"I don't know, but I'll find out." I began to shake with rage.

"The bitch. Lucy could have been killed."

"Christ, you could have been killed."

"The goddam bitch."

"Kay, be still and listen to me." He said the words slowly and in a way that was meant to soothe. "} will get back down to North Carolina and see what the hell's going on. We'll get to the bottom of this. I promise. But I want you to get out of that hotel as soon as you can. How long are you supposed to be in Knoxville? "

"I can leave after I meet Katz and Dr. Shade at the Farm. Katz is picking me up at eight. God, I hope it isn't still raining. I haven't even looked out the window yet."

"It's sunny here," he said as if that meant it had to be sunny in Knoxville.

"If something comes up and you decide not to leave, then change hotels."

"I will."

"Then go back to Richmond."

"No," I said.

"I can't do anything about this in Richmond. And Lucy's not there. At least I know she's safe. If you talk to Marino, don't tell him anything about me. Don't breathe a word about where Lucy is. Just assume he will tell Denesa Steiner. He's out of control, Benton. He's confiding in her now, I know it. "

"I don't think it would be wise for you to come to North Carolina right now."

"I've got to."

"Why?"

"I've got to find Emily Steiner's old medical records. I need to go through all of them. I also want you to find out for me every place Denesa Steiner has lived. I want to know about other children or husbands and siblings. There may be other deaths. There may be other exhumations we have to do."

"What are you thinking?"

"For one thing, I'll bet you'll find there is no sick sister who lives in Maryland. Her purpose in driving north was to run my car off the road and hope Lucy died." Wesley did not say anything. I sensed his equivocation and did not like it.

I was afraid to say what was really on my mind, but I could not be silent.

"And so far there's no record of the SIDS. Her first child. Vital Records can't find anything about that in California. I don't think the child ever existed, and that fits the pattern."

"What pattern?"

"Benton," I said, "we don't know that Denesa Steiner didn't kill her own daughter." He let out a deep breath.

"You're right. We don't know that. We don't know much."

"And Mote pointed out in the consultation that Emily was sickly."

"What are you getting at?"

"Munchausen's by proxy."

"Kay, no one will want to believe that. I don't think I want to believe that." It is an almost unbelievable syndrome in which primary care givers-usually mothers-secretly and cleverly abuse their children to get attention. They cut their flesh and break their bones, poison and smother them almost to death. Then these women rush to doctors' offices and emergency rooms and tell teary tales of how their little one got sick or hurt, and the staff feels so sorry for Mother. She gets so much attention. She becomes a master at manipulating medical professionals and her child may eventually die.

"Imagine the attention Mrs. Steiner has gotten because of her daughter's murder," I said.

"I won't argue that. But how would Munchausen's explain Ferguson's death or what you're alleging happened to Lucy?"

"Any woman who could do what was done to Emily could do anything to anyone. Besides, maybe Mrs. Steiner is running out of relatives to kill. I'll be surprised if her husband really died of a heart attack.

She probably killed him in some disguised, subtle manner, too. These women are pathological liars. They are incapable of remorse. "

"What you're suggesting goes beyond Munchausen's. We're talking serial killings now."

"Cases aren't always one thing, because people aren't always one thing, Benton. You know that. And women serial killers often murder husbands, relatives, significant others. Their methods are usually different from those of male serial killers. Women psychopaths don't rape and strangle people. They like poisons. They like to smother people who can't defend themselves because they're either too young or too old or incapacitated for some other reason. The fantasies are different because women are different from men."

"No one around her is going to want to believe what you're proposing," Wesley said.

"It will be hell to prove, if you're right."

"Cases like this are always hell to prove."

"Are you suggesting I present this possibility to Marino?"

"I hope you won't. I certainly don't want Mrs. Steiner privy to what we're thinking. I need to ask her questions. I need her to cooperate."

"I agree," he said, and I knew it had to be very hard for him when he added! "Truth is, we really can't have Marino working this case any longer. At the very least, he's personally involved with a potential suspect. He may be sleeping with the killer."

"Just like the last investigator was," I reminded him. He did not respond. Our shared fear for Marino's safety did not need to be said. Max Ferguson had died, and Denesa Steiner's fingerprint was on an article of clothing he was wearing at the time. It would have been so simple to lure him into unusual sex play and then kick the stool out from under him.

"I really hate for you to get more deeply into this, Kay," Wesley said.

"One of the complications of our knowing each other so well," I said.

"I hate it, too. I wish you weren't, either."

"It's different. You're a woman and a doctor. If what you're thinking is right, you'll push her buttons. She's going to want to draw you into her game."

"She's already drawn me into it."

"She'll draw you in deeper."

"I hope she does." I felt the rage again. He whispered, "I want to see you."

"You will," I said.

"Soon."

18

The University of Tennessee's Decay Research Facility was simply known as The Body Farm, and had gone by that name for as long as I could remember. People like me intended no irreverence when we called it that, for no one respects the dead more than those of us who work with them and hear their silent stories. The purpose is to help the living.

That was the point when The Body Farm came into being more than twenty years before, when scientists got determined to learn more about time of death. On any given day its several wooded acres held dozens of bodies in varying stages of decomposition. Research projects had brought me here periodically over the years, and though I would never be perfect in determining time of death, I had gotten better.

The Farm was owned and run by the university's Anthropology Department, headed by Dr. Lyall Shade and oddly located in the basement of the football stadium. At 8:15, Katz and I went downstairs, passing the zoo archaeology mollusk and neotropical primates labs, and the tamarin and mar muses collection and strange projects named with roman numerals. Many of the doors were plastered with Far Side cartoons and pithy quotations that made me smile. We found Dr. Shade at his desk looking over fragments of charred human bone.

"Good morning," I said.

"Good morning, Kay," he said with a distracted smile. Dr. Shade was well served by his name for more reasons than the apparent ironical one. It was true he communed with the ghosts of people past through their flesh and bones and what they revealed as they lay for months on the ground. But he was unassuming and introverted, a very gentle spirit much older than his sixty years. His hair was short and gray, his face pleasant and preoccupied. Tall, he was hard bodied and weathered like a farmer, which was yet another irony, for Farmer Shade was one of his nicknames. His mother lived in a nursing home and made skull rings for him from fabric remnants.

The ones he had sent to me looked like calico doughnuts, but they functioned very well when I was working with a skull, which is unwieldy and tends to roll no matter whose brain it once held.