Lanie's one of the most centered personalities Beckett's ever known. Given the fact that she finds herself surrounded by corpses and looks straight into the face of death, she's got to have a sense of humor to go along with it to balance herself out. Beckett's is there, perhaps, but a little dryer in nature.

"So that's how you can bring a group of women to tears at one of your readings. It's not just the words on the page, it's the way you read them: slow, deliberate, kind of like this verbal caress. Of course, you probably could've provoked them to a different kind of emotion if you hadn't been reading Derek Storm's death scene at the time, but details." Unconsciously, she finds herself arching back into the touch of his hand.