"As far as you know, is robbery involved in the cases of the other eight missing women?" Scarpetta asks.

"Rumor has it that their billfolds were cleaned out of cash and tossed not far from where they were snatched."

"No fingerprints in any of the cases, as far as you know?"

"I don't know for a fact."

"Perhaps DNA from skin cells where the perpetrator touched the billfold?"

"I don't know what the Baton Rouge police have done, because they don't tell anybody shit. But the guys at my department swabbed everything we could, including Ivy Ford's wallet, and did get her DNA profile-and another one that isn't in the FBI's database, CODIS. Louisiana, as you know, is just getting started on a DNA database and is so backed up on entering samples, you may as well forget it."

"But you do have an unknown profile," Scarpetta says with interest. "Although we have to accept right off that it could be anybody's. What about her children, her husband?"

"The DNA's not theirs."

Scarpetta nods. "Then you have to start wondering who else would have had good reason to touch Ivy Ford's wallet. Who else besides the killer."

"I wonder about that twenty-four hours a day."

"And this most recent case, Glenda Marler?"

"The state police labs have the evidence. The tests results will be a while, even though there's a rush on them."

"An alternate light source used on the inside of the car?"

"Yes. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing," Nic says in frustration. "No crime scenes, no bodies, like it's all a bad dream. If even just one body would show up. The coroner's great. You've heard of him? Dr. Sam Lanier."

Scarpetta doesn't know him.

8

THE EAST BATON ROUGE PARISH Coroner's Office overlooks a long straight reach of the Mississippi River and the former art deco state capitol where the wily, fearless and despotic Huey Long was assassinated.