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"Don't tell me you're on one of those eat-all-you-want-except-white-stuff diets."
         "You got it, babe. Nothing white for me except women. Now me? If I was a drug dealer, I wouldn't give a shit. Eat whatever the hell I wanted. Twinkies, Moon Pies, white bread and jelly. But that's because I wouldn't have a brain, right? See, all these dead drug dealers are dead because they're stupid, and that's why they ain't got body fat and can eat all the white shit they want."
         Their voices and laughter fade as Scarpetta follows a corridor so familiar she remembers the brush of the gray carpet beneath her shoes, the exact feel of the firm low-pile carpet she picked out when she designed her part of the building.
         "He really is most inappropriate," Dr. Marcus is saying. "One thing I do require in this place is proper decorum."
         Walls are scuffed, and the Norman Rockwell prints she bought and framed herself are cockeyed and two are missing. She stares inside the open doorways of offices they pass, noticing sloppy mounds of paperwork and microscopic slide folders and compound microscopes perched like big tired gray birds on overwhelmed desks. Every sight and sound reaches out to her like needy hands, and deep down she feels what has been lost and it hurts much more than she ever thought it could.
         "Now I'm making the connection, regrettably. The infamous Peter Marano. Yes indeed. Quite a reputation that man has," Dr. Marcus says.
         "Marino," she corrects him.
         A right turn and they do not pause at the coffee station but Dr. Marcus opens a solid wooden door that leads into the library, and she is greeted by medical books abandoned on long tables and other reference books tilted and upended on shelves like drunks. The huge horseshoe-shaped table is a landfill of journals, scraps of paper, dirty coffee cups, even a Krispy Kreme doughnut box. Her heart pounds as she looks around. She designed this generous space and was proud of the way she budgeted her funds because medical and scientific textbooks and a library to hold them are exorbitantly expensive and beyond what the state considers necessary for an office whose patients are dead. Her attention hovers over sets of Greenfield's Neuropathology and law reviews that she donated from her own collection. The volumes are out of order. One of them is upside down. Her anger spikes.
         She fastens her eyes on Dr. Marcus and says, "I think we'd better lay down some ground rules."
         "Goodness, Kay. Ground rules?" he asks with a puzzled frown that is feigned and annoying.
         She can't believe his blatant condescension. He reminds her of a defense attorney, not a good one, who hoodwinks the courtroom by stipulating away the seventeen years she spent in postgraduate education and reduces her on the witness stand to Ma'am or Mrs. or Ms. or, worst of all, Kay.
         "I'm sensing resistance to my being here ..." she starts to say.
         "Resistance? I'm afraid I don't understand."
         "I think you do ..."
         "Let's don't make assumptions."
         "Please don't interrupt me, Dr. Marcus. I don't have to be here." She takes in trashed tables and unloved books and wonders if he is this contemptuous with his own belongings. "What in God's name has happened to this place?" she asks.
         He pauses as if it requires a moment of divining to understand what she means. Then he comments blandly, "Today's medical students. No doubt they were never taught to pick up after themselves."
         "In five years they've changed that much," she says, dryly.
         "Perhaps you're misinterpreting my mood this morning," he replies in the same coaxing tone that he used with her over the phone yesterday. "Granted, I have a lot on my mind, but I'm quite pleased you're here."
         "You seem anything but pleased." She keeps her eyes steadily on him while he stares past her. "Let's start with this. I didn't call