I had no idea what he was talking about.

'The last time I saw anything like this was Texas, 1949,' he went on, talking fast,

'when I was doing my residency and about to get married…'

I had to cut him off. 'Slow down, Fred,' I said. 'Tell me what's happened.'

'A fifty-two-year-old Tangier lady. Probably been dead at least twenty-four hours in her bedroom. She's got severe skin eruptions in crops, just covered with them, including the palms of her hands and the bottoms of her feet. Crazy as it sounds, it looks like smallpox.'

'You're right. That's crazy,' I said as my mouth got dry. 'What about chicken pox? Any way this woman was immunosuppressed?'

'I don't know anything about her, but I've never seen chicken pox look like this. These eruptions follow the small-pox pattern. They're in crops, like I said, all about the same age, and the farther away from the center of the body, the denser they get. So they're confluent, on the face, the extremities.'

I was thinking of the torso, of the small area of eruptions that I had assumed were shingles, my heart filled with dread. I did not know where that victim had died, but I believed it was somewhere in Virginia. Tangier Island was also in Virginia, a tiny barrier island in the Chesapeake Bay where the economy was based on crabbing.

'There are a lot of strange viruses out there these days,' he was saying.

'Yes, there are,' I agreed. 'But Hanta, Ebola, HIV, dengue, et al., do not cause the symptoms you have described. That doesn't mean there isn't something else we don't know about.'

'I know smallpox. I'm old enough to have seen it with my own two eyes. But I'm not an expert in infectious diseases, Kay. And I sure as hell don't know the things that you do. But whatever it might be in this case, the fact is, the woman's dead and some type of poxvirus killed her.'

'Obviously, she lived alone.'

'Yes.'

'And she was last seen alive when?'

'The chief's working on that.'

'What chief?' I said.

'The Tangier police department has one officer. He's the chief. I'm in his trailer now, using the phone.'

'He's not overhearing this.'

'No, no. He's out talking to neighbors. I did my best to get information, without a whole lot of luck. You ever been out here?'

'No, I haven't.'

'Let's just say they don't exactly rotate their crops. There are maybe three family names on the whole island. Most folks grow up here, never leave. It's mighty hard to understand a word they're saying. Now that's a dialect you won't hear in any other corner of the world.'

'Nobody touches her until I have a better idea what we're dealing with,' I said, unbuttoning my pajamas.

'What do you want me to do?' he asked.

'Get the police chief to guard the house. No one goes in or near it until I say. Go home. I'll call you later in the day.'

The labs had not completed microbiology on the torso, and now I could not wait. I dressed in a hurry, fumbling with everything I touched, as if my motor skills had completely left me. I sped downtown on streets that were deserted, and at close to five was parking in my space behind the morgue. As I let myself into the bay, I startled the night security guard and he startled me.

'Lord have mercy, Dr Scarpetta,' said Evans, who had watched over the building for as long as I had been here.

'Sorry,' I said, my heart thudding. 'I didn't mean to frighten you.'

'Just making my rounds. Is everything all right?'

'I sure hope so.' I went past him.

'Is something coming in?'

He followed me up the ramp. I opened the door leading inside, and looked at him.

'Nothing I know of,' I replied.

Now he was completely confused, for he did not understand why I was here at this hour if no case was coming in. He started shaking his head as he headed back toward the door leading out into the parking lot. From there, he would go next door to the lobby of the Consolidated Labs, where he would sit watching a small, flickering TV until it was time to make his rounds again. Evans would not step foot into the morgue. He did not understand how anyone could, and I knew he was scared of me.

'I won't be down here long,' I told him. 'Then I'll be upstairs.'

'Yes, ma'am,' he said, still shaking his head. 'You know where I'll be.'

Midway along the corridor in the autopsy suite was a room not often entered, and I stopped there first, unlocking the door. Inside were three freezers unlike any normally seen. They were stainless steel and oversized, with temperatures digitally displayed

on doors. On each was a list of case numbers, indicating the unidentified people inside. I opened a door and thick fog rolled out as frigid air bit my face. She was in a pouch, and on a tray, and I put on gown, gloves, face shield, every layer of protection we had. I knew I might already be in trouble, and the thought of Wingo and his vulnerable condition thrilled me with fear as I slid out the pouch and lifted it onto a stainless steel table in the middle of the room. Unzipping black vinyl, I exposed the torso to ambient air, and I went out and unlocked the autopsy suite.

Collecting a scalpel and clean glass slides, I pulled the surgical mask back down over my nose and mouth, and returned to the freezer room, shutting the door. The torso's outer layer of skin was moist as thawing began, and I used warm, wet towels to speed that along before unroofing vesicles, or the eruptions clustered over her hip and at the ragged margins of the amputations.

With the scalpel, I scraped vesicular beds, and made smears on the slides. I zipped up the pouch, marking it with blaze orange biological hazard tags, almost could not lift the body back up to its frigid shelf, my arms trembling under the strain. There was no one to call for help but Evans, so I managed on my own, and placed more warnings on the door.

I headed upstairs to the third floor, and unlocked a small lab that would have looked like most were it not for various instruments used only in the microscopic study of tissue, or histology. On a counter was a tissue processor, which fixed and dehydrated samples such as liver, kidney, spleen, and then infiltrated them with paraffin. From there the blocks went to the embedding center, and on to the microtome where they were shaved into thin ribbons. The end product was what kept me bent over my microscope downstairs.

While slides air-dried, I rooted around shelves, moving aside stains of bright orange, blue and pink in coplin jars, pulling out Gram's iodine for bacteria. Oil Red for fat in liver, silver nitrate, Biebrach Scarlet and Acridine Orange, as I thought about Tangier Island, where I'd never had a case before. Nor was there much crime, so I had been told, only drunkenness, which was common with men alone at sea. I thought of blue crab again, and irrationally wished Bev had sold me rock fish or tuna.

Finding the bottle of Nicolaou stain, I dipped in an eye dropper and carefully dripped a tiny amount of the red fluid on each slide, then finished with cover slips. These I secured in a sturdy cardboard folder, and I headed downstairs to my floor. By now, people were beginning to arrive for work, and they gave me odd looks as I came

down the hall and boarded the elevator in scrubs, mask and gloves. In my office, Rose was collecting dirty coffee mugs off my desk. She froze at the sight of me.

'Dr Scarpetta?' she said. 'What in the world is going on?'

'I'm not sure, but I hope nothing,' I replied as I sat at my desk and took the cover off my microscope.

She stood in the doorway, watching as I placed a slide on the stage. She knew by my mood, if by nothing else, that something was very wrong.

'What can I do to help,' she said in a grim, quiet way.

The smear on the slide came into focus, magnified four hundred and fifty times, and then I applied a drop of oil. I stared at waves of bright red eosinophilic inclusions within infected epithelial cells, or the cytoplasmic Guarnieri bodies indicative of a