Postmortem

Chapter 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And I wouldn't blame you."

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

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

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

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

"Good point."

We thought for a minute.

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

He wanted to make sure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Then what?"

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

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

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

"The gloves were lined with talc."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The soap went crazy, blazing neon white.

"I'll be damned…"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My anxious inner voice was nagging at me again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vander was saying, "We've got to figure out the composition of this stuff."

Like thoughtful shoppers, we needed to find a box of the soap and read the ingredients.

"I'll hit the ladies' rooms," I volunteered.

"I'll hit the men's."

What a scavenger hunt this turned out to be.

After wandering in and out of the ladies' rooms throughout the building I got smart and found Wingo. One of his jobs was to fill all the soap dispensers in the morgue. He directed me to the janitor's closet on the first floor, several doors down from my office. There, on a top shelf, right next to a pile of dusting rags, was an industrial-sized gray box of Borawash hand soap.

The main ingredient was borax.

A quick check in one of my chemical reference books hinted at why the soap powder lit up like the Fourth of July. Borax is a boron compound, a crystalline substance that conducts electricity like a metal at high temperatures. Industrial uses of it range from the making of ceramics, special glass, washing powders and disinfectants, to the manufacturing of abrasives and rocket fuels.

Ironically, a large percentage of the world's supply of borax is mined in Death Valley.

Friday night came and went, and Marino did not call.

By seven o'clock the following morning I had parked behind my building and uneasily began checking the log inside the morgue office.

I shouldn't have needed convincing. I knew better. I would have been one of the first to be alerted. There were no bodies signed in I wasn't expecting, but the quiet seemed ominous.

I couldn't shake the sensation another woman was waiting for me to tend to her, that it was happening again. I kept expecting Marino to call.

Vander rang me up from his home at seven-thirty.

"Anything?" he asked.

"I'll call you immediately if there is."

"I'll be near the phone."

The laser was upstairs in his lab, loaded on a cart and ready to be brought down to the X-ray room should we need it. I'd reserved the first autopsy table, and late yesterday afternoon Wingo had scrubbed it mirror-bright and set up two carts with every conceivable surgical tool and evidence-collection container and device. The table and carts remained unused.

My only cases were a cocaine overdose from Fredericksburg and an accidental drowning from James City County.

Just before noon Wingo and I were alone, methodically finishing up the morning's work.

His running shoes squeaked across the damp tile floor as he leaned a mop against the wall and remarked to me, "Word is they had a hundred cops working overtime last night."

I continued filling out a death certificate. "Let's hope it makes a difference."

"Would if I was the guy."

He began hosing down a bloody table. "The guy'd be crazy to show his face. One cop told me they're stopping everybody out on the street. They see you walking around late they're going to check you out. Taking plate numbers, too, if they see your car parked somewhere late."

"What cop?"

I looked up at him. We had no cases from Richmond this morning, no cops in from Richmond either. "What cop told you this?"

"One of the cops who came in with the drowning."

"From James City County? How did he know what was going on in Richmond last night?"

Wingo glanced curiously at me. "His brother's a cop here in the city."

I turned away so he couldn't see my irritation. Too many people were talking. A cop whose brother was a cop in Richmond just glibly told Wingo, a stranger, this? What else was being said? There was too much talk. Too much. I was reading the most innocent remark differently, becoming suspicious of everything and everybody.

Wingo was saying, "My opinion's the guy's gone under. He's cooling his heels for a while, until everything quiets down."

He paused, water drumming down on the table. "Either that or he hit last night and no one's found the body yet."

I said nothing, my irritation becoming acute.

"Don't know, though."

His voice was muffled by splashing water. "Kind of hard to believe he'd try it. Too risky, you ask me. But I know some of the theories. They say some guys like this get really bold after a while. Like they're jerking everybody around, when the truth is they want to be caught. Could be he can't help himself and is begging for someone to stop him…"

"Wingo…" I warned.

He didn't seem to hear me and went on, "Has to be some kind of sickness. He knows he's sick. I'm pretty sure of it. Maybe he's begging someone to save him from himself…"

"Wingo!" I raised my voice and spun around in my chair. He'd turned off the water but it was too late. My words were out and startlingly loud in the still, empty suite "He doesn't want to be caught!"

His lips parted in surprise, his face stricken by my sharpness. "Gee. I didn't mean to upset you, Dr. Scarpetta. I…"

"I'm not upset," I snapped. "But people like this bastard don't want to be caught, okay? He isn't sick, okay? He's antisocial, he's evil and he does it because he wants to, okay?"

Shoes quietly squeaking, he slowly got a sponge out of a sink and began wiping down the sides of the table. He wouldn't look at me.

I stared after him in a defeated way.

He didn't look up from his cleaning.

I felt bad. "Wingo?"

I pushed back from the desk. "Wingo?"

He reluctantly came over to me, and I lightly touched his arm. "I apologize. I have no reason to be short with you."

"No problem," he said, and the uneasiness in his eyes unnerved me. "I know what you're going through. With what's been happening and all. Makes me crazy, you know. Like I'm sitting around all the time trying to figure out something to do. All this stuff you're getting hit with these days and I can't figure out anything. I just, well, I just wish I could do something…"

So that was it! I hadn't hurt his feelings as much as I had reinforced his worries. Wingo was worried about me. He knew I wasn't myself these days, that I was strung tight to the point of breaking. Maybe it was becoming apparent to everyone else, too. The leaks, the computer violation, the mislabeled slides. Maybe no one would be surprised if I were eventually accused of incompetence "We saw it coming," people would say. "She was getting unhinged."

For one thing, I wasn't sleeping well. Even when I tried to relax, my mind was a machine with no Off switch. It ran on and on until my brain was overheated and my nerves were humming like power lines.

Last night I had tried to cheer up Lucy by taking her out to dinner and a movie. The entire time we were inside the restaurant and the theater I was waiting for my pager to go off, and every so often I tested it to make sure the batteries were still charged. I didn't trust the silence.

By 3:00 P. M. I'd dictated two autopsy reports and demolished a stack of micro dictations. When I heard my phone ring as I was getting on the elevator, I dashed back to my office and snatched up the receiver.

It was Bill.

"We still on?"

I couldn't say no. "Looking forward to it," I replied with enthusiasm I didn't feel. "But I'm not sure my company is worth writing home about these days."

"I won't write home about it, then."

I left the office.

It was another sunny day, but hotter. The grass border around my building was beginning to look parched, and I heard on the radio as I was driving home that the Hanover tomato crop was going to be damaged if we didn't get more rain. It had been a peculiar and volatile spring. We had long stretches of sunny, windy weather, and then quite out of nowhere, a fierce black army of clouds would march across the sky. Lightning would knock out electricity all over the city, and the rain would billow down in sheets. It was like dashing a bucket of water in the face of a thirsty man-it happened too fast for him to drink a drop.

Sometimes I was struck by certain parallels in life. My relationship with Bill had been little different from the weather. He marched in with an almost ferocious beauty, and I discovered all I wanted was a gentle rain, something quiet to quench the longing of my heart. I was looking forward to seeing him tonight, and yet I wasn't.

He was punctual, as always, and drove up at five exactly.

"It's good and it's bad," he remarked when we were on my back patio lighting the grill.

"Bad?" I asked. "I don't think you mean it quite like that, Bill."

The sun was at a sharp angle and still very hot, but clouds were streaming across the face of it, throwing us into intervals of shade and white light. The wind had whipped up and the air was pregnant with change.

He wiped his forehead on his shirtsleeve and squinted at me. A gust of wind bent the trees and sent a paper towel fluttering across the patio. "Bad, Kay, because his getting quiet may mean he's left the area."

We backed away from the smoldering coals and sipped from bottles of beer. I couldn't endure the thought that the killer might have moved on. I wanted him here. At least we were familiar with what he was doing. My nagging fear was he might begin striking in other cities where the cases would be worked by detectives and medical examiners who did not know what we knew. Nothing could foul up an investigation like a multi jurisdictional effort. Cops were jealous of their turf. Each investigator wanted to make the arrest, and he thought he could work the case better than anyone else. It got to the point one thought a case belonged to him.

I supposed I was not above feeling possessive either. The victims had become my wards, and their only hope for justice was for their killer to be caught and prosecuted here. A person can be charged with only so many capital murders, and a conviction somewhere else might preclude a trial here. It was an outrageous thought. It would be as if the deaths of the women in Richmond were practice, a warm-up, and utterly in vain. Maybe it would turn out that everything happening to me was in vain, too.

Bill was squirting more lighter fluid on the charcoal. He backed away from the grill and looked at me, his face flushed from the heat.

"How about your computer?" he asked. "Anything new?"

I hesitated. There was no point in my being evasive. Bill knew very well that I'd ignored Amburgey's orders and hadn't changed the password or done anything else to, quote, "secure" my data. Bill was standing right over me last Monday night when I activated answer mode and set the echo on again as if I were inviting the perpetrator to try again. Which was exactly what I was doing.

"It doesn't appear anyone else has gotten in, if that's what you mean."

"Interesting," he mused, taking another swallow of beer. "It doesn't make much sense. You'd think the person would try to get into Lori Petersen's case."

"She isn't in the computer," I reminded him. "Nothing new is going into the computer until these cases are no longer under active investigation."

"So the case isn't in the computer. But how's the person getting in going to know that unless she looks?"

"She?"

"She, he-whoever."

"Well, she-he-whoever looked the first time and couldn't pull up Lori's case."

"Still doesn't make a lot of sense, Kay," he insisted. "Come to think of it, it doesn't make a lot of sense someone would have tried in the first place. Anybody who knows much about computer entry would have realized a case autopsied on a Saturday isn't likely to be in the office data base by Monday."

"Nothing ventured, nothing gained," I muttered.

I was edgy around Bill. I couldn't seem to relax or give myself up to what should have been a lovely evening.

Inch-thick rib eyes were marinating in the kitchen. A bottle of red wine was breathing on the counter. Lucy was making the salad, and she was in fine spirits considering we hadn't heard a word from her mother, who was off somewhere with her illustrator. Lucy seemed perfectly content. In her fantasies she was beginning to believe she would never leave, and it troubled me that she'd begun hinting at how nice it would be "when Mr. Boltz" and I "got married."

Sooner or later I would have to dash her dreams against the hard rock of reality. She would be going home just as soon as her mother returned to Miami, and Bill and I were not going to get married.

I'd begun scrutinizing him as though for the first time. He was staring pensively at the flaming charcoal, his beer absently cradled in both hands, the hair on his arms and legs gold like pollen in the sun. I saw him through a veil of rising heat and smoke, and it seemed a symbol of the distance growing between us.

Why did his wife kill herself with his gun? Was it simply utilitarian, that his gun was the most convenient means of instantly snuffing herself out? Or was it her way of punishing him for sins I knew nothing of? His wife shot herself in the chest while she was sitting up in bed-in their bed. She pulled the trigger that Monday morning just hours, maybe even minutes, after they made love. Her PERK was positive for sperm. The faint scent of perfume still lingered on her body when I examined her at the scene. What was the last thing Bill said to her before he left for work? "Earth to Kay…"

My eyes focused.

Bill was staring at me. "Off somewhere?" he asked, slipping an arm around my waist, his breath close to my cheek. "Can I come?"

"I was just thinking."

"About what? And don't tell me it's about the office…"

I came out with it. "Bill, there's some paperwork missing from one of the case files you, Amburgey and Tanner were looking through the other day…"

His hand kneading the small of my back went still. I could feel the anger in the pressure of his fingers. "What paperwork?"

"I'm not real sure," I nervously replied. I didn't dare get specific, didn't dare mention the PERK label missing from Lori Petersen's file. "I was just wondering if you may have noticed anyone accidentally picking up anything-" He abruptly removed his arm and blurted out, "Shit. Can't you push these goddam cases out of your mind for one goddam evening?"

"Bill…"

"Enough, all right?"

He plunged his hands into the pockets of his shorts and wouldn't look at me. "Jesus, Kay. You're going to make me crazy. They're dead. The women are fucking dead. Dead. Dead! You and I are alive. Life goes on. Or at least it's supposed to. It's going to do you in-it's going to do us in-if you don't stop obsessing over these cases."

But for the rest of the evening, while Bill and Lucy were chatting about inconsequential matters at the dinner table, my ear was turned toward the phone. I kept expecting it to ring. I was waiting for Marino's call.

When it rang early in the morning the rain was lashing my house and I was sleeping restlessly, my dreams fragmented, worrisome.

I fumbled for the receiver.

No one was there.

"Hello?" I said again as I flicked on the lamp.

In the background a television was faintly playing. I could hear the murmur of distant voices reciting lines I could not make out, and as my heart thudded against my ribs I slammed down the receiver in disgust.

It was Monday now, early afternoon. I was going over the preliminary lab reports of the tests the forensic scientists were conducting upstairs.

They had given the strangling cases a top priority. Everything else - blood alcohol levels, street drugs and barbiturates was temporarily on hold. I had four very fine scientific minds focused on trace amounts of a glittery residue that might be a cheap soap powder found in public restrooms all over the city.

The preliminary reports weren't exactly thrilling. So far, we couldn't even say very much about the known sample, the Borawash soap we used in the building. It was approximately twenty five percent "inert ingredient, an abrasive," and seventy-five percent sodium borate. We knew this because the manufacturer's chemists had told us so. Scanning electron microscopy wasn't so sure. Sodium borate, sodium carbonate and sodium nitrate, for example, all came up as flat-out sodium in SEM. The trace amounts of the glittery residue came up the same way - as sodium. It's about as specific as saying something contains trace elements of lead, which is everywhere, in the air, in the soil, in the rain. We never tested for lead in gunshot residues because a positive result wouldn't mean a thing.

In other words, all that glitters isn't borax.

The trace evidence we'd found on the slain women's bodies could be something else, such as a sodium nitrate with uses ranging from fertilizer to a component of dynamite. Or it could be a crystal carbonate used as a constituent in photography developers. Theoretically, the killer could spend his working hours in a darkroom or in a greenhouse or on a farm. How many substances out there contain sodium? God only knows.

Vander was testing a variety of other sodium compounds in the laser to see if they sparkled. It was a quick way to mark items off our list.

Meanwhile, I had my own ideas. I wanted to know who else in the greater Richmond metropolitan area ordered Borawash, who in addition to the Health and Human Services Department. So I called the distributor in New Jersey. I got some secretary who referred me to sales who referred me to accounting who referred me to data processing who referred me to public relations who referred me back to accounting.

Next, I got an argument.

"Our list of clients is confidential. I'm not allowed to release that. You're what kind of examiner?"

"Medical examiner," I measured out each word. "This is Dr. Scarpetta, chief medical examiner in Virginia."

"Oh. You grant licenses to physicians, then-"

"No. We investigate deaths."

A pause. "You mean a coroner?"

There was no point in explaining that, no, I was not a coroner. Coroners are elected officials. They usually aren't forensic pathologists. You can be a gas station attendant and get elected coroner in some states. I let him think he was in the right ballpark and this only made matters worse.

"I don't understand. Are you suggesting someone is saying Borawash is fatal? That just isn't possible. To my knowledge, it isn't toxic, absolutely not. We've never had any problems of that nature. Did someone eat it? I'm going to have to refer you to my supervisor…"

I explained a substance that may be Borawash had been found at several related crime scenes but the cleanser had nothing to do with the deaths, the potential toxicity of the soap wasn't my concern. I told him I could get a court order, which would only waste more of his time and mine. I heard keys clicking as he went into a computer.

"I think you're going to want me to send this to you, ma'am. There are seventy-three names here, clients in Richmond."

"Yes, I would very much appreciate it if you would send me a printout as quickly as possible. But if you would, read me the list over the phone, please."

Decidedly lacking in enthusiasm, he did, and a lot of good it did. I didn't recognize most of the businesses except for the Department of Motor Vehicles, Central Supply for the city, and of course, HHSD. Collectively speaking, they included probably ten thousand employees, everyone from judges to public defenders to prosecutors to the entire police force to mechanics at the state and city garages. Somewhere within this great pool of people was a Mr. Nobody with a fetish for cleanliness.

I was returning to my desk a little after 3:00 P.M. with another cup of coffee when Rose buzzed me and transferred a call.

"She's been dead awhile," Marino was saying.

I grabbed my bag and was out the door.