Postmortem

Chapter 16

The distance between my right hand and the.38 beneath my pillow was twelve inches, no more.

It was the longest distance I'd ever known. It was forever. It was impossible. I wasn't thinking, just feeling that distance, as my heart went crazy, flailing against my ribs like a bird against the bars of its cage. Blood was roaring in my ears. My body was rigid, every muscle and tendon straining, stiff and quivering with fear. It was pitch-black inside my bedroom.

Slowly I nodded my head, the metallic words ringing, the hand crushing my lips against my teeth. I nodded. I nodded to tell him I wouldn't scream.

The knife against my throat was so big it felt like a machete. The bed tilted to the right and with a click I went blind. When my eyes adjusted to the lamplight, I looked at him and stifled a gasp.

I couldn't breathe or move. I felt the razor-thin blade biting coldly against my skin.

His face was white, his features flattened beneath a white nylon stocking. Slits were cut in it for eyes. Cold hatred poured from them without seeing. The stocking sucked in and out as he breathed. The face was hideous and inhuman, just inches from mine.

"One sound, I'll cut your head off."

Thoughts were sparks flying so fast and in so many directions. Lucy. My mouth was getting numb and I tasted the salty blood. Lucy, don't wake up. Tension ran through his arm, through his "Shut up!"

The hand tightened savagely. My jaw was going to shatter like an eggshell.

His eyes were darting, looking around, looking at everything inside my bedroom. They stopped at the draperies, at the cords hanging down. I could see him looking at them. I knew what he was thinking. I knew what he was going to do with them.

I'm going to die.

Don't. You don't want to do this. You don't have to do this.

I'm a person, like your mother, like your sister. You don't want to do this. I'm a human being like you. There are things I can tell you. About the cases. What the police know. You want to know what I know.

Don't. I'm a person. A person! I can talk to you! You have to let me talk to you! Fragmented speeches. Unspoken. Useless. I was imprisoned by silence. Please don't touch me. Oh, God, don't touch me.

I had to get him to take away his hand, to talk to me.

I tried to will my body to go limp, to relax. It worked a little. I loosened up a little, and he sensed it.

He eased the grip of his hand over my mouth, and I swallowed very slowly.

He was wearing a dark blue jumpsuit. Sweat stained the collar, and there were wide crescent moons under his arms. The hand holding the knife to my throat was sheathed in the translucent skin of a surgical glove. I could smell the rubber. I could smell him.

I saw the jumpsuit in Betty's lab, smelled the syrupy putrid smell of it as Marino was untying the plastic bag…

"Is it the smell he remembers?"

played in my mind like the rerun of an old movie. Marino's finger pointing at me as he winked, "Bingo…"

The jumpsuit flattened on the table inside the lab, a large or an extra large with bloody swatches cut out of it…

He was breathing hard.

"Please," I barely said without moving.

"Shut up!"

"I can tell you."

Then the eyes darted frantically to the cord leading out of my bedside lamp. Something white flashed out of his pocket and he stuffed it into my mouth and moved the knife away.

My neck was so stiff it was on fire. My face was numb. I tried to work the dry cloth forward in my mouth, pushing it around with my tongue without him noticing. Saliva was trickling down the back of my throat.

The house was absolutely silent. My ears were filled with the pounding of my blood. Lucy. Please, God.

The other women did what he said. I saw their suffused faces, their dead faces.

As I tried to remember what I knew about him, tried to make sense of what I knew about him. The knife was just inches from me, glinting in the lamplight. Lunge for the lamp and smash it to the floor.

My arms and legs were under the covers. I couldn't kick or grab or move. If the lamp crashed to the floor, the room would go black.

I wouldn't be able to see. He had the knife.

I could talk him out of it. If only I could talk, I could reason with him.

Their suffused faces, the cords cutting into their necks.

Twelve inches, no more. It was the longest distance I'd ever known.

He didn't know about the gun.

He was nervous, jerky, and seemed confused. His neck was flushed and dripping with sweat, his breathing labored and fast.

He wasn't looking at my pillow. He was looking around at everything, but he wasn't looking at my pillow.

"You move…"

He lightly touched the needle point of the knife to my throat.

My eyes were widely fixed on him.

"You're going to enjoy this, bitch."

It was a low, cold voice straight out of hell. "I've been saving the best for last."

The stocking sucking in and out. "You want to know how I've been doing it. Going to show you real slow."

The voice. It was familiar.

My right hand. Where was the gun? Was it farther to the right or to the left? Was it directly centered under my pillow? I couldn't remember. I couldn't think! He had to get to the cords. He couldn't cut the cord to the lamp. The lamp was the only light on. The switch to the overhead light was near the door. He was looking at it, at the vacant dark rectangle.

I eased my right hand up an inch.

The eyes darted toward me, then toward the draperies again.

My right hand was on my chest, almost to my right shoulder under the sheet.

I felt the edge of the mattress lift as he got up from the bed. The stains under his arms were bigger. He was soaking wet with sweat.

Looking at the light switch near the blank doorway, looking across the bedroom at the draperies again, he seemed indecisive.

It happened so fast. The hard cold shape knocked against my hand and my fingers seized it and I was rolling off the bed, pulling the covers with me, thudding to the floor. The hammer clicked back and locked and I was sitting straight up, the sheet twisted around my hips, all of it happening at once.

I don't remember doing it. I don't remember doing any of it. It was instinct, someone else. My finger was against the trigger, hands trembling so badly the revolver was jumping up and down.

I don't remember taking the gag out.

I could only hear my voice.

I was screaming at him.

"You son of a bitch! You goddam son of a bitch!"

The gun was bobbing up and down as I screamed, my terror, my rage exploding in profanities that seemed to be coming from someone else. Screaming, I was screaming at him to take off his mask.

He was frozen on the other side of the bed. It was an odd detached awareness. The knife in his gloved hand, I noticed, was just a folding knife.

His eyes were riveted to the revolver.

"TAKE IT OFF!"

His arm moved slowly and the white sheath fluttered to the floor…

As he spun around…

I was screaming and explosions were going off, spitting fire and splintering glass, so fast I didn't know what was happening.

It was madness. Things were flying and disconnected, the knife flashing out of his hand as he slammed against the bedside table, pulling the lamp to the floor as he fell, and a voice said something. The room went black.

A frantic scraping sound was coming from the wall near the door…

"Where're the friggin' lights in this joint…?"

I would have done it.

I know I would have done it.

I never wanted to do anything so badly in my life as I wanted to squeeze that trigger.

I wanted to blow a hole in his heart the size of the moon.

We'd been over it at least five times. Marino wanted to argue. He didn't think it happened the way it did.

"Hey, the minute I saw him going through the window, Doe, I was following him. He couldn'ta been in your bedroom no more than thirty seconds before I got there. And you didn't have no damn gun out. You went for it and rolled off the bed when I busted in and blew him out of his size-eleven jogging shoes."

We were sitting in my downtown office Monday morning. I could hardly remember the past two days. I felt as if I'd been under water or on another planet.

No matter what he said, I believed I had my gun on the killer when Marino suddenly appeared in my doorway at the same time his.357 pumped four bullets into the killer's upper body. I didn't check for a pulse. I made no effort to stop the bleeding. I just sat in the twisted sheet on the floor, my revolver in my lap, tears streaming down my cheeks as it dawned on me.

The.38 wasn't loaded.

I was so upset, so distracted when I went upstairs to bed, I'd forgotten to load my gun. The cartridges were still in their box tucked under a stack of sweaters inside one of my dresser drawers where Lucy would never think to look.

He was dead.

He was dead when he hit my rug.

"He didn't have his mask off either," Marino was going on. "Memory plays weird tricks, you know? I pulled the damn stocking off his face soon as Snead and Riggy got there. By then he was already dead as dog food."

He was just a boy.

He was just a pasty-faced boy with kinky dirty-blond hair. His mustache was nothing more than a dirty fuzz.

I would never forget those eyes. They were windows through which I saw no soul. They were empty windows opening onto a darkness, like the ones he climbed through when he murdered women whose voices he'd heard over the phone.

"I thought he said something," I muttered to Marino. "I thought I heard him say something as he was falling. But I can't remember."

Hesitantly, I asked, "Did he?"

"Oh, yeah. He said one thing."

"What?" I shakily retrieved my cigarette from the ashtray.

Marino smiled snidely. "Same last words recorded on them little black boxes of crashed planes. Same last words for a lot of poor bastards. He said, 'Oh, shit.'

"One bullet severed his aorta. Another took out his left ventricle. One more went through a lung and lodged in his spine. The fourth one cut through soft tissue, missing every vital organ, and shattered my window.

I didn't do his autopsy. One of my deputy chiefs from northern Virginia left the report on my desk. I don't remember calling him in to do it but I must have.

I hadn't read the papers. I couldn't stomach it. Yesterday's headline in the evening edition was enough. I caught a glimpse of it as I hastily stuffed the paper in the garbage seconds after it landed on my front stoop: STRANGLER SLAIN BY DETECTIVE INSIDE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER'S BEDROOM Beautiful. I asked myself, Who does the public think was inside my bedroom at two o'clock in the morning, the killer or Marino? Beautiful.

The gunned-down psychopath was a communications officer hired by the city about a year ago. Communications officers in Richmond are civilians, they aren't really cops. He worked the six-to-midnight shift. His name was Roy McCorkle. Sometimes he worked 911. Sometimes he worked as a dispatcher, which was why Marino recognized the CB voice on the 911 tape I played for him over the phone. Marino didn't tell me he recognized the voice. But he did.

McCorkle wasn't on duty Friday night. He called in sick. He hadn't been to work since Abby's Thursday morning front page story. His colleagues didn't have much of an opinion of him one way or another except they found his CB phone manner and jokes amusing. They used to kid him about his frequent trips to the men's room, as many as a dozen during a shift. He was washing his hands, his face, his neck. A dispatcher walked in on him once and found McCorkle practically taking a sponge bath.

In the communications men's room was a dispenser of Borawash soap.

He was an "all-right guy."

No one who worked with him really knew him well. They assumed he had a woman he was seeing after hours, "a good-looking blonde" named "Christie."

There was no Christie. The only women he saw after hours were the ones he butchered. No-one who worked with him could believe he was the one, the strangler.

McCorkle, we were considering, may have murdered the three women in the Boston area years ago. He was driving a rig back then. One of his stops was Boston, where he delivered chickens to a packing plant. But we couldn't be sure. We may never know just how many women he murdered all over the United States. It could be dozens. He probably started out as a peeper, then progressed to a rapist. He had no police record. The most he'd ever gotten was a speeding ticket.

He was only twenty-seven.

According to his resume on file with the police department, he'd worked a number of jobs: trucker, dispatcher for a cement company in Cleveland, mail deliveryman and as a deliveryman for a florist in Philadelphia.

Marino wasn't able to find him Friday night but he didn't look very hard. From eleven-thirty Marino was on my property, out of sight behind shrubbery, watching. He was wearing a dark blue police jumpsuit so he would blend with the night. When he switched on the overhead light inside my bedroom, and I saw him standing there in the jumpsuit, the gun in hand, for a paralyzing second I didn't know who was the killer and who was the cop.

"See," he was saying,. "I'd been thinking about the Abby Turnbull connection, about the possibility the guy was after her and ended up with the sister by mistake. That worried me. I asked myself, what other lady in the city's he getting hooked into?"

He looked at me, his face thoughtful.

When Abby was followed from the newspaper late one night and dialed 911, it was McCorkle who answered the call. That was how he knew where she lived. Maybe he'd already thought of killing her, or maybe it didn't occur to him until he heard her voice and realized who she was. We would never know.

We did know all five women had dialed 911 in the past. Patty Lewis did less than two weeks before she was murdered. She called at 8:23 on a Thursday night, right after a bad rainstorm, to report a traffic light out a mile from her house. She was being a good citizen. She was trying to prevent an accident. She didn't want anybody to get hurt.

Cecile Tyler hit a nine instead of a four. A wrong number.

I never dialed 911.

I didn't need to.

My number and address were in the phone directory because medical examiners had to be able to reach me after business hours. Also I talked with several dispatchers on several occasions over the past few weeks when I was trying to find Marino. One of them might have been McCorkle. I'd never know. I don't think I wanted to know.

"Your picture's been in the paper and on TV," Marino went on. "You've been working all his cases, he's been wondering what you know. He's been thinking about you. Me, I was worried. Then all that shit about his metabolic disorder and your office having something on him."

He paced as he talked. "Now he's going to be hot. Now it's gotten personal. The snooty lady doctor here's maybe insulting his intelligence, his masculinity."

The phone calls I was getting at late hours "This pushes his button. He don't like no broad treating him like he's a stupid ass. He's thinking, 'The bitch thinks she's smart, better'n me. I'll show her. I'll fix her.'

"I was wearing a sweater under my lab coat. Both were buttoned up to the collar. I couldn't get warm. For the last two nights I'd slept in Lucy's room. I was going to redecorate my bedroom. I was thinking of selling my house.

"So I guess that big newspaper spread on him the other day rattled his cage all right. Benton said it was a blessing. That maybe he'd get reckless or something. I was pissed. You remember that?"

I barely nodded.

"You want to know the big reason I was so damned pissed?"

I just looked at him. He was like a kid. He was proud of himself. I was supposed to praise him, be thrilled, because he shot a man at ten paces, mowed him down inside my bedroom. The guy had a buck knife. That was it. What was he going to do, throw it? "Well, I'll tell you. For one thing, I got a little tip sometime back."

"A tip?"

My eyes focused. "What tip?"

"Golden Boy Boltz," he replied matter-of-factly as he flicked an ash. "Just so happens he was big enough to pass along something right before he blew out of town. Told me he was worried about you…"

"About me?" I blurted.

"Said he dropped by your house late one night and there was this strange car. It cruised up, cut its lights and sped off. He was antsy you was being watched, maybe it was the killer…"

"That was Abby!" I crazily broke out. "She came to see me, to ask me questions, saw Bill's car and panicked…"

Marino looked surprised, just for an instant. Then shrugged. "Whatever. Just as well it caught our attention, huh?"

I didn't say anything. I was on the verge of tears.

"It was enough to give me the jitters. Fact is, I've been watching your house for a while. Been watching it a lot of late nights. Then comes the damn story about the DNA link. I'm thinking this squirrel's maybe already casing the doc. Now he's really going to be off the wall. The story ain't going to lure him to the computer. It's going to lure him straight to her."

"You were right," I said, clearing my throat.

"You're damn right I was right."

Marino didn't have to kill him. No one would ever know except the two of us. I'd never tell. I wasn't sorry. I would have done it myself. Maybe I was sick inside because if I tried I would have failed. The.38 wasn't loaded. Click. That's as far as I would have gotten. I think I was sick inside because I couldn't save myself and I didn't want to thank Marino for my life.

He was going on and on. My anger started to simmer. It began creeping up my throat like bile.

When suddenly Wingo walked in.

"Uh."

Hands in his pockets, he looked uncertain as Marino eyed him in annoyance.

"Uh, Dr. Scarpetta. I know this isn't a good time and all. I mean, I know you're still upset…"

"I'm not upset!"

His eyes widened. He blanched.

Lowering my voice, I said, "I'm sorry, Wingo. Yes. I'm upset. I'm ragged. I'm not myself. What's on your mind?"

He reached in a pocket of his powder-blue silk trousers and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a cigarette butt, Benson Hedges 100's.

He placed it lightly on my blotter.

I looked blankly at him, waiting.

"Uh, well, you remember me asking about the commissioner, about whether he's an antismoker and all that?"

I nodded.

Marino was getting restless. He was looking around as if he were bored.

"You see, my friend Patrick. He works in accounting across the street, in the same building where Amburgey works. Well."

He was blushing. "Patrick and I, we meet sometimes at his car and go off for lunch. His assigned parking place is about two rows down from where Amburgey's is. We've seen him before."

"Seen him before?" I asked, baffled. "Seen Amburgey before? Doing what?"

Wingo leaned over and confided, "Seen him smoking, Dr. Scarpetta."

He straightened up. "I swear. Late morning and right after lunchtime, Patrick and me, we're sitting in the car, in Patrick's car, just talking, listening to tunes. We've seen Amburgey get into his black New Yorker and light up. He doesn't even use the ashtray because he doesn't want anybody to know. He's looking around the whole time. Then he flicks the butt out the window, looks around some more and strolls back toward the building squirting freshener in his mouth…"

He stared at me, bewildered.

I was laughing so hard I was crying. It must have been hysteria. I couldn't stop. I was pounding the top of my desk and wiping my eyes. I'm sure people could hear me up and down the hall.

Wingo started laughing, uneasily, then he couldn't stop either.

Marino scowled at both of us as if we were imbeciles. Then he was fighting a smile. In a minute he was choking on his cigarette and guffawing.

Wingo finally went on, "The thing is…"

He took a deep breath. "The thing is, Dr. Scarpetta, I waited until he did it and right after he left his car I ran over and collected the butt. I took it straight up to serology, to Betty, had her test it."

I gasped. "You did what? You took the butt to Betty? That's what you took up to her the other day? To what? Have his saliva tested? What for?"

"His blood type. It's AB, Dr. Scarpetta."

"My God."

The connection was that fast. The blood type that came up on the mislabeled PERK Wingo found inside the evidence refrigerator was AB.

AB is extremely rare. Only four percent of the population has type AB.

"I was wondering about him," Wingo explained. "I know how much he, uh, hates you. It's always hurt me he treats you so bad. So I asked Fred…"

"The security guard?"

"Yeah. I asked Fred about seeing anybody. You know, if he'd seen anybody going inside our morgue who wasn't supposed to be there. He said he saw this one dude on an early Monday evening. Fred was starting his rounds and stopped off to use the john down there. He's coming out just as this white dude's coming in, into the john, I'm saying. Fred told me the white dude had something in his hands, some paper packets of some sort. Fred just went on out, went about his business."

"Amburgey? It was Amburgey?"

"Fred didn't know. He said most white folks look alike to him. But he remembered this dude because he had on a real nice silver ring with a real big blue stone in it. An older guy, scrawny, and about bald."

It was Marino who proposed, "So maybe Amburgey went into the john and swabbed himself-"

"They're oral," I recalled. "The cells that showed up on the slides. And no Barr bodies. Y chromosome, in other words male."

"I love it when you talk dirty." Marino grinned at me, and went on, "So he swabs the inside of his cheeks - the ones above his friggin' neck, I hope. Smears some slides from a PERK, slaps a label on it-"

"A label he got from Lori Petersen's file," I interrupted him again, this time incredulously. "Then he tucks it inside the fridge to make you think you screwed up. Hell, maybe he's the one breaking into the computer, too. Unbelievable."

Marino was laughing again. "Don't you love it? We'll nail his ass!"

The computer had been broken into over the weekend, sometime after hours on Friday, we believed. Wesley noticed the commands on the screen Saturday morning when he came in for McCorkle's autopsy. Someone had tried to pull up Henna Yarborough's case. The call, of course, could be traced. We were waiting for Wesley to get the goods from the telephone company.

I'd been assuming it was McCorkle who might have gotten in at some point Friday evening before he came after me.

"If the commissioner's the one breaking into the computer," I reminded them, "he's not in trouble. He has the right, ex officio, to my office data and anything else he cares to peruse. We'll never be able to prove he altered a record."

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

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

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

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

Through the closing doors I blew them each a kiss.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I wish I were going with you."

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

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

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

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

I owed her a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It had happened again.

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

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

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

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

I didn't ask.

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

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

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

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

I gave Abby a big hug.

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

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

"We're going to the beach."

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

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

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

We continued bickering at the ticket counter.

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

"Auntie Kay…"

"You're going to be cold."

"Auntie Kay!"

"We've got time for a sandwich."

"I'm not hungry!"

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

"You sound just like Grans!"

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