"Hell, call me, for that matter," Marino was quick to volunteer. "You got my pager number. If I'm not available, ask the dispatcher to send a car by."

Fine, I thought. Maybe if I'm lucky I'll make it home by midnight.

"Just be extremely careful."

Wesley looked hard at me. "All theories aside, two people have been murdered. The killer's still out there. The victimology, the motivation are sufficiently strange for me to believe anything's possible."

His words resurfaced more than once during the drive home. When anything is possible, nothing is impossible. One plus one does not equal three. Or does it? Sterling Harper's death did not seem to belong in the same equation as the deaths of her brother and Beryl. But what if it did?

"You told me Miss Harper was out of town the night Beryl was murdered," I said to Marino. "Have you learned anything more about that?"

"Nope."

"Wherever it was she went, do you suppose she drove?" I asked.

"Nope. Only car the Harpers had was the white Rolls, and her brother had it the night of Beryl's death."

"You know that?"

"Checked it out with Culpeper's Tavern," he said. "Harper came in his usual time that night. Drove up just like he always did and left around six-thirty."

In light of recent events, I doubted anybody thought it the least bit strange when I announced at staff conference the following Monday morning that I was taking annual leave.

The assumption was that my encounter with Jeb Price had stressed me to the point I needed to get away, regroup, bury my head in the sand for a while. I didn't tell anybody where I was going because I didn't know. I just walked out, leaving behind a secretly relieved secretary and an overwhelmed desk.

Returning home, I spent the entire morning on the phone, calling every airline that serviced Richmond's Byrd Airport, the airport most convenient for Sterling Harper.

"Yes, I know there's a twenty percent penalty," I said to the USAir ticket agent. "You misunderstand. I'm not trying to change the ticket. This was weeks ago. I'm trying to find out if she ever got on the flight at all."

"The ticket wasn't for you?"

"No," I said for the third time. 'It was issued in her name."

"Then she really needs to contact us herself."

"Sterling Harper is dead," I said. "She can't contact you herself." A startled pause.

"She died suddenly right around the time of a trip she was supposed to go on," I explained. "If you could just check your computer…"

This went on. It got to where I could recite the same lines without thinking. USAir had nothing, nor did the computers for Delta, United, American, or Eastern. As far as the agents could tell from their records, Miss Harper had not flown out of Richmond during the last week of October, when Beryl Madison was murdered. Miss Harper hadn't driven, either. I seriously doubted she had taken the bus. That left the train.

An Amtrak agent named John said his computer was down and asked if he could call me back. I hung up as someone rang my doorbell.

It was not quite noon. The day was as tart and crisp as a fall apple. Sunlight painted white rectangles in my living room and winked off the windshield of the unfamiliar silver Mazda sedan parked in my drive. The pasty, blond young man I observed through the peephole was standing back from my front door, head down, the collar of a leather jacket up around his ears. My Ruger was hard and heavy in my hand, and I stuffed it in the pocket of my warm-up jacket as I unfastened the dead bolt. I didn't recognize him until we were face-to-face.

"Dr. Scarpetta?" he asked nervously.

I made no move to let him inside, my right hand in my pocket and firm around the butt of the revolver.

"Please forgive me for appearing on your doorstep like this," he said. "I called your office and was told you're on vacation. I found your name in the book and the line was busy. So I concluded you were home. I, well, I really need to talk to you. May I come in?"

He looked even more innocuous in person than he had looked on the videotape Marino had shown me.

"What is this about?" I asked firmly.

"Beryl Madison, it's about her," he said. "Uh, my name's Al Hunt. I won't take much of your time. I promise."

I backed away from the door and he stepped inside. His face got as white as alabaster when he seated himself on my living room couch and his eyes fixed briefly on the butt of the revolver protruding from my pocket as I settled in a wing chair a safe distance away.

"Uh, you've got a gun?" he said.

"Yes, I do," I answered.

"I don't like them, like guns."

"They're not very likable," I agreed.

"No, ma'am," he said. "My father took me deer hunting once. When I was a boy. He hit a doe. She was crying. The doe, she was crying, lying on her side and crying. I never could shoot anything."

"Did you know Beryl Madison?" I asked.

"The police - The police have talked to me about her," he stammered. "A lieutenant. Marino, Lieutenant Marino. He came by the car wash where I work and talked to me, then asked me down to headquarters. We talked for a long time. She used to bring her car in. That's how I met her."

As he rambled on I couldn't help but wonder what "colors" were radiating from me. Steely blue? Maybe a hint of bright red because I was alarmed and doing my best not to show it? I contemplated ordering him to leave. I considered calling the police. I couldn't believe he was sitting inside my house, and perhaps the sheer audacity on his part and mystification on mine explains why I did nothing at all.

I interrupted him. "Mr. Hunt-"

"Please call me Al."

"Al, then," I said. "Why did you want to see me? If you have information, why aren't you talking to Lieutenant Marino?"

The color rose to his cheeks and he looked uncomfortably down at his hands.

"What I have to say doesn't really belong in the category of police information," he said "I thought you might understand."

"Why would you think that? You don't know me," I answered.

"You took care of Beryl. As a rule, women are more intuitive, more compassionate than men," he said.

Perhaps it was that simple. Perhaps Hunt was here because he believed I would not humiliate him. He was staring at me now, a wounded, woebegone look in his eyes that was on the verge of becoming panic.

He asked, "Have you ever known something with certainty, Dr. Scarpetta, even though there is absolutely no evidence to support your belief?"

"I'm not clairvoyant, if that's what you're asking," I replied.

"You're being the scientist."

"I am a scientist."

"But you've had the feeling," he insisted, his eyes desperate now. "You know very well what I mean, don't you?"

"Yes," I said. "I think I know what you mean, Al."

He seemed relieved and took a deep breath. "I know things, Dr. Scarpetta. I know who murdered Beryl."

I didn't react at all.

"I know him, know what he thinks, feels, why he did it," he said with emotion. "If I tell you, will you promise to treat what I say with great care, consider it seriously and not- Well, I don't want you running to the police. They wouldn't understand. You see that, don't you?"

"I will very carefully consider what you have to say," I replied.

He leaned forward on the couch, his eyes luminous in his wan El Greco face. I instinctively moved my right hand closer to my pocket. I could feel the rubber grip of the revolver against the side of my palm.

"The police already don't understand," he said. "They aren't capable of understanding me. Why I left psychology, for example. The police wouldn't understand that. I have a master's degree. And what? I worked as a nurse and now I'm working in a car wash? You don't really think the police are going to understand that, do you?"

I didn't respond.

"When I was a kid I dreamed of being a psychologist, a social worker, maybe even a psychiatrist," he went on. "It all came so naturally to me. It was what I should be, what my talents directed that I should be."

"But you're not," I reminded him. "Why?"

"Because it would have destroyed me," he said, averting his eyes. "It isn't something I have control over, what happens to me. I relate so completely to other people's problems and idiosyncrasies that the person who is me gets lost, suffocates. I didn't realize how dramatic this was until I spent time on a forensic unit. For the criminally insane. Uh, it was part of my research, my research for my thesis."

He was getting increasingly distracted. "I'll never forget. Frankie. Frankie was a paranoid schizophrenic. He beat his mother to death with a stick of firewood. I got to know Frankie. I very gently walked him through his life until we reached that winter's afternoon.

"I said to him, 'Frankie, Frankie, what little thing was it? What pushed that button? Do you remember what was going through your mind, through your nerves?'

"He said he was sitting in the chair he always sat in before the fire, watching the flames burn down, when they began whispering to him. Whispering terrible, mocking things. When his mother walked in she looked at him the way she always did, but this time he saw it in her eyes. The voices got so loud he couldn't think and next thing he was wet and sticky and she didn't have a face anymore. He came to when the voices were still. I couldn't sleep for many nights after that. Every time I'd close my eyes I'd see Frankie crying, covered with his mother's blood. I understood him. I understood what he'd done. Whoever I talked to, whatever story I heard, it affected me the same way."

I was sitting calmly, my powers of imagination switched off, the scientist, the clinician deliberately donned like a suit of clothes.

I asked him, "Have you ever felt like killing anyone, Al?"

"Everybody's felt that way at some point," he said as our eyes met.

"Everybody? Do you really think so?"

"Yes. Every person has the capacity. Absolutely."

"Who have you felt like killing?" I asked.

"I don't own a gun or anything else, uh, dangerous," he answered. "Because I don't ever want to be vulnerable to an impulse. Once you can envision yourself doing something, once you can relate to the mechanism behind the deed, the door is cracked. It can happen. Virtually every heinous event that occurs in this world was first conceived in thought. We aren't good or bad, one or the other."