Cruel and Unusual

5

Lucy stayed up very late working with the computer and I did not hear her stir when I woke up to the alarm early Monday morning. Parting the curtains in my bedroom window, I looked out at powdery flakes swirling in lights burning on the patio. The snow was deep and nothing was moving in my neighborhood. After coffee and a quick scan of the paper, I got dressed and was almost to the door when I turned around. No matter that Lucy was no longer twelve years old, I could not leave without checking on her.

Slipping inside her bedroom, I found her sleeping on her side in a tangle of sheets, the duvet half on the floor. It touched me that she was wearing a sweat suit that she had gotten out of one of my drawers. I had never had another human being wish to sleep in anything of mine, and I straightened the covers, careful not to wake her.

The drive downtown was awful, and I envied workers whose offices were closed because of the snow. Those of us who had not been granted an unexpected holiday crept slowly along the interstate, skating with the slightest tap on the brakes as we peered through streaked windshields that the wipers could not keep clean. I wondered how I would explain to Margaret that my teenage niece thought our computer system was insecure. Who had gotten into my directory, and why had Jennifer Deighton been calling my number and hanging up? I did not get to the office until half past eight, and when I walked into the morgue, I stopped midway in the corridor, puzzled. Parked at a haphazard angle near the stainless steel refrigerator door was a gurney, bearing a body, covered by a sheet. Checking the toe tag, I read Jennifer Deighton's name, and I looked around. There was no one inside the office or X-ray room. I opened the door to the autopsy suite and found Susan dressed in scrubs and dialing a number on the phone. She quickly hung up and greeted me with a nervous “Good morning.”

“Glad you made it in.” I unbuttoned my coat, regarding her curiously.

“Ben gave me a lift,” she said, referring to my administrator, who owned a Jeep with four-wheel drive. “So far, we're the only three here.”

“No sign of Fielding?”

“He called a few minutes ago and said he couldn't get out of his driveway. I told him we only have one case so far, but if more come in Ben can pick him up.”

“Are you aware that our case is parked in the hall?” She hesitated, blushing. “I was taking her over to X ray when the phone rang. Sorry.”

“Have you weighed and measured her yet?”

“No.”

“Let's do that first.”

She hurried out of the autopsy suite before I could comment further. Secretaries and scientists who worked in the labs upstairs often entered and left the building through the morgue because it was convenient to the parking lot. Maintenance workers were in and out, too. Leaving a body unattended in the middle of a corridor was very poor form and could even jeopardize the case should chain of evidence be questioned in court.

Susan returned pushing the gurney, and we went to work, the stench of decomposing flesh nauseating. I fetched gloves and a plastic apron from a shelf, and clamped various forms in a clipboard. Susan was quiet and tense. When she reached up to the control panel to reset the computerized floor scale, I noticed her hands were shaking. Maybe she was suffering from morning sickness.

“Everything okay?” I asked her.

“Just a little tired.”

“You sure?”

“Positive. She weighs one-eighty exactly.”

I changed into my greens and Susan and I moved the body into the X-ray room across the hall, transferring it from the gurney to the table. Opening the sheet, I wedged a block under the neck to keep the head from lolling. The flesh of her throat was clean, spared from soot and burns because her chin had been tucked dose to her chest while she was inside the car with the engine running. I did not see any obvious injuries, no bruises or broken fingernails. Her nose wasn't fractured. There were no cuts inside her lips and she hadn't bitten her tongue.

Susan took X rays and slipped them through the processor while I went over the front of the body with a lens. I collected a number of barely visible whitish fibers, quite possibly from the sheet or her bed covers, and found others similar to the ones on the bottoms of her socks. She wore no jewelry and was naked beneath her gown. I remembered the rumpled covers on her bed, the pillows propped against the headboard and glass of water on the table. The night of her death she had put curlers in her hair, gotten undressed, and at some point, perhaps, had been reading in bed.

Susan emerged from the developer room and leaned against the wall, supporting the small of her back with her hands.

“What's the story on this lady?” she asked. “Was she married?”

“It appears she lived alone.”

“Did she work?”

“She ran a business out of her home.”

Something caught my eye.

“What sort of business?”

“Possibly fortune-telling of sorts.”

The feather was very small and sooty, clinging to Jennifer Deighton's gown in the area of her left hip. Reaching for a small plastic bag, I tried to recall if I'd noticed any feathers around her house. Perhaps the pillows on herbed were filled with feathers.

“Did you find any evidence she was into the occult?”

“Some of her neighbors seemed to think she was a witch,” I said.

“Based on what?”

“There's a church near her house. Allegedly, the lights in the steeple starting going on and off after she moved in some months ago.”

“You're kidding.”

“I saw them go on myself when I was leaving the scene. The steeple was dark. Then suddenly it was lit up.”

“Weird.”

“It was weird.”

“Maybe it's on a timer.”

“Unlikely. Lights going on and off all night would not conserve electricity. If it's true they go on and off all night. I saw it happen only once.”

Susan did not say anything.

“Possibly there's a short in the wiring.”

In fact, I thought as I continued to work, I would call the church. They might be unaware of the problem.

“Any strange stuff inside her house?”

“Crystals. Some unusual books.”

Silence.

Then Susan said, “I wish you'd told me earlier.”

“Pardon?”

I glanced up. She was staring uneasily at the body. She looked pale.

“Are you sure you're feeling all right?”

I asked.

“I don't like stuff like this.”

“Stuff like what?”

“It's like someone having AIDS or something. It ought to be told up front. Especially now.”

“It's unlikely this woman has AIDS or -”

“I should have been told. Before I touched her.”

“Susan -”

“I went to school with a girl who was a witch.”

I stopped what I was doing. Susan was rigid against the wall, hands pressed against her belly.

“Her name was Doreen. She belonged to a coven and our senior year she put a curse on my twin sister, Judy. Judy was killed in a car wreck two weeks before graduation.”

Bewildered, I stared at her.

“You know how occult stuff creeps me out! Like that cow's tongue with needles stuck in it that the cops brought in a couple of months ago. The one wrapped up in a list of dead people's names. It was left on a grave.”

“It was a prank,” I reminded her calmly.”

The tongue came from a grocery store, and the names were meaningless, copied from headstones in the cemetery.”

“You shouldn't tamper with the satanic, prank or not.” Her voice trembled. “I take evil just as seriously as God.”

Susan was the daughter of a minister and had abandoned religion long ago. I'd never heard her so much as allude to Satan or mention God unless it was profanely. I'd never known her to be the least bit superstitious or unnerved by anything. She was about to cry.

“Tell you what,” I said quietly. “Since it appears I'm going to be short-staffed today, if you'll answer the phones upstairs, I'll take care of things down here.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and I immediately went to her.

“It's okay.”

Putting my arm around her, I walked her out of the room. “Come on,” I said gently as she leaned against me, sobbing. “You want Ben to take you home?”

She nodded, whispering, “I'm sorry. I'm sorry.”

“All you need is a little rest.”

I sat her in a chair inside the morgue office and reached for the phone.

Jennifer Deighton had inhaled no carbon monoxide or soot because by the time she had been placed inside her car she was no longer breathing. Her death was a homicide, an obvious one, and throughout the afternoon I impatiently left messages for Marino to call me. Several times I tried to check on Susan but her phone just rang and rang.

“I'm concerned,” I said to Ben Stevens. “Susan's not answering her phone. When you drove her home, did she mention that she was planning to go somewhere?”

“She told me she was going to bed.”

He was sitting at his desk, going through reams of computer printouts. Rock and roll played quietly from the radio on a bookcase, and he was drinking tangerine flavored mineral water. Stevens was young, smart, and boyishly good looking. He worked hard, and played hard in singles bars, so I had been UK. I was quite certain his job as my administrator would prove to be a short step on his way to someplace better.

“Maybe she unplugged her phone so she could sleep,” he said, turning on his adding machine.

“Maybe that's it.”

He launched into an update on our budget woes.

Late afternoon when it was beginning to get dark out, Stevens buzzed my line.

“Susan called. She ill she won't be in tomorrow. And I've got a John Deighton on hold. Says he's Jennifer Deighton's brother.” Stevens transferred the call.

“Hello. They said you did my sister's autopsy,” a man mumbled. “Uh, Jennifer Deighton's my sister.”

“Your name, please?”

“John Deighton. I live in Columbia, South Carolina.”

I glanced up as Marino appeared in my office doorway, and motioned forhim to take a chair.

“They said she hooked up a hose to her car and killed herself.”

“Who said that” I asked. “And could you speak up, please?”

He hesitated. “I don't remember the name, should've wrote it down but I was too shocked.”

The man didn't sound shocked. His voice was so muffled I barely could hear what he was saying.

“Mr. Deighton, I'm very sorry,” I said. “But you will have to request any information regarding her death in writing. I will also need, included with your written request, some verification that you are next of kin.”

He did not respond.

“Hello?”

I asked. “Hello?”

I was answered by a dial tone.

“That's strange, “I said to Marino. “Are you familiar with a John Deighton who claims to be Jennifer Deighton's brother?”

“That's who that was? Shit. We're trying to reach him.

“He said someone's already notified him about her death.”

“You know where he was calling from?”

“Columbia, South Carolina, supposedly. He hung up on me.”

Marino didn't seem interested. “I just came from Vander's office,” he said, referring to Neils Vander, the chief fingerprints examiner. “He checked out Jennifer Deighton's car, plus the books that were beside her bed and a poem that was stuck inside one of 'em. As for the sheet of blank paper that was on her bed, he hasn't gotten to that yet.”

“Anything so far?”

“He lifted a few. Will run them through the computer if there's a need. Probably most of the prints are hers. Here.”

He placed a small paper bag on my desk. “Happy reading.”

“I think you're going to want those prints run without delay,” I said grimly.

A shadow passed over Marino's eyes. He massaged his temples.

“Jennifer Deighton definitely did not commit suicide,” I informed him. “Her CO was less than seven percent. She had no soot in her airway. The bright pink tint of her skin was due to exposure to cold, not CO poisoning.”

“Christ,” he said.

Shuffling through the paperwork in front of me, I handed him a body diagram, then opened an envelope and withdrew Polaroid photographs of Jennifer Deighton's neck.

“As you can see,” I went on, “there are no injuries externally.”

“What about the blood on the car seat?”

“A postmortem artifact due to purging. She was beginning to decompose. I found no abrasions or contusions, no fingertip bruises. But here” - I showed him a photograph of her neck at autopsy - “she's got irregular hemorrhages in the sternocleidomastoid muscles bilaterally. She's also got a fracture of the right cornua of the hyoid. Her death was caused by asphyxia, due to pressure applied to the neck “

Marino interrupted loudly. “You suggesting she got yoked?”

I showed him another photograph. “She's also got some facial perechia, or pinpoint hemorrhages. These findings are consistent with yoking, yes. She's a homicide, and I might suggest that we keep this out of the newspapers as long as possible.”

“You know, I didn't need this.”

He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes. “I got eight un-cleared homicides sitting on my desk even as we speak. Henrico don't got shit on Eddie Heath, and the kid's old man calls me almost every day. Not to mention, they're having a damn drug war-in Mosby Court. Merry friggin' Christmas. I didn't need this.”

“Jennifer Deighton didn't need this either, Marino.”

“Keep going. What else did you find?”

“She did have high blood pressure, as her neighbor Mrs. Clary suggested.”

“Huh,” he said, shifting his eyes away from me. “How could you tell?”

“She had left ventricular hypertophy, or thickening of the left side of the heart.”

“High blood pressure does that?”

“It does. I should find fibrinoid changes in the renal microvasculature or early nephrosclerosis. I suspect the brain will show hypertensive changes, too, in the cerebral arterioles, but I won't be able to say with certainty until I can take a look under the scope.”

“You're saying kidney and brain cells get killed off when you got high blood pressure?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Anything else?”

“Nothing significant.”

“What about gastric contents?” Marino asked.

“Meat, some vegetables, partially digested.”

“Alcohol or drugs?”

“No alcohol. Drug screens are under way.”

“No sign of rape?”

“No injuries or other evidence of sexual assault. I swabbed her for seminal fluid but won't get those reports for a while. Even then, you can't always be sure.”

Marino's face was unreadable.

“What are you after?” I finally asked.

“Well, I'm thinking about how this thing was staged. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make us think she gassed herself. But then the lady's dead before he even gets her into her car. What I'm considering is that he didn't mean to whack her inside the house. You know, he applies a choke hold, uses too much force, and she dies. So, maybe he didn't know her health was bad and that's how it happened.”

I started shaking my head. “Her high blood pressure has nothing to do with it.”

“Explain how she died, then.”

“Say the assailant is right-handed, he brought his left arm around the front of her neck and used his right hand to pull the left wrist toward the right.”

I demonstrated. “This placed pressure eccentrically on her neck, resulting in fracture of the right greater cornua of the hyoid bone. The pressure collapsed her upper airway and put pressure on the carotid arteries. She would have gotten hypoxic, or air hungry. Sometimes pressure on the neck produces bradycardia, a drop in the heart rate, and the victim has an arrhythmia.”

“Could you tell from her autopsy if the assailant started using a choke hold that ended up a yoking? If he was just trying to subdue her and used too much force, in other words?”

“I can't tell you that from medical findings.”

“But it's possible.”

“It's within the realm of possibility.”

“Come on, Doc,” Marino said, exasperated. “Get off the witness stand for a minute, okay? Somebody else in this office besides you and me?”

No one was. But I was unnerved. Most of my staff had not shown up for work today, and Susan had acted bizarrely. Jennifer Deighton, a stranger, apparently had been trying to call me, then was murdered, and a man who claimed to be her brother had just hung up on me. Not to mention, Marino's mood was foul. When I felt a loss of control, I became very clinic.

“Look,” I said, “he very well may have used a choke hold to subdue her and ended up applying too much force, yoking her by mistake. In fact, I'll even go so far as to suggest that he simply thought he'd knocked her out and didn't know she was dead when he placed her inside her car.”

“So we're dealing with a dumb shit”

“I wouldn't conclude that if I were you. But if he gets up tomorrow morning and reads in the paper that Jennifer Deighton was murdered, he may be in for the surprise of his life. He's going to wonder what he did wrong. Which is why I recommended we keep this away from the press.”

“I got no problem with that. By the way, just because you didn't know Jennifer Deighton don't mean she didn't know you.”

I waited for him to explain.

“I've been thinking about your hang ups. You're on TV, in the papers. Maybe she knew someone was after her, didn't know where to turn, and reached out to you for help. When she got your machine, she was too paranoid to leave a message.”

“That's a very depressing thought.”

“Almost everything we think in this joint is depressing.”

He got up from his chair.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Check her house. Tell me if you find any feather pillows, down-filled jackets, feather dusters, anything relating to feathers.”

“Why?”

“I found a small feather on her gown.”

“Sure. I'll let you know. Are you leaving?”

I glanced past him as I heard the elevator doors open and shut. “Was that Stevens? “I asked.

“Yeah.”

“I've got a few more things to do before I go home,” I said.

After Marino got on the elevator, I went to a window at the end of the hall that overlooked the parking loon back. I wanted to make sure Ben Stevens's Jeep was gone. It was, and I watched as Marino emerged from the budding, picking his way through crushed snow lit up by street lamps. He trudged to his car and stopped to vigorously shake snow off his feet, like a cat that's stepped in water, before sliding behind the wheel. God forbid that anything should violate the freshened au and Armor All of his inner sanctum. I wondered ft he had plans for Christmas and was dismayed that I had not thought to invite him in for dinner. This would be his AS Christmas since he and Doris had divorced.

As I made my way back down the empty hall, I ducked into each office along the way to check computer terminals. Unfortunately, no one was logged in, and the only cable tagged with a device number was Fielding's. It was neither tty07 nor tty14. Frustrated, I unlocked Margaret's office and switched on the light.

Typically, it looked as if a fierce wind had blown through, scattering papers across her desk, tipping books over in the bookcase and knocking others on the floor. Stacks of continuous-paper printouts spilled over like accordions, and indecipherable notes and telephone numbers were taped to walls and terminal screens. The minicomputer hummed like an electronic insect and lights danced across banks of modems on a shelf. Sitting in her chair before the system terminal, I slid open a drawer to my right and began rapidly walking my fingers through file tabs, I found several with promising labels such as “users” and “networking;” but nothing I perused told me what I needed to know. Looking around as I thought,I noticed a thick bundle of cables that ran up the wall behind the computer and disappeared through the ceiling. Each cable was tagged.

Both tty07 and tty14 were connected directly to the computer. Unplugging tty07 first, I roamed from terminal to terminal to see which had been disconnected as a result. The terminal in Ben Stevens's office was down, then up again when I reconnected the cable. Next I set about to trace tty14, and was perplexed when the unplugging of that cable seemed to illicit no response. Terminals on the desks of my staff continued to work without pause. Then I remembered Susan. Her office was downstairs in the morgue.

Unlocking her door, I noticed two details the instant I walked into her office. There were no personal effects, such as photographs and knickknacks, to be seen, and on a bookshelf over the desk were a number of UNIX, SQL, and WordPerfect reference guides. I vaguely recalled that Susan had signed up for several computer courses last spring. Flipping a switch to turn on her monitor, I tried to log in and was baffled when the system responded. Her terminal was still connected; it could not be tty14. And then I realized something so obvious that I might have laughed were I not horrified.

Back upstairs, I paused in my office doorway, looking in as if someone I had never met worked here. Pooled around the workstation on my desk were lab reports, call sheets, death certificates, and page proofs of a forensic pathology textbook I was editing, and the return bearing my microscope didn't look much better. Against a wall were three tall filing cabinets, and across from them a couch situated far enough away from bookcases that you could easily go around it to reach books on lower shelves. Directly behind my chair was an oak credenza I had found years earlier in the state's surplus warehouse. In drawers had locks, making it a perfect repository for my pocketbook and active cases that were unusually sensitive. I kept the key under my phone, and I thought again of last Thursday when Susan had broken jars of formalin while I was doing Eddie Heath's autopsy.

I did not know the device number of my terminal, for there had never been occasion when it mattered. Seating myself at my desk and sliding out the keyboard drawer, I tried to log in but my keystrokes were ignored. Disconnecting tty14 had disconnected me.

“Damn,” I whispered as my blood ran cold. “Damn!”

I had sent no notes to my administrator's terminal. It was not I who had typed “I can't find it.” In fact, when the file was accidentally created late last Thursday afternoon, I was in the morgue. But Susan wasn't. I had given her my keys and told her to lie down on the couch in my office until she recovered from the formalin spill. Was it possible that she not only had broken into my directory but also had gone through files and the paperwork on my desk? Had she attempted to send a note to Ben Stevens because she couldn't find what they were interested in? One of the trace evidence examiners from upstairs suddenly appeared in my doorway, startling me.

“Hello,” he muttered as he looked through paperwork, his lab coat buttoned up to his chin. Pulling out a multiple-page report, he walked in and handed it to me.

“I was getting ready to leave this in your box,” he said. “But since you're still here, I'll give it to you in person. I've finished examining the adhesive residue you-lifted from Eddie Heath's wrists.”

“Building materials?” I asked, scanning the first page of the report.

“That's right. Paint, plaster, wood, cement, asbestos, glass. Typically, we find this sort of debris in burglary cases, often on the suspects' clothing, in their cuffs, pockets, shoes, and so on.”

“What about on Eddie Heath's clothes?”

“Some of this same debris was on his clothes.”

“And the paints? Tell me about them.”

“I found bits of paint from five different origins. Three of them are layered, meaning something was painted and repainted a number of times.”

“Are the origins vehicular or residential?” I inquired.

“Only one is vehicular, an acrylic lacquer typically used as a top coat in cars manufactured by General Motors.”

It could have come from the vehicle used to abduct Eddie Heath, I thought. And it could have come from anywhere.

“The color?” I inquired.

“Blue.”

“Layered?”

“No.”

“What about the debris from the area of pavement where the body was found? I asked Marino to get sweepings to you and he said he would.”

“Sand, dirt, bits of paving material, plus the miscellaneous debris you might expect around a Dumpster. Glass, paper, ash, pollen, rust, plant material.”

“That's different from what you found adhering to the residue on his wrists?”

“Yes. It would appear to me that the tape was applied and removed from his wrists in a location where there's debris from building materials and birds.”

“Birds?”

“On the third page of the report,” he said. “I found a lot of feather parts.”

Lucy was restless and rather irritable when I got home. Clearly, she had not had enough to occupy her during the day, for she had taken it upon herself to rearrange my study. The laser printer had been moved, as had the modem and all of my computer reference guides.

“Why did you do this?” I asked.

She was in my chair, her back to me, and she replied without turning around or slowing her finger; on the keyboard. “It makes more sense this way.”

“Lucy, you can't just go into someone else's office and move everything around. How would you feel ft I did that to you?”

“There would be no reason to rearrange anything of mine. It's all arranged very sensibly.”

She stopped typing and swiveled around. “See, now you can reach the printer without getting up from the chair. Your books are right here within reach, and the modem is out of your way completely. You shouldn't set books, coffee cups, and things on top of a modem.”

“Have you been in here all day?” I asked.

“Where else would I be? You took the car. I went Jogging around your neighborhood. Have you ever tried to run on snow?”

Pulling up a chair, I opened my briefcase and got out the paper bag Marino had given me. “You're saying you need a car.”

“I feel stranded.”

“Where would you like to go?”

“To your club. I don't know where else. I'd simply like the option. What's in the bag?”

“Books and a poem Marino gave me.”

“Since when is he a member of the literati?” She got up and stretched. “I'm going to make a cup of herbal tea. Would you like some?”

“Coffee, please.”

“It's bad for you,” she said as she left the room.

“Oh, hell, “I muttered irritably as I pulled the books and poem out of the bag and red fluorescent powder got all over my hands and clothes.

Neils Vander had done his usual thorough examination, and I had forgotten his passion for his new toy. Several months ago he had acquired an alternate light source and had retired the laser to the scrap heap. The Luma-Lite, with its “state-of-the-art three-hundred-and-fifty-watt high-intensity blue enhanced metal vapor arc lamp,” as Vander lovingly described it whenever the subject came up, turned virtually invisible hairs and fibers a burning orange. Semen stains and street drug residues jumped out like solar flares, and best of all, the light could pick up fingerprints that never would have been seen-in the past.

Vander had gone the gamut on Jennifer Deighton's paperback novels. They had been placed in the glass tank and exposed to vapors from Super Glue, the cyanoacrylate ester that reacts to the components of perspiration transferred by human skin. Then Vander had dusted the slick covers of the books with the red fluorescent powder that was now all over me. Finally, he had subjected the books to the cool blue scrutiny of the Luma-Lite and purpled pages with Ninhydrin. I hoped he would be rewarded for all of his trouble. My reward was to go into the bathroom and clean up with a wet washcloth.

Flipping through Paris Trout was unrevealing. The novel told the story of the heartless murder of a black girl, and if that was significant to Jennifer Deighton's own story, I could not imagine why. Seth Speaks was a spooky account of someone supposedly from another life communicating through the author. It did not really surprise me that Miss Deighton, with her otherworldly inclinations, might read such a thing. What interested me most was the poem.

It was typed on a sheet of white paper smudged purple with Ninhydrin and enclosed in a plastic bag:

Jenny's kisses many

warmed the copper penny

wedded to her neck

with cotton string.

It was in the spring

when he had found it

on the dusty drive

beside the meadow

and given it to her.

No words of passion

spoken.

He loved her

with a token.

The meadow now is brown

and overgrown with brambles.

He is gone.

The coin asleep

is cold

down deep

in a woodland

wishing pond.

There was no date, no name of the author. The paper was creased from having been folded in quarters. I got up and went into the living room, where Lucy had set coffee and tea on the table and was stirring the fire.

“Aren't you hungry?” she asked.

“As a matter of fact, I am,” I, said, glancing over the poem again and wondering what it meant. Was “Jenny” Jennifer Deighton? “What would you like to eat?”

“Believe it or not, steak. But only if it's good and the cows haven't been fed a bunch of chemicals,” Lucy said. “Is it possible you could bring home a car from work so I could use yours this week?”

“I generally don't bring home the state car unless I'm on call.”

“You went to a scene last night when you supposedly weren't on call. You're always on call, Aunt Kay.”

“All right,” I said. “Why don't we do this. We'll go get the best steak in town. Afterward, we'll stop by the office and drive the wagon home and you can take my car. There's still a little ice on the roads in spots. You have to promise to be extra careful.”

“I've never seen your office.”

“I'll show it to you if you wish.”

“No way. Not at night.”

“The dead can't hurt you.”

“Yes, they can,” Lucy said. “Dad hurt me when he died. He left me to be raised by Mom.”

“Let's get our coats.”

“Why is it that every time I bring up anything germane to our dysfunctional family, you change the subject?”

I headed to my bedroom for my coat “Do you want to borrow my black leather jacket?”

“See, you're doing it again,” she screamed.

We argued all the way to Ruth's Chris Steak House, and by the time I parked the car I had a headache and was completely disgusted with myself. Lucy had provoked me into raising my voice, and the only other person who could routinely do that was my mother.

“Why are you being so difficult?” I said in her ear as we were shown to a table.

“I want to talk to you and you won't let me,” she said.

A waiter instantly appeared for drink orders.

“Dewar's and soda, “I said.

“Sparkling water with a twist,” Lucy said. “You shouldn't drink and drive.”

“I'm having only one. But you're right. I'd be better off not having any. And you're being critical again. How can you expect to have friends if you talk to people this way?”

“I don't expect to have friends.” She stared off. “It's others who expect me to have friends. Maybe I don't want any friends because most people bore me.”

Despair pressed against my heart. “I think you want friends more than anyone I know, Lucy.”

“I'm sure you think that. And you probably also think I should get married in a couple of years.”

“Not at all. In fact, I sincerely hope you won't.”

“While I was roaming around inside your computer today, I saw the file called 'flesh.'

Why do you have a file called that?” my niece asked.

“Because I'm in the middle of a very difficult case.”

“The little boy named Eddie Heath? I saw his record in the case file. He was found with no clothes on, next to a Dumpster. Someone had cut out parts of his skin.”

“Lucy, you shouldn't read case records,” I said as my pager went off. I unclipped it from the waistband of my abs and glanced at the number.

“Excuse me for a moment” I said, getting up from the table as our drinks arrived.

I found a pay phone. It was almost eight P.M…

“I need to talk to you,” said Neils Vander, who was still at the office. “You might want to come down here and bring by Ronnie Waddell's ten print cards.”

“Why?”

“We've got an unprecedented problem. I'm about to call Marino, too.”

“All right. Tell him to meet me at the morgue in a half hour.”

When I returned to the table, Lucy knew by the look on my face that I was about to ruin another evening.

“I'm so sorry,” I said.

“Where are we going?”

“To my office, then to the Seaboard Building.”

I got out my billfold.

“What's in the Seaboard Building?”

“It's where the serology, DNA, and fingerprint labs moved not so long ago. Marino's going to meet us,” I said. “Its been a long time since you've seen him.”

“Jerks like him don't change or get better with time.”

“Lucy, that's unkind. Marino is not a jerk.”

“He was last time I was here.”

“You weren't exactly nice to him, either.”

“I didn't call him a smartass brat.”

“You called him a number of other names, as I recall, and were continually correcting his grammar.”

A half hour later, I left Lucy inside the morgue office while I hurried upstairs. Unlocking the credenza, I retrieved Waddell's case file, and no sooner had I boarded the elevator when the buzzer sounded from the bay. Marino was dressed in jeans and a dark blue parka, his balding head warmed by a Richmond Braves baseball cap.

“You two remember each other, don't you?”

I said. “Lucy's visiting me for Christmas and is helping out with a computer problem,” I explained as we walked out into the cold night air.

The Seaboard Building was across the street from the parking lot behind the morgue and cater-cornered to the front of Main Street Station, where the Health Department's administrative offices had relocated while its former building was being stripped of asbestos. The cock in Main Street Station's tower floated high above us like a hunter's moon, and red lights atop high buildings blinked slow warnings to low-flying planes. Somewhere in the dark, a train lumbered along its tracks, the earth rumbling and creaking like a ship at sea.

Marino walked ahead of us, the tip of his cigarette glow glowing at intervals. He did not want Lucy here, and I knew she sensed it. When he reached the Seaboard Building, where supplies had been loaded onto boxcars around the tithe of the Civil War, I rang the bell outside the door. Vander appeared almost immediately to let us in He did not greet Marino or ask who Lucy was. If a creature from outer space were to accompany someone he trusted, Vander would not ask any questions or expect to be introduced. We followed him up a flight of stairs to the second floor, where old corridors and offices had been repainted in shades of gunmetal gray and refurnished with cherry-finished desks and bookcases and teal upholstered chairs.

“What are you working on so late?” I asked as we entered the room housing the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, known as AFIS.

“Jennifer Deighton's case,” he said.

“Then what do you want with Waddell's ten print cards?” I asked, perplexed.

“I want to be sure it was Waddell you autopsied last week,” Vander said bluntly.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Marino looked at him in astonishment.

“I'm getting ready to show you.”

Vander seated himself before the remote input terminal, which looked like an everyday PC. It was connected by modem to the State Police computer, on which resided a data base of more than six million fingerprints. He hit several keys, activating the laser printer.

“Perfect scores are few and far between, but we got one here.”

Vander began typing, and a bright white fingerprint filled the seen. “Right index finger, plain whorl.”

He pointed to the vortex of lines swirling behind glass. “A damn good partial recovered from Jennifer Deighton's house.”

“Wherein her house?” I asked.

“From a dining room chair. At first I wondered if there was some mistake. But apparently not.”

Vander continued staring at the screen, then resumed typing as he talked. “The print comes back to Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“That's impossible,” I said, shocked.

“You would think so,” Vander replied abstractedly.

“Did you find anything in Jennifer Deighton's house that might indicate she and Waddell were acquainted?”

I asked Marino as I opened Waddell's case file.

“No.”

“If you've got Waddell's prints from the morgue,” Vander said to me, “we'll see how they compare to what's in AFIS.”

I pulled out two manila envelopes, and it struck me wrong immediately that both weren't heavy and thick. I felt my face get hot as I opened each and found the expected photographs inside and nothing else. There was no envelope containing Waddell's ten print cards. When I looked up, everybody was looking at me.

“I don't understand this,” I said, conscious of Lucy's uneasy stare.

“You don't have his prints?” Marino asked in disbelief.

I rifled through the file again. “They're not here.”

“Susan usually does it, right?” he said.

“Yes. Always. She was supposed to make two sets. One for Corrections and one for us. Maybe she gave them to Fielding and he forgot to give them to me.”

I got out my address book and reached for the phone. Fielding was home and knew nothing about the fingerprint cards.

“No, I didn't notice her printing him, but I don't notice half of what other people are doing down there,” he said. “I just assumed she'd given the cards to you.”

Dialing Susan's number next, I tried to remember seeing her get out the spoon and print cards, or rolling Waddell's fingers on the ink pad.

“Do you remember seeing Susan print Waddell?” I asked Marino as Susan's phone continued to ring.

“She didn't do it while I was there. I would have offered to help if she had.”

“No answer.”

I hung up.

“Waddell was cremated,” Vander said.

“Yes,” I said.

We were silent for a moment.

Then Marino said to Lucy with unnecessary brusqueness, “You mind? We need to talk alone for a minute.”

“You can sit in my office,” Vander said to her. “Down the hall, last one on the right.”

When she was gone, Marino said, “Waddell's supposedly been locked up ten years, and there's no way the print we got from Jennifer Deighton's chair was left ten years ago. She didn't even move into her house on Southside until a few months ago, and the dining room furniture looks brand-new. Plus, there were indentations on the carpet in the living room that make it appear a dining room chair was carried in there, maybe on the night she died. That's why I wanted the chairs dusted to begin with.”

“An uncanny possibility,” Vander said. “At this moment, we can't prove that the man who was executed last week was Ronnie Joe Waddell.”

“Perhaps there is some other explanation for how Waddell's print ended up on a chair in Jennifer Deighton's house,” I said. “For example, the penitentiary has a wood shop that makes furniture.”

“Unlikely as hell,” Marino said. “For one thing, they don't do woodworking or make license plates on death row. And even if they did, most civilians don't end up with prison-made furniture in their house.”

“All the same,” Vander said to Marino, “it would be interesting if you could track down who and where she bought her dining room set from.”

“Don't worry. It's a top priority.”

“Waddell's complete past arrest record, including his prints, should all be in one file at the FBI,” Vander added. “I'll get a copy of their print card and retrieve the photograph of the thumbprint from Robyn Naismith's case. Where else was Waddell arrested?”

“Nowhere else,” Marino said. “The only jurisdiction that will have his records should be Richmond.”

“And this print found on a dining room chair is the only one you've identified?”

I asked Vander.

“Of course, a number of those lifted came back to Jennifer DOW” he said. “Particularly on the books by her bed and the folded sheet of paper - the poem. And a couple of unknown partials from her car, as you might expect, maybe left by whoever loaded groceries into her trunk or filled her tank with gas. That's all for now.”

“And no luck with Eddie Heath?”

I asked.

“There wasn't much to examine. The paper bag, can of soup, candy bar. I tried the Luma-Lite on his shoes and clothes. No luck.”

Later, he walked us out through the bay, where locked freezers stored the blood of enough convicted felons to fill a small city, the samples awaiting entry into the Commonwealth's DNA data bank. Parked in front of the door was Jennifer Deighton's car, and it looked more pathetic than I remembered, as if it had gone into a dramatic decline since the murder of its owner. Metal along the sides was creased and dented from being repeatedly struck by other car doors. Paint was rusting in spots and Scraped and gouged in others, and the vinyl top was peeling. Lucy paused to peer inside a sooty window.

“Hey, don't touch nothing,” Marino said to her.

She looked levelly at him without a word, and all of us went outside.

Lucy drove off in my car and went straight to the house without waiting for Marino or me. When we walked in, she was already in my study with the door shut.

“I can see she's still Miss Congeniality,” Marino said.

“You don't win any prizes tonight, either.”

I opened the fireplace screen and added several logs.

“She'll keep her mouth shut about what we were talking about?”

“Yes,” I said wearily. “Of course.”

“Yeah, well, I know you trust her, since you're her aunt. But I'm not sure it was a good idea for her to hear all that, Doc.”

“I do trust Lucy. She means a lot to me. You mean a lot to me. I hope the two of you will become friends. The bar is open, or I'll be glad to put on a pot of coffee.”

“Coffee would be good.”

He sat on the edge of the hearth and got out his Swiss Army knee. While I made coffee, he trimmed his nails and tossed the shavings into the fire. I tried Susan's number again, but there was no answer.

“I don't think Susan took his prints,” Marino said when I set the coffee tray on the butler's table.”

I've been thinking while you were in the kitchen. I know she didn't do it while I was at the morgue that night, and I was there most of the time. So unless it was done right when the body was brought in, forget it.”

“It wasn't done then,” I said, getting more unnerved. “Corrections was out of there in minutes. The entire scene was very distracting. It was late and everybody was tired. Susan forgot, and I was too busy with what I was doing to notice.”

“You hope she forgot.”

I reached for my coffee.

“Something's going on with her, based on what you've been telling me. I wouldn't trust her as far as I could throw her,” he said.

Right now I didn't.

“We need to talk to Benton,” he said.

“You saw Waddell on the table, Marino. You saw him executed. I can't believe we can't say it was him.”

“We can't say it. We could compare mug shots and your morgue photos and still not say it. I hadn't seen him since he got popped more than ten years ago. The guy they walked out to the chair was about eighty pounds heavier. His beard, mustache, and head had been shaved. Sure, there was enough resemblance that I just assumed. But I can't swear it was him.”

I recalled Lucy's walking off the plane the other night. She was my niece. I had seen her but a year ago, and still I almost had not recognized her. I knew all too well how unreliable visual identifications can be.

“If someone switched inmates,” I said. “And if Waddell is free and someone else was put to death, please tell me why.”

Marino spooned more sugar into his coffee.

“A motive, for God's sake. Marino, what would it be?”

He looked up. “I don't know why.”

Just then, the door to my study opened and both of us turned as Lucy walked out. She came into the living room and sat on the side of the hearth opposite Marino, who had his back to the fire, elbows on his knees.

“What can you tell me about AFIS?” she asked me as if Marino were not in the room.

“What is it you wish to know?” I said.

“The language. And is it run on a mainframe.”

“I don't know the technical details. Why?”

“I can find out if files have been altered.”

I felt Marino's eyes on me.

“You can't break into the State Police computer, Lucy.”

“I probably could, but I'm not necessarily advocating that. There may be some other way to gain access.”

Marino turned to her. “You're saying you could tell if Waddell's records was changed in AFIS?”

“Yes. I'm saying I could tell if his records were changed.”

Marino's jaw muscles flexed. “Seems to me if someone was slick enough to do it, they'd be slick enough to make sure some computer nerd didn't catch on.”

“I'm not a computer nerd. I'm not a nerd of any description.”

They fell silent, parked on either end of the hearth like mismatched bookends.

“You can't go into AFIS,” I said to Lucy.

She looked impassively at me.

“Not alone,” I added. “Not unless there is a safe way to grant you access. And even if there is, I think I'd rather you stay out of it.”

“I don't think you'd really rather that. If something was tampered with, you know I'd find out, Aunt Kay.”

“The kid's got a god complex.”

Marino got up from the hearth.

Lucy said to him, “Could you hit the twelve on the clock over there on the wall? If you drew your gun right this minute and took aim?”

“I ain't interested in shooting up your aunt's house in order to prove something to you.”

“Could you hit the twelve from where you're standing?”

“You're damn right.”

“You're positive.”

“Yeah, I'm positive.”

“The lieutenant's got a god complex,” Lucy said to me.

Marino turned to the fire, but not before I caught a flicker of a smile.

“All Neils Vander has is a workstation and printer,” Lucy said. “He's connected to the State Police computer by modem. Has that always been the case?”

“No,” I replied. “Before he moved into the new building, there was much more equipment involved.”

“Describe it.”

“Well, there were several different components. But the actual computer was much like the one Margaret has in her office.”

Realizing Lucy had not been inside Margaret's office, I added, “A mini.”

Firelight cast moving shadows on her face. “I'll bet JON is a mainframe that isn't a mainframe. I'll bet it's a series of minis strung together all of it connected by UNIX or some other multiuser, multitasking environment. If you got me access to the system, I could probably do it from your terminal here in the house, Aunt Kay.”

“I don't want anything traced back to me,” I said with feeling.

“Nothing would be traced back to you. I would dial into your computer downtown, then go through a series of gateways, set up a really complicated link. By the time all was said and done, I'd be very hard to track.”

Marino headed to the bathroom.

“He acts like he lives here,” Lucy said.

“Not quite,” I replied.

Several minutes later, I walked Marino out. The crusty snow of the lawn seemed to radiate light, and the air was sharp in my lungs like the first hit of a menthol cigarette.

“I'd love it if you would join Lucy and me for Christmas dinner,” I said from the doorway.

He hesitated, looking at his car parked on the street. “That's mighty nice of you, but I can't make it, Doc.”

“I wish you did not dislike Lucy so much,' I said, hurt.

“I'm tired of her treating me like a dumb shit who was born in a barn.”

“Sometimes you act like a dumb shit who was born in a barn. And you haven't tried very hard to earn her respect.”

“She's a spoiled Miami brat.”

“When she was ten, she was a Miami brat,” I said. “But she's never been spoiled. In fact, quite the opposite is true. I want you two to get along. I want that for my Christmas present.”

“Who said I was giving you a Christmas present?”

“Of course you are. You're going to give me what I've just requested. And I know exactly how to make it happen.”

“How?” he asked suspiciously.

“Lucy wants to learn to shoot and you just told her you could shoot the twelve off a dock. You could give her a lesson or two.”

“Forget it” he said.