"The woman in your case. What happened to her, exactly?" Scarpetta asks while Marino's heavy footsteps sound in the hallway, and Browning gets up and goes to the doorway.

"Was in bed, sick with the flu. We aren't sure after that, except he got in an unlocked door and must have gotten scared off when Lucy came home. The victim was unconscious, in shock, had a seizure, hell if I know. Doesn't remember what happened, but was nude, facedown in the bed, covers off the bed."

"Injuries?" She can hear Marino and Browning talking just outside the bedroom. She hears the word "bones."

"Nothing except bruises. Benton says bruises on her hands, chest, back."

"So Benton knows about this. Everybody does except me," she says, getting angry. "Lucy kept this from me. Why didn't she tell me?"

Rudy hesitates, and it seems hard for him to say, "Personal reasons, I think."

1 see.

"I'm sorry. Don't get me started. But I'm really sorry. I shouldn't even be telling you, but you need to know since it now looks like your case is connected. Don't ask me how, Jesus, I've never seen anything as creepy weird as this. What the hell are we dealing'with? Some freak?"

Marino walks into the bedroom, his eyes intense on Scarpetta. "A freak, yes," she says to Rudy and looks at Marino. "Very possibly a white male named Edear Allan Posue, in his thirties, mid-thirties. There are

i C*

databases for pharmacies," she says. "He might be in a pharmaceutical database, maybe different ones, might be on steroids for respiratory disease. That's all I'm going to say."

"That's all you need to say," he says, sounding encouraged.

Scarpetta ends the call and keeps looking at Marino while she thinks, only fleetingly, of how her view of rules has changed as light changes with the weather and the season, and things that looked one way in the past look another way now and will look different in days and years to come. There are few databases on earth that TLP can't hack into. At this moment, it is all about tracking monsters. The hell with rules. The hell with the doubt and guilt she feels as she stands in the bedroom and tucks the phone back into her pocket.

"From his bedroom window he could see into hers," Scarpetta says to Marino and Browning. "If Mrs. Paulsson's games, so-called games, went on in the house, he might have seen them through the windows. And God forbid, if something went on in Gilly's room, he could have seen that, too."

"Doc?" Marino starts to say, his eyes intense and angry.

"My point is, human nature, damaged human nature, is a strange thing," she adds. "Seeing someone victimized can make someone want to victimize that person again. Watching sexual violence through a window could be very provocative to someone who is marginal…"

"What games?" Browning interrupts her.

"Doc?" Marino says, and his eyes are hot and hard with the fury that goes with the hunt. "Looks like there's quite a crowd out there in the shed, a lot of dead people. Think you might want to take a look."

"You were saying something about another case?" Browning asks as they follow the narrow, dim, cold hallway. The smell of dust and mildew suddenly seems choking to Scarpetta, arid she tries not to think about Lucy, about what she deems personal and off-limits. Scarpetta tells Browning and Marino what Rudy just told her. Browning gets excited. Marino gets quiel.

"Then Pogue is probably in Florida," Browning says. "I'm on that like a flea on a dog." He looks confused by a host of thoughts that flicker in his eyes, and in the kitchen he stops and adds, "I'll be out in a minute," and he unclips his phone from his belt.

A crime scene technician in a navy blue jumpsuit and a baseball cap is dusting the plate around a light switch in the kitchen, and Scarpetta hears other cops on the other side of the small depressing house, in the living room. By the back door are big black trash bags tied and tagged as evidence, and Junius Eise enters her mind. He is going to be busy sorting through the demented trash of Edgar Allan Pogue's demented life.

"This guy ever work for a funeral home?" Marino asks Scarpetta, and beyond the back door the yard is overgrown and dead and thick with soggy leaves. "The shed back here is piled, I mean piled, with boxes of what looks like human ashes. They've been around for a while, but I don't think they've been here long. Like maybe he just moved them out there in the shed."

She doesn't say anything until they get to the shed. Then she borrows a flashlight from one of the cops, and she directs the strong beam inside the shed. The light picks out big plastic garbage bags that the cops have opened. Spilling out of them are white ashes, bits of chalky bone, and cheap metal boxes and cigar boxes that are coated with white dust. Some of them are dented. A cop stands to one side of the open door and reaches inside it with a retractable tactical baton that he has opened. He pokes into an open bag of ashes.

"You think he burned up these people himself?" the cop asks Scarpetta. Her light moves through the blackness inside the shed, stopping on long bones and a skull the color of old parchment.

"No," she replies. "Not unless he has his own crematorium somewhere. These are typical for cremains." She moves the light to a dusty, dented box half buried in ashes inside a trash bag. "When the ashes of your person are returned to you, it's in a plain cheap box like this. You want something fancier, you buy it." She moves the light back to the unburned long bones and skull, and the skull stares at them with black empty eyes and a gap-toothed grimace. "To reduce a human body to ash requires temperatures as high as eighteen hundred degrees or two thousand degrees."

"What about the bones that aren't burned?" He points his baton at the long bones and skull, and the baton is steady in his hand but she can tell that he is unnerved.

"I'd check to see if there have been any grave robberies around here in recent memory," she replies. "These bones look pretty old to me. Certainly, they aren't fresh. And I don't smell any odor, not like we'd smell if bodies have been decomposing out here." She stares at the skull and it stares back at her.

"Necrophilia," Marino comments, flashing his light around the inside of the shed, at the white dust of what must be scores and scores of people that has been accumulating somewhere for years and years and then recently was dumped inside the shed.

"I don't know," Scarpetta replies, turning off her light and stepping back from the shed. "But I'd say it's very possible he has a scam going, taking cremains for a fee, ostensibly to fulfill some poor person's wish to have his ashes scattered over a mountain, over the sea, in a garden, in his favorite fishing hole. You take the money and dump the ashes somewhere. I guess eventually in this shed. No one knows. It's happened before. He may have started doing it while he worked for me. I'd check with local crematoriums too, see if he hung around any of them, looking for business. Of course, they probably won't admit to it." She walks off through the wet dead leaves.

"So this is all about money?" the cop with the baton follows her, incredulity in his voice.

"Maybe he got so attracted to death, he starting causing it," she replies, walking through the yard. The rain has stopped. The wind is quiet, and the moon has come out of the clouds and is diin and pale like a.shard o! glass high above the mossy slate roof of the house where Edgar Allan Pogue lived.