Four Scarpetta Novels by Patricia Cornwell

consultants.”
    â€œI’d be happy to accommodate a conversation with you about that anytime.”
    â€œHave you interviewed a violent offender yet? Or perhaps sat in on one of Dr. Wesley’s interviews?”
    â€œNot yet. But I absolutely will.”
    â€œWe’ll meet again, Dr. Minor. It is Dr. Minor?”
    â€œAs soon as I take my quals and find time to really focus on my dissertation. We’re already planning my hooding ceremony.”
    â€œOf course you are. One of the finest moments in our lives.”
    Â 
    In centuries past, the stucco computer lab behind the old brick morgue was a quarters for horses and grooms.
    Fortunately, before there was an architectural review board that could put a stop to it, the building was converted into a garage/storage facility that is now, as Lucy calls it, her make-do computer lab. It’s brick. It’s small. It’s minimal. Construction is well in the works on a massive facility on the other side of the Cooper River, where land is plentiful and zoning laws are toothless, as Lucy puts it. Her new forensic labs, when completed, will have every instrument and scientific capability imaginable. So far they manage fairly well with fingerprint analysis, toxicology, firearms, some trace evidence, and DNA. The Feds haven’t seen anything yet. She will put them to shame.
    Inside her lab of old brick walls and fir-wood flooring is her computer domain, which is secured from the outside world by bullet-and hurricane-proof windows, the shades always drawn. Lucy sits before a work station that is connected to a sixty-four-gigabyte server with a chassis built of six U mountable racks. The kernel—or operating system interfacing the software with the hardware—is of her own design, built with the lowest assembly language so she could talk to the motherboard herself when she was creating her cyberworld—or what she calls the Infinity of Inner Space (IIS), pronounced IS, the prototype of which she sold for a staggering sum that’s indecent to mention. Lucy doesn’t talk about money.
    Along the top of the walls are flat video screens constantly displaying every angle and sound captured by a wireless system of cameras and embedded microphones, and what she’s witnessing is unbelievable.
    â€œYou stupid son of a bitch,” she says loudly to the flat screen in front of her.
    Marino is giving Shandy Snook a tour of the morgue, different angles of them on the screens, their voices as clear as if Lucy is with them.
    Â 
    Boston, the fifth floor of a mid-nineteenth-century brownstone on Beacon Street. Benton Wesley sits at his desk gazing out his window at a hot-air balloon drifting above the common, above Scotch elms as old as America. The white balloon slowly rises like a huge moon against the downtown skyline.
    His cell phone rings. He puts on his wireless earpiece, says, “Wesley,” and hopes like hell it’s not some emergency that has to do with Dr. Self, the current hospital scourge, perhaps the most dangerous one ever.
    â€œIt’s me,” Lucy says in his ear. “Log on now. I’m conferencing you.”
    Benton doesn’t ask why. He logs on to Lucy’s wireless network, which transfers video, audio, and data in real time. Her face fills the video screen of the laptop on his desk. She looks fresh and dynamically pretty, as usual, but her eyes are sparking with fury.
    â€œTrying something different,” she says. “Connecting you to security access so you can see what I’m seeing right now. Okay? Your screen should split into four quadrants to pick up four angles or locations. Depending on what I choose. That should be enough for you to see what our so-called friend Marino is doing.”
    â€œGot it,” Benton says as his screen splits, allowing him to view, simultaneously, four areas of Scarpetta’s building scanned by cameras.
    The buzzer in the morgue bay.
    In the upper-left