Postmortem (42 page)

All eyes fell to the cigarette butt inside the plastic bag.

Evidence tampering, fraud, not even the governor could take such liberties. A felony is a felony. I doubted it could be proved.

I got up and hung my lab coat on the back of the door. Slipping on my suit jacket, I collected a fat folder off a chair. I was due in court in twenty minutes to testify in yet one more homicide case.

Wingo and Marino walked me out to the elevator. I left them and stepped inside.

Through the closing doors I blew them each a kiss.

Three days later, Lucy and I sat in the back of a Ford Tempo heading to the airport. She was returning to Miami, and I was going with her for two very good reasons.

I intended to see about the situation with her mother and the illustrator she had married, and I desperately needed a vacation.

I planned to take Lucy to the beach, to the Keys, to the Everglades, to the Monkey Jungle and the Seaquarium. We'd watch the Seminoles wrestle alligators. We'd watch the sun set over Biscayne Bay and go see the pink flamingos in Hialeah. We'd rent the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, and then tour the famous ship at Bayside and imagine Marlon Brando on deck. We'd go shopping along Coconut Grove, and eat grouper and red snapper and Key lime pie until we were sick. We'd do everything I wished I could have done when I was her age.

We'd also talk about the shock of what she'd been through. Miraculously, she had slept through everything until Marino opened fire. But Lucy knew her aunt was almost murdered.

She knew the killer got in through my office window, which was closed but unlocked, because Lucy forgot to lock it after opening it several days earlier.

McCorkle cut the wires to the burglar alarm system outside the house. He came in through the first-floor window, walked within feet of Lucy's room and quietly went up the stairs. How did he know my bedroom was on the second floor? I don't think he could have unless he'd watched my house in the past.

Lucy and I had a lot of talking to do. I needed to talk to her as much as she needed for me to talk to her. I planned to hook her up with a good child psychologist. Maybe both of us should go.

Our chauffeur was Abby. She was kind enough to insist on driving us to the airport.

She pulled in front of the airline gate, turned around and smiled wistfully.

"I wish I were going with you."

"You're welcome to," I responded with feeling. "Really. We'd love it, Abby. I'll be down there for three weeks. You have my mother's phone number. If you can get away, hop a plane and we'll all go to the beach together."

An alert tone sounded on her scanner. She absently reached around to turn up the volume and adjust the squelch.

I knew I wouldn't hear from her. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

By the time our plane took off, she would be chasing ambulances and police cars again. It was her life. She needed reporting like other people need air.

I owed her a lot.

Because of what she set up behind the scenes we discovered it was Amburgey breaking into the OCME computer. The call was traced back to his home telephone. He was a computer hack and had a PC at home with a modem.

I think he broke in the first time simply because he was monitoring my work, as usual. I think he was rolling through the strangling cases when he noticed a detail in Brenda Steppe's record different from what Abby reported in the paper. He realized the leak couldn't be my office. But he so desperately wanted it to be, he altered the record to make it appear that way.

Then he deliberately keyed on the echo and tried to pull up Lori Petersen's case. He wanted us to find those commands on the screen the following Monday, just hours before he called me to his office in front of Tanner and Bill.

One sin led to another. His hatred blinded his reason, and when he saw the computer labels in Lori's case file he wasn't able to restrain himself. I'd thought a long time about the meeting in my conference room, when the men were going through the files. I'd assumed the PERK label was stolen when several cases slipped off Bill's lap and scattered over the floor. But as I went over it I recalled Bill and Tanner sorting out the paperwork by the proper case numbers. Lori's case was not among them because Amburgey was perusing it at the time. He took advantage of the confusion and quickly tore off the PERK label. Later, he left the computer room with Tanner but stayed behind alone in the morgue to use the men's room. He planted the slides.

That was his first mistake. His second mistake was underestimating Abby. She was livid when she realized someone was using her reporting to jeopardize my career. It didn't matter whose career, I suspected. Abby simply didn't cotton to being used. She was a crusader: truth, justice and the American way. She was all dressed up with rage with no place to go.

After her story hit the racks, she went to see Amburgey. She was already suspicious of him, she'd confessed to me, because he was the one who slyly gave her access to the information about the mislabeled PERK. He had the serology report on his desk, and notes to himself about the "fouled-up chain of evidence," and the "inconsistency of these results with those from earlier tests."

While Abby was seated on one side of his famous Chinese desk, he stepped out, leaving her alone for a minute-long enough for her to see what was on his blotter.

It was obvious, what he was doing. His feelings for me were no secret. Abby wasn't stupid. She became the aggressor. Last Friday morning she had gone back to see him and confronted him about the computer violation.

He was cagey, feigning horror that she might print such a thing, but he was salivating. He could taste my disgrace.

She set him up by admitting she didn't have enough to go on. "The computer violation's only happened once," she told him. "If it happens again, Dr. Amburgey, I'll have no choice but to print it and other allegations I've heard, because the public will have to know there's a problem at the OCME."

It had happened again.

The second computer violation had nothing to do with the planted news story, because it wasn't the killer who needed to be lured back to the OCME computer. It was the commissioner.

"By the way," Abby told me as we got the bags out of the trunk, "I don't think Amburgey's going to be a problem anymore."

"A leopard can't change its spots," I remarked, glancing at my watch.

She smiled at some secret she wasn't going to divulge. "Just don't be surprised when you come back to find he's no longer in Richmond."

I didn't ask.

She had plenty on Amburgey. Someone had to pay. She couldn't touch Bill.

He had called me yesterday to say he was glad I was all right, that he had heard about what had happened. He had made no references to his own crimes, and I had not so much as alluded to them when he calmly said he didn't think it was a good idea for us to see each other anymore.

"I've given it a lot of thought, and I just don't think it's going to work, Kay."

"You're right," I agreed, surprised by my own sense of relief. "It just isn't going to work, Bill."

I gave Abby a big hug.

Lucy frowned as she struggled with a very large pink suitcase.

"Shoot," she complained. "Mom's computer's got nothing but word processing on it. Shoot. No data base or nothing."

"We're going to the beach."

I shouldered two bags and followed her through the opening glass doors. "We're going to have a good time, Lucy. You can just lay off the computer for a while. It's not good for your eyes."

"There's a software store about a mile from my house . . ."

"The beach, Lucy. You need a vacation. Both of us need a vacation. Fresh air, sunshine, it will be good for you. You've been cooped up inside my office for two weeks."

We continued bickering at the ticket counter.

I shoved the bags on the scale, straightened Lucy's collar in back and asked her why she hadn't carried her jacket. "The air-conditioning in planes is always too high."

"Auntie Kay . . ."

"You're going to be cold."

"Auntie Kay!"

"We've got time for a sandwich."

"I'm not hungry!"

"You need to eat. From here we're stuck in Dulles for an hour and there's no lunch on the plane from there. You need something in your stomach."

"You sound just like Grans!"

Patricia Daniels Cornwell was an award winning crime reporter for The Charlotte Observer before she went to work five years ago as a computer analyst in the Chief Medical Examiner's office in Virginia. A graduate of Davidson College in North Carolina, she is the author also of A Time for Remembering, a biography of Ruth Bell Graham, wife of the evangelist, published in 1983. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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