Postmortem

Chapter 13

The next morning I was at the office by six. No one else was in, the phones up front still coded to roll over to the state switchboard.

While coffee was dripping, I stepped into Margaret's office. The computer in answer mode was still daring the perpetrator to try again. He hadn't.

It didn't make sense. Did he know we had discovered the break in after he tried to pull up Lori Petersen's case last week? Did he get spooked? Did he suspect nothing new was being entered? Or was there some other reason? I stared at the dark screen. Who are you? I wondered. What do you want from me? The ringing started again down the hall. Three rings and abrupt silence as the state operator intervened.

"He's very cunning, very deliberate…"

Fortosis didn't need to tell me that., "We're not dealing with some mental misfit…"

I wasn't expecting him to be anything like us. But he could be.

Maybe he was.

"… able to function well enough in society to maintain an acceptable public persona…"

He might be competent enough to work in any profession. He might use a computer on his job or he might have one at home.

He would want to get inside my mind. He would want to get inside my mind as much as I wanted to get inside his. I was the only real link between him and his victims. I was the only living witness. When I examined the contusions, the fractured bones, and the deep tissue cuts, I alone realized the force, the savageness required to inflict the injuries. Ribs are flexible in young, healthy people. He broke Lori's ribs by smashing his knees down on top of her rib cage with all of his weight. She was on her back then. He did this after he jerked the telephone cord out of the wall.

The fractures to her fingers were twist fractures, the bones violently wrenched out of joint. He gagged and tied her, then broke heir fingers one by one. He had no reason except to cause her excruciating pain and give her a taste of what was to come.

All the while, she was panicking for air. Panicking as the constricted blood flow ruptured vessels like small balloons and made her head feel as if it were going to explode. Then he forced himself inside her, into virtually every orifice.

The more she struggled, the more the electrical cord tightened around her neck until she blacked out for the last time and died.

I had reconstructed all of it. I had reconstructed what he did to all of them.

He was wondering what I knew. He was arrogant. He was paranoid.

Everything was in the computer, everything he did to Patty, to Brenda, to Cecile… The description of every injury, every shred of evidence we'd found, every laboratory test I'd instigated.

Was he reading the words I dictated? Was he reading my mind? My low-heeled shoes clicked sharply along the empty hallway as I ran back to my office. In a burst of frantic energy, I emptied the contents of my billfold until I found the business card, off white with the Times masthead in raised black Gothic print across the center. On the back was the ballpoint scribbling of an unsteady hand.

I dialed Abby Turnbull's pager number.

I scheduled the meeting for the afternoon because when I spoke to Abby her sister's body had not yet been released. I didn't want Abby inside the building until Henna was gone and in the care of the funeral home.

Abby was on time. Rose quietly showed her to my office and I just as quietly shut both doors.

She looked terrible. Her face was more deeply lined, her color almost gray. Her hair was loose and bushy over her shoulders, and she was dressed in a wrinkled white cotton blouse and khaki skirt. When she lit a cigarette, I noticed she was shaking. Somewhere deep within the emptiness of her eyes was a glint of grief, of rage.

I began by telling her what I told the loved ones of any of the victims whose cases I worked.

"The cause of your sister's death, Abby, was strangulation due to the ligature around her neck."

"How long?" She blew out a tremulous stream of smoke. "How long did she live after… after he got to her?"

"I can't tell you exactly. But the physical findings lead me to suspect her death was quick."

Not quick enough, I did not say. I found fibers inside Henna's mouth. She had been gagged. The monster wanted her alive for a while and he wanted her quiet. Based on the amount of blood loss, I'd classified her cutting injuries as perimortem, meaning I could say with certainty only that they were afflicted around the time of death. She bled very little into surrounding tissues after the assault with the knife. She may already have been dead. She may have been unconscious.

More likely it was worse than that. I suspected the cord from the venetian blinds was jerked tight around her neck when she straightened her legs in a violent reflex to pain.

"She had petechial hemorrhages in the conjunctivae, and facial and neck skin," I said to Abby. "In other words, rupture of the small, superficial vessels of the eyes and face. This is caused by pressure, by cervical occlusion of the jugular veins due to the ligature around her neck."

"How long did she live?" she dully asked again.

"Minutes," I repeated.

That's as far as I intended to go. Abby seemed slightly relieved. She was seeking solace in the hope her sister's suffering was minimal. Someday, when the case was closed and Abby was stronger, she would know. God help her, she would know about the knife.

"That's all?" she asked shakily.

"That's all I can say now," I told her. "I'm sorry. I'm so terribly sorry about Henna."

She smoked for a while, taking nervous jerky drags as if she didn't know what to do with her hands. She was biting her lower lip, trying to keep it from trembling.

When she finally met my eyes, her own were uneasy, suspicious.

She knew I hadn't asked her here for this. She sensed there was something else.

"It's really not why you called, is it?"

"Not entirely," I replied frankly.

Silence.

I could see the resentment, the anger building.

"What?" she demanded. "What is it you want from me?"

"I want to know what you're going to do."

Her eyes flashed. "Oh, I get it. You're worried about your goddam self. Jesus Christ. You're just like the rest of them!"

"I'm not worried about myself," I said very calmly. "I'm beyond that, Abby. You have enough to cause me trouble. If you want to run my office and me into the ground, then do it. That's your decision."

She looked uncertain, her eyes shifting away.

"I understand your rage."

"You couldn't possibly understand it."

"I understand it better than you might imagine."

Bill flashed in my mind. I could understand Abby's rage very well.

"You couldn't. Nobody could!" she exclaimed. "He stole my sister from me. He stole a part of my life. I'm so damn tired of people taking things from me! What kind of world is this," she choked, "where someone can do something like that? Oh, Jesus! I don't know what I'm going to do…"

I said firmly, "I know you intend to investigate your sister's death on your own, Abby. Don't do it."

"Somebody's got to!" she cried out. "What? I'm supposed to leave it up to the Keystone Kops?"

"Some matters you must leave to the police. But you can help. You can if you really want to."

"Don't patronize me!"

"I'm not."

"I'll do it my own way…"

"No. You won't do it your own way, Abby. Do it for your sister."

She stared blankly at me with red-rimmed eyes.

"I asked you here because I'm taking a gamble. I need your help."

"Right! You need me to help by leaving town and keeping the hell out of it.."

I was slowly shaking my head.

She looked surprised.

"Do you know Benton Wesley?"

"The profiler," she replied hesitantly. "I know who he is."

I glanced up at the wall clock. "He'll be here in ten minutes."

She stared at me for a long time. "What? What is it, exactly, you want me to do?"

"Use your journalistic connections to help us find him."

"Him?"

Her eyes widened.

I got up to see if there was any coffee left.

Wesley was reluctant when I had explained my plan over the telephone, but now that the three of us were in my office it seemed clear to me he'd accepted it.

"Your complete cooperation is non-negotiable," he said to Abby emphatically. "I've got to have your assurance you'll do exactly what we agree upon. Any improvisation or creative thinking on your part could blow the investigation right out of the water. Your discretion is imperative."

She nodded, then pointed out, "If it's the killer breaking into the computer, why's he done it only once?"

"Once we're aware of," I reminded her.

"Still, it hasn't happened again since you discovered it."

Wesley suggested, "He's been running like hell. He's murdered two women in two weeks and there's probably been sufficient information in the press to satisfy his curiosity. He could be sitting pretty, feeling smug, because by all news accounts we don't have anything on him."

"We've got to inflame him," I added. "We've got to do something to make him so paranoid he gets reckless. One way to do this is to make him think my office has found evidence that could be the break we've been waiting for."

"If he's the one getting into the computer," Wesley summarized, "this could be sufficient incentive for him to try again to discover what we supposedly know."

He looked at me.

The fact was we had no break in the case. I'd indefinitely banished Margaret from her office and the computer was to be left in answer mode. Wesley had set up a tracer to track all calls made to her extension. We were going to use the computer to lure the murderer by having Abby's paper print a story claiming the forensic investigation had come up with a "significant link."

"He's going to be paranoid, upset enough to believe it," I predicted. "If he's ever been treated in a hospital around here, for example, he's going to worry now that we might track him through old charts. If he gets any special medications from a pharmacy, he's got that to worry about, too."

All of this hinged on the peculiar odor Matt Petersen mentioned to the police. There was no other "evidence" to which we could safely allude.

The one piece of evidence the killer would have trouble with was DNA.

I could bluff him from hell to breakfast with it, and it might not even be a bluff.

Several days ago, I had gotten copies of the reports from the first two cases. I studied the vertical array of bands of varying shades and widths, patterns that looked remarkably like the bar codes stamped on supermarket packaged foods. There were three radioactive probes in each case, and the position of the bands in each probe for Patty Lewis's case was indistinguishable from the position of the bands in the three probes in Brenda Steppe's.

"Of course this doesn't give us his identity," I explained to Abby and Wesley. "All we can say is if he's black, then only one out of 135 million men theoretically can fit the same pattern. If he's Caucasian, only one out of 500 million men."

DNA is the microcosm of the total person, his life code. Genetic engineers in a private laboratory in New York had isolated the DNA from the samples of seminal fluid I collected. They snipped the samples at specific sites, and the fragments migrated to discrete regions of an electrically charged surface covered with a thick gel. A positively charged pole was at one end of the surface, a negatively charged pole at the other.

"DNA carries a negative charge," I went on. "Opposites attract."

The shorter fragments traveled farther and faster in the positive direction than the longer ones did, and the fragments spread out across the gel, forming the band pattern. This was transferred to a nylon membrane and exposed to a probe.

"I don't get it," Abby interrupted. "What probe?"

I explained. "The killer's double-stranded DNA fragments were broken, or denatured, into single strands. In more simplistic terms, they were unzipped like a zipper. The probe is a solution of single-stranded DNA of a specific base sequence that's labeled with a radioactive marker. When the solution, or probe, was washed over the nylon membrane, the probe sought out and bonded with complementary single strands-with the killer's complementary single strands."

"So the zipper is zipped back up?" she asked. "But it's radioactive now?"

"The point is that his pattern can now be visualized on X-ray film," I said.

"Yeah, his bar code. Too bad we can't run it over a scanner and come up with his name," Wesley dryly added.

"Everything about him is there," I continued. "The problem is the technology isn't sophisticated enough yet to read the specifics, such as genetic defects, eye and hair color, that sort of thing. There are so many bands present covering so many points in the person's genetic makeup it's simply too complex to definitively make anything more out of it than a match or a nonmatch."

"But the killer doesn't know that."

Wesley looked speculatively at me.

"That's right."

"Not unless he's a scientist or something," Abby interjected.

"We'll assume he isn't," I told them. "I suspect he never gave DNA profiling a thought until he started reading about it in the papers. I doubt he understands the concept very well."

"I'll explain the procedure in my story," Abby thought out loud. "I'll make him understand it just enough to freak him."

"Just enough to make him think we know about his defect," Wesley agreed. "If he has a defect… That's what worries me, Kay."

He looked levelly at me. "What if he doesn't?"

I patiently went over it again. "What continues to stand out to me is Matt Petersen's reference to 'pancakes,' to the smell inside the bedroom reminding him of pancakes, of something sweet but sweaty."

"Maple syrup," Wesley recalled.

"Yes. If the killer has a body odor reminiscent of maple syrup, he may have some sort of anomaly, some type of metabolic disorder. Specifically, 'maple syrup urine disease.'"

"And it's genetic?" Wesley had asked this twice.

"That's the beauty of it, Benton. If he has it, it's in his DNA somewhere."

"I've never heard of it," Abby said. "This disease."

"Well, it's not exactly your common cold."

"Then exactly what is it?"

I got up from my desk and went to a bookcase. Sliding out the fat Textbook of Medicine, I opened it to the right page and set it before them.

"It's an enzyme defect," I explained as I sat back down. "The defect results in amino acids accumulating in the body like a poison. In the classic or acute form, the person suffers severe mental retardation and/or death at infancy, which is why it's rare to find healthy adults of sound mind who suffer from the disease. But it's possible. In its mild form, which would have to be what the killer suffers from if this is his affliction, postnatal development is normal, symptoms are intermittent, and the disease can be treated through a low-protein diet, and possibly through dietary supplements-specifically, thiamine, or vitamin B1, at ten times the normal daily intake."

"In other words," Wesley said, leaning forward and frowning as he scanned the book, "he could suffer from the mild form, lead a fairly normal life, be smart as hell-but stink?"

I nodded. "The most common indication of maple syrup urine disease is a characteristic odor, a distinctive maple syrupy odor of the urine and perspiration. The symptoms are going to be more acute when he's under stress, the odor more pronounced when he's doing what stresses him most, which is committing these murders. The odor's going to get into his clothing. He's going to have a long history of being self-conscious about his problem."

"You wouldn't smell it in his seminal fluid?" Wesley asked.

"Not necessarily."

"Well," Abby said, "if he's got this body odor, then he must take a lot of showers. If he works around people. They'd notice it, the smell."

I didn't respond.

She didn't know about the glittery residue, and I wasn't going to tell her. If the killer has this chronic odor, it wouldn't be the least bit unusual for him to be compulsive about washing his armpits, his face and hands, frequently throughout the day while he's exposed to people who might notice his problem. He might be washing himself while at work, where there might be a dispenser of borax soap in the men's room.

"It's a gamble." Wesley leaned back in his chair. "Jeez."

Shaking his head. "If the smell Petersen mentioned was something he imagined or something he confused with another odor maybe a cologne the killer was wearing-we're going to look like fools. The squirrel's going to be all the more certain we don't know what the hell we're doing."

"I don't think Petersen imagined the smell," I said with conviction. "As shocked as he was when he found his wife's body, the smell had to be unusual and potent for Petersen to notice and remember it. I can't think of a single cologne that would smell like sweaty maple syrup. I'm speculating the killer was sweating profusely, that he'd left the bedroom maybe minutes before Petersen walked in."

"The disease causes retardation…" Abby was flipping through the book.

"If it's not treated immediately after birth," I repeated.

"Well, this bastard isn't retarded." She looked up at me, her eyes hard.

"Of course he isn't," Wesley agreed. "Psychopaths are anything but stupid. What we want to do is make the guy think we think he's stupid. Hit him where it hurts-his goddam pride, which is hooked up with his grandiose notions of his off-the-charts IQ."

"This disease," I told them, "could do that. If he has it, he's going to know it. Possibly it runs in his family. He's going to be hyper-sensitive, not only about his body odor, but also about the mental deficiencies the defect is known to cause."

Abby was making notes to herself. Wesley was staring off at the wall, his face tense. He didn't look happy.

Blowing in frustration, he said, "I just don't know, Kay. If the guy doesn't have this maple syrup whatever…"

He shook his head. "He'll be on to us in a flash. It could set the investigation back."

"You can't set back something that is already backed into a corner," I said evenly. "I have no intention of naming the disease in the article."

I turned to Abby. "We'll refer to it as a metabolic disorder. This could be a number of things. He's going to worry. Maybe it's something he doesn't know he has. He thinks he's in perfect health? How can he be sure? He's never had a team of genetic engineers studying his body fluids before. Even if the guy's a physician, he can't rule out the possibility he has an abnormality that's been latent most of his life, sitting there like a bomb waiting to go off. We'll plant the anxiety in his head. Let him stew over it. Hell, let him think he's got something fatal.

Maybe it will send him to the nearest clinic for a physical. Maybe it will send him to the nearest medical library. The police can make a check, see who seeks out a local doctor or frantically begins riffling through medical reference books at one of the libraries. If he's the one who's been breaking into the computer here, he'll probably do it again. Whatever happens, my gut tells me something will happen. It's going to rattle his cage."

The three of us spent the next hour drafting the language in Abby's article.

"We can't have attribution," she insisted. "No way. If these quotes are attributed to the chief medical examiner, it will sound fishy because you've refused to talk in the past. And you've been ordered not to talk now. It's got to look like the information was leaked."

"Well," I commented dryly, "I suppose you can pull your famous 'medical source' out of your hat."

Abby read the draft aloud. It didn't set well with me. It was too vague. "Alleged" this and "possible" that.

If only we had his blood. The enzyme defect, if it existed, could be assayed in his leukocytes, his white blood cells. If only we had something.

As if on cue my telephone buzzed. It was Rose. "Dr. Scarpetta, Sergeant Marino's here. He says it's urgent."

I met him in the lobby. He was carrying a bag, the familiar gray plastic bag used to hold clothing connected to criminal cases.

"You ain't gonna believe this." He was grinning, his face flushed. "You know Magpie?"

I was staring at the bulging bag, my confusion apparent.

"You know, Magpie. All over the city with all his earthly belongings in a grocery cart he swiped somewhere. Spends his hours rummaging through garbage cans and Dumpsters."

"A street person?" What was Marino talking about?

"Yo. The Grand Dragon of street persons. Well, over the weekend he's fishing around in this Dumpster less than a block from where Henna Yarborough was whacked and guess what? He finds himself a nice navy blue jumpsuit, Doc. Flips him right out because the damn thing's stained with blood. He's a snitch of mine, see. Has the brains to stuff the thing in a trash bag, and he's been wheeling the damn thing around for days, looking for me. So he waves me down on the street a little while ago, charges me the usual ten-spot, and Merry Christmas."

He was untwisting the tie around the top of the bag. "Take a whiff."

It almost knocked me over, not just the stench of the days-old bloody garment but a powerful maple-sweetish, sweaty odor. A chill ran down my spine.

"Hey," Marino went on, "I bopped by Petersen's apartment before I come over here. Had him take a whiff."

"Is it the odor he remembers?"

He shot his finger at me and winked. "Bingo."

For two hours Vander and I worked on the blue jumpsuit. It would take a while for Betty to analyze the bloodstains, but there was little doubt in our minds the jumpsuit was worn by the killer. It sparkled under the laser like mica-flecked blacktop.

We suspected when he assaulted Henna with the knife he got very bloody and wiped his hands on his thighs. The cuffs of the sleeves were also stiff with dried blood. Quite likely it was his habit to wear something like a jumpsuit over his clothes when he struck. Maybe it was routine for him to toss the garment into a Dumpster after the crime. But I doubted it. He tossed this one because he made this victim bleed.

I was willing to bet he was smart enough to know bloodstains are permanent. If he were ever picked up, he had no intention of having anything hanging in his closet that might be stained with old blood. He had no intention of anyone's tracing the jumpsuit either. The label had been removed.

The fabric looked like a cotton and synthetic blend, dark blue, the size a large or perhaps an extra-large. I was reminded of the dark fibers found on Lori Petersen's window sill and on her body. There were a few dark fibers on Henna's body as well.

The three of us had said nothing to Marino about what we were doing. He was out on the street somewhere, maybe at home drinking beer in front of the TV. He didn't have a clue. When the news broke, he was going to think it was legitimate, that the information was leaked and related to the jumpsuit he turned in and to the DNA reports recently sent to me. We wanted everybody to think the news was legitimate.

In fact, it probably was. I could think of no other reason for the killer's having such a distinctive body odor, unless Petersen was imagining things and the jumpsuit just happened to be tossed on top of a Mrs. Butterworth's maple syrup bottle inside the Dumpster.

"It's perfect," Wesley was saying. "He never thought we'd find it. The toad had it all figured out, maybe even knew where the Dumpster was before he went out that night. He never thought we'd find it."

I stole a glance at Abby. She was holding up amazingly well.

"It's enough to run with," Wesley added.

I could see the headline: DNA, NEW EVIDENCE: SERIAL KILLER MAY HAVE METABOLIC DISORDER If he truly did have maple syrup urine disease, the front-page story ought to knock him off his feet.

"If your purpose is to entice him with the OCME computer," Abby said, "we have to make him think the computer figures in. You know, the data are related."

I thought for a minute. "Okay. We can do that if we say the computer got a hit on a recent data entry, information relating to a peculiar smell noted at one of the scenes and associated with a recently discovered piece of evidence. A search hit on an unusual enzyme defect that could cause a similar odor, but sources close to the investigation would not say exactly what this defect or disease might be, or if the defect has been verified by the results of recently completed DNA tests."

Wesley liked it. "Great. Let him sweat."

He didn't catch the pun.

"Let him wonder if we found the jumpsuit," he went on. "We don't want to give details. Maybe you can just say the police refused to disclose the exact nature of the evidence."

Abby continued to write.

I said, "Going back to your 'medical source,' it might be a good idea to have some pointed quotes coming from this person's mouth."

She looked up at me. "Such as?"

I eyed Wesley and replied, "Let this medical source refuse to reveal the specific metabolic disorder, as we've agreed. But have this source say the disorder can result in mental impairment, and in acute stages, retardation. Then add, uh… " I composed out loud, "An expert in human genetics stated that certain types of metabolic disorders can cause severe mental retardation. Though police believe the serial killer cannot possibly be severely mentally impaired, there is evidence to suggest he might suffer a degree of deficiency that manifests itself in disorganization and intermittent confusion."

Wesley muttered, "He'll be off the wall. It will absolutely enrage him."

"It's important we don't question his sanity," I continued. "It will come back to haunt us in court."

Abby suggested, "We'll simply have the source say so. We'll have the source distinguish between slowness and mental illness."

By now, she had filled half a dozen pages in her reporter's notepad.

She asked as she wrote, "This maple syrup business. Do we want to be that specific about the smell?"

"Yes," I said without pause. "This guy may work around the public. He's going to have colleagues, if nothing else. Someone may come forward."

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

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

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

Both of them looked surprised.

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

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

"Let him wonder that," I replied.

She nodded, bending over her notepad again.

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

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

"Emotional stress?"

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

"Then what?" I looked impassively at him.

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

"Depends on whether it becomes acute."

"Let's say it does."

"He's got a real problem."

"Meaning?"

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

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

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

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

"Possibly."

"Okay."

He hesitated. "What next?"

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

I stopped right there.

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

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

"It's been in my differential."

"And you didn't say anything."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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