Near the coffee machine is the soda machine, and he takes five of the biggest plastic cups and lids and walks up to the counter with them. The cups are bright with cartoon designs and the lids he picks out are white with a little spout for drinking. He sets the cups and lids on the counter.

"Do you have any plastic oranges with green straws? Orange drinks?" he asks the lady behind the counter.

"What?" She frowns and picks up one of the cups. "There's nothing in these. You buying Big Slurps or not?"

"Not," he says. "I just want the cups and the lids."

"We don't sell just cups."

"That's all I want," he says.

She peers over her glasses to look at his face, and he wonders what she sees when she looks at his face like that. "We don't sell just the cups, I'm telling you."

"I'd rather buy the orange drinks if you've got them," he replies.

"What orange drinks?" Her impatience flares. "See that big cooler back there? What's in there is what we got."

"They're in plastic oranges that look just like oranges and come with a green straw."

Her frown dissolves into a look of amazement and her brightly painted lips part in a gaping smile that reminds him of a jack-o'-lantern. "Well, I'll be damned, now I know exactly what you're talking about. Those damn orange drinks. Darling, they haven't been sold in years. Damn, I haven't thought about those forever."

"Then I'll just take the cups and lids," he insists.

"Lord, I give up. Good thing my shift's about to end, tell you that."

"A long night," he says.

"Just got longer." She laughs. "Those damn oranges with the straws." She looks toward the door as the old man in baggy shorts comes in to pay for his gas.

Pogue doesn't pay any attention to him. Pogue stares at her, at her dyed hair as platinum as fishing line and her powdered skin that looks like a soft, wrinkled cloth. If he touched her skin, it would feel like butterfly wings. If he touched her skin, the powder would come off, just like butterfly wings. Her name tag says EDITH.

"Tell you what," Edith is speaking to him. "I'm gonna charge you fifty cents per empty cup and throw in the lids for nothing. Now I got other customers." Her fingers peck on the register and the drawer slides open.

Pogue hands Edith a five-dollar bill and his fingers touch her fingers as he takes his change, and her fingers are cool and quick and soft, and he knows the skin on them is loose, the loose skin that women her age have. Outside in the humid night, he waits for traffic and crosses the street the same way he did minutes earlier. He lingers beneath the same black olive trees and palms, watching the front door of the Other Way Lounge. When no one comes or goes, he walks rapidly to his car and gets in.

"You should tell him," Marino says. "Even if it don't turn out the way you think, he ought to know what's going on."

"That's how people head off down the wrong path," Scarpetta replies.

"It's also how they get a head start."

"Not this time," she says.

"You're the boss, Doc."

Marino is stretched out on his bed inside the Marriott on Broad Street, and Scarpetta is sitting in the same chair she was sitting in earlier, but she has pulled it closer to him. He looks very big but less threatening in loose white cotton pajamas she found for him at a department store south of the river. Beneath the light, soft fabric his wounds are dark orange with Betadine. He claims his injuries aren't hurting as much, not nearly as much. She has changed out of her mud-spattered midnight blue suit and is wearing tan corduroys and a dark blue turtleneck sweater and loafers. They are in his room because she did not want him in her room, so she decided his room was safe enough, and they have eaten sandwiches sent up by room service and now they are just talking.

"But I still don't see why you can't just bounce it off him," Marino says, and he is fishing. His curiosity about her relationship with Benton is as pervasive as dust. She notices it constantly and it gets on her nerves, and there is no use trying to get rid of it.

"I'll take the soil samples to the labs first thing in the morning," she tells him. "We'll know in a hurry whether a mistake has been made. If one has, there is no point in my telling Benton about it. A mistake is not germane to the case. It would simply be a mistake. A bad one."

"You don't believe it, though." He looks at her from clouds of pillows she plumped behind him. His color is better. His eyes are brighter.

"I don't know what I believe," she says. "It makes no sense either way. If the trace evidence found on the tractor driver isn't a mistake, then how do you explain it? How could the same type of evidence turn up in Gilly Paulsson's case? Perhaps you have a theory."

Marino thinks hard, his eyes fixing on the window filled with blackness and the lights of downtown. "I can't think how," he says. "I swear to God, I can't come up with anything except what I said in the meeting. And that was just being a smartass."

"Who? You?" she asks dryly.

"Seriously. How could what's-his-name Whitby have the same trace on him that she did? In the first place, she died two weeks before he did. So why would he have it on him at all, especially two weeks after she got it on her? It don't look good," he decides.

Her spirit recoils and she feels a sickness that she has learned to recognize as fear. The only logical explanation at the moment is cross contamination or mislabeling. Either can happen more easily than people might think. All it takes is for one evidence bag or test tube to be placed in the wrong envelope or rack or the wrong label to be stuck on a sample. This can happen in five seconds of inattention or confusion and then the evidence suddenly came from a source that either makes no sense or, worse, answers a question that could set a suspect free or send him to court, to prison, to the death chamber. She thinks of dentures. She envisions the Fort Lee soldier trying to force the wrong dentures into the dead obese woman's mouth. That's all it takes, one lax moment like that.

"I still don't see why you don't bounce it off Benton," Marino says, reaching for a glass of water by the bed. "What would be wrong with my having a few beers? A few hairs of the dog?"

"What would be right with it?" She has file folders in her lap and is idly flipping through copies of reports, seeing if anything she already knows about Gilly and the tractor driver might suddenly tell her something new. "Alcohol interferes with healing," she says. "It's not been much of a friend to you anyway, has it?"

"Last night it wasn't."

"Order what you want. I'm not going to tell you what to do."

He hesitates and she senses that he wants her to tell him what to do, but she won't. She's done it before and it is a waste, and she doesn't want to be his co-pilot as he flies like a crazed mad bomber through life. Marino looks at the phone, his hands in his lap, and he reaches for the water.

"How are you feeling?" she asks, turning a page. "Need more Advil?"

"I'm okay. Nothing a few beers wouldn't fix."

"That's up to you." She turns another page, scanning the long list of Mr. Whitby's ruptured and lacerated organs.

"You sure she's not going to call the cops?" Marino asks.

She feels his eyes on her. They shine on her like the soft heat from a lamp and she doesn't blame him for feeling scared. The accusations alone would ruin him, that is the truth of the matter. He would be destroyed in law enforcement, and it is quite possible that a Richmond jury would find him guilty just because he is a man, a very big man, and Mrs. Paulsson is skilled at acting pitiful and helpless. The thought of her sharpens Scarpetta's anger.