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Kay in front of your staff and colleagues. Actually, I would prefer that you didn't call me by my first name at all."
         "I suppose part of the commissioner's motivation is preventive damage control," Dr. Marcus replies as if she said nothing about his calling her Kay.
         "I didn't agree to participate in some media relations scheme," she tells him. "When you called yesterday, I agreed to do what I could to help you figure out what happened to Gilly Paulsson. And I can't do that if you aren't completely open with me and whoever I bring in to assist me, which in this case is Pete Marino."
         "Frankly, it didn't occur to me that you would have a strong desire to attend staff meeting." He glances at his watch again, an old watch with a narrow leather wristband. "But as you wish. We have no secrets in this place. Later, I'll go over the Paulsson case with you. You can re-autopsy her if you want."
         He holds open the library door. Scarpetta stares at him in disbelief.
         "She died two weeks ago and her body hasn't been released to her family yet?" she asks.
         "They're so distraught, they haven't made arrangements to claim her, allegedly," he replies. "I suppose they're hoping we'll pay for the burial."

    Chapter 4

         In   the    conference    room of the OCME, Scarpetta rolls out a chair at the foot of the table, an outer reach of her former empire that she never visited when she was here. Not once did she sit at the foot of the conference table in the years she ran this office, not even if it was to have a casual conversation over a bagged lunch.
         It registers somewhere in her disturbed thoughts that she is being contraire by choosing a chair at the foot of the long dark polished table when there are two other empty seats midway. Marino finds a chair against the wall and sets it next to hers, so he is neither at the foot of the table nor against the wall but somewhere in between, a big grumpy lump in black cargo pants and an LAPD baseball cap.
         He leans close to her and whispers, "Staff hates his guts."
         She doesn't respond and concludes that his source is Julie the clerk. Then he jots something on a notepad and shoves it toward her. "FBI involved," she reads.
         Marino must have made phone calls while Scarpetta was with Dr. Marcus in the library. She is baffled. Gilly Paulsson's death is not federal jurisdiction. At the moment it's not even a crime, because there is no cause or manner of death, only suspicion and sticky politics. She subtly pushes the notepad back in Marino's direction and senses Dr. Marcus is watching them. For an instant, she is in grammar school, passing notes and about to be scorched by one of the nuns. Marino has the nerve to slip out a cigarette and begin tapping it on top of his notepad.
         "This is a nonsmoking building, I'm afraid," Dr. Marcus's authoritative voice punctures the silence.
         "And it oughta be," Marino says. "Secondary smoke will kill ya." He taps the filtered end of a Marlboro on top of the notepad that bears his secret message about the FBI. "I'm happy to see the Guts Man is still around," he adds, referring to the male anatomical model on a stand behind Dr. Marcus, who sits at the head of the table. "Now that's a thousand-yard stare if I ever saw one," Marino says of the Guts Man, whose removable plastic organs are present and primly in place, and Scarpetta wonders if he has been used for teaching or explaining injuries to families and attorneys since she was here. Probably not, she decides. Otherwise Guts Man would be missing organs.
         She does not know anyone on Dr. Marcus's staff except Assistant Chief Jack Fielding, who so far has avoided eye contact with her and has developed a skin disorder since she saw him last. Five years have passed, she thinks, and she can scarcely believe what has become of her vain bodybuilding former forensic pathology partner. Fielding was