Postmortem (24 page)

Betty and I both glanced toward the door at the same time as Marino casually walked in.

"I just had a freaky little thought, Doc."

He paused, his face hard as his eyes wandered to the slides and filter paper on the countertop.

I stared numbly at him.

"Me, I'd take this PERK here over to Vander. Maybe you left it in the fridge. Then again, maybe you didn't."

A sense of alarm fluttered through my blood before the jolt of comprehension.

"What?" I asked, as if he were crazy. "Someone else put it there?"

He shrugged. "I'm just suggesting you consider every possibility."

"Who?"

"Got no idea."

"How? How could that be possible? Someone would have to have gotten inside the autopsy suite, had access to the refrigerator. And the file is labeled . . ."

The labels: it was coming to me. The computer-generated labels left over from Lori's autopsy. They were inside her case file. No one had been inside her file except me - and Amburgey, Tanner and Bill.

When the three men left my office early Monday evening, the front doors were chained. All of them went out through the morgue. Amburgey and Tanner had left first, and Bill a little later.

The autopsy suite was locked, but the walk-in refrigerator was not. We had to leave the refrigerator unlocked so funeral homes and rescue squads could deliver bodies after hours. The walk-in refrigerator had two doors, one opening onto the hallway, another leading into the autopsy suite. Had one of the men gone through the refrigerator and into the suite? On a shelf near the first table were stacks of evidence kits, including dozens of PERKS. Wingo always kept the shelves fully stocked.

I reached for the phone and instructed Rose to unlock my desk drawer and open Lori Petersen's case file.

"There should be some evidence labels inside," I told her.

While she checked, I tried to remember. There were six, maybe seven labels left over, not because I didn't collect a lot of samples but because I collected so many of them-almost twice as many as usual, resulting in my generating not one, but two runs of computerized labels. Left over should be labels for heart, lung, kidneys and other organs, and an extra one for a PERK.

"Dr. Scarpetta?"

Rose was back. "The labels are here."

"How many?"

"Let me see. Five."

"For what?"

She replied, "Heart, lung, spleen, bile and liver."

"And that's all."

"Yes. "

"You're sure there isn't one for a PERK?"

A pause. "I'm sure. Just these five."

Marino said, "You slapped the label on this PERK, and your prints should be on it, seems to me."

"Not if she was wearing gloves," said Betty, who was watching all this with dismay.

"I generally don't wear gloves when I'm labeling things," I muttered. "They're bloody. The gloves would be bloody."

Marino blandly went on, "Okay. So you wasn't wearing gloves and Dingo was-"

"Wingo," I irritably said. "His name's Wingo!"

"Whatever."

Marino turned to leave. "Point is, you touched the PERK with bare hands, meaning your prints should be on it."

He added from the hall, "But maybe nobody else's should be."

Chapter
10

Nobody else's were. The only identifiable prints on the cardboard file were mine.

There were a few smudges - and something else so completely unexpected that I had, for the moment, completely forgotten the unhappy reason for coming to see Vander at all.

He was bombarding the file with the laser and the cardboard was lit up like a night sky of pinpoint stars.

"This is just crazy," he marveled for the third time.

"The damn stuff must have come from my hands," I said incredulously. "Wingo was wearing gloves. So was Betty . . ."

Vander flipped on the overhead light and shook his head from side to side. "If you were male, I'd suggest the cops take you in for questioning."

"And I wouldn't blame you."

His face was intense: "Rethink what you've been doing this morning, Kay. We've got to make sure this residue's from you. If it is, we might have to reconsider our assumptions about the strangling cases, about the glitter we've been finding-"

"No," I interrupted. "It isn't possible I've been leaving the residue on the bodies, Neils. I wore gloves the entire time I worked with them. I took my gloves off when Wingo found the PERK. I was touching the file with my bare hands."

He persisted, "What about hair sprays, cosmetics? Anything you routinely use?"

"Not possible," I repeated. "This residue hasn't shown up when we've examined other bodies. It's shown up only in the strangling cases. "

"Good point."

We thought for a minute.

"Betty and Wingo were wearing gloves when they handled this file?"

He wanted to make sure.

"Yes, they were, which is why they left no prints."

"So it isn't likely the residue came from their hands?"

"Had to have come from mine. Unless someone else touched the file."

"Some other person who may have planted it in the refrigerator, you're still thinking."

Vander looked skeptical. "Yours were the only prints, Kay."

"But the smudges, Neils. Those could be from anyone."

Of course they could be. But I knew he didn't believe it.

He asked, "What exactly were you doing just before you came upstairs?"

"I was posting a hit-and-run."

"Then what?"

"Then Wingo came over with the slide folder and I took it straight to Betty."

He glanced unemphatically at my bloodstained scrubs and observed, "You were wearing gloves while doing the post."

"Of course, and I took them off when Wingo brought me the file, as I've already explained-"

"The gloves were lined with talc."

"I don't think that could be it."

"Probably not, but it's a place to start."

I went back down to the autopsy suite to fetch an identical pair of latex gloves. Several minutes later, Vander was tearing open the packet, turning the gloves inside out, and shooting them with the laser.

Not even a glimmer. The talc didn't react, not that we really, thought it would. In the past we'd tested various body powders , from the murdered women's scenes in hopes of identifying the glittery substance. The powders, which had a talc base, hadn't reacted either.

The lights went on again. I smoked and thought. I was trying to envision my every move from the time Wingo showed me the slide file to when I ended up in Vander's office. I was engrossed in coronary arteries when Wingo walked up with the PERK. I set down the scalpel, peeled off my gloves and opened the file to look at the slides. I walked over to the sink, hastily washed my hands and patted them dry with a paper towel. Next I went upstairs to see Betty. Did I touch anything inside her lab? I didn't recall if I had.

It was the only thing I could think of. "The soap I used downstairs when I washed up. Could that be it?"

"Unlikely," Vander said without pause. "Especially if you rinsed off. If your everyday soap reacted even after rinsing we'd be finding the glittery stuff all the time on bodies and clothes. I'm pretty certain this residue is coming from something granular, a powdery substance of some sort. The soap you used downstairs is a disinfectant, a liquid, isn't it?"

It was, but that wasn't what I'd used. I was in too big of a rush to go back to the locker room and wash with the pink disinfectant kept in bottles by the sinks. Instead, I went to the sink nearest me, the one in the autopsy suite where there was a metal dispenser filled with the same grainy, gray soap powder used throughout the rest of the building. It was cheap. It was what the state purchased by the truckload. I had no idea what was in it. It was almost odorless and didn't dissolve or lather. It was like washing up with wet sand.

There was a ladies' room down the hall. I left for a moment and returned with a handful of the grayish powder. Lights out and Vander switched on the laser again.

The soap went crazy, blazing neon white.

"I'll be damned . . ."

Vander was thrilled. I wasn't exactly feeling the same way. I desperately wanted to know the origin of the residue we'd been finding on the bodies. But I'd never, not in my wildest fantasies, hoped it would turn out to be something found in every bathroom inside my building.

I still wasn't convinced. Did the residue on this file come from my hands? What if it didn't? We experimented.

Firearms examiners routinely conduct a series of test fires to determine distance and trajectory. Vander and I were conducting a series of test washings to determine how thoroughly one had to rinse his hands in order for none of the residue to show up in the laser.

He vigorously scrubbed with the powder, rinsed well, and carefully dried his hands with paper towels. The laser picked up one or two sparkles, and that was it. I tried to reenact my handwashing, doing it exactly as I did it when I was downstairs. The result was a multitude of sparkles that were easily transferred to the countertop, the sleeve of Vander's lab coat, anything I touched. The more I touched, obviously, the fewer sparkles there were left on my hands.

I returned to the ladies' room and presently was back with a coffee cup full of the soap. We washed and washed, over and over again. Lights went on and off, the laser spitting, until the entire area of the sink looked like Richmond from the air after dark.

One interesting phenomenon became apparent. The more we washed and dried, the more the sparkles accumulated. They got under our nails, clung to our wrists and the cuffs of our sleeves. They ended up on our clothing, found their way to our hair, our faces, our necks-everywhere we touched. After about forty-five minutes of dozens of experimental washings, Vander and I looked perfectly normal in normal light. In the laser, we looked as if we'd been decorated with Christmas glitter.

"Shit," he exclaimed in the dark. It was an expletive I'd never heard him use. "Would you look at this stuff? The bastard must be a clean freak. To leave as much of the stuff as he does, he must be washing his hands twenty times a day."

"If this soap powder's the answer," I reminded him. "Of course, of course."

I prayed the scientists upstairs could make their magic work. But what couldn't be determined by them or anyone else, I thought, was the origin of the residue on the slide file - and how the file had gotten inside the refrigerator to begin with.

My anxious inner voice was nagging at me again.

You just can't accept you made a mistake, I admonished myself. You just can't handle the truth. You mislabeled this PERK, and the residue on it came from your own hands.

But what if? What if the scenario were a more pernicious one? I silently argued. What if someone maliciously planted the file inside the refrigerator, and what if the glittery residue was from this person's hands instead of mine? The thought was strange, the poison of an imagination gone berserk.

So far a similar residue had been found on the bodies of four murdered women.

I knew Wingo, Betty, Vander and I had touched the file. The only other people who might have touched it were Tanner, Amburgey or Bill.

His face drifted through my mind. Something unpleasant and chilling shifted inside me as Monday afternoon slowly replayed in my memory. Bill was so distant during the meeting with Amburgey and Tanner. He was unable to look at me then, or later when the three men were going through the cases inside my conference room.

I saw case files slipping off Bill's lap and falling to the floor in a commingled, god-awful mess. Tanner quickly offered to pick them up. His helpfulness was so automatic. But it was Bill who picked up the paperwork, paperwork that would have included leftover labels. Then he and Tanner sorted through everything. How easy it would have been to tear off a label and slip it into a pocket . . .

Later, Amburgey and Tanner left together, but Bill remained with me. We talked in Margaret's office for ten or fifteen minutes. He was affectionate and full of promises that a couple of drinks and an evening together would soothe my nerves.

He left long before I did, and when he went out of the building he was alone and unwatched . . .

I blanked the images out of my mind, refused to see them anymore. This was outrageous. I was losing control. Bill would never do such a thing. In the first place, there would be no point. I couldn't imagine how such an act of sabotage could possibly profit him. Mislabeled slides could only damage the very cases he eventually would be prosecuting in court. Not only would he be shooting himself in the foot, he'd be shooting himself in the head.

You want someone to blame because you can't face the fact that you probably screwed up! These strangling cases were the most difficult of my career, and I was gripped by the fear I was becoming too caught up in them. Maybe I was losing my rational, methodical way of doing things. Maybe I was making mistakes.