"We gotta look around, Doc," is what Marino has to say about it.

He sits down on the foot of my bed, and that is wrong, too. I want to tell him to get off my bed and out of my room. It is all I can do not to order him out of my house and possibly out of my life. It doesn't matter how long I have known him or how much we have been through together.

"How's the elbow, Doc?" He indicates the cast that immobilizes my left arm like a stovepipe.

"It's fractured. It hurts like hell." I shut the drawer too hard.

'Taking your medicine?"

"I'll survive."

He watches my every move. "You need to be taking that stuff they gave you."

We have suddenly reversed roles. I act like the rude cop while he is logical and calm like the lawyer-physician I am supposed to be. I walk back into the cedar-lined closet and begin gathering blouses and laying them in the suit bag, making sure top buttons are buttoned, smoothing silk and polished cotton with my right hand. My left elbow throbs like a toothache, my flesh sweating and itching inside plaster. I spent most of the day in the hospital_not that getting a cast put on a fractured limb is a lengthy procedure, but doctors insisted on checking me very carefully to make sure I didn't have other injuries. I repeatedly explained that when I fled from my house, I fell down my front steps and fractured my elbow, nothing more. Jean-Baptiste Chandonne never had a chance to touch me. I got away and am okay, I kept saying during X ray after X ray. Hospital staff held me for observation until late afternoon and detectives were in and out of the examination room. They took my clothes. My niece, Lucy, had to bring me something to wear. I have had no sleep.

The telephone pierces the air like a foil. I pick up the extension by the bed. "Dr. Scarpetta," I announce into the handset, and my own voice saying my name reminds me of calls in the middle of the night when I answer my phone and some detective gives me very bad news about a death scene somewhere.