"You think you could stick that needle in his arm, Doc? You think you could turn on the gas or strap him in the chair and hit the switch?"

I didn't reply.

"I think about that a lot," he went on.

"I wouldn't think about it too much," I said.

"I know you could do it." He wouldn't let it rest. "And you know what else, I think you'd like it but just won't admit it, not even to yourself Sometimes I really want to kill someone."

I glanced up at him, blood speckling my face shield and saturating the long sleeves of my gown.

"Now you're really worrying me," I said, and I meant it.

"See, I think a lot of people feel that way and just won't admit it."

Her heart and lungs were within normal limits.

"I think most people don't feel that way."

Marino was getting more belligerent, as if his rage over what had been done to Kim Luong made him feel as powerless as she had been.

"I think Lucy feels that way;" he said.

I glanced up at him, refusing to believe it.

"I think she just waits for an opportunity. And if she don't get that out of her system, she's gonna end up waiting tables."

"Be quiet, Marino:" 'Truth hurts, don't it? Least I admit it. Take the asshole who did this. Me? I'd like to handcuff him to a chair, shackle his ankles and put the barrel of my pistol in his mouth and ask him if he had an orthodontist because he was about to need one."

Her spleen, kidneys, liver were within normal limits.

"Then I'd stick it against his eye, tell him to take a look and let me know if I needed to clean the inside of the barrel."

Inside her stomach were what appeared to be remnants of chicken, rice and vegetables, and I thought of the container and fork that had been found in a paper bag near her pocketbook and coat.

"Hell, maybe I'd just backup like I'm on the fucking firing range and use him as a target, see how much he liked..: ' "Stop it!" I said.

He shut up.

"Goddamn it, Marino. What's gotten into you?" I asked, scalpel in one hand, forceps in the other.

He was quiet for a while, our silence heavy as I worked and kept him busy with various tasks.

Then he said, "The woman who ran up to the ambulance last night is a friend of Kim's, works as a waitress at Shoney's, was taking night classes at VCU. They lived together. So the friend gets home from class. She's got no idea what's happened and her phone rings, and this dumbass reporter says, `What was your reaction when you heard?' "

He paused. I looked up at him as he stared at the openedup body, the chest cavity empty and gleaming red, pale ribs gracefully bowed out from the perfectly straight spine. I plugged in the Stryker saw.

"According to the friend, there's no indication she might have known anybody who struck her as weird. Nobody coming into the store and bothering her, giving her the creeps. There was a false alarm earlier in the week, Tuesday, same back door, it happens a lot. People forget it's armed," he went on, his eyes distant. "It's like he just suddenly flew out of hell:'

I began sawing through the skull with all its comminuted fractures and areas punched out by violent blows of a tool or tools I couldn't identify. A hot bony dust drifted through the air.

By early afternoon, roads had thawed enough so that other diligent, hopelessly behind forensic scientists could come to work. I decided to make my rounds because I was frantic.

My first stop was the Forensic Biology Section, a tenthousand-square-foot area where only an authorized few had access to electronic cards for the locks. People didn't drop by to chat. They traversed the corridor and glanced at intense scientists in white behind glass but rarely got any closer than that.

I pressed an intercom button to see if Jamie Kuhn was in.

"Let me find him," a voice called back.

The instant he opened the door, Kuhn held out a clean, long white lab coat, gloves and mask. Contamination was the enemy of DNA, especially in an era when every pipette, microtome, glove, refrigerator and even pen used for labeling might be questioned in court. The degree of laboratory precautions had become just about as stringent as the sterile procedures found in the operating room.

"I hate to do this to you, Jamie," I said.

"You always say that," he said. "Come on in."

There were three sets of doors to pass through, and fresh lab coats hung in each airlocked space to make sure you exchanged the one you'd just put on for yet another one. Tacky paper on the floors was for the bottom of your shoes. The process was repeated twice more to make sure no one carried contaminants from one area into another.

The examiners' work area was an open, bright room of black counterspace and computers, water baths, containment units and laminar flow hoods. Individual stations were neatly arranged with mineral oil, autopipettes, polypropylene tubes and tube racks. Reagents, or the substances used to cause reactions, were made in big batches from molecular biology-grade chemicals. They were given unique identification numbers and stored in small aliquots away from chemicals kept for general use.

Contamination was managed primarily through serialization, heat denaturation, enzymatic digestion, screening, repeated analysis, ultraviolet irradiation, iodinizing irradiation, use of controls and samples taken from a healthy volunteer. If all else failed, the examiner just quit on certain samples. Maybe he tried again in a few months. Maybe he didn't.

Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, had made it possible to get DNA results in days instead of weeks. Now with short tandem repeat typing, STR, it was theoretically possible that Kuhn could get results in a day. That was, if there was cellular tissue for testing, and in the case of the pale hair from the unidentified man found in the container, there was not.

"That's a damn shame," I said. "Because it looks like I've found more of it. This time adhering to the body of the woman murdered last night at the Quik Cary."

"Wait a minute. Am I hearing this right? The hair from the container guy's clothing matches hair on her?"

"Looks like it. You can see my urgency."

"Your urgency's about to get more urgent," he said. "Because the hair's not cat hair, dog hair. It's not animal hair. It's human."

"It can't be," I said.

"It absolutely is."

Kuhn was a wiry young man who didn't get excited by much. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen his eyes light up.

"Fine, unpigmented, rudimentary," he went on. "Baby hair. I figured maybe the guy has a baby at home. But now, two cases? Maybe the same hair on the murdered lady?"

"Baby hair isn't six or seven inches long," I told him. "That's what I collected from her body."

"Maybe it grows longer in Belgium," he dryly said.

"Let's talk about the unidentified man in the container first. What would baby hair be doing all over him?" I asked. "Even if he does have a baby back home? And even if it were possible for baby hair to be that long?"

"Not all of them are that long. Some are extremely short. Like stubble when you shave:' "Any of the hair forcibly removed?" I asked.

"I'm not seeing any roots with follicular tissues still adhering-mostly the bulbous-shaped roots you associate with hair naturally falling out. Shedding, in other words. Which is why I can't do DNA."

"But some of it's been cut or shaved?" I thought out loud, drawing a blank.

"Right. Some's been cut, some hasn't. Like those weird styles. You've seen them-short on top and long and wispy on the sides."

"Not on a baby I haven't," I answered.

"What if he had triplets, quintuplets, sextuplets because his wife had been on a fertility drug?" Kuhn suggested. "The hair would be the same but if it's coming from, different kids that might explain the different lengths., The DNA would be the same, too, saying you had anything to test."