Now she is asking the man with the clipboard his name, and he is telling her it is Bud Light, which is easy enough for Marino to remember, even if he doesn't believe in Bud Lite or Miller Lite or Michelob Lite or anything lite. She is explaining that she needs to know exactly where the body was found because she needs to take soil samples. Bud doesn't seem the least bit curious. Maybe he assumes good-looking women medical examiners and big cops in LAPD caps always take soil samples when some construction worker is run over by a tractor. So they start walking through the thick wet mud again, getting closer to the building, and all the while this is going on, Marino is thinking about Suz.

Last night he was just starting another round of whisky at the FOP lounge, having a nice honest conversation with Junius Else, or Eise-Ass, as Marino has called him for years. Browning had already gone home and Marino was talking away when his cell phone rang. By this point, he was feeling pretty good and probably shouldn't have answered his cell phone. Probably it should have been turned oft, but he hadn't turned it otr because Scarpetta had called earlier when Fielding wouldn't come to the door, and Marino told her to call back if she needed him. That's the real reason he answered his cell phone when it rang, although it is also true that when he's enjoying another round he is, at that moment more than any other, most likely to answer the door or the phone or talk to a stranger.

"Marino," he said above the din inside the FOP lounge.

"This is Suzanna Paulsson. I'm so sorry to bother you." She began to cry.

It doesn't matter what she said after that, and some of it he can't remember as he's picking his way through thick red mud while Scarpetta digs into her shoulder bag for packets of sterile wooden tongue depressors and plastic freezer bags. The most important part of what happened last night Marino can't remember and probably never will, because Suz had whisky at her house, sour-mash bourbon, and lots of it. She was wearing jeans and a soft pink sweater when she led him into the living room and drew the drapes across the windows, then sat next to him on the couch and told him about her scumbag ex-husband and Homeland Security and women pilots and other couples he used to invite to the house. She kept referring to these other couples as if it were important, and Marino asked her if these couples were who she meant when she said "them" several times while he and Scarpetta were here. Suz wouldn't answer him directly. She said the same thing. She said, Ask Frank.

I'm asking you, Marino replied.

Ask Frank, she kept saying. He had all kinds in here. Ask him.

Had them here for what reason?

You'll find out, she said.

Marino stands back watching Scarpetta as she pulls on latex gloves and rips open a white paper packet. There is nothing left of the tractor driver's death scene but muddy asphalt in front of a back door that is next to the huge bay door. He watches her get down and look around the muddy pavement, and he remembers yesterday morning, when they were cruising by in the rental car, talking about the past, and if he could go back to yesterday morning, he would. If only he could go back. His stomach is sour and stabbed by nausea. His head throbs in rapid rhythm with his racing heart. He breathes in the cold air and tastes the dirt and the concrete of the building that is falling down around them.

"So what you looking for exactly, you don't mind me asking?" Bud is saying, looking on.

She carefully scrapes a wooden tongue depressor over a small area of dirt and sand that is stained, maybe with blood. "Just checking on what's here," she explains.

"You know, I watch some of those TV shows. At least I catch a bit here and there when the wife is watching."

"Don't believe everything you see." Scarpetta drops more dirt in the bag, then drops in the tongue depressor after it. She seals the bag and marks it with more of that writing of hers that Marino can't make out. She gently tucks the bag inside the nylon scene kit, which is upright on the pavement.

"So you ain't gonna take this dirt back and put it inside some magic machine," Bud jokes.

"No magic involved," she says, opening another white packet as she squats in the parking lot near the door she used to unlock and walk in every morning when she was chief.

Several times this morning Marino has had flashes in the throbbing darkness of his soul. They are electrical, like a picture blinking in and out of a TV that is seriously malfunctioning, severely damaged, and blinking in and out so fast that he can't see what's there, but is given only fuzzy impressions of what might be there. Lips and tongue. Fragments of hands and shut eyes. And his mouth going on her. What he knows for a fact is that he woke up naked in her bed at seven minutes past five this morning.

Scarpetta works like an archaeologist, as much as Marino knows about an archaeologist's methods. She carefully scrapes the top of a muddy area where he thinks he might see dark spots of blood. Her coat drapes around her and drags along the filthy blacktop and she doesn't care. If only all women cared as little as she does about things that don't matter. If only all women cared as much as she does about things that do matter. Marino imagines Scarpetta would understand a bad night. She would make coffee and hang around long enough to talk about it. She wouldn't lock herself in the bathroom and cry and holler and order him to get the hell out of her house.

Marino walks off quickly from the parking lot and back through the red mud, his big boots slipping. He slips and catches himself with a grunt that turns into a heave as he vomits, bending over deeply in loud heaves, a bitter brown liquid splashing on his boots. He is trembling and gagging and believing he will die when he feels her hand on his elbow. He would know that hand anywhere, that strong, sure hand.

"Come on," she says quietly, gripping his arm. "Let's get you back into the car. It's all right. Put your hand on my shoulder and for God's sake watch where you step or both of us are going down."

He wipes his mouth on his coat sleeve. Tears flood his eyes as he wills one foot at a time to move, holding on to her and holding himself up as he squishes through the muddy bloody-red battlefield around the ruined? building where they first met.

"What if I raped her, Doc?" he says, so sick he might die. "What if I did?"

It is very hot inside the hotel room and Scarpetta has given up adjusting the thermostat. She sits in a chair by the window and watches Marino on the bed. He is stretched out in his black pants and black shirt, the baseball cap lonely on the dresser, his black boots lonely on the floor.

"You need to get some food in you," she says from her chair near the window.

Nearby on the carpet is her mud-spotted black nylon crime scene kit, and draped over another chair is her mud-spattered coat. Wherever she has walked in the room she has tracked red mud, and when her eyes fall on the trail she has made, she is reminded of a crime scene, and then she thinks about Suzanna Paulsson's bedroom and what crime may or may not have occurred there within the past twelve hours.

"I can't eat nothing right now," Marino says from his supine position. "What if she goes to the police?"

Scarpetta has no intention of giving him false hope. She can't give him anything because she doesn't know anything. "Can you sit up, Marino? It would be better if you sit up. I'm going to order something."

She gets up from the chair and leaves behind her more bits and flakes of drying mud as she walks to the phone by the bed. She finds a pair of reading glasses in a pocket of her suit jacket and puts them on the tip of her nose, and she studies the phone. Unable to figure out the number for room service, she dials zero for the operator and is transferred to room service.