The Body Farm

by Patricia Cornwell

Little Emily Steiner is dead. She left a North Carolina church meeting late one October afternoon and strolled along a lakeside path toward her house two miles away. Who met her on the path? Who followed her home, kidnapped her from her bedroom, and left her body by the lake days later? It's a puzzling and terrifying crime, reminiscent of the work of serial killer Temple Gault, who has long eluded Dr. Kay Scarpetta and the FBI's Investigative Support Unit in Quantico, Virginia, where Scarpetta consults as a forensic pathologist. At the request of the North Carolina authorities, Scarpetta and her colleagues, Benton Wesley and Pete Marino, fly to the mountains near Asheville to assist. They find a mother in mourning and an investigation in disarray. It's particularly frustrating to work a homicide after the fact. An inexperienced pathologist missed or misinterpreted some of the evidence, leaving Scarpetta with inconclusive medical and laboratory reports, and photographs that only raise…