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of the empty golf course. Thick clouds pass over the oblong moon, and it glows on and off like a signal lantern, as if telling me what is coming down the tracks and if I should stop or go, and I can’t see the stars at all. I worry that the bad weather is moving fast, carried on the same strong south wind that brings in the big planes and their sad cargo. I should hurry, but I’m distracted by the bathroom mirror, by the person in it, and I pause to look at myself in the glare of fluorescent lights.
Who are you now? Who really?
    My blue eyes and short blond hair, the strong shape of my face and figure, aren’t so different, I decide, are remarkably the same, considering my age. I have held up well in my windowless places of concrete and stainless steel, and much of it is genetic, an inherited will to thrive in a family as tragic as a Verdi opera. The Scarpettas are from hearty Northern Italian stock, with prominent features, fair skin and hair, and well-defined muscle and bone that stubbornly weather hardship and the abuses of self-indulgence most people wouldn’t associate with me. But the inclinations are there, a passion for food, for drink, for all things desired by the flesh, no matter how destructive. I crave beauty and feel deeply, but I’m an aberration, too. I can be unflinching and impervious. I can be immutable and unrelenting, and these behaviors are learned. I believe they are necessary. They aren’t natural to me, not to anyone in my volatile, dramatic family, and that much I know is true about what I come from. The rest I’m not so sure about.
    My ancestors were farmers and worked for the railroads, but in recent years my mother has added artists, philosophers, martyrs, and God knows what to the mix as she has set about to research our genealogy. According to her, I’m descended from artisans who built the high altar and choir stalls and made the mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica and created the fresco ceiling of the Chiesa dell’Angelo San Raffaele. Somehow I have a number of friars and monks in my past, and most recently—based on what I don’t know—I share blood with the painter Caravaggio, who was a murderer, and have some tenuous link to the mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for heresy during the Roman Inquisition.
    My mother still lives in her small house in Miami and is pre-possessed with her efforts to explain me. I’m the only physician in the family tree that she knows of, and she doesn’t understand why I’ve chosen patients who are dead. Neither my mother nor my only sibling, Dorothy, could possibly fathom that I might be partly defined by the terrors of a childhood consumed by tending to my terminally ill father before I became the head of the household at the age of twelve. By intuition and training, I’m an expert in violence and death. I’m at war with suffering and pain. Somehow I always end up in charge or to blame. It never fails.
    I shut the door on what has been my home not just for six months but more than that, really. Briggs has managed to remind me where I’m from and headed. It’s a course that was set long before this past July, as long ago as 1987, when I knew my destiny was public service and didn’t know how I could repay my medical-school debt. I allowed something as mundane as money, something as shameful as ambition, to change everything irrevocably and not in a good way—indeed, in the worst way. But I was young and idealistic. I was proud and wanted more, not understanding then that more is always less if you can’t be sated.
    Having gotten full rides through parochial school and Cornell and Georgetown Law, I could have begun my professional life unburdened by the obligations of debt. But I’d turned down Bowman Gray Medical School because I wanted Johns Hopkins badly. I wanted it as badly as I’d ever wanted anything, and I went there without benefit of financial aid, and what I ended up owing was impossible. My