"SECOND INSTAR." Nic shows off by answering the forgotten question about Maggie the maggot.

The cops around the table shake their heads and cut their eyes at one another. Nic has the capacity to irritate her comrades and has done so on and off for the past two and a half months. In some ways, she reminds Scarpetta of Lucy, who spent the first twenty years of her young life accusing people of slights they hadn't quite committed and flexing her gifts to the extreme of exhibitionism.

"That's very good, Nic," Scarpetta commends her.

"Who invited smarty pants?" Reba, who refuses to return to the Holiday Inn, is just plain obnoxious when she isn't nodding off into her plate.

"I think Nic hasn't been drinking enough and is having the D.T. s and seeing maggots crawling everywhere," says the detective with the shiny shaved head.

The way he looks at Nic is pretty obvious. Despite her being the class nerd, he is attracted to her.

"And you probably think an instar is a position on a baseball field."

Nic wants to be funny but can't escape the gravity of her mood. "See that little maggot I gave Dr. Scarpetta…?"

"Ah! At last she confesses."

"It's second instar." Nic knows she should stop. "Already shed its skin once since it hatched."

"Oh, yeah? How do you know? You an eyewitness? You actually see little Maggie shed her little skin?" the detective with the shaved head persists, winking at her.

"Nic's got a tent in the Body Farm, sleeps out there with all her creepy-crawly friends," someone else says.

"I would if I needed to."

No one argues with that. Nic is well known for her ventures into the two-acre, wooded decay research facility at the University of Tennessee, where the decomposition of donated human bodies is studied to determine many important facts of death, not the least of which is when death occurred. The joke is, she visits the Body Farm as if she's dropping by the old folks' home and checking on her relatives.