Nic shuts her eyes. "I hope she didn't feel any of this."

No one comments.

"I mean"-she looks at Scarpetta-"was she feeling all this?"

"She was feeling terror. Physically? It's hard to say what pain she felt. When injuries occur so quickly…"

Marino interrupts. "You know when you stick your hand in a drawer and cut yourself with a knife and don't feel it? I think it's like that unless it's slow. Slow like in torture."

Nic's heart seems to flutter, as if something is wrong with it.

"She wasn't tortured," Scarpetta says, looking at Nic. "Definitely not."

"What about the stabs?" Nic asks.

"Lacerations of fingers and palms. Defense injuries." She glances at Nic again. "Punctures of the right and left lung with two hundred mis of hemothorax on each side. I'm so sorry. I know this is hard."

"Would that have killed her? The lung injuries?"

"Eventually. But in combination with the head injuries, absolutely. She also had fractured fingernails on the right and left. Nonidentifiable material recovered from under the nails."

"Do you think it was saved?" Lucy asks. "DNA wasn't as advanced then as it is now."

"I wonder what the hell nonidentifiable is," Marino says.

"What kind of knife?" Nic asks.

"Short-bladed. But just how short-bladed, I can't tell."

"Maybe a pocketknife," Marino offers.

"Maybe," Scarpetta says.

"My mother didn't have a pocketknife. She didn't have any…" Nic starts to tear up, then regains control. "She wasn't into weapons, is what I'm saying."

"He might have had one," Lucy tells her kindly. "But my guess is, if the weapon was a pocketknife, he didn't think he needed a weapon. Might have just been something he carried around with him like a lot of guys do."

"Are the stab wounds different than the ones we saw today?" Nic asks Scarpetta.

"Absolutely," she says.

118

NIC BEGINS TO talk about her mother's antiques store. She says her mother owned it but only worked there part-time to be available to her family. She says her mother was acquainted with Charlotte Dard.

Nic stares at her mug of coffee. "If I fire this thing up one more time in the microwave, you think I'll have caffeine D.T. s tomorrow?"

"Your mother and Charlotte Dard were friends?" Marino asks. "Shit. You don't mind my asking, why the hell haven't you mentioned this before?"

"This is the God's truth," Nic replies. "I never remembered it until just now. I guess I blocked out so much. I almost never think about my mother, or at least I didn't start to until these women began disappearing. Then today… that scene. What he did to Rebecca Milton. And now."

She gets up to reheat her coffee. The microwave runs loudly for a minute, the door opens, and she returns to the sofa, steam rising from coffee no longer fit to drink. It smells overcooked.

"Nic," Scarpetta says, "is your married name Robillard?"

She nods.

"What is your family name?"

"Mayeux. My mother's name is Annie Mayeux. That's why hardly anybody realizes I'm her daughter. With time, people forget anyway. Cops who remember her death never associate me with her. I never say anything." She sips her coffee, not seeming to mind the taste. "Her antiques shop specialized in stained-glass windows, doors, shutters, old salvage stuff, some of it really nice if you knew what you were looking for.

"And a lot of furniture was handmade out of cypress. Charlotte Dard was one of her customers, was remodeling her house and buying a lot of things from my mom's shop, and that's how the two of them got friendly. Not close." She pauses, searching her memory. "My mom talked about this rich woman with a sports car and how beautiful her house was going to be when it was all done.

"I guess Mrs. Dard's business helped out a lot. Papa never made much as a schoolteacher." Nic smiles sadly. "Mama did really well and was frugal. Most of what my father lives off now came from my mother, from how well she did with that shop."

"Mrs. Dard was a drug abuser," Scarpetta says. "She died from a drug overdose, an accident or a homicide. I suspect the latter. She supposedly was suffering blackouts not long before her death. Do you know anything about that?"

"Everybody around here does," Nic replies. "It certainly was the talk of Baton Rouge. She dropped dead in a motel room, the Paradise Acres Motel, sounds like the name of a cemetery. Off Chocktaw, a terrible part of town. Rumor was, she was having an affair and met up with the person there. I don't know anything more than what was in the news."

"What about her husband?" Lucy asks.

"Good question. I've never heard of anyone who's met him. How strange is that? Except he's some sort of aristocrat and travels all the time."

"Have you ever seen a picture of him?" Rudy asks.

Nic shakes her head.

"So he's not in the news."

"He's really private," Nic replies.

"What else?" Marino asks.

"Yeah, there's some kind of weird connection going on here, right?" Rudy looks at Scarpetta. "Some pharmacist came up as a suspect, and Rocco Caggiano was his lawyer."

Marino gets up for more coffee.

"Think," Lucy encourages Nic.

"Okay." She takes a deep breath. "Okay. Here's something. I think Charlotte Dard invited Mom to a cocktail party. I remember. Mom never went to cocktail parties. She didn't drink and was shy, felt out of place among uppity people. So this was a big deal that she was going. It was on the plantation, the Dard plantation. Mom went to drum up business for her shop. And out of respect for her best customer, Mrs. Dard."

"When was this?" Scarpetta asks.

Nic thinks. "Not long before my mother was killed."

"How long is not long?" Rudy asks.

"I don't know." Nic swallows hard again. "Days. Days, I think. She wore this dress, had to go out to buy it." She shuts her eyes again. A sob catches in her throat. "It was pink with white piping. It was still hanging on her closet door when she got killed, you know, hanging there to remind her it needed to go to the dry cleaners."

"And your mother died less than two weeks before Charlotte Dard did," Scarpetta remarks.

"Kind of interesting," Marino points out, "that Mrs. Dard was so fucked up and having violent fits, and nobody worried about her throwing a fancy garden party?"

"I'm thinking that," Rudy says.

"You know what?" Marino adds. "I drove almost twenty hours to get here. Then Lucy made me airsick. I gotta go to bed. Otherwise, I'll be making deductions that will cause you to arrest Santa Claus for something."

"I didn't make you airsick," Lucy says. "Go to bed. You need your beauty sleep. I thought you were Santa Claus."

He gets up from the couch and leaves, heading to the main house.

"I'm not going to make it much longer, either." Scarpetta gets up from her chair.

"Time to go," Nic says.

"You don't have to." Scarpetta tries hard to help.

"Can I ask you just one last thing?" Nic says.

"Of course." She is so tired, her brain feels frozen.

"Why would he beat her to death?"

"Why did someone beat Rebecca Milton to death?"

"Things didn't go the way he planned."

"Would your mother have resisted him?" Lucy asks.

"She would have clawed his eyes out," Nic replies.

"Maybe that's your answer. Please forgive me. I can't be much use to you now. I'm too tired."

Scarpetta leaves the small living room and closes her bedroom door.

"How are you?" Lucy moves to the couch and looks at Nic. "This is tough, really tough. Too tough to describe. You're brave, Nic Robillard."

"Worse for my father. He gave up on life. Quit everything."

"Like what?" Rudy asks gently.

"Well, he loved to teach. And he loves the water, or used to. He and Mom. They had this little fishing camp where nobody would bother them. Out in the middle of nowhere, I mean nowhere. He's never been there since."