and sugar. You shouldn’t be serving me. Here I am, just sitting.” She pops up from her wing chair.

  “Sit down, sit down.” Scarpetta sets Nic’s coffee on a table. “There are croissants and rather inedible-looking bagels. I’ll let you help yourself.”

  “But when you were in medical school, you weren’t a small-town . . .” Nic catches herself before saying hick. “Miami’s not exactly some little mud puddle in Louisiana. All these guys in my class are from big cities.”

  She fixes her attention on Scarpetta’s coffee cup, on how perfectly steady it is as she lifts it to her lips. She drinks her coffee black and seems uninterested in food.

  “When my chief told me the department was offered a fully funded slot at the Academy and would I go, I can’t tell you what I felt like,” Nic goes on, worrying that she’s talking too much about herself. “I really couldn’t believe it and had to go to a world of trouble to make it possible for me to leave home for close to three months. Then I got here to Knoxville and found myself with Reba as a roommate.

  “I can’t say it’s been fun, and I feel terrible sitting here and complaining.” She nervously drinks her coffee, setting it down, then picking it up again, clenching her napkin tightly in her lap. “Especially to you.”

  “Why especially to me?”

  “Truth is, I guess I was hoping to impress you.”

  “You have.”

  “And you don’t seem the sort to appreciate whining.” Nic looks up at her. “It’s not like people are always nice to you, either.”

  Scarpetta laughs. “Shall I call that an understatement?”

  “That didn’t come out right. People are jealous out there. You’ve had your battles. What I’m saying is, you don’t complain.”

  “Ask Rose about that.” Scarpetta is quite amused.

  Nic’s mind locks, as if she should know who Rose is but can’t make a connection.

  “My secretary,” Scarpetta explains, sipping her coffee.

  An awkward silence follows, and Nic asks, “What happened to the other two?”

  Scarpetta is confused.

  “The other two women in your medical class.”

  “One dropped out. I think the other got married and never practiced medicine.”

  “I wonder what they’re feeling now. Probably regret.”

  “They probably wonder about me, too,” Scarpetta replies. “They probably think I feel regret.”

  Nic’s lips part in disbelief. “You?”

  “Everything comes with sacrifices. And it’s human nature to have a hard time accepting anyone who’s different. Usually, you don’t figure that out until you get what you asked for in life and are shocked that in some instances your reward is hatred instead of applause.”

  “I don’t see myself as different or hated. Maybe picked on a lot, but not back home,” Nic quickly replies. “Just because I’m with a small department instead of LAPD doesn’t mean I’m stupid.” Her spirit rises, her voice heating up. “I’m not some mudbug swamp-rat redneck . . .”

  “Mudbug.” Scarpetta frowns. “I don’t believe I know what that is.”

  “A crawfish.”

  “Did someone in the class call you a crawfish?”

  Nic can’t help but lighten up. “Oh, hell. None of them have ever even eaten a crawfish. They probably think it’s a fish that crawls along the bottom of the ocean or something.”

  “I see.”

  “I know what you mean, though. Sort of,” Nic says. “In Zachary, only two street cops are women. I’m the only female investigator, and it’s not that the chief dislikes women or anything like that. In fact, the mayor’s a woman. But most times when I’m in the break room, getting coffee or eating or whatever, I’m the only woman in there. Truth is, I rarely think about it. But I have thought about it a lot here at the Academy. I realize I try too hard to prove I’m really not a hick, and then I annoy everyone. Well, I know you need to go. You probably have to pack, and I don’t want you to miss your plane.”

  “Not so fast,” Scarpetta replies. “I don’t think we’re finished talking.”

  Nic relaxes, her attractive face more animated, her slender body less rigid in the chair. When she speaks this time, she doesn’t sound as nervous.

  “I will tell you the nicest thing anybody’s said to me during this entire ten weeks. Reba said I look a little bit like you. ’Course, it was when she was drunk. Hope I didn’t just insult you.”

  “You may have insulted yourself,” Scarpetta modestly replies. “I’m somewhat older than you, if what I read on your application is to be trusted.”

  “Thirty-six in August. It’s amazing what you pick up about people.”

  “I make it my business to know as much about people as I can. It’s important to listen. Most people are too busy making assumptions, too self-absorbed to listen. And in the morgue, my patients speak very quietly and are unforgiving if I don’t listen and find out everything I can about them.”

  “Sometimes I don’t listen to Buddy like I should—when I’m frantic or just too tired.” Sadness crosses her eyes. “I of all people ought to know how that feels, since Ricky hardly ever listened to me, which is one reason we didn’t get along. One of many reasons.”

  Scarpetta has suspected that Nic’s marriage is in trouble or has ended. People who are unhappy in relationships carry about them a distinct air of discontent and isolation. In Nic’s case, the signs are there, especially the anger that she thinks she hides.

  “How bad?” Scarpetta asks her.

  “Separated, well on our way to divorce.” Nic reaches for her coffee cup again but changes her mind. “Thank God my father lives nearby in Baton Rouge or I don’t know what I’d do about Buddy. I know damn well Ricky would take him from me just to pay me back.”

  “Pay you back? For what?” Scarpetta inquires, and she has a reason for all these questions.

  “A long story. Been going on more than a year, from bad to worse, not that it was ever all that good.”

  “About as long as these women have been disappearing from your area.” Scarpetta finally gets to her point. “I want to know how you’re handling that, because it will get you if you let it. When you least expect it. It’s not escaped my notice that you haven’t brought up the cases once, not once, not while I’ve been here. Ten women in fourteen months. Vanished, from their homes, vehicles, parking lots, all in the Baton Rouge area. Presumed dead. I can assure you they are. I can assure you they were murdered by the same person, who is shrewd—very shrewd. Intelligent and experienced enough to gain trust, then abduct, then dispose of the bodies. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again. The latest disappearance was just four days ago—in Zachary. That makes two cases in Zachary, the first one several months ago. So you’re going home to that, Nic. Serial murders. Ten of them.”

  “Not ten. Just the two in Zachary. I’m not on the task force,” Nic replies with restrained resentment. “I don’t run with the big boys. They don’t need help from little country cops like me, at least that’s the way the U.S. Attorney looks at it.”

  “What’s the U.S. Attorney got to do with it?” Scarpetta asks. “These cases aren’t the jurisdiction of the feds.”

  “Weldon Winn’s not only an egotistical asshole, but he’s stupid. Nothing worse than someone who’s stupid and arrogant and has power. The cases are high-profile, all over the news. He wants to be part of them, maybe end up a federal judge or senator someday.

  “And you’re right. I
know what I’m going home to, but all I can do is work the two disappearances we’ve had in Zachary, even if I know damn well they’re connected to the other eight.”

  “Interesting the abductions are now happening farther north of Baton Rouge,” Scarpetta says. “He may be finding his earlier killing field too risky.”

  “The only thing good I can say about that is Zachary may be in the East Baton Rouge Parish, but at least it isn’t the jurisdiction of the Baton Rouge police. So the high and mighty task force can’t boss me around about my cases.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  “Let’s see. The most recent one. What I know about it. What anybody knows about it. Two days after Easter, just four nights ago,” she begins. “A forty-year-old schoolteacher named Glenda Marler. She’s a teacher at the high school—same high school I went to. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, very smart. Divorced, no children. This past Tuesday night, she goes to the Road Side Bar Be Q, gets pulled pork, hush puppies and slaw to go. She has a ’94 Honda Accord, blue, and is observed driving away from the restaurant, south on Main Street, right through the middle of town. She vanishes, her car found abandoned in the parking lot of the high school where she taught. Of course, the task force is suggesting she was having a rendezvous with one of her students, that the case isn’t related to the others, that it’s a copycat. Bullshit.”

  “Her own high school parking lot,” Scarpetta thoughtfully observes. “So he talked to her, found out about her after he had her in his car, maybe asked her where she worked, and she told him. Or else he stalked her.”

  “Which do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Most serial killers stalk their victims. But there’s no set rule, despite what most profilers would like to think.”

  “The other victim,” Nic continues, “vanished right before I came here. Ivy Ford. Forty-two years old, blonde, blue-eyed, attractive, worked as a bank teller. Kids are off in college, and her husband was up in Jackson, Mississippi, on a business trip, so she was home alone when someone must have showed up at her door. As usual, no sign of a struggle. No nothing. And she’s gone without a trace.”

  “Nothing is ever without a trace,” Scarpetta says as she envisions each scenario, contemplating the obvious: The victim has no reason to fear her attacker until it is too late.

  “Is Ivy Ford’s house still secured?” Scarpetta doubts it after all this time.

  “Family’s still living in it. I don’t know how people return to homes where such awful things have happened.”

  Nic starts to say that she wouldn’t. But that isn’t true. Earlier in her life, she did.

  “The car in this most recent case, Glenda Marler’s case, is impounded and was thoroughly examined?” Scarpetta asks.

  “Hours and hours we . . . well, as you know, I was here.” This detail disappoints her. “But I’ve gotten the full report, and I know we spent a lot of time on it. My guys lifted every print they could find. Entered the useable ones in AFIS, and no matches. Personally, I don’t think that matters because I believe that whoever grabbed Glenda Marler was never inside her car. So his prints wouldn’t be in there, anyway. And the only prints on the door handles were hers.”

  “What about her keys and wallet and any other personal effects?”

  “Keys in the ignition, her pocketbook and wallet in the high school parking lot about twenty feet from the car.”

  “Money in the wallet?” Scarpetta asks.

  Nic shakes her head. “But her checkbook and charge cards weren’t touched. She wasn’t one to carry much cash. Whatever she had, it was gone, and I know she had at least six dollars and thirty-two cents because that was the change she got when she gave the guy at the barbeque a ten-dollar bill to pay for her food. I had my guys check, because oddly, the bag of food wasn’t inside her car. So there was no receipt. We had to go back to the barbeque and have him pull her receipt.”

  “Then it would appear that the perpetrator took her food, too.”

  This is odd, more typical of a burglary or robbery, certainly not the usual in a psychopathic violent crime.

  “As far as you know, is robbery involved in the cases of the other eight missing women?” Scarpetta asks.

  “Rumor has it that their billfolds were cleaned out of cash and tossed not far from where they were snatched.”

  “No fingerprints in any of the cases, as far as you know?”

  “I don’t know for a fact.”

  “Perhaps DNA from skin cells where the perpetrator touched the billfold?”

  “I don’t know what the Baton Rouge police have done, because they don’t tell anybody shit. But the guys at my department swabbed everything we could, including Ivy Ford’s wallet, and did get her DNA profile—and another one that isn’t in the FBI’s database, CODIS. Louisiana, as you know, is just getting started on a DNA database and is so backed up on entering samples, you may as well forget it.”

  “But you do have an unknown profile,” Scarpetta says with interest. “Although we have to accept right off that it could be anybody’s. What about her children, her husband?”

  “The DNA’s not theirs.”

  Scarpetta nods. “Then you have to start wondering who else would have had good reason to touch Ivy Ford’s wallet. Who else besides the killer.”

  “I wonder about that twenty-four hours a day.”

  “And this most recent case, Glenda Marler?”

  “The state police labs have the evidence. The tests results will be a while, even though there’s a rush on them.”

  “An alternate light source used on the inside of the car?”

  “Yes. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing,” Nic says in frustration. “No crime scenes, no bodies, like it’s all a bad dream. If even just one body would show up. The coroner’s great. You’ve heard of him? Dr. Sam Lanier.”

  Scarpetta doesn’t know him.

  THE EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH Coroner’s Office overlooks a long straight reach of the Mississippi River and the former art deco state capitol where the wily, fearless and despotic Huey Long was assassinated.

  Muddy, sluggish water carries Dr. Sam Lanier’s eye to a riverboat casino and past the USS Kidd battleship to the distant Old Mississippi Bridge, as he stands before his office window on the fifth floor of the Governmental Building. He is a fit man in his early sixties with a head of gray hair that naturally parts neatly on the right side. Unlike most men of his power, he shuns suits except when he is in court or attending the political functions he cannot avoid.

  His may be a political office, but he despises politics and virtually all people involved in it. Contrary by nature, Dr. Lanier wears the same outfit pretty much every day, even if he’s meeting with the mayor: comfortable shoes capable of walking him into unpleasant places, dark slacks and a polo shirt embroidered with the East Baton Rouge Parish coroner’s crest.

  Deliberate man that he is, he ponders how to handle the bizarre communication he received yesterday morning, a letter enclosed in a National Academy of Justice postage-paid mailing. Dr. Lanier has been a member of the organization for years. The large white NAJ envelope was sealed. It did not look tampered with in any way until Dr. Lanier opened it and found another envelope, also sealed. It was addressed to him by hand in block printing, the return address the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Polunsky Unit. A search on the Internet revealed that the Polunsky Unit is death row. The letter, also written by hand in block printing, reads:

  Greetings Monsieur Lanier,

  Of course you remember Madame Charlotte Dard, whose untimely, sad death occurred on 14 September 1995. You witnessed her autopsy, and I do envy you for that delicious experience, having never seen one myself, not in person. I will be executed soon and am relieving myself of secrets.

  Madame Dard was murdered very cleverly.

  Mais non! Not by me.

  A person of interest, as they stupidly refer to possible suspects these days, fled to Palm Desert shortly after Madame Dard’s death. This person is n
ot there now. This person’s location and identity you must discover for yourself. I very much encourage you to seek assistance. Might I suggest the great skills of Detective Pete Marino? He knows me very well from my joyous Richmond days. Surely you must have heard of the great Marino?

  Your surname, mon cher monsieur, implies you are of French descent. Perhaps we are related.

  Á bientôt,

  Jean-Baptiste Chandonne

  Dr. Lanier has heard of Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. He has not heard of Pete Marino but is introduced to him easily enough by sending out a few search engines to chug through cyberspace and find him. It is true. Marino led the investigation when Chandonne was murdering women in Richmond. What interests Dr. Lanier more, however, is that Marino is best known for his close professional relationship with Dr. Kay Scarpetta, a gifted forensic pathologist. Dr. Lanier has always respected her and was more than a little impressed when he heard her lecture at a regional meeting of coroners. Most forensic pathologists, particularly ones with her status, look down on coroners, think they’re all funeral home directors who got voted into office. Of course, some of them are.

  Trouble stuck out its big foot and tripped Dr. Scarpetta, hurting her badly, several years back. For that she has Dr. Lanier’s sympathy. Not a day goes by when trouble doesn’t stomp around looking for him, too.

  Now some notorious serial killer seems to think Dr. Lanier needs the help of her colleague Marino. Maybe he does. Maybe he’s being set up. With the election not even six months away, Dr. Lanier is suspicious of any deviation from routine, and a letter from Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes him as leery as hell. The only reason he can’t dismiss it is simple: Jean-Baptiste Chandonne, if the letter is really from him, knows about Charlotte Dard. Her case has been forgotten by the public and was never all that newsworthy outside of Baton Rouge. Her cause of death was undetermined. Dr. Lanier has always entertained the possibility that she was murdered.