All That Remains

12

Abby Turnbull had been a crime reporter in Richmond when Elizabeth Mott and Jill Harrington were murdered. I was willing to bet that Abby not only remembered the cases, but probably knew more about them than Captain Montana did.

The next morning she called from a pay phone and left a number where she told Rose she would wait for fifteen minutes. Abby insisted that I call her back from a "safe place."

"Is everything all right?" Rose asked quietly as I peeled off my surgical gloves.

"God only knows," I said, untying my gown.

The nearest "safe place" I could think of was a pay phone outside the cafeteria in my building. Breathless and somewhat frantic to meet Abby's deadline, I dialed the number my secretary had given me.

"What's going on? " Abby asked immediately. "Some Metro cop came by my apartment, said you'd sent him."

"That's correct," I reassured her. "Based on what you've told me, I didn't think it a good idea to call you at home. Are you all right?"

"Is that why you wanted me to call?"

She sounded disappointed.

"One of the reasons. We need to talk."

There was a long silence on the line.

"I'll be in Williamsburg on Saturday," she then said. "Dinner, The Trellis at seven?"

I did not ask her why she was going to be in Williamsburg. I wasn't sure I wanted to know, but when I parked my car in Merchant's Square Saturday, I found my apprehensions diminishing with each step I took. It was hard to be preoccupied with murder and other acts of incivility while sipping hot apple cider in the sharp wintry air of one of my favorite places in America.

It was a low season for tourists, and there were still plenty of people about, strolling, browsing inside the restored shops, and riding past in horse-drawn carriages driven by liverymen in knee breeches and three-cornered hats. Mark and I had talked about spending a weekend in Williamsburg. We would rent one of the nineteenth-century carriage houses inside the Historic District, follow cobblestone sidewalks beneath the glow of gaslights and dine in one of the taverns, then drink wine before the fire until falling asleep in each other's arms.

Of course, none of it had come to pass, the history of our relationship more wishes than memories. Would it ever be different from this? Recently, he had promised me on the phone that it would. But he had promised before, and so had I. He was still in Denver and I was still here.

Inside the Silversmith's Shop, I bought a handwrought sterling silver pineapple charm and a handsome chain. Lucy would get a late Valentine's Day present from her negligent aunt. A forage, inside the Apothecary Shop brought forth soaps for my guest room, spicy shaving cream for Fielding and Marino, and potpourri for Bertha and Rose. At five minutes before seven, I was inside The Trellis looking for Abby. When she arrived half an hour later, I was impatiently waiting at a table nestled against a planter of wandering jew.

"I'm sorry," she said with feeling, slipping out of her coat. "I got delayed. Got here as fast as I could."

She looked keyed up and exhausted, her eyes nervously darting about. The Trellis was doing a brisk business, people talking in low voices in the wavering shadows of candlelight. I wondered if Abby felt she had been followed.

"Have you been in Williamsburg all day?"

I asked.

She nodded.

"I don't suppose I dare ask what you've been doing."

"Research" was all she said.

"Nowhere near Camp Peary, I hope."

I looked her in the eye.

She got my meaning very well. "You know," she said.

The waitress arrived and then went off to the bar to get Abby a Bloody Mary.

"How did you find out?"

Abby asked, lighting a cigarette.

"A better question is how did you find out?"

"I can't tell you that, Kay."

Of course she couldn't. But I knew. Pat Harvey.

"You have a source," I said carefully. "Let me just ask you this. Why would this source want you to know? Information wasn't passed on to you without there being motive on the source's part."

"I'm well aware of that."

"Then why?"

"The truth is important."

Abby stared off. "I'm also a source."

"I see. In exchange for information, you pass on what you dig up."

She did not respond.

"Does this include me?"

I asked.

"I'm not going to screw you, Kay. Have I ever?"

She looked hard at me.

"No," I said sincerely. "So far, you never have."

Her Bloody Mary was set before her, and she absently stirred it with the stalk of celery.

"All I can tell you," I went on, "is you're walking on dangerous ground. I don't need to elaborate. You should realize this better than anyone. Is it worth the stress? Is your book worth the price, Abby?"

When she made no comment, I added with a sigh, "I don't guess I'm going to change your mind, am I?"

"Have you ever gotten into something you can't get out of?"

"I do it all the time."

I smiled wryly. "That's where I am now."

"That's where I am, too."

"I see. And what if you're wrong, Abby?"

"I'm not the one who can be wrong," she replied. "Whatever the truth is about who's committing these murders, the fact remains that the FBI and other interested agencies are acting on certain suspicions and making decisions based on them. That's reportable. If the feds, the police, are wrong, it just adds another chapter."

"That sounds awfully cold," I said uneasily.

"I'm being professional, Kay. When you talk professionally, sometimes you sound cold, too."

I had talked to Abby directly after the body of her murdered sister was discovered. If I hadn't sounded cold on that horrible occasion, at best I had come across as clinical.

"I need your help with something," I said. "Eight years ago, two women were murdered very close to here. Elizabeth Mott and Jill Harrington."

She looked curiously at me. "You don't think - "

"I'm not sure what I'm thinking," I interrupted. "But I need to know the details of the cases. There's very little in my office reports. I wasn't in Virginia then. But there are news clips in the files. Several of them have your byline."

"It's hard for me to imagine that what happened to Jill and Elizabeth is connected to the other cases.' "So you remember them," I said, relieved.

"I will never forget them. It was one of the few times working on something actually gave me nightmares."

"Why is it hard for you to imagine a connection?"

"A number of reasons. There was no jack of hearts found. The car wasn't found abandoned on a roadside, but in a motel parking lot, and the bodies didn't turn up weeks or months after the fact decomposing in the woods. They were found within twenty-four hours. Both victims were women, and they were in their twenties, not teenagers. And why would the killer strike and then not do it again until some five years later?"

"I agree," I said. "The timing doesn't fit with the profile of your typical serial killer. And the MO seems inconsistent with the others. The victim selection seems inconsistent as well."

"Then why are you so interested?"

She sipped her drink.

"I'm groping, and I'm troubled by their cases, which were never solved," I admitted. "It's unusual for two people to be abducted and murdered. There was no evidence of sexual assault. The women were killed around here, in the same area where the other murders have occurred."

"And a gun and a knife were used," Abby mused.

She knew about Deborah Harvey, then.

"There are some parallels," I said evasively.

Abby looked unconvinced but interested.

"What do you want to know, Kay?"

"Anything you might remember about them. Anything at all."

She thought for along moment, toying with her drink.

"Elizabeth was working in sales for a local computer company and doing extremely well," she said. "Jill had just finished law school at William and Mary and had gone to work with a small firm in Williamsburg. I never did buy the notion that they went off to a motel to have sex with some creep they met in a bar. Neither of the women struck me as the type. And two of them with one man? I always thought it was strange. Also, there was blood in the backseat of their car. It didn't match either Jill's or Elizabeth's blood types."

Abby's resourcefulness never ceased to amaze me. Somehow she had gotten hold of the serology results.

"I assume the blood belonged to the killer. There was a lot of it, Kay. I saw the car. It looked as if someone had been stabbed or cut in the backseat. Possibly, this would place the killer there, but it was hard to come up with a good interpretation of what might have occurred. The police were of the opinion the women met up with this animal in the Anchor Bar and Grill. But if he rode off with them in their car and was planning to kill them, then how was he going to get back to his car later on?"

"Depends on how far the motel is from the bar. He could have walked back to his car after the murders."

"The motel is a good four or five miles from the Anchor Bar, which isn't around anymore, by the way. The women were last seen inside the bar at around ten P.M. If the killer had left his car there, it probably would have been the only one in the lot by the time he got back to it, and that wouldn't have been very bright. A cop might have noticed the car, or at least the night manager would have as he was locking up to go home."

"This doesn't preclude the killer leaving his car at the motel and abducting them in Elizabeth's, then returning later, getting into his car, and driving off," I pointed out.

"No, it doesn't. But if he drove his own car to the motel, then when did he get inside hers? The scenario of the three of them being inside a motel room together, and then forcing them to drive him to the cemetery, has never set well with me. Why go to all the trouble, the risk? They could have started screaming in the parking lot, could have resisted. Why not just murder them inside the room?"

"Was it verified that the three of them were ever inside one of the rooms?"

"That's the other thing," she said. "I questioned the clerk who was on duty that night. The Palm Leaf, a low rent motel off Route Sixty in Lightfoot. Doesn't exactly do a thriving business. But the clerk didn't remember either woman. Nor did he remember some guy coming in and renting a room near where the Volkswagen was found. In fact, most of the rooms in that section of the motel were vacant at the time. More important, no one checked in and then left without turning in the key. Hard to believe this guy would have had opportunity or inclination to check out. Certainly not after committing the crimes. He would have been bloody."

"What was your theory when you were working on your stories?"

I asked.

"The same as it is now. I don't think they met up with their killer inside the bar. I think something happened shortly after Elizabeth and Jill left."

"Such as?"

Frowning, Abby was stirring her drink again. "I don't know. They definitely weren't the type to pick up a hitchhiker, certainly not at that late hour. And I never believed there was a drug connection. Neither Jill nor Elizabeth was found to have used coke, heroin, or anything like that, and no paraphernalia was found inside their apartments. They didn't smoke, weren't heavy drinkers. Both of them jogged, were health nuts."

"Do you know where they were heading after they left the bar? Were they going straight home? Might they have stopped somewhere?"

"No evidence if they did."

"And they left the bar alone?"

"Nobody I talked to remembered seeing them with another person while they were in the bar drinking. As I remember it, they had a couple of beers, were at a comer table talking. Nobody recalled seeing them leave with anyone."

"They might have met someone in the parking lot when they left," I said. "This individual might even have been waiting in Elizabeth's car."

"I doubt they would have left the car unlocked, but I suppose it's possible."

"Did the women frequent this bar?"

"As I remember it, they didn't frequent it, but they'd gone there before."

"A rough place?"

"That was my expectation since it was a favorite watering hole for military guys," she replied. "But it reminded me of an English pub. Civilized. People talking, playing darts. It was the sort of place I could have gone with a friend and felt quite comfortable and private. The theory was that the killer was either someone passing through town or else a military person temporarily stationed in the area. It wasn't someone they knew."

Perhaps not, I thought. But it must have been someone they felt they could trust, at least initially, and I recalled what Hilda Ozimek had said about the encounters being "friendly" at first. I wondered what would come to her if I showed her photographs of Elizabeth and Jill.

"Did Jill have any medical problems you're aware of?"

I asked.

She thought about this, her face perplexed. "I don't recall."

"Where was she from?"

"Kentucky comes to mind."

"Did she go home often?"

"I didn't get that impression. I think she made it home for holidays and that was about it."

Then it wasn't likely she had a prescription for Librax filled in Kentucky where her family lived, I thought.

"You mentioned she had just begun practicing law," I went on. "Did she travel much, have reason to be in and out of town?"

She waited as our chef's salads were served, then said, "She had a close friend from law school. I can't remember his name, but I talked to him, asked him about her habits, activities. He said he was suspicious Jill was having an affair."

"What made him suspect that?", "Because during their third year of law school she drove to Richmond almost every week, supposedly because she was job hunting, liked Richmond a lot, and wanted to find an opening in a firm there. He told me she often needed to borrow his notes because her out-of-town excursions caused her to miss classes. He thought it was strange, especially since she ended up going with a firm here in Williamsburg right after graduation. He went on and on about it because he was afraid her trips might be related to her murder, if she were seeing a married man in Richmond, for example, and perhaps threatened to expose their affair to his wife. Maybe she was having an affair with someone prominent, a successful lawyer or judge, who couldn't afford the scandal, so he silenced Jill forever. Or got someone else to, and it just so happened Elizabeth had the misfortune of being around at the time."

"What do you think?"

"The lead went nowhere, like ninety percent of the tips I get."

"Was Jill romantically involved with the student who told you this?"

"I think he would have liked for her to have been," she said. "But no, they weren't involved. I got the impression this was, in part, the reason for his suspicions. He was pretty sure of himself and figured the only reason Jill never succumbed to his charms was because she had somebody else nobody knew about. A secret lover."

"Was he ever a suspect, this student?"

I asked.

"Not at all. He was out of town when the murders occurred, and that was verified beyond a doubt."

"Did you talk to any of the other lawyers in the firm where Jill worked?"

"I didn't get very far with that," Abby answered. "You know how lawyers are. In any event, she'd been with they firm only a few months before she was murdered. I don't think her colleagues knew her very well."

"Doesn't sound as if Jill was an extrovert," I remarked.

"She was described as charismatic, witty, but self-contained."

"And Elizabeth?" I asked.

"More outgoing, I think," she said. "Which I suppose she had to have been to be good in sales."

The glow of gaslight lamps pushed the darkness back from cobblestone sidewalks as we walked to the Merchant's Square parking lot. A heavy layer of clouds obscured the moon, the damp, cold air penetrating.

"I wonder what these couples would be doing now, if they'd still be with each other, what difference they, might have made," Abby said, chin tucked into her collar, hands in her pockets.

"What do you think Henna would be doing?"

I gently asked about her sister.

"She'd probably still be in Richmond. I guess both of us would be."

"Are you sorry you moved?"

"Some days I'm sorry about everything. Ever since Henna died, it's as if I've had no options, no free will. It's as if I've been propelled along by things out of my control."

"I don't see it that way. You chose to take the job at the Post, move to D.C. And now you've chosen to write a book."

"Just as Pat Harvey chose to hold that press conference and do all the other things she's done that have burned her so badly," she said.

"Yes, she has made choices, too."

"When you're going through something like this, you don't know what you're doing, even if you think you do," she went on. "And no one can really understand what it's like unless they've suffered the same thing. You feel isolated. You go places and people avoid you, are afraid to meet your eyes and make conversation because they don't know what to say. So they whisper to each other. 'See her over there? Her sister was the one murdered by the strangler.' Or 'That's Pat Harvey. Her daughter was the one.' You feel as if you're living inside a cave. You're afraid to be alone, afraid to be with others, afraid to be awake, and afraid to go to sleep because of how awful it feels when morning comes. You run like hell and wear yourself out. As I look back, I can see that everything I've done since Henna died was half crazy."

"I think you've done remarkably well," I said sincerely.

"You don't know the things I've done. The mistakes I've made."

"Come on. I'll drive you to your car," I said, for we had reached Merchant's Square.

I heard a car engine start in the dark lot as I got out my keys. We were inside my Mercedes, doors locked and seat belts on when a new Lincoln pulled up beside us and the driver's window hummed down.

I opened my window just enough to hear what the man wanted. He was young, clean cut, folding a map and struggling with it.

"Excuse me."

He smiled helplessly. "Can you tell me how to get back on Sixty-four East from here?"

I could feel Abby's tension as I gave him quick directions.

"Get his plate number," she said urgently as he drove away. She dug in her pocketbook for a pen and notepad.

"E-N-T-eight-nine-nine," I read quickly.

She wrote it down.

"What's going on?"

I asked, unnerved.

Abby looked left and right for any sign of his car as I pulled out of the lot.

"Did you notice his car when we got to the parking lot?"

she asked.

I had to think. The parking lot was nearly empty when we had gotten there. I had been vaguely aware of a car that might have been the Lincoln parked in a poorly lit corner.

I told Abby this, adding, "But I assumed no one was in it."

"Right. Because the car's interior light wasn't on."

"I guess not."

"Reading a map in the dark, Kay?"

"Good point," I said, startled.

"And if he's from out of town, then how do you explain the parking sticker on his rear bumper?"

"Parking sticker?"

I repeated.

"It had the Colonial Williamsburg seal on it. The same sticker I was given years ago when the skeletal remains were discovered at that archaeology dig, Martin's Hundred. I did a series, was out here a lot, and the sticker permitted me to park inside the Historic District and at Carter's Grove."

"The guy works here and needed directions to Sixty-four?" I muttered.

"You got a good look at him?" she asked.

"Pretty good. Do you think it was the man who followed you that night in Washington?"

"I don't know. But maybe,… Damn it, Kay! This is making me crazy!"

"Well, enough is enough," I said firmly. "Give me that license number. I intend to do something about it."

The next morning Marino called with the cryptic message, "If you haven't read the Post, better go out and get a copy."

"Since when do you read the Post?"

"Since never, if I can help it. Benton alerted me about an hour ago. Call me later. I'm downtown."

Putting on a warm-up suit and ski jacket, I drove through a downpour to a nearby drugstore. For the better part of half an hour I sat inside my car, heater blasting, windshield wipers a monotonous metronome in the hard, cold rain. I was appalled by what I read. Several times it entered my mind that if the Harveys didn't sue Clifford Ring, I should.

The front page carried the first in a three-part series about Deborah Harvey, Fred Cheney, and the other couples who had died. Nothing sacred was spared, Ring's reporting so comprehensive it included details even I did not know.

Not long before Deborah Harvey was murdered, she had confided to a friend her suspicions that her father was an alcoholic and having an affair with an airline flight attendant half his age. Apparently, Deborah had eavesdropped on a number of telephone conversations between her father and his alleged mistress. The flight attendant lived in Charlotte, and according to the story, Harvey was with her the night his daughter and Fred Cheney disappeared, which was why the police and Mrs. Harvey were unable to reach him. Ironically, Deborah's suspicions did not make her bitter toward her father but her mother, who, consumed with her career, was never home, and therefore, in Deborah's eyes, to blame for her father's infidelity and alcohol abuse.

Column after column of vitriolic print added up to paint a pathetic portrait of a powerful woman bent on saving the world while her own family disintegrated from neglect. Pat Harvey had married into money, her home in Richmond was palatial, her quarters at the Watergate filled with antiques and valuable art, including a Picasso and a Remington. She wore the right clothes, went to the right parties, her decorum impeccable, her policies and knowledge of world affairs brilliant.

Yet lurking behind this plutocratic, flawless facade, Ring concluded, was "a driven woman born in a blue collar section of Baltimore, someone described by her colleagues as tormented by insecurity that perpetually propelled her into proving herself."

Pat Harvey, he said, was a megalomaniac. She was irrational - if not rabid when threatened or put to the test.

His treatment of the homicides that had occurred in Virginia over the past three years was just as relentless. He disclosed the fears of the CIA and FBI that the killer might be someone at Camp Peary, and served up this revelation with such a wild spin that it made everyone involved look bad.

The CIA and the Justice Department were involved in a cover-up, their paranoia so extreme they had encouraged investigators in Virginia to withhold information from each other. False evidence had been planted at a scene. Disinformation had been "leaked" to reporters, and it was even suspected that some reporters were under surveillance. Pat Harvey, meanwhile, was supposedly privy to all this, and her indignation was not exactly depicted as righteous, as evidenced by her demeanor during her infamous press conference. Engaged in a turf battle with the Justice Department, Mrs. Harvey had exploited sensitive information to incriminate and harass those federal agencies with which she had become increasingly at odds due to her, campaign against fraudulent charities such as ACTMAD.

The final ingredient in this poisonous stew was me. I had stonewalled and withheld case information at the request of the FBI until forced by threat of a court order to release my reports to the families. I had refused to talk to the press. Though I had no formal obligation to answer, to the FBI, it was suggested by Clifford Ring that it was possible my professional behavior was influenced by my personal life. "According to a source close to Virginia's Chief Medical Examiner," the article read, "Dr. Scarpetta has been romantically involved with an FBI Special. Agent for the past two years, has frequently visited Quantico and is on friendly terms with the Academy's personnel, including Benton Wesley, the profiler involved in these cases."

I wondered how many readers would conclude from this that I was having an affair with Wesley.

Impeached along with my integrity and morals was my competence as a forensic pathologist. In the ten cases in question, I had been unable to determine a cause of death in all of them but one, and when I discovered a cut, on one of Deborah Harvey's bones, I was so worried that I had inflicted this myself with a scalpel, claimed Ring, that I "drove to Washington in the snow, Harvey's and Cheney's skeletons in the trunk of her Mercedes, and sought the advice of a forensic anthropologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History."

Like Pat Harvey, I had "consulted a psychic."

I had accused investigators of tampering with Fred Cheney's and Deborah Harvey's remains at the scene, and then returned to the wooded area to search for a cartridge case myself because I did not trust the police to find it. I had also taken it upon myself to question witnesses, including a clerk at a 7-Eleven, where Fred and Deborah were last seen alive. I smoked, drank, had a license to carry my.38 concealed, had "almost been killed" on several occasions, was divorced and "from Miami."

The latter somehow seemed an explanation for all of the above.

The way Clifford Ring made it sound, I was an arrogant, gun-slinging wild woman who, when it came to forensic medicine, didn't know her ass from a hole in the ground.

Abby, I thought, as I sped home over rain-slick streets. Was this what she meant last night when she referred to mistakes she had made? Had she fed information to her colleague Clifford Ring? "That wouldn't add up," Marino pointed out later as we sat in my kitchen drinking coffee. "Not that my opinion about hers changed. I think she'd sell her grandmother for a story. But she's working on this big book, right? Don't make sense that she'd share information with the competition, especially since she's pissed off at the Post."

"Some of the information had to have come from her."

It was hard for me to admit. "The bit about the Seven-Eleven clerk, for example. Abby and I were together that night. And she knows about Mark."

"How?"

Marino looked curiously at me.

"I told her."

He just shook his head.

Sipping my coffee, I stared out at the rain. Abby had tried to call twice since I'd gotten home from the drugstore. I had stood by my machine listening to her tense voice. I wasn't ready to talk to her yet. I was afraid of what I might say.

"How's Mark going to react?"

Marino asked.

"Fortunately, the story didn't mention his name."

I felt another wave of anxiety. Typical of FBI agents, especially those who had spent years under deep cover, Mark was secretive about his personal life to the point of paranoia. The paper's allusion to our relationship would upset him considerably, I feared. I had to call him. Or maybe I shouldn't. I didn't know what to do.

"Some of the information, I suspect, came from Morrell," I went on, thinking aloud.

Marino was silent.

"Vessey must have talked, too. Or at least someone at the Smithsonian did," I said. "And I don't know how the hell Ring found out that we went to see Hilda Ozimek."

Setting down his cup and saucer, Marino leaned forward and met my eyes.

"My turn to give advice."

I felt like a child about to be scolded.

"It's like a cement truck with no brakes going down a hill. You ain't going to stop it, Doc. All you can do is get ' out of the way."

"Would you care to translate?"

I said impatiently.

"Just do your work and forget it. If you get questioned, and I'm sure you will, just say you never talked to Clifford Ring, don't know nothing about it. Brush it off, in other words. You get into a pissing match with the press and you're going to end up like Pat Harvey. Looking like an idiot."

He was right.

"And if you got any sense, don't talk to Abby anytime soon."

I nodded.

He stood up. "Meanwhile, I got a few things to run down. If they pan out, I'll let you know."

That reminded me. Fetching my pocketbook, I got out the slip of paper with the plate number Abby had taken down.

"Wonder if you could check NCIC. A Lincoln Mark Seven, dark gray. See what comes back."

"Someone tailing you?"

He tucked the slip of paper in his pocket.

"I don't know. The driver stopped to ask directions. I don't think he was really lost."

"Where?" he asked as I walked him to the door.

"Williamsburg. He was sitting in the car in an empty parking lot. This was around ten-thirty, eleven last night at Merchant's Square. I was getting into my car when his headlights suddenly went on and he drove over, asked me how to get to Sixty-four."

"Huh," Marino said shortly. "Probably some dumb shit detective working under cover, bored, waiting for someone to run a red light or make a U-turn. Might have been trying to hit on you, too. A decent-looking woman out at night alone, climbing into a Mercedes."

I didn't offer that Abby had been with me. I didn't want another lecture.

"I wasn't aware that many detectives drive new Lincolns," I said.

"Would you look at the rain. Shit," he complained as he ran to his car.

Fielding, my deputy chief, was never too preoccupied or busy to glance at any reflective object he happened to pass. This included plate-glass windows, computer screens, and the bulletproof security partitions separating the lobby from our inner offices. When I got off the elevator on the first floor, I spotted him pausing before the morgue's stainless-steel refrigerator door, smoothing back his hair.

"It's getting a little long over your ears," I said.

"And yours is getting a little gray."

He grinned.

"Ash. Blonds go ash, never gray."

"Right."

He absently tightened the drawstring of his surgical greens, biceps bulging like grapefruits. Fielding couldn't blink without flexing something formidable. Whenever I saw him hunched over his microscope, I was reminded of a steroid version of Rodin's The Thinker.

"Jackson was released about twenty minutes ago," he said, referring to one of the morning's cases. "That's it, but we've already got one for tomorrow. The guy they had on life support from the shoot-out over the weekend."

"What's on your schedule for the rest of the afternoon?"

I asked. "And that reminds me, I thought you had court in Petersburg."

"The defendant pleaded."

He glanced at his watch. "About an hour ago."

"He must have heard you were coming."

"Micros are stacked up to the ceiling in the cinderblock cell the state calls my office. That's my agenda for the afternoon. Or at least it was."

He looked speculatively at me.

"I've got a problem I'm hoping you can help me with. I need to track down a prescription that may have been filled in Richmond eight or so years ago."

"Which pharmacy?"

"If I knew that," I said as we took the elevator to the second floor, "then I wouldn't have a problem. What it amounts to is we need to organize a telethon, so to speak. As many people as possible on the lines calling every pharmacy in Richmond."

Fielding winced. "Jesus, Kay, there's got to be at least a hundred."

"A hundred and thirty-three. I've already counted. Six of us with a list of twenty-two, twenty-three, each. That's fairly manageable. Can you help me out?"

"Sure."

He looked depressed.

In addition to Fielding, I drafted my administrator, Rose, another secretary, and the computer analyst. We assembled in the conference room with lists of the pharmacies. My instructions were quite clear. Discretion. Not a word about what we were doing to family, friends, or the police. Since the prescription had to be at least eight years old and Jill was deceased, there was a good chance the records were no longer in the active files. I told them to ask the pharmacist to check the drugstore's archives. If he was uncooperative or reluctant to release the information, roll that call over to me.

Then we disappeared into our respective offices. Two hours later, Rose appeared at my desk, tenderly massaging her right ear.

She handed me a call sheet and could not suppress a triumphant smile. "Boulevard Drug Store at Boulevard and Broad. Jill Harrington had two prescriptions for Librax filled."

She gave me the dates.

"Her physician?"

"Dr. Anna Zenner," she answered.

Good God. Hiding my surprise, I congratulated her. "You're wonderful, Rose. Take the rest of the day off."

"I leave at four-thirty anyway. I'm late."

"Then take a three-hour lunch tomorrow."

I felt like hugging her. "And tell the others mission accomplished. They can put down the phones."

"Wasn't Dr. Zenner the president of the Richmond Academy of Medicine not so long ago?" Rose asked, pausing thoughtfully in my doorway. "Seems I read something about her. Oh! She's the musician."

"She was the president of the Academy year before last. And yes, she plays the violin for the Richmond Symphony."

"Then you know her."

My secretary looked impressed.

All too well, I thought, reaching for the phone.

That evening, when I was home, Anna Zenner returned my call.

"I see from the papers you have been very busy lately, Kay," she said. "Are you holding up?"

I wondered if she had read the Post. This morning's installment had included an interview with Hilda Ozimek and a photograph of her with the caption "Psychic Knew All of Them Were Dead."

Relatives and friends of the slain couples were quoted, and half of a page was filled with a color diagram showing where the couples' cars and bodies had been found. Camp Peary was ominously positioned in the center of this cluster like a skull and crossbones on a pirate's map.

"I'm doing all right," I told her. "And I'll be doing even better if you can assist me with something."

I explained what I needed, adding, "Tomorrow I will fax you the form citing the Code giving me statutory rights to Jill Harrington's records."

It was pro forma. Yet it seemed awkward reminding her of my legal authority.

"You can bring the form in person. Dinner at seven on Wednesday?"

"It's not necessary for you to go to any trouble - " "No trouble, Kay," she interrupted warmly. "I have missed seeing you."