"The coroner called wanting my help with the case," he says.

"Your help?"

"Now what the hell is that supposed to mean? You don't think I could help somebody with a case? I could help any goddamn…"

"Of course you could. So why aren't you helping the Baton Rouge coroner?"

"Because I don't know anything about that case! Jesus, you're making me crazy!"

"The Last Precinct could help down there."

"Would you fucking give it a rest? The coroner didn't seem all that hot and bothered by it, just indicated he might want the Doc's medical opinion…"

"Their legal system is based on the Napoleonic Code."

Marino has no idea what he's talking about. "What's Napoleon got to do with anything!"

"The French legal system," Benton says. "The only state in America that has a legal system based on the French legal system instead of the English. Baton Rouge has more unsolved homicides of women per capita than any other city in America."

"All right, already. So it ain't a nice place."

"She should not go down there. Especially alone. Not under any circumstances. Make sure of it, Pete." Benton is still looking out the window. "Trust me on this one."

"Trust you. What a joke."

"The least you can do is take care of her."

Marino is incensed, staring at Bentons back.

"She can't go anywhere near him."

"Who the hell are you talking about?" Marino asks, his frustration intensifying.

Benton is a stranger. Marino doesn't know this man.

"Wolfieboy? Jesus. I thought we were talking about a drug overdose case in Cajun country," Marino complains.

"Keep her out of there."

"You got no right asking me anything, especially about her."

"He's fixated on her."

"What the hell does he have to do with Louisiana?" Marino steps closer to him and scrutinizes his face, as if straining to read something he can't quite see.

"This is a continuation of a power struggle he lost with her in the past. And he intends to win it now if it's the last thing he does."

"Don't sound to me like he's gonna win a goddamn thing when he gets pumped full of enough juice to kill a herd of horses."

"I'm not talking about Jean-Baptiste. Have you forgotten the other Chandonne, his brother? The Last Precinct should help the coroner. She shouldn't."

Marino doesn't listen. He feels as if he's sitting in the backseat of a moving car that has no one at the wheel.

"The Doc knows what Wolfman wants of her." Marino sticks with one subject-the one that interests him and makes sense. "She won't mind giving him the needle, and I'll be right there behind the smoky glass, smiling."

"Have you asked her if she minds?" Benton looks out at another spring day dying gently. Tender, vivid greens are dipped in golden sunlight, and shadows deepen closer to the ground.

"I don't need to ask."

"I see. So you haven't discussed it with her. I'm not surprised. It wouldn't be like her to discuss it with you."

The insult is subtle but stings Marino like a sea nettle. He has never been intimate with Kay Scarpetta. No one has ever been as intimate with her, not the way Benton was. She hasn't told Marino how she feels about being an executioner. She doesn't discuss her feelings with him.

"I've depended on you to take care of her," Benton says.

The air seems to heat up, both of them sweating and silent.

"I know how you feel, Pete," Benton softly says. "I've always known."

"You don't know nothing."

"Take care of her."

"I came here so you could start doing that," Marino says.

22

CARTHAGE BLUFF LANDING is a good popular stop for groceries and gas, but Bev Kiffмn never docks there.

She doesn't slow down as she motors past and approaches Tin Lizzy's Landing, a restaurant that cost a million dollars to build from torn-down shacks and what Bev calls salvage shit. Rich people from the mainland can access Lizzy's from the Springfield Bridge and eat all the Cajun steaks and seafood and drink all they want without having to go home after dark in a boat. Six months ago, Bev asked Jay to take her there for her birthday, and he just laughed, and then his face twisted in a snarl as he called her stupid and ugly and out of her mind to think he'd take her to a restaurant at all, much less an upper-class one accessible by a highway.

Jealousy smolders as Bev picks up speed, heading due west to Jacks Boat Landing. She imagines Jay touching other women.

She remembers her father lifting other little girls on his lap, demanding that Bev bring home playmates just so he could cuddle with them and make her watch. He was a handsome, successful businessman and, during her teenage years, the object of her friends' crushes. He touched them in ways that weren't obvious or reportable, just what he considered innocent contact between his hard penis and their buttocks as they sat on his lap. He never exposed himself or talked in a vulgar manner, never even swore. Worst of all, when he accidentally brushed against their breasts, her friends liked it, and sometimes they brushed against him first.

Bev walked out on him one day and never went back, the same way her mother had when Bev was three, leaving her with him and his needs. Bev grew up addicted to men, going from one to the next. Leaving Jay is another matter entirely, and she isn't sure why she hasn't done it yet. She isn't sure why she'll do whatever he demands, despite her fears for her own safety. The thought of him going off in the boat one day and never returning sears her with terror. It would serve her right, since that's what she did to her father, who was dropped by a heart attack in 1997. Bev didn't go to his funeral.

Now and then when she's headed to shore, she thinks of the Mississippi River. On a good day, she could make it there in less than six hours, and she senses Jay is onto her occasional impulse to escape to the Gulf Coast. He's told her more than once that the Mississippi is the biggest river in the United States, more than a million miles of rough, muddy water and tributaries that fan out into thousands of creeks, marshes and swamps, where a person could get so lost "she would end up a skeleton in her boat," as Jay puts it. Those are his words exactly, saying she and her instead of he and his, his choice of words no accident. Jay doesn't have accidents of the tongue or anything else.

All the same, when Bev is out in the boat, she fantasizes about the Mississippi, about riverboat cruises and casinos, about fruity cocktails and beer in frozen glasses and maybe watching Mardi Gras from the window of a nice air-conditioned hotel. She wonders if good food would make her sick now that she's gone so long without it. A comfortable bed would probably stiffen her up and make her sore because she's so accustomed to a stinking, broken-down mattress that not even Jay will sleep on anymore.

She motors around a semi-submerged log, worried at first that it might move and prove to have teeth, and she begins to itch, especially beneath the tight waistband of her jeans.

"Shit!" She steers with one hand and digs the other under her clothes, clawing at her flesh as her welts get bigger. "Goddamnit! Oh, shit, what the fuck's bit me now?"

Breathing hard and beginning to panic, she shoves the throttle lever into neutral, opens the hatch and rummages in her beach bag for the insect repellent, spraying herself all over, including under her clothes.

It's all in her head, Jay always says. The welts aren't bites, they're hives, because she has a nervous condition, because she's half-crazy. Well, I wasn't half-crazy until I met you, she answers him in her head. I never got hives in my life, nothing like that, not even poison ivy. Bev drifts in the creek for a minute or two, contemplating what she's about to do and imagining Jay's face when she brings him what he wants, then imagining his face if she doesn't.