Postmortem (35 page)

Wesley considered. "One thing's damn certain, it will further unhinge him. Should make him paranoid as hell."

"Unless he really doesn't have a weird case of B. O.," Abby said.

"How is he going to know he doesn't?" I asked.

Both of them looked surprised.

"Ever heard the expression, 'A fox never smells its own'?" I added.

"You mean he could stink and not know it?" she asked.

"Let him wonder that," I replied.

She nodded, bending over her notepad again.

Wesley settled back in his chair. "What else do you know about this defect, Kay? Should we be checking out the local pharmacies, see if someone buys a lot of oddball vitamins or prescription drugs?"

"You could check to see if someone regularly comes in to buy large doses of B1," I said. "There's also MSUD powder, a dietary supplement available. I think it's over-the-counter, a protein supplement. He may be controlling the disease through diet, through a limiting of normal high-protein foods. But I think he's too careful to be leaving those kinds of tracks, and in truth, I don't think his disease has been acute enough for him to be on a very restricted diet. I suspect in order for him to function as well as he does he leads a fairly normal life. His only problem is he has a strange-smelling body odor that gets more noticeable when he's under stress."

"Emotional stress?"

"Physical stress," I replied. "MSUD tends to flare up under physical stress, such as when the person is suffering from a respiratory infection, the flu. It's physiological. He's probably not getting enough sleep. It takes a lot of physical energy to stalk victims, break into houses, do what he does. Emotional stress and physical stress are connected-one adds to the other. The more emotionally stressed he becomes, the more physically stressed he becomes, and vice versa."

"Then what?" I looked impassively at him.

"Then what happens," he repeated, "if the disease flares up?"

"Depends on whether it becomes acute."

"Let's say it does."

"He's got a real problem."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, the amino acids build up in his system. He's going to get lethargic, irritable, ataxic. Symptoms similar to severe hyperglycemia. It may be necessary for him to be hospitalized."

"English," Wesley said. "What the hell's ataxic mean?"

"Unsteady. He's going to walk around like he's drunk. He's not going to have the wherewithal to scale fences and climb through windows. If it gets acute, if his stress level continues to climb, and if he goes untreated, it could get out of control."

"Out of control?" he persisted. "We stress him - that's our purpose, right? His disease gets out of control?"

"Possibly."

"Okay."

He hesitated. "What next?"

"Severe hyperglycemia, and his anxiety increases. If it isn't controlled, he's going to get confused, overwrought. His judgment may be impaired. He'll suffer mood changes."

I stopped right there.

But Wesley wasn't going to let me. He was leaning forward in his chair, staring at me.

"You didn't just think of this maple syrup urine disease business, did you?" he pushed.

"It's been in my differential."

"And you didn't say anything."

"I wasn't at all sure," I replied. "I saw no reason to suggest it until now."

"Right. Okay. You say you want to rattle his cage, stress him right out of his mind. Let's do it. What's the last stage? I mean, what if his disease gets really bad?"

"He may become unconscious, have convulsions. If this is prolonged, it may lead to a severe organic deficit."

He stared incredulously at me as his eyes filled with comprehension. "Jesus. You're trying to kill the son of a bitch."

Abby's pen stopped. Startled, she looked up at me.

I replied, "This is all theoretical. If he's got the disease, it's mild. He's lived with it all his life. It's highly unlikely MSUD's going to kill him."

Wesley continued to stare. He didn't believe me.

Chapter
14

I couldn't sleep all night. My mind wouldn't shut down and I tossed miserably between unsettling realities and savage dreams. I shot somebody and Bill was the medical examiner called to the scene. When he arrived with his black bag, he was accompanied by a beautiful woman I did not know . . .

My eyes flew open in the dark, my heart squeezed as if by a cold hand. I got out of bed long before my alarm went off and drove to work in a fog of depression.

I don't know when in my life I'd ever felt so lonely and withdrawn. I scarcely spoke to anyone at the office, and my staff began to cast nervous, strange glances my way.

Several times I came close to calling Bill, my resolve trembling like a tree about to fall. It finally fell shortly before noon. His secretary brightly told me "Mr. Boltz" was on vacation and wouldn't be back until the first of July.

I left no message. The vacation wasn't planned, I knew. I also knew why he didn't say a word about it to me. In the past he would have told me. The past was past. There would be no resolution or lame apologies or outright lies. He'd cut me off forever because he couldn't face his own sins.

After lunch I went upstairs to serology and was surprised to find Betty and Wingo with their backs to the door, their heads together as they looked at something white inside a small plastic bag.

I said, "Hello," and came inside.

Wingo nervously tucked the bag in a pocket of Betty's lab coat, as if slipping her money.

"You finished downstairs?" I pretended I was too preoccupied to have noticed this peculiar transaction.

"Uh, yeah. Sure am, Dr. Scarpetta," he quickly replied, on .his way out. "McFee, the guy shot last night released him a little while ago. And the burn victims coming in from Albemarle won't be in till four or so."

"Fine. We'll hold them until the morning."

"You got it," I heard him say from the hallway.

Spread out on the wide table in the center of the room was the reason for my visit. The blue jumpsuit. It looked flat and mundane, neatly smoothed out and zipped up to the collar. It could have belonged to anybody. There were numerous pockets, and I think I must have checked each one half a dozen times hoping to find anything that might hint at who he was, but they were empty. There were large holes cut in the legs and sleeves where Betty had removed swatches of bloodstained fabric.

"Any luck grouping the blood?" I asked, trying not to stare at the plastic bag peeking out of the top of her pocket.

"I've got some of it worked out." She motioned me to follow her to her office.

On her desk was a legal pad scribbled with notes and numbers that would look like hieroglyphics to the uninitiated.

"Henna Yarborough's blood type is B," she began. "We're lucky on that count because it's not all that common. In Virginia, about twelve percent of the population's type B. Her PGM's one plus, one-minus. Her PEP is A-one, EAP is CB, ADA-one and AK-one: The subsystems, unfortunately, are very common, up there in the eighty-nine percent and above of Virginia's population. "

"How common is the actual configuration?"

The plastic peeking out of the top of her pocket was beginning to unsettle me.

She started stabbing out digits on a calculator, multiplying the percentages and dividing by the number of subsystems she had. "About seventeen percent. Seventeen out of a hundred people could have that configuration."

"Not exactly rare," I muttered.

"Not unless sparrows are rare."

"What about the bloodstains on the jumpsuit?"

"We were lucky. The jumpsuit must have already air-dried by the time the street person found it. It's in amazingly good shape. I got all the subsystems except an EAR It's consistent with Henna Yarborough's blood. DNA should be able to tell us with certainty, but we're talking about a month to six weeks."

I commented abstractedly, "We ought to buy stock in the lab."

Her eyes lingered on me and grew soft. "You look absolutely ragged, Kay."

"That obvious, is it?"

"Obvious to me."

I didn't say anything.

"Don't let all this get to you. After thirty years of this misery, I've learned the hard way . . ."

"What's Wingo up to?" I foolishly blurted out.

Surprised, she faltered. "Wingo? Well . . ."

I was staring at her pocket.

She laughed uneasily, patted it. "Oh, this. Just a little private work he's asked me to do."

That was as much as she intended to say. Maybe Wingo had other real worries in his life. Maybe he was having an HIV test done on the sly. Good God, don't let him have AIDS.

Gathering my fragmented thoughts, I asked, "What about the fibers? Anything?"

Betty had compared fibers from the jumpsuit to fibers left at Lori Petersen's scene and to a few fibers found on Henna Yarborough's body.

"The fibers found on the Petersen windowsill could have come from the jumpsuit," she told me, "or they could have come from any number of dark blue cotton-polyester blend twills."

In court, I dismally thought, the comparison's not going to mean a thing because the twill is about as generic as dimestore typing paper - you start looking for it and you're going to find it all over the place. It could have come from someone's work pants. It could, for that matter, have come from a paramedic's or cop's uniform.

There was another disappointment. Betty was sure the fibers I found on Henna Yarborough's body were not from the jumpsuit.

"They're cotton," she was saying. "They may have come from something she was wearing at some point earlier in the day, or even a bath towel. Who knows? People carry all sorts of fibers on their person. But I'm not surprised the jumpsuit didn't leave fibers."

"Because twill fabrics, such as the fabric of the jumpsuit, are very smooth. They rarely leave fibers unless the fabric comes in contact with something abrasive."

"Such as a brick window ledge or a rough wooden sill, as in Lori's case."

"Possibly, and the dark fibers we found in her case may have come from a jumpsuit. Maybe even this one. But I don't think we're ever going to know."

I went back downstairs to my office and sat at my desk for a while, thinking. Unlocking the drawer, I pulled out the five murdered women's cases.

I began looking for anything I might have missed. Once again, I was groping for a connection.

What did these five women have in common? Why did the killer pick them? How did he come in contact with them? There had to be a link. In my soul, I didn't believe it was a random selection, that he just cruised around looking for a likely candidate. I believed he selected them for a reason. He had some sort of contact with them first, and perhaps followed them home.

Geographics, jobs, physical appearances. There was no common denominator. I tried the reverse, the least common denominator, end I continued to go back to Cecile Tyler's record.

She was black. The four other victims were white. I was bothered by this in the beginning, and I was still bothered by it now. Did the killer make a mistake? Perhaps he didn't realize she was black. Was he really after somebody else? Her friend Bobbi, for example? I flipped pages, scanning the autopsy report I'd dictated. I perused evidence receipts, call sheets and an old hospital chart from St. Luke's, where she'd been treated five years earlier for an ectopic pregnancy. When I got to the police report, I looked at the name of the only relative listed, a sister in Madras, Oregon. From her Marino got information about Cecile's background, about her failed marriage to the dentist now living in Tidewater.

X rays sounded like saw blades bending as I pulled them out of manila envelopes and held them up, one by one, to the light of my desk lamp. Cecile had no skeletal injuries other than a healed impaction fracture of her left elbow. The age of the injury was impossible to tell but I knew it wasn't fresh. It could go back too many years to matter.

Again, I contemplated the VMC connection. Both Lori Petersen and Brenda Steppe had recently been in the hospital's ER. Lori was there because her rotation was trauma surgery. Brenda was treated there after her automobile accident. Perhaps it was too farfetched to think Cecile might have been treated there as well for her fractured elbow. At this point, I was willing to explore anything.

I dialed Cecile's sister's number listed on Marino's report.

After five rings the receiver was picked up.

"Hello?"

It was a poor connection and clearly I'd made a mistake.

"I'm sorry, I must have the wrong number," I quickly said.

"Pardon?"

I repeated myself, louder.

"What number were you dialing?"

The voice was cultured and Virginian and seemed that of a female in her twenties.

I recited the number.

"That's this number. With whom did you wish to speak?"

"Fran O'Connor," I read from the report.