As the chief of the new Cambridge Forensic Center in Massachusetts, a joint venture of the state and federal governments and MIT, and Harvard, Scarpetta is confronted with a case that could shut down her new facility and ruin her personally and professionally. A young man drops dead, but when his body is examined the next morning, there are stunning indications that he may have been alive when he was zipped inside a pouch and locked inside the Center's cooler. When 3-D radiology scans reveal more shocking details about internal injuries—ones that suggest the possibility of a conspiracy to cause mass casualties—Scarpetta realizes that she is fighting a cunning, cruel, and invisible enemy. Now it is a race against time to discover who and why before more people die.