Текст книги "Postmortem"

Автор книги: Патрисия Корнуэлл

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I washed my hands. "We just do things together, and we work together…"

"He's not married?"

She was watching him follow the walkway to the front door.

"His wife died last year."

"Oh."

A pause. "How?"

I kissed the top of her head and went out of the kitchen to answer the door. Now was not the time for me to answer such a question. I wasn't sure how Lucy would take it.

"You recovering?" Bill smiled and lightly kissed me.

I shut the door. "Barely."

"Wait till you've had a few glasses of this magic stuff," he said, holding up the bottles as if they were prize catches from a hunt. "From my private stock-you'll love it."

I touched his arm and he followed me to the kitchen.

Lucy was grating cheese again, up on her footstool, her back to us. She didn't even glance around when we walked in.

"Lucy?"

Still grating.

"Lucy?"

I led Bill over to her. "This is Mr. Boltz, and Bill, this is my niece."

Reluctantly, she stopped what she was doing and looked straight at me. "I scraped my knuckle, Auntie Kay. See?"

She held up her left hand. A knuckle was bleeding a little.

"Oh, dear. Here, I'll get a Band-Aid… "

"Some of it got in the cheese," she went on, as if suddenly on the verge of tears.

"Sounds to me like we need an ambulance," Bill announced, and he quite surprised Lucy by plucking her off the stool and locking his arms under her thighs. She was in a ridiculously funny sitting position. "Rerrrrrr-RERRRRRRRRRR…"

He was wailing like a siren and carrying her over to the sink. "Three one-six, bringing in an emergency – cute little girl with a bleeding knuckle."

He was talking to a dispatcher now. "Please have Dr. Scarpetta ready with a Band-Aid…"

Lucy was shrieking with laughter. Momentarily her knuckle was forgotten and she was staring with open adoration at Bill as he uncorked a bottle of wine.

"You have to let it breathe," he was gently explaining to her. "See, it's sharper now than it will be in an hour or so. Like everything else in life, it gets mellower with time."

"Can I have some?"

"Well, now," he replied with exaggerated gravity, "all right by me if your Auntie Kay says so. But we wouldn't want you getting silly on us."

I was quietly putting the pizza together, spreading the dough with sauce and overlaying this with the meats, vegetables and parmesan cheese. Topping it with the crumbled mozzarella, I slid it into the oven. Soon the rich garlicky aroma was filling the kitchen and I was busying myself with the salad and setting the table while Lucy and Bill chatted and laughed.

We didn't eat until late, and Lucy's glass of wine turned out to be a good thing. By the time I was clearing the table, her eyes were half shut and she was definitely ready for bed, despite her unwillingness to say good-night to Bill, who had completely won her heart.

"That was rather amazing," I said to him after I'd tucked her in and we were sitting at the kitchen table. "I don't know how you managed it. I was worried about her reaction…"

"You thought she'd view me as competition." He smiled a little.

"Let's just put it this way. Her mother's in and out of relationships with just about anything on two legs."

"Meaning she doesn't have much time for her daughter."

He refilled our glasses.

"To put it mildly."

"That's too damn bad. She's something, smart as hell. Must have inherited your brains."

He slowly sipped his wine, adding, "What does she do all day long while you're working?"

"Bertha's here. Mostly Lucy stays in my office hours on end banging on the computer."

"Playing games on it?"

"Hardly. I think she knows more about the damn thing than I do. Last time I checked, she was programming in Basic and reorganizing my data base."

He began studying his wineglass. Then he asked, "Can you use your computer to dial up the one downtown?"

"Don't even suggest it!"

"Well."

He looked at me. "You'd be better off. Maybe I was hoping."

"Lucy wouldn't do such a thing," I said with feeling. "And I'm not sure how I would be better off were it true."

"Better your ten-year-old niece than a reporter. It would get Amburgey off your back."

"Nothing would get him off my back," I snapped.

"That's right," he said dryly. "His reason for getting up in morning is to jerk you around."

"I'm frankly beginning to wonder that."

Amburgey was appointed in the midst of the city's black community publicly protesting that the police were indifferent to homicides unless the victims were white. Then a black city councilman was shot in his car, and Amburgey and the mayor considered it good public relations, I supposed, to appear unannounced at the morgue the next morning.

Maybe it wouldn't have turned out so badly had Amburgey thought to ask questions while he watched me perform the autopsy, had he kept his mouth shut afterward. But the physician combined with the politician, compelling him to confidently inform the press waiting outside my building that the "spread of pellet wounds" over the dead councilman's upper chest "indicates a shotgun blast at close range."

As diplomatically as possible, I explained when the reporters questioned me later that the "spread" of holes over the chest was actually marks of therapy made when ER attendants inserted large-gauge needles into the subclavian arteries to transfuse blood. The councilman's lethal injury was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.

The reporters had a field day with Amburgey's blunder.

"The problem is he's a physician by training," I was saying to Bill. "He knows just enough to think he's an expert in forensic medicine, to think he can run my office better than I can, and a lot of his opinions are flat-out full of shit."

"Which you make the mistake of pointing out to him."

"What am I supposed to do? Agree and look as incompetent as he is?"

"So it's a simple case of professional jealousy," he said with a shrug. "It happens."

"I don't know what it is. How the hell do you explain these things? Half of what people do and feel doesn't make a damn bit of sense. For all I know, I could remind him of his mother."

My anger was mounting with fresh intensity, and I realized by the expression on his face that I was glaring at him.

"Hey," he objected, raising his hand, "don't be pissed at me. I didn't do anything."

"You were there this afternoon, weren't you?"

"What do you expect? I'm supposed to tell Amburgey and Tanner I can't be in on the meeting because you and I have been seeing each other?"

"Of course you couldn't tell them that," I said in a miserable way. "But maybe I wanted you to. Maybe I wanted you to punch Amburgey's lights out or something."

"Not a bad idea. But I don't think it would help me much come reelection time. Besides, you'd probably let my ass rot in jail. Wouldn't even post my bond."

"Depends on how much it was."

"Shit."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"About the meeting. You must have known about it since yesterday."

Maybe you'd known about it longer, I started to say, and that's why you didn't so much as call me over the weekend! Restraining myself, I stared tensely at him.

He was studying his wineglass again. After a pause, he replied, "I didn't see any point in telling you. All it would have done was worry you, and it was my impression the meeting was pro forma-"

"Pro forma?"

I looked incredulously at him. "Amburgey's gagged me and spent half the afternoon tearing apart my office and that's pro forma?"

"I feel sure some of what he did was sparked by your disclosure of the computer violation; Kay. And I didn't know about that yesterday. Hell, you didn't even know about that yesterday."

"I see," I said coldly. "No one knew about it until I told them."

Silence.

"What are you implying?"

"It just seemed an incredible coincidence we discovered the violation just hours before he called me to his office. I had the peculiar thought that maybe he knew… "

"Maybe he did."

"That certainly reassures me."

"It's moot anyway," he easily went on. "So what if Amburgey knew about the violation by the time you came to his office this afternoon? Maybe somebody talked-your computer analyst, for example. And the rumor drifted up to the twenty-fourth floor."

He shrugged. "It just gave him one more worry, right? You didn't trip yourself up, if that's the case, because you were smart enough to tell the truth."

"I always tell the truth."

"Not always," he remarked slyly. "You routinely lie about usby omission-"

"So maybe he knew," I cut him off. "I just want to hear you didn't."

"I didn't."

He looked intensely at me. "I swear. If I'd heard anything about it, I would have forewarned you, Kay. I would have run to the nearest phone booth-"

"And charged out as Superman."

"Hell," he muttered, "now you're making fun of me."

He was in his boyish wounded manifestation. Bill had a lot of roles and he played all of them extraordinarily well. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe he was so smitten with me. Was that a role as well? I think he had a starring role in the fantasies of half the city's women, and his campaign manager was shrewd enough to take advantage of it. Photographs of Bill had been plastered over restaurant and storefronts, and nailed to telephone poles on virtually every city block. Who could resist that face? He was stunningly handsome, his hair streaked straw-blond, his complexion perpetually sunburned from the many hours he spent each week at his tennis club. It was hard not to stare openly at him.

"I'm not making fun of you," I said wearily. "Really, Bill. And let's not fight."

"Fine by me."

"I'm just sick. I don't have any idea what to do."

Apparently he'd already thought about this, and he said, "It would be helpful if you could figure out who's been getting into your data." A pause. "Or better, if you could prove it."

"Prove it?" I looked warily at him. "Are you suggesting you have a suspect?"

"Not based on any fact."

"Who?"

I lit a cigarette.

His attention drifted across the kitchen. "Abby Turnbull is top on my list."

"I thought you were going to tell me something I couldn't have figured out on my own."

"I'm dead serious, Kay."

"So she's an ambitious reporter," I said irritably. "Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of hearing about her. She's not as powerful as everyone makes her out to be."

Bill set his wineglass on the table with a sharp click. "The hell she isn't," he retorted, staring at me. "The woman's a goddam snake. I know she's an ambitious reporter and all that shit. But she's worse than anybody imagines. She's vicious and manipu– lative and extremely dangerous. The bitch would stoop to anything."

His vehemence startled me into silence. It was uncharacteristic of him to use such vitriolic terms in describing anyone. Especially someone I assumed he scarcely knew.

"Remember that story. she did on me a month or so back?"

Not long ago the Times finally got around to the obligatory profile of the city's new Commonwealth's attorney. The story was a rather lengthy spread that ran in the Sunday paper, and I didn't remember in detail what Abby Turnbull had written except that the piece struck me as unusually colorless considering its author.

I said as much to him, "As best I recall, the story was toothless. It did no harm; neither did it do any good."

"There's a reason for that," he fired back at me. "I suspect it wasn't something she wanted to write, particularly."

He wasn't hinting that the assignment had been a boring one. Something else was coming and my nerves were coiling tightly again.

"My session with her was pretty damn terrible. She spent an entire day with me, riding around in my car, going from meeting to meeting, hell, even to my dry cleaner's. You know how these reporters are. They'll follow you into the men's room if you let them. Well, let's just say that as the evening progressed, things took a rather unfortunate and definitely unexpected turn."

He hesitated to see if I got his implication.

I got it all too well.

Glancing at me, his face hard, he said, "It completely broadsided me. We got out of the last meeting around eight. She insisted we go to dinner. You know, it was on the paper and she had a few questions to finish up. We'd no sooner pulled out of the restaurant's parking lot when she said she wasn't feeling well. Too much wine or something. She wanted me to drop her off at her house instead of taking her back to the paper, where her car was parked. So I did. Took her home. And when I pulled in front of her house, she was all over me. It was awful."

"And?" I asked as if I didn't care.

"And I didn't handle it worth a damn. I think I humiliated her without intending to. She's been out to jerk the hell out of me ever since."

"What? She's calling you, sending you threatening letters?"

I wasn't exactly serious. Nor was I prepared for what he said next.

"This shit she's been writing. The fact maybe it's coming from your computer. As crazy as it may sound, I think her motivation is mostly personal-"

"The leaks? Are you suggesting she's breaking into my computer and writing lurid details about these cases to jerk you around?"

"If these cases are compromised in court, who the hell gets hurt?"

I didn't respond. I was staring in disbelief at him.

"I do. I'll be the one prosecuting the cases. Cases as sensational and heinous as these get screwed up because of all this shit in the papers, and no one's going to be sending me flowers or thankyou notes. She sure as hell knows that, Kay. She's sticking it to me, that's what she's doing."

"Bill," I said, lowering my voice, "it's her job to be an aggressive reporter, to print everything she can get her hands on. More important, the cases would get screwed up in court only if the sole evidence was a confession. Then the defense gets to make him change his mind. He takes it all back. The party line is the guy's psychotic and knows the details of the murders because he read about them in the paper. He imagined he committed the crimes. That sort of rubbish. The monster who's killing these women isn't about to turn himself in or confess to anything."

He drained his glass and refilled it. "Maybe the cops develop him as a suspect and get him to talk. Maybe that's the way it happens. And it might be the only thing linking him to the crimes. There isn't a shred of physical evidence that's amounted to anything-"

"No shred of physical evidence?" I interrupted. Surely I hadn't heard him right. Was the wine dulling his senses? "He's leaving a load of seminal fluid. He gets caught and DNA will nail him to-"

"Oh, yeah. Sure it will. DNA printing's only gone to trial a couple of times in Virginia. There are very few precedents, very few convictions nationwide – every damn one of them still being appealed. Try explaining to a Richmond jury the guy's guilty because of DNA. I'll be lucky if I can find a juror who can spell DNA. Anybody's got an IQ over forty and the defense will find a reason to exclude him, that's what I put up with week after week… "

"Bill…"

"Hell." He began to pace the kitchen floor. "It's hard enough to get a conviction if fifty people swear they saw the guy pull the trigger. The defense will drag in a herd of expert witnesses to muddy the waters and hopelessly confuse everything. You of all people know how complicated this DNA testing is."

"Bill, I've explained just as difficult things to juries in the past."

He started to say something but caught himself. Staring across the kitchen again, he took another swallow of wine.

The silence was drawn out and heavy. If the outcome of the trials depended solely on the DNA results, this placed me in the position of being a key witness for the prosecution. I'd been in such a position many times in the past and I couldn't recall it ever unduly worrying Bill.

Something was different this time.

"What is it?"

I forced myself to ask. "Are you unsettled because of our relationship? You're thinking someone's going to figure it out and accuse us of being professionally in bed together-accuse me of rigging the results to suit the prosecution?"

He glanced at me, his face flushed. "I'm not thinking that at all. It's a fact we've been together, but big deal? So we've gone out to dinner and taken in a few plays…"

He didn't have to complete the sentence. Nobody knew about us. Usually he came to my house or we went to some distant place, such as Williamsburg or D.C., where it wasn't likely we would run into anybody who would recognize us. I'd always been more worried about the public seeing us together than he seemed to be.

Or was he alluding to something else, something far more biting? We were not lovers, not completely, and this remained a subtle but uncomfortable tension between us.

I think we'd both been aware of the strong attraction, but we'd completely avoided doing anything about it until several weeks ago. After a trial that didn't end until early evening, he casually offered to buy me a drink. We walked to a restaurant near the courthouse and two Scotches later we were heading to my house. It was that sudden. It was adolescent in its intensity, our lust as tangible as heat. The forbiddenness of it made it all the more frantic, and then quite suddenly while we were in the dark on my living room couch, I panicked.

His hunger was too much. It exploded from him, invaded instead of caressed as he pushed me down hard into the couch. It was at that moment I had a vivid image of his wife slumped against pale blue satin pillows in bed like some lovely life-size doll, the front of her white negligee stained dark red, the ninemillimeter automatic just inches from her limp right hand.

I'd gone to the suicide scene knowing only that the wife of the man running for Commonwealth's attorney apparently had committed suicide. I did not know Bill then. I examined his wife. I literally held her heart in my hands. Those images, all of them, flashed graphically behind my eyes in my dark living room so many months later.

Physically, I withdrew from him. I'd never told him the real reason why, although in the days that followed he continued to pursue me even more vigorously. Our mutual attraction remained but a wall had gone up. I could not seem to tear it down or climb over it much as I wanted to.

I was scarcely hearing a word he was saying.

"… and I don't see how you could rig DNA results unless you're involved in a conspiracy that includes the private lab conducting the tests and half the forensic bureau, too-"

"What?" I asked, startled. "Rig DNA results?"

"You haven't been listening," he blurted out impatiently.

"Well, I missed something, that's certain."

"I'm saying no one could accuse you of rigging anything that's my point. So our relationship has nothing to do with what I'm thinking."

"Okay."

"It's just…" He faltered.

"Just what?" I asked. Then, as he drained his glass again, I added, "Bill, you have to drive."

He waved it off.

"Then what is it?" I demanded again. "What?"

He pressed his lips together and wouldn't look at me. Slowly, he drew it out. "It's just I'm not sure where you'll be in the eyes of the jurors by then."

I couldn't have been more stunned had he struck me with his open palm.

"My God… You do know something. What? What! What is that son of a bitch plotting? He's going to fire me because of this goddam computer violation, is this what he's said to you?"

"Amburgey? He's not plotting anything. Hell, he doesn't have to. If your office gets blamed for the leaks, and if the public eventually believes the inflammatory news stories are why the killer's striking with increased frequency, then your head will be on the block. People need someone to blame. I can't afford my star witness to have a credibility or popularity problem."

"Is this what you and Tanner were discussing so intensely after lunch?"

I was just a blink away from tears. "I saw you on the sidewalk, coming out of The Peking…"

A long silence. He had seen me, too, then but had pretended otherwise. Why? Because he and Tanner probably were talking about me! "We were discussing the cases," he replied evasively. "Discussing a lot of things."

I was so enraged, so stung, I didn't trust myself to say a word.

"Listen," he said wearily as he loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. "This didn't go right. I didn't mean for it to come out like this. I swear to God. Now you're all upset, and I'm all upset. I'm sorry."

My silence was stony.

He took a deep breath. "It's just we have real things to worry about and we should be working on them together. I'm painting worst-case scenarios so we can be prepared, okay?"

"What exactly do you expect me to do?" I measured each word to keep my voice steady.

"Think five times about everything. Like tennis. When you're down or psyched you've got to play it careful. Concentrate on every shot, don't take your eye off the ball for a second."

His tennis analogies got on my nerves sometimes. Right now was a good example. "I always think about what I'm doing," I said testily. "You don't need to tell me how to do my job. I'm not known for missing shots."

"It's especially important now. Abby Turnbull's poison. I think she's setting us up. Both of us. Behind the scenes. Using you or your office computer to get to me. Not giving a damn if she maims justice in the process. The cases get blown out of the water and you and I are both blown out of office. It's that simple."

Maybe he was right, but I was having a hard time accepting that Abby Turnbull could be so evil. Surely if she had even a drop of human blood in her veins she would want the killer punished. She wouldn't use four brutally murdered young women as pawns in her vindictive machinations if she were guilty of vindictive machinations, and I wasn't convinced she was.

I was about to tell him he was exaggerating, his bad encounter with her had momentarily distorted his reason. But something stopped me.

I didn't want to talk about this anymore.

I was afraid to.

It was nagging at me. He'd waited until now to say anything. Why? His encounter with her was weeks ago. If she were setting us up, if she were so dangerous to both of us, then why hadn't he told me this before now?

"I think what you need is a good night's sleep," I said quietly.

"I think we'd be wise to strike this conversation, at least certain portions of it, go on as if it never happened."

He pushed back from the table. "You're right. I've had it. So have you. Christ, I didn't mean for it to go like this," he said again. "I came over here to cheer you up. I feel terrible… " His apologies continued as we went down the hall. Before I could open the door, he was kissing me and I could taste the wine on his breath and feel his heat. My physical response was always immediate, a frisson of spine-tingling desire and fear running through me like a current. I involuntarily pulled away from him and muttered, "Good night."

He was a shadow in the darkness heading to his car, his profile briefly illuminated by the interior light as he opened the door and climbed in. I was still standing numbly on the porch long after red taillights had burned along the vacant street and disappeared behind trees.

Chapter 8

The inside of Marino's silver Plymouth Reliant was as cluttered and slovenly as I would have expected it to be – had I ever given the matter a moment's thought.

On the floor in back were a chicken-dinner box, crumpled napkins and Burger King bags, and several coffee-stained Styrofoam cups. The ashtray was overflowing, and dangling from the rearview mirror was an evergreen-scented air freshener shaped like a pine tree and about as effective as a shot of Glade aimed inside a Dumpster. Dust and lint and crumbs were everywhere, and the windshield was practically opaque with smoker's soot.

"You ever give this thing a bath?" I was fastening my seatbelt.

"Not anymore I don't. Sure, it's assigned to me, but it ain't mine. They don't let me take it home at night or over the weekend or nothing. So I wax it to a spit shine and use up half a bottle of Armor All on the inside and what happens? Some drone's going to be in it while I'm off duty. I get it back looking just like this. Never fails. After a while, I started saving everybody the trouble. Started trashing it myself."

Police traffic quietly crackled as the scanner light blinked from channel to channel. He pulled out of the parking lot behind my building. I hadn't heard a word from him since he abruptly left the conference room on Monday. It was late Wednesday afternoon now, and he had mystified me moments ago by suddenly, appearing in my doorway with the announcement that he wanted to take me on a "little tour."

The "tour," it turned out, entailed a retrospective visit to the crime scenes. The purpose, as best I could ascertain, was for me to fix a map of them in my head. I couldn't argue. The idea was a good one. But it was the last thing I was expecting from him. Since when did he include me in anything unless he absolutely had no choice? "Got a few things you need to know," he said, as he adjusted the side mirror.

"I see. I suppose the implication is had I not agreed to your 'little tour' then you might never have gotten around to telling me these few things I need to know?"

"Whatever."

I waited patiently as he returned the lighter to its socket. He took his time settling more comfortably behind the wheel.

"Might interest you to know," he began, "we gave Petersen a polygraph yesterday and the sucker passed it. Pretty telling, but it don't completely let him off the hook. It's possible to pass it if you're one of these psychopaths who can lie as easy as other people breathe. He's an actor. He probably could say he's Christ crucified and his hands wouldn't sweat, his pulse would be steadier than yours and mine when we're in church."

"That would be highly unusual," I said. "It's pretty hard, close to impossible, to beat a polygraph. I don't care who you are."

"It's happened before. That's one reason it's not admissible in court."

"No, I won't go so far as to say it's infallible."

"Point is," he went on, "we don't have probable cause to pop him or even tell him not to skip town. So I've got him under surveillance. What we're really looking for is his activities after hours. Like, what he does at night. Like, maybe does he get in his car and drive through various neighborhoods, cruising, getting the lay of the land."

"He hasn't gone back to Charlottesville?"

Marino flicked an ash out the window. "He's hanging around for a while, says he's too upset to go back. He's moved, staying in an apartment on Freemont Avenue, says he can't set foot in the house after what happened. I think he's gonna sell the joint. Not that he'll need the money."

He glanced over at me and I was briefly faced with a distorted image of myself in his mirrored shades. "Turns out the wife had a hefty life insurance policy. Petersen's going to be about two hundred grand richer. Guess he'll be able to write his plays and not have to worry about making a living."

I didn't say anything.

"And I guess we just let it slide he was brought up on rape charges the summer after he graduated from high school."

"You've looked into that?"

I knew he had or he wouldn't have mentioned it.

"Turns out he was doing summer theater in New Orleans and made the mistake of taking some groupie too seriously. I've talked with the cop who investigated the case. According to him, Petersen's the lead actor in some play, and this babe in the audience gets the hots for him, comes to see him night after night, leaves him notes, the whole nine yards. Then she turns up backstage and they end up bar-hopping in the French Quarter. Next thing you know, she's calling the cops at four in the morning, all hysterical, claiming she's been raped. He's in hot water because her PERK's positive and the fluids pop up nonsecreter, which is what he is."

"Did the case go to court?"

"Damn grand jury threw it out. Petersen admitted having sex with her inside her apartment. Said it was consensual, she came on to him. The girl was pretty bruised up, even had a few marks on her neck. But no one could prove how fresh the bruises were and if Petersen caused 'em by working her over. See, the grand jury takes one look at a guy like him. They take into account he's in a play and this girl initiated the encounter. He still had her notes inside the dressing room, which clearly showed the girl had a thing for him. And he was real convincing when he testified she had bruises when he was with her, that she supposedly told him she'd been in a fight several days earlier with some guy she was in the process of breaking up with. Nobody's going to throw the book at Petersen. The girl had the morals of a guppy and was either a Froot Loop or else she made a stupid mistake, laid herself wide open, so to speak, for getting a number done on her."

"Those kinds of cases," I quietly commented, "are almost impossible to prove."

"Well, you just never know. It's also sort of coincidental," he added as a by-the-way for which I was completely unprepared, "that Benton called me up the other night to tell me the big mother computer in Quantico got a hit on the MO of whoever's whacking these women here in Richmond."

"Where?"

"Waltham, Massachusetts, as a matter of fact," he replied, glancing over at me. "Two years ago, right at the time Petersen was a senior at Harvard, which is about twenty miles east of Waltham. During the months of April and May, two women was raped and strangled inside their apartments. Both lived alone in first-floor apartments, was tied up with belts, electrical cords. The killer apparently got in through unsecured windows. Both times it occurred on the weekend. The crimes are a carbon copy of what's been happening here."

"Did the murders stop after Petersen graduated and moved here?"

"Not exactly," he replied. "There was one more later that summer which Petersen couldn't have committed because he was living here, his wife just starting at VMC. But there were a few differences in the third case. The victim was a teenager and lived about fifteen miles from where the other two homicides occurred.