"I'm on call for court in Chesterfield," Dr. Ramie concludes. "I'm going to need a ride, my car's in the shop again."

"I'll drop you off," Marino volunteers, winking at her.

Dr. Ramie looks terrified.

Everyone makes moves to get out of their chairs, but Dr. Marcus stops them. "Before you go," he says, "I could use your help and you could probably use a little mental stretching. As you know, the Institute is running another death investigation school, and as usual I've been prevailed upon to lecture about the medical examiner system. I thought I'd try our a few test cases on the group, especially since we are fortunate enough to have an expert in our midst."

The bastard, Scarpetta thinks. So this is what it's going to be like. The hell with their talk in the library. The hell with his making the office open to her.

He pauses, looking around the table. "A twenty-year-old white female," he begins, "seven weeks pregnant. Her boyfriend kicks her in the belly. She calls the police and goes to the hospital. Hours later she passes the fetus and placenta. The police notify me. What do I do?"

No one answers him. It's obvious that they aren't accustomed to his mental stretches and just stare at him.

"Come on, come on," he says with a smile. "Let's say I just got such a phone call, Dr. Ramie."

"Sir?" She turns red again.

"Come, come. Tell me how to handle it, Dr. Ramie."

"Process it like a surgical?" she guesses as if some alien force has just sucked away her long years of medical training, her very intelligence.

"Anybody else?" Dr. Marcus asks. "Dr. Scarpetta?" He says her name slowly, making sure she notices that he didn't call her Kay. "Ever had a case like this?"

"I'm afraid so," she replies.

"Tell us. What's the legal impact?" he asks quite pleasantly.

"Obviously, if you beat up a pregnant woman, it's a crime," she answers. "On the CME-1, I'm going to call the fetal death a homicide."

"Interesting." Dr. Marcus looks around the table as he takes aim at her again. "So your initial report of investigation would say homicide.

Perhaps a bit bold of you? Intent is for the police to determine, not us, correct?"

The sniping son of a bitch, she thinks. "Our job as mandated by code is to determine cause and manner of death," she says. "As you may recall, in the late nineties the statute changed after a man shot a woman through the belly and she lived but her unborn child died. In the scenario you've put before us, Dr. Marcus, I suggest you have the fetus brought in. Autopsy it and give it a case number. There's no place on a yellow bordered death certificate for manner of death, so you include that with cause, an intrauterine fetal demise due to an assault on the mother. Use a yellow-bordered death certificate since the fetus wasn't born alive. Keep a copy with the case file because a year from now that certificate won't exist anymore, after the Bureau of Vital Records compiles its statistics."

"And what do we do with the fetus?" Dr. Marcus asks, not quite so pleasantly.

"Up to the family."

"It's not even ten centimeters," he says, his voice getting tight again. "There's nothing left for the funeral home to bury."

"Then fix it in formalin. Give it to the family, whatever they want."

"And call it a homicide," he says coldly.

"The new statute," she reminds him. "In Virginia, an assault with the intent of killing family members, born or unborn, is a capital crime. Even if you can't prove intent and the charge is malicious wounding of the mother, that carries the same penalty as murder. From there it tracks down through the system as manslaughter and so on. The point is, there doesn't have to be intent. The fetus doesn't even have to be viable. A violent crime has occurred."

"Any debate?" Dr. Marcus asks his staff. "No comments?"

No one responds, not even Fielding.

"Then we'll try another one," Dr. Marcus says with an angry smile.

Go ahead, Scarpetta thinks. Go ahead, you insufferable bastard.

"A young male in a hospice program," Dr. Marcus begins. "He's dying of AIDS. He tells the doctor to pull the plug. If the doctor withdraws life support and the patient dies, is it an ME case or not? Is it a homicide? How about our guest expert again? Did the doctor commit homicide?"

"It's a natural death unless the doctor put a bullet through the patient's head," Scarpetta answers.

"Ah. Then you're an advocate of euthanasia."

"Informed consent is murky." She doesn't answer his ridiculous charge. "The patient is often dealing with depression, and when people are depressed, they can't make informed decisions. This is really a societal question."

"Let me clarify what you're saying," Dr. Marcus replies.

"Please do."

"You have this man in hospice who says, 'I think I'd like to die today.' Should you expect your local doc to do it?"

"The truth is, the patient in hospice already has that capacity. He can decide to die," she replies. "He can have morphine when he wants it for pain, so he asks for more and goes to sleep and dies from an O.D. He can wear a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet and a squad doesn't have to resuscitate him. So he dies. Chances are there will be no consequences to anyone."

"But is it our case?" Dr. Marcus insists, his thin face white with rage as he glares at her.

"People are in hospices because they want pain control and want to die in peace," she says. "People who make informed decisions to wear DNR bracelets basically want the same thing. A morphine O.D., a withdrawal of vital support in a hospice, a person wearing a DNR bracelet isn't resuscitated. These are not our issues. If you get called about a case like that, Dr. Marcus, I hope you turn it down."

"Any comment?" Dr. Marcus asks tersely, shuffling paperwork and ready to leave.

"Yeah," Marino says to him. "You ever thought of writing Q and As for Jeopardy?"

Benton Wesley paces from window to window inside his three bedroom town home at the Aspen Club. The signal of his cell phone surges in and out, and Marino's voice is clear, then broken.

"What? I'm sorry, say that again." Benton backs up three steps and stands still.

"I said that's not the half of it. A hell of a lot worse than you thought." Marino's voice comes through intact. "It's like he brought her in to kick the shit out of her in front of an audience. Or try. I emphasize try."

Benton stares out at snow caught in crooks of aspen trees and piled on the stubby needles of black spruce. The morning is sunny and clear for the first time in days, and magpies frolic from branch to branch, landing in a flutter and then flitting off in small white bursts of snow. A part of Benton's mind processes the activity and tries to determine a reason, perhaps a biological cause and effect that might explain the long-tailed birds' gymnastics, as if it matters. His mental probing is as conditioned as the wildlife and as relentless as the gondolas swinging up and down the mountain.

"Try, yes. Try." Benton smiles a little as he imagines it. "But you need to understand he didn't invite her because it was a choice. It was an order. The health commissioner's behind it."

"And you know that how?"

"It took me one phone call after she told me she was going."

"It's too bad about Asp-" Marino's voice fractures.

Benton moves to the next window, {lames snapping and wood popping in the fireplace at his back. He continues to stare out the floor-to-ceiling glass, his attention fixing on the stone house across the street as the front door opens. A man and a boy emerge dressed for the weather, their breath streaming out in a frozen vapor.

"By now she's aware of it," Benton says. "Aware she's being used." He knows Scarpetta well enough to make predictions that undoubtedly are true. "I promise she knows the politics or simply that there are politics. Unfortunately, there's more, a lot more. Can you hear me?"