The last obstacle is voice analysis, which Lucy will conduct immediately to verify that the caller was Jean-Baptiste Chandonne. That is no threat. Benton has spent several years meticulously studying, transcribing and editing recordings of Jean-Baptiste's voice, then rerecording them into digital files with a single directional microphone that, when used in a high-sensitivity mode, picks up multidirectional sound, or background noise-in this case, the inside of a prison. He edited and spliced it on a computer, and the results are seamless, each file a blitz of sound bites intended for voicemail or a live recipient who has no chance for a response that would force a mental engagement that is impossible. Switching from Menu to a folder he named Redstick for Baton Rouge, he verifies the time stamp on the LCD and double-checks that all details of the setup are in order.

He plugs the microphone into a speaker port and tucks in the earpiece.

The phone at Infosearch Solutions-The Last Precinct-is picked up.

"Manhattan. Collect call to Infosearch Solutions on Seventy-fifth," he says into the microphone.

"Your name?"

"Polunksy Unit."

"Please hold."

The operator connects the call.

"Collect call from Polunksy Unit. Will you accept charges?"

"Yes," without pause or change of inflection.

"Good afternoon. May I ask who's calling?" a male voice continues, the caller ID showing the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Benton sets noise cancel on high to eradicate the live feedback of New York traffic and other sounds that would be ruinous for a call supposedly made from the interior of a penitentiary. He presses Play. The indicator light glows green, and File One begins.

"When Mademoiselle Farinelli returns, tell her Baton Rouge. " Jean-Baptiste s recorded voice is as natural as if he himself is speaking in real time.

"She's out of the office. Who's calling? Who is this?" The man in Lucy's office tries to talk to what is nothing more than a memory chip on the line. "May I give her a message?"

The call ended seven seconds ago. Benton erases File One from Red-stick, to ensure that Jean-Baptiste s faked message cannot be played again, ever, by anyone.

He walks swiftly along the congested sidewalk again, head bent, missing nothing.

59

"PLEASE DON'T HURT ME," the lamb says. Jay helps the woman sit up. She cries and moans as he gently cleans her bloody hair, worrying about the split in her scaJp, caused by the blunt-force trauma of her head cracking against the outboard motor. He reassures her that the injury isn't serious and didn't fracture her skuJJ. She's not seeing double, is she?

"No," she says, her breath catching as he touches her hair again with the wet, bloody towel. "I can see fine."

Jays sweetness, his protectiveness, has the usual effect, and the woman's attention is fixed only on him. She identifies with him to the extent that she feels she can tell him that Bev-whose name the woman doesn't know-pushed her into the outboard motor.

"That's how I hit my head," she confides to Jay.

He tosses the bloody towel to Bev. She hasn't moved, just stands in the middle of the small room, staring at him like a cottonmouth coiled to strike. The towel lands at her feet, and she doesn't pick it up.

He tells her to pick it up.

Bev doesn't.

"Pick it up and wash it in the sink," he says. "I don't want to look at that thing on the floor. You shouldn't have hurt her. Clean the towel and get all this insect repellent off her."

"I don't need her to get it off me," the woman pleads. "Maybe it's good to keep it on because of all the bugs."

"No. You need it washed off," Jay says, leaning close and smelling her neck. "You have too much on. It's toxic. She must have soaked you with an entire bottle. That's not good."

"I don't want her touching me again!"

"She hurt you?"

The lamb doesn't answer.

"I'm here. She won't hurt you."

Jay gets up from the edge of the bed, and Bev collects the wet, gory towel.

"We don't need to waste water," she says. "The tank's low."

"It's supposed to rain, eventually," Jay replies, studying the woman as if she's a car he might buy. "The tank's got plenty, anyway. Wash the towel and bring it back in here."

"Please don't hurt me."

The woman lifts her head up from the pillow. It is pinkish and wet, and a bright red spot indicates that her laceration has begun to bleed again.

"Just take me home and I won't tell anybody. Not anybody, I swear to God."

Her eyes plead with Jay, her only hope because he's glorious to look at, and so far he's been nice.

"Won't tell anybody what?" Jay asks her, moving closer, sitting on the edge of the iron-frame bed with its foul, broken-down mattress. "What's there to tell? You hurt yourself, now, didn't you, and we're Good Samaritans, taking care of you."

She nods, uncertainty, then fear contorting her face.

"Make it quick. Please," she whispers between convulsions, sobs and hiccups jerking her body. "If you aren't going to let me go. Make it quick."

Bev returns with the towel and hands it to Jay. Water drips on the bed and trickles down his bare, muscular arm. Bev runs her fingers through his hair and kisses the back of his neck, then presses close to him as he opens the woman's blouse.

"Ah. No bra," he says. "She wasn't wearing one?" He cranes his head around, demanding an answer in a soft voice that by now has become scary.

Bev slides her hands down his sweaty chest.

The woman's eyes are wide with the same glassy terror that Bev saw in the boat. She trembles violently, her naked breasts quivering. A drop of saliva slips out of the side of her mouth, and Jay stands up, disgusted.

"Get the rest of her clothes off and clean her up," he orders Bev. "You touch her again, you know what I'll do to you."

Bev smiles. Theirs is a well-rehearsed, long-running drama.

60

THE NEXT MORNING, Scarpetta is still in Florida. Once again, she was about to leave and was waylaid, this time by FedEx delivering two packages, one from the Polunsky Prison Information Office, the other a thick package containing Charlotte Dard's case, mostly copies of autopsy and lab reports and histological slides.

Scarpetta places a slide of the left ventricular free wall on the compound microscopes stage. If she could add up the hours she's spent looking at slides throughout her career, the number would be in the tens of thousands. Although she respects the histologist, whose devotion is to the minuscule structures of tissues and the tales their cells can tell, she has never been able to comprehend sitting inside a tiny lab day in and day out, surrounded by sections of heart, lung, liver, brain and other organs, and injuries and stigmata of diseases that are cut into sections and turn rubbery inside bottles of a fixative such as formalin. Each tissue section is embedded in paraffin wax or a plastic resin and shaved into slices thin enough for light to pass through them. After they are mounted on glass slides, they are stained with a variety of dyes that were developed by the nineteenth-century textile industry.

Mostly, Scarpetta sees a lot of pinks and blues, but there are a perfusion of colors used, depending on the tissue and the cellular structure and possible defects that need to give up their secrets to her at the other end of the lens. Dyes, like diseases, are often named for whoever discovered or invented them, and this is where histology becomes unnecessarily complicated, if not annoying. It isn't enough for dyes or dyeing techniques to be called blue or violet; they must be Cresyl blue, Cresyl violet, or Perl's Prussian blue, or Heidenhain's haematoxylin (purplish red), or Masson's trichrome (blue and green), or Bielschowsky (neutral red), or her favorite mundanity: Jones's methenamine silver. A typical egocentric pathological legacy is a van Gieson staining of a Schwann cell nuclei from a Schwannoma, and Scarpetta fails to understand why German naturalist Theodor Schwann would have wanted a tumor named after him.