"So maybe she's coming back to Richmond," Eise supposes. "Maybe that's really why she's here. At least when she used to send us samples, she never mislabeled them and we knew exactly where they came from. She didn't mind discussing cases, would come up here herself instead of treating us like robots at General Motors because we're not great and a mighty doctor-lawyer-Indian Chief. She didn't swab the hell out of everything if she could lift it with tape, Post-its, whatever we recommended. I guess you're right. Peanut Gallery's dead wrong."

"What the hell's a peanut gallery?"

"Don't know, really."

"Obscured cortical texture, totally," Kit says, peering at a magnified dyed black hair that looks as big as a dark winter tree in the circle of light. "Like someone dipped this hair in a pot of black ink. No line of demarcation, no sir, so either recently dyed or was cut off below the grown-out undyed roots."

She is making notes as she moves the slide around and adjusts the focus and magnification, doing her best to make a dyed hair speak. It won't say much. The distinctive characteristics of the pigment in the cuticle have been obscured by dye, like an over-inked fingerprint that blots out ridge detail. Dyed, bleached, and gray hair are pretty worthless in microscopic comparison, and half the human population has dyed, bleached, gray, or permed hair. But these days in court, jurors expect a hair to announce who, what, when, where, why, and how.

Eise hates what the entertainment industry has done to his profession. People he meets say they want to be him, what an exciting profession he has, and it isn't true, it just isn't. He doesn't go to crime scenes or wear a gun. He never has. He doesn't get a special phone call and put on a special uniform or jumpsuit and rush out in a special all-terrain crime scene vehicle to look for fibers or fingerprints or DNA or Martians. Cops and crime scene technicians do that. Medical examiners and death investigators do that. In the old days when life was simpler and the public left forensic people alone, homicide detectives like Pete Marino drove their beat-up junkers to the scene, gathered the evidence themselves, and not only knew what to collect but what to leave.

Don't vacuum the whole goddamn parking lot. Don't stuff the poor woman's entire bedroom inside fifty-gallon plastic bags and bring all that shit in here. It's like someone panning for gold and bringing home the entire stream bed instead of carefully sifting through it first. A lot of the nonsense that goes on these days is laziness. But there are other problems, more insidious ones, and Eise keeps thinking that maybe he ought to retire. He has no time for research or just plain fun and is nagged by paperwork that must be perfect, just as his analysis must be perfect. He suffers from eyestrain and insomnia. Rarely is he thanked or given credit when a case is solved and the guilty person gets what he deserves. What kind of world do we live in? It has gotten worse. Yes it has.

"!(you do run into Dr. Scarpctta, Eise remarks, "ask her about Marino. He and I used to pal around when he came down here, used to put away a few beers at the FOP lounge."

"He's here," Kit says. "He came with her. You know, I'm feeling a little weird, that tickle in my throat, and I'm aching. Hope I'm not getting the damn flu."

"He's here? Holy cow. I'm gonna call that boy right away. Well, hallelujah! So he's working on the Sick Girl too."

Gilly Paulsson now goes by that name, if she is referred to by a name at all. It's easier not to use a real name, assuming one can remember it. Victims become where they were found or what was done to them. The Suitcase Lady. The Sewer Lady. The Landfill Baby. The Rat Man. The Duct Tape Man. As for the real birth names of these dead people, most of the time Eise hasn't a clue. He prefers not to have a clue.

"If Scarpetta has any opinions about why Sick Girl has red, white, and blue paint and some other weirdo dust in her mouth, I'm listening," he says. "Apparently metal painted red, white, and blue. There's unpainted metal, too, bits of shiny metal. And something else. I don't know what the something else is." He manipulates the trace evidence on the slide, obsessively moving it around. "I'll run SEM/EDX next, see what kind of metal. Anything red, white, and blue at Sick Girl's house? Guess I'll be tracking down that boy Marino and buy him a few cool ones. Lord, I could use a few myself."

"Don't talk about cool ones right now," Kit says. "I'm feeling kind of sick. I know we can't catch things from swabs and tape lifts and all the rest. But sometimes I wonder when they send up all that crap from the morgue."

"Nope. All those little bacteria are as dead as doornails when they get to us," Eise says, looking up at her. "You look at 'em close enough, they all got on teeny-weeny toe tags. You look pale, girl." He hates to encourage her sudden bout of illness. It's lonely up here when Kit isn't around, but she doesn't feel good. It's obvious. It's not right of him to pretend otherwise. "Why don't you take a break, girl? Did you get a flu shot? They ran out by the time I got around to it."

"Me too. Couldn't get one anywhere," she says, getting up from her chair. "I think I'll go make some hot tea."

Lucy does not like to trust other people to do her work. As much as she relies on Rudy, she doesn't trust him with her work, not these days, because of Henri and the way he feels about her. Lucy looks at the printed results from the IAFIS search by herself while she sits in her office, headphones on, skipping through banal recordings of her neighbor Kate's banal telephone conversations. It is early morning, Thursday, one week before Christmas.

Late yesterday, Kate called her back. She left a message on Lucy's cell phone. "Hugs and kisses for the tickets," and "Who is the pool lady? Someone famous?" Lucy does have a pool lady and she is nobody famous. She is a brunette in her fifties and looks much too small to use a skimmer, and she's not a movie star and she's not a beast. Lucy's bad luck holds strong with IAFIS, which returned no good candidates, meaning the automated search came up empty-handed. Matching latent prints to latent prints, especially when some of the prints are partial ones, is a crap shoot.

Each of a person's ten fingerprints is unique. For example, a person's left thumbprint does not match his right thumbprint. With no ten-print card on file, IAFIS could only get a hit on unknown latents if the perpetrator left a latent print of his right thumb at one crime scene and a latent of the same thumb at another crime scene, and both latents were entered into IAFIS, and both latents were either complete prints or just so happened to include the same friction ridge characteristics in each print.

A manual or visual comparison of the latent prints tells another story, however, and here Lucy's luck gets a little better. Latent partial prints she recovered from the drawing of the eye do match some of the partial prints she recovered from the bedroom after Henri was attacked. This doesn't surprise Lucy, but she is happy for the verification. The beast who entered her house is the same beast who left the drawing of the eye, and the same beast also scratched her black Ferrari, although no print was recovered from the car. But how many beasts go around drawing eyes? So he did it, although none of these matches tell Lucy who he is. All she knows is that the same beast is causing all this trouble, and he does not have a ten-print card on file in IAFIS or anywhere else, it seems, and he continues to stalk Henri and must not know that she is far away from here. Or maybe he assumes Henri is coming back or at least hears about his latest exploits.

In the beast's mind, if Henri at least knows he taped a drawing on the door, then Henri is frightened and upset again and maybe she will never come back. What matters to the beast is that he overpower her. That is what stalking is all about. It is an overpowering of another person. In a sense, the stalker takes his victim hostage without ever laying a finger on her or in some cases ever meeting her. As far as Lucy knows, the beast has never met Henri. As far as Lucy knows. What does she know, really? Not a hell of a lot.