"You're going to enjoy this, b.i.t.c.h."

It was a low, cold voice straight out of h.e.l.l. "I've been saving the best for last."

The stocking sucking in and out. "You want to know how I've been doing it. Going to show you real slow."

The voice. It was familiar.

My right hand. Where was the gun? Was it farther to the right or to the left? Was it directly centered under my pillow? I couldn't remember. I couldn't think! He had to get to the cords. He couldn't cut the cord to the lamp. The lamp was the only light on. The switch to the overhead light was near the door. He was looking at it, at the vacant dark rectangle.

I eased my right hand up an inch.

The eyes darted toward me, then toward the draperies again.

My right hand was on my chest, almost to my right shoulder under the sheet.

I felt the edge of the mattress lift as he got up from the bed. The stains under his arms were bigger. He was soaking wet with sweat.

Looking at the light switch near the blank doorway, looking across the bedroom at the draperies again, he seemed indecisive.

It happened so fast. The hard cold shape knocked against my hand and my fingers seized it and I was rolling off the bed, pulling the covers with me, thudding to the floor. The hammer clicked back and locked and I was sitting straight up, the sheet twisted around my hips, all of it happening at once.

I don't remember doing it. I don't remember doing any of it. It was instinct, someone else. My finger was against the trigger, hands trembling so badly the revolver was jumping up and down.

I don't remember taking the gag out.

I could only hear my voice.

I was screaming at him.

"You son of a b.i.t.c.h! You G.o.ddam son of a b.i.t.c.h!"

The gun was bobbing up and down as I screamed, my terror, my rage exploding in profanities that seemed to be coming from someone else. Screaming, I was screaming at him to take off his mask.

He was frozen on the other side of the bed. It was an odd detached awareness. The knife in his gloved hand, I noticed, was just a folding knife.

His eyes were riveted to the revolver.

"TAKE IT OFF!"

His arm moved slowly and the white sheath fluttered to the floor a As he spun around a I was screaming and explosions were going off, spitting fire and splintering gla.s.s, so fast I didn't know what was happening.

It was madness. Things were flying and disconnected, the knife flashing out of his hand as he slammed against the bedside table, pulling the lamp to the floor as he fell, and a voice said something. The room went black.

A frantic sc.r.a.ping sound was coming from the wall near the door a "Where're the friggin' lights in this joint a ?"

I would have done it.

I know I would have done it.

I never wanted to do anything so badly in my life as I wanted to squeeze that trigger.

I wanted to blow a hole in his heart the size of the moon.

We'd been over it at least five times. Marino wanted to argue. He didn't think it happened the way it did.

"Hey, the minute I saw him going through the window, Doe, I was following him. He couldn'ta been in your bedroom no more than thirty seconds before I got there. And you didn't have no d.a.m.n gun out. You went for it and rolled off the bed when I busted in and blew him out of his size-eleven jogging shoes."

We were sitting in my downtown office Monday morning. I could hardly remember the past two days. I felt as if I'd been under water or on another planet.

No matter what he said, I believed I had my gun on the killer when Marino suddenly appeared in my doorway at the same time his .357 pumped four bullets into the killer's upper body. I didn't check for a pulse. I made no effort to stop the bleeding. I just sat in the twisted sheet on the floor, my revolver in my lap, tears streaming down my cheeks as it dawned on me.

The .38 wasn't loaded.

I was so upset, so distracted when I went upstairs to bed, I'd forgotten to load my gun. The cartridges were still in their box tucked under a stack of sweaters inside one of my dresser drawers where Lucy would never think to look.

He was dead.

He was dead when he hit my rug.

"He didn't have his mask off either," Marino was going on. "Memory plays weird tricks, you know? I pulled the d.a.m.n stocking off his face soon as Snead and Riggy got there. By then he was already dead as dog food."

He was just a boy.

He was just a pasty-faced boy with kinky dirty-blond hair. His mustache was nothing more than a dirty fuzz.

I would never forget those eyes. They were windows through which I saw no soul. They were empty windows opening onto a darkness, like the ones he climbed through when he murdered women whose voices he'd heard over the phone.

"I thought he said something," I muttered to Marino. "I thought I heard him say something as he was falling. But I can't remember."

Hesitantly, I asked, "Did he?"

"Oh, yeah. He said one thing."

"What?" I shakily retrieved my cigarette from the ashtray.

Marino smiled snidely. "Same last words recorded on them little black boxes of crashed planes. Same last words for a lot of poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. He said, *Oh, s.h.i.t.'

"One bullet severed his aorta. Another took out his left ventricle. One more went through a lung and lodged in his spine. The fourth one cut through soft tissue, missing every vital organ, and shattered my window.

I didn't do his autopsy. One of my deputy chiefs from northern Virginia left the report on my desk. I don't remember calling him in to do it but I must have.

I hadn't read the papers. I couldn't stomach it. Yesterday's headline in the evening edition was enough. I caught a glimpse of it as I hastily stuffed the paper in the garbage seconds after it landed on my front stoop: STRANGLER SLAIN BY DETECTIVE INSIDE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER'S BEDROOM Beautiful. I asked myself, Who does the public think was inside my bedroom at two o'clock in the morning, the killer or Marino? Beautiful.

The gunned-down psychopath was a communications officer hired by the city about a year ago. Communications officers in Richmond are civilians, they aren't really cops. He worked the six-to-midnight shift. His name was Roy McCorkle. Sometimes he worked 911. Sometimes he worked as a dispatcher, which was why Marino recognized the CB voice on the 911 tape I played for him over the phone. Marino didn't tell me he recognized the voice. But he did.

McCorkle wasn't on duty Friday night. He called in sick. He hadn't been to work since Abby's Thursday morning front page story. His colleagues didn't have much of an opinion of him one way or another except they found his CB phone manner and jokes amusing. They used to kid him about his frequent trips to the men's room, as many as a dozen during a shift. He was washing his hands, his face, his neck. A dispatcher walked in on him once and found McCorkle practically taking a sponge bath.

In the communications men's room was a dispenser of Borawash soap.

He was an "all-right guy."

No one who worked with him really knew him well. They a.s.sumed he had a woman he was seeing after hours, "a goodlooking blonde" named "Christie."

There was no Christie. The only women he saw after hours were the ones he butchered. No-one who worked with him could believe he was the one, the strangler.

McCorkle, we were considering, may have murdered the three women in the Boston area years ago. He was driving a rig back then. One of his stops was Boston, where he delivered chickens to a packing plant. But we couldn't be sure. We may never know just how many women he murdered all over the United States. It could be dozens. He probably started out as a peeper, then progressed to a rapist. He had no police record. The most he'd ever gotten was a speeding ticket.

He was only twenty-seven.

According to his resume on file with the police department, he'd worked a number of jobs: trucker, dispatcher for a cement company in Cleveland, mail deliveryman and as a deliveryman for a florist in Philadelphia.

Marino wasn't able to find him Friday night but he didn't look very hard. From eleven-thirty Marino was on my property, out of sight behind shrubbery, watching. He was wearing a dark blue police jumpsuit so he would blend with the night. When he switched on the overhead light inside my bedroom, and I saw him standing there in the jumpsuit, the gun in hand, for a paralyzing second I didn't know who was the killer and who was the cop.

"See," he was saying,. "I'd been thinking about the Abby Turnbull connection, about the possibility the guy was after her and ended up with the sister by mistake. That worried me. I asked myself, what other lady in the city's he getting hooked into?"

He looked at me, his face thoughtful.

When Abby was followed from the newspaper late one night and dialed 911, it was McCorkle who answered the call. That was how he knew where she lived. Maybe he'd already thought of killing her, or maybe it didn't occur to him until he heard her voice and realized who she was. We would never know.

We did know all five women had dialed 911 in the past. Patty Lewis did less than two weeks before she was murdered. She called at 8:23 on a Thursday night, right after a bad rainstorm, to report a traffic light out a mile from her house. She was being a good citizen. She was trying to prevent an accident. She didn't want anybody to get hurt.

Cecile Tyler hit a nine instead of a four. A wrong number.

I never dialed 911.

I didn't need to.

My number and address were in the phone directory because medical examiners had to be able to reach me after business hours. Also I talked with several dispatchers on several occasions over the past few weeks when I was trying to find Marino. One of them might have been McCorkle. I'd never know. I don't think I wanted to know.

"Your picture's been in the paper and on TV," Marino went on. "You've been working all his cases, he's been wondering what you know. He's been thinking about you. Me, I was worried. Then all that s.h.i.t about his metabolic disorder and your office having something on him."

He paced as he talked. "Now he's going to be hot. Now it's gotten personal. The snooty lady doctor here's maybe insulting his intelligence, his masculinity."

The phone calls I was getting at late hours "This pushes his b.u.t.ton. He don't like no broad treating him like he's a stupid a.s.s. He's thinking, *The b.i.t.c.h thinks she's smart, better'n me. I'll show her. I'll fix her.'

"I was wearing a sweater under my lab coat. Both were b.u.t.toned up to the collar. I couldn't get warm. For the last two nights I'd slept in Lucy's room. I was going to redecorate my bedroom. I was thinking of selling my house.

"So I guess that big newspaper spread on him the other day rattled his cage all right. Benton said it was a blessing. That maybe he'd get reckless or something. I was p.i.s.sed. You remember that?"

I barely nodded.

"You want to know the big reason I was so d.a.m.ned p.i.s.sed?"

I just looked at him. He was like a kid. He was proud of himself. I was supposed to praise him, be thrilled, because he shot a man at ten paces, mowed him down inside my bedroom. The guy had a buck knife. That was it. What was he going to do, throw it? "Well, I'll tell you. For one thing, I got a little tip sometime back."

"A tip?"

My eyes focused. "What tip?"

"Golden Boy Boltz," he replied matter-of-factly as he flicked an ash. "Just so happens he was big enough to pa.s.s along something right before he blew out of town. Told me he was worried about you a"

"About me?" I blurted.

"Said he dropped by your house late one night and there was this strange car. It cruised up, cut its lights and sped off. He was antsy you was being watched, maybe it was the killer a"

"That was Abby!" I crazily broke out. "She came to see me, to ask me questions, saw Bill's car and panicked a"

Marino looked surprised, just for an instant. Then shrugged. "Whatever. Just as well it caught our attention, huh?"

I didn't say anything. I was on the verge of tears.

"It was enough to give me the jitters. Fact is, I've been watching your house for a while. Been watching it a lot of late nights. Then comes the d.a.m.n story about the DNA link. I'm thinking this squirrel's maybe already casing the doc. Now he's really going to be off the wall. The story ain't going to lure him to the computer. It's going to lure him straight to her."

"You were right," I said, clearing my throat.

"You're d.a.m.n right I was right."

Marino didn't have to kill him. No one would ever know except the two of us. I'd never tell. I wasn't sorry. I would have done it myself. Maybe I was sick inside because if I tried I would have failed. The .38 wasn't loaded. Click. That's as far as I would have gotten. I think I was sick inside because I couldn't save myself and I didn't want to thank Marino for my life.

He was going on and on. My anger started to simmer. It began creeping up my throat like bile.

When suddenly Wingo walked in.

"Uh."

Hands in his pockets, he looked uncertain as Marino eyed him in annoyance.

"Uh, Dr. Scarpetta. I know this isn't a good time and all. I mean, I know you're still upset a"

"I'm not upset!"

His eyes widened. He blanched.

Lowering my voice, I said, "I'm sorry, Wingo. Yes. I'm upset. I'm ragged. I'm not myself. What's on your mind?"

He reached in a pocket of his powder-blue silk trousers and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a cigarette b.u.t.t, Benson Hedges 100's.

He placed it lightly on my blotter.

I looked blankly at him, waiting.

"Uh, well, you remember me asking about the commissioner, about whether he's an antismoker and all that?"

I nodded.

Marino was getting restless. He was looking around as if he were bored.

"You see, my friend Patrick. He works in accounting across the street, in the same building where Amburgey works. Well."