The fingerprints say the murderer is the man who'sjust been executed ...At 11.05 one December evening in Richmond, Virginia, convictedmurderer Ronnie Joe Waddell is pronounced dead in the electric chair.At the morgue Dr Kay Scarpetta waits for Waddell's body. Preparing toperform a post-mortem before the subject is dead is a strange feeling,but Scarpetta has been here before. And Waddell's death is not theonly newsworthy event on this freezing night: the grotesquely woundedbody of a young boy is found propped against a rubbish skip. ToScarpetta the two cases seem unrelated, until she recalls that thebody of Waddell's victim had been arranged in a strikingly similarposition ...