"Nothing is ever without a trace," Scarpetta says as she envisions each scenario, contemplating the obvious: The victim has no reason to fear her attacker until it is too late.

"Is Ivy Ford's house still secured?" Scarpetta doubts it after all this time.

"Family's still living in it. I don't know how people return to homes where such awful things have happened."

Nic starts to say that she wouldn't. But that isn't true. Earlier in her life, she did.

"The car in this most recent case, Glenda Marler's case, is impounded and was thoroughly examined?" Scarpetta asks.

"Hours and hours we… well, as you know, I was here." This detail disappoints her. "But I've gotten the full report, and I know we spent a lot of time on it. My guys lifted every print they could find. Entered the useable ones in AFIS, and no matches. Personally, I don't think that matters because I believe that whoever grabbed Glenda Marler was never inside her car. So his prints wouldn't be in there, anyway. And the only prints on the door handles were hers."

"What about her keys and wallet and any other personal effects?"

"Keys in the ignition, her pocketbook and wallet in the high school parking lot about twenty feet from the car."

"Money in the wallet?" Scarpetta asks.

Nic shakes her head. "But her checkbook and charge cards weren't touched. She wasn't one to carry much cash. Whatever she had, it was gone, and I know she had at least six dollars and thirty-two cents because that was the change she got when she gave the guy at the barbeque a ten-dollar bill to pay for her food. I had my guys check, because oddly, the bag of food wasn't inside her car. So there was no receipt. We had to go back to the barbeque and have him pull her receipt."

"Then it would appear that the perpetrator took her food, too."

This is odd, more typical of a burglary or robbery, certainly not the usual in a psychopathic violent crime.