Postmortem

Chapter 7

We waited in the bright sun for a break in rush-hour traffic and hurried across the street. No one talked, and I walked several paces ahead of them, leading them around to the back of the building. The front doors would be chained by now.

Leaving them inside the conference room, I went to collect the files from a locked drawer in my desk. I could hear Rose shuffling paper next door. It was after five and she was still here. This comforted me a little. She was lingering because she sensed something bad was going on for me to have been summoned to Amburgey's office.

When I returned to the conference room, the three men had pulled their chairs close together. I sat across from them, quietly smoking and silently daring Amburgey to ask me to leave. He didn't. So I sat.

Another hour went by.

There was the sound of pages turning, of reports being riffled through, of comments and observations made in low voices. Photographs were fanned out on the table like playing cards. Amburgey was busily taking notes in his niggling, fussy scrawl. At one point several case files slid off Boltz's lap and splashed on the carpet.

"I'll pick it up."

Tanner unenthusiastically scooted his chair to one side.

"I've got it."

Boltz seemed disgusted as he began to collect the paperwork scattered under and around the table. He and Tanner were considerate enough to sort everything by the proper case numbers while I numbly looked on. Amburgey, meanwhile, continued to write as if nothing had happened.

The minutes took hours to go by, and I sat.

Sometimes I was asked a question. Mostly, the men just looked and talked among themselves as if I were not there.

At half past six we moved into Margaret's office. Seating myself before the computer, I deactivated answer mode, and momentarily the case screen was before us, a pleasing orange and blue construction of Margaret's design. Amburgey glanced at his notes and read me the case number of Brenda Steppe, the first victim.

Entering it, I hit the query key. Almost instantly, her case was up.

The case screen actually comprised more than half a dozen tables which were joined. The men began scanning the data filling the orange fields, glancing at me each time they were ready for me to page-down.

Two pages later, we all saw it at the same time.

In the field called "Clothing, Personal Effects, etc." was a description of what came in with Brenda Steppe's body, including the ligatures. Written in black letters as big as life was "tan fabric belt around neck."

Amburgey leaned over me and silently ran his finger across the screen.

I opened Brenda Steppe's case file and pointed out that this was not what I had dictated in the autopsy protocol, that typed in my paper record was "a pair of nude pantyhose around her neck."

"Yes," Amburgey jogged my memory, "but take a look at the rescue squad's report. A tan cloth belt is listed, is it not?"

I quickly found the squad sheet and scanned it. He was right. The paramedic, in describing what he had seen, mentioned the victim was bound with electrical cords around the wrists and ankles, and a "tannish cloth belt-like article" was around her neck.

Boltz suggested, as if trying to be helpful, "Perhaps one of your clerks was going through this record as she typed it, and she saw the squad sheet and mistakenly typed in the bit about the belt in other words, she didn't notice this was inconsistent with what you dictated in the autopsy report."

"It's not likely," I objected. "My clerks know to get the data only from the autopsy and lab reports and the death certificate."

"But it's possible," Amburgey said, "because this belt is mentioned. It's in the record."

"Of course it's possible."

"Then it's also possible," Tanner decided, "the source of this tan belt, which was cited in the paper, came from your computer. That maybe a reporter has been getting into your data base, or has been getting someone else to get into it for him. He printed inaccurate information because he read an inaccuracy in your office's data."

"Or he got the information from the paramedic who listed the belt in his squad report," I countered.

Amburgey backed away from the computer. He said coldly, "I'll trust you to do something to ensure the confidentiality of your office records. Get the girl who looks after your computer to change the password. Whatever it takes, Dr. Scarpetta. And I'll expect a written statement from you pertaining to the matter."

He moved to the doorway, hesitating long enough to toss back at me, "Copies will be given to the appropriate parties, and then it remains to be seen if any further measures will have to be taken."

With that he was gone, Tanner at his heels.

When all else fails, I cook.

Some people go out after a god-awful day and slam a tennis ball around or jog their joints to pieces on a fitness course. I had a friend in Coral Gables who would escape to the beach with her folding chair and burn off her stress with sun and a slightly pornographic romance she wouldn't have been caught dead reading in her professional world she was a district court judge. Many of the cops I know wash away their miseries with beer at the FOP lounge.

I've never been particularly athletic, and there wasn't a decent beach within reasonable driving distance. Getting drunk never solved anything. Cooking was an indulgence I didn't have time for most days, and though Italian cuisine isn't my only love, it has always been what I do best.

"Use the finest side of the grater," I was saying to Lucy over the noise of water running in the sink.

"But it's so hard," she complained, blowing in frustration.

"Aged parmigiano-reggiano is hard. And watch your knuckles, okay?"

I finished rinsing green peppers, mushrooms and onions, patted them dry and placed them on the cutting board. Simmering on the stove was sauce made last summer from fresh Hanover tomatoes, basil, oregano and several cloves of crushed garlic. I always kept a good supply in the freezer for times like these. Luganega sausage was draining on paper towels near other towels of browned lean beef. High-gluten dough was on the counter rising beneath a damp dish towel, and crumbled in a bowl was whole-milk mozzarella imported from New York and still packed in its brine when I'd bought it at my favorite deli on West Avenue. At room temperature the cheese is soft like butter, when melted is wonderfully stringy.

"Mom always gets the boxed kind and adds a bunch of junk to it," Lucy said breathlessly. "Or she buys the kind already made in the grocery store."

"That's deplorable," I retorted, and I meant it. "How can she eat such a thing?" I began to chop. "Your grandmother would have let us starve first."

My sister has never liked cooking. I've never understood why. Some of the happiest times when we were growing up were spent around the dinner table. When our father was well, he would sit at the head of the table and ceremoniously serve our plates with great mounds of steaming spaghetti or fettuccine or-on Fridays-frittata. No matter how poor we were, there was always plenty of food and wine, and it was always a joy when I came home from school and was greeted by delicious smells and promising sounds coming from the kitchen.

It was sad and a violation of tradition that Lucy knew nothing of these things. I assumed when she came home from school most days she walked into a quiet, indifferent house where dinner was a drudgery to be put off until the last minute. My sister should never have been a mother. My sister should never have been Italian.

Greasing my hands with olive oil, I began to knead the dough, working it hard until the small muscles in my arms hurt.

"Can you twirl it like they do on TV?" Lucy stopped what she was doing, staring wide-eyed at me.

I gave her a demonstration.

"Wow!"

"It's not so hard."

I smiled as the dough slowly spread out over my fists. "The trick is to keep your fingers tucked in so you don't poke holes in it."

"Let me do it."

"You haven't finished grating the cheese," I said with mock severity.

"Please…"

She got down from her footstool and came over to me. Taking her hands in mine, I bathed them with olive oil and folded them into fists. It surprised me that her hands were almost the size of mine. When she was a baby her fists were no bigger than walnuts. I remembered the way she would reach out to me when I was visiting back then, the way she would grab my index finger and smile while a strange and wonderful warmth spread through my breast. Draping the dough over Lucy's fists, I helped her flop it around awkwardly.

"It gets bigger and bigger," she exclaimed. "This is neat!"

"The dough spreads out because of the centrifugal force similar to the way people used to make glass. You know, you've seen the old glass windows with ripples in them?"

Nodding.

"The glass was spun into a large, flat disk-"

We both looked up as gravel crunched beneath tires in the drive. A white Audi was pulling in and Lucy's mood immediately began to sink.

"Oh," she said unhappily. "He's here."

Bill Boltz was getting out of the car and collecting two bottles of wine from the passenger's seat.

"You'll like him very much."

I was deftly laying the dough in the deep pan. "He very much wants to meet you, Lucy."

"He's your boyfriend."

I washed my hands. "We just do things together, and we work together…"

"He's not married?"

She was watching him follow the walkway to the front door.

"His wife died last year."

"Oh."

A pause. "How?"

I kissed the top of her head and went out of the kitchen to answer the door. Now was not the time for me to answer such a question. I wasn't sure how Lucy would take it.

"You recovering?" Bill smiled and lightly kissed me.

I shut the door. "Barely."

"Wait till you've had a few glasses of this magic stuff," he said, holding up the bottles as if they were prize catches from a hunt. "From my private stock-you'll love it."

I touched his arm and he followed me to the kitchen.

Lucy was grating cheese again, up on her footstool, her back to us. She didn't even glance around when we walked in.

"Lucy?"

Still grating.

"Lucy?"

I led Bill over to her. "This is Mr. Boltz, and Bill, this is my niece."

Reluctantly, she stopped what she was doing and looked straight at me. "I scraped my knuckle, Auntie Kay. See?"

She held up her left hand. A knuckle was bleeding a little.

"Oh, dear. Here, I'll get a Band-Aid… "

"Some of it got in the cheese," she went on, as if suddenly on the verge of tears.

"Sounds to me like we need an ambulance," Bill announced, and he quite surprised Lucy by plucking her off the stool and locking his arms under her thighs. She was in a ridiculously funny sitting position. "Rerrrrrr-RERRRRRRRRRR…"

He was wailing like a siren and carrying her over to the sink. "Three one-six, bringing in an emergency - cute little girl with a bleeding knuckle."

He was talking to a dispatcher now. "Please have Dr. Scarpetta ready with a Band-Aid…"

Lucy was shrieking with laughter. Momentarily her knuckle was forgotten and she was staring with open adoration at Bill as he uncorked a bottle of wine.

"You have to let it breathe," he was gently explaining to her. "See, it's sharper now than it will be in an hour or so. Like everything else in life, it gets mellower with time."

"Can I have some?"

"Well, now," he replied with exaggerated gravity, "all right by me if your Auntie Kay says so. But we wouldn't want you getting silly on us."

I was quietly putting the pizza together, spreading the dough with sauce and overlaying this with the meats, vegetables and parmesan cheese. Topping it with the crumbled mozzarella, I slid it into the oven. Soon the rich garlicky aroma was filling the kitchen and I was busying myself with the salad and setting the table while Lucy and Bill chatted and laughed.

We didn't eat until late, and Lucy's glass of wine turned out to be a good thing. By the time I was clearing the table, her eyes were half shut and she was definitely ready for bed, despite her unwillingness to say good-night to Bill, who had completely won her heart.

"That was rather amazing," I said to him after I'd tucked her in and we were sitting at the kitchen table. "I don't know how you managed it. I was worried about her reaction…"

"You thought she'd view me as competition." He smiled a little.

"Let's just put it this way. Her mother's in and out of relationships with just about anything on two legs."

"Meaning she doesn't have much time for her daughter."

He refilled our glasses.

"To put it mildly."

"That's too damn bad. She's something, smart as hell. Must have inherited your brains."

He slowly sipped his wine, adding, "What does she do all day long while you're working?"

"Bertha's here. Mostly Lucy stays in my office hours on end banging on the computer."

"Playing games on it?"

"Hardly. I think she knows more about the damn thing than I do. Last time I checked, she was programming in Basic and reorganizing my data base."

He began studying his wineglass. Then he asked, "Can you use your computer to dial up the one downtown?"

"Don't even suggest it!"

"Well."

He looked at me. "You'd be better off. Maybe I was hoping."

"Lucy wouldn't do such a thing," I said with feeling. "And I'm not sure how I would be better off were it true."

"Better your ten-year-old niece than a reporter. It would get Amburgey off your back."

"Nothing would get him off my back," I snapped.

"That's right," he said dryly. "His reason for getting up in morning is to jerk you around."

"I'm frankly beginning to wonder that."

Amburgey was appointed in the midst of the city's black community publicly protesting that the police were indifferent to homicides unless the victims were white. Then a black city councilman was shot in his car, and Amburgey and the mayor considered it good public relations, I supposed, to appear unannounced at the morgue the next morning.

Maybe it wouldn't have turned out so badly had Amburgey thought to ask questions while he watched me perform the autopsy, had he kept his mouth shut afterward. But the physician combined with the politician, compelling him to confidently inform the press waiting outside my building that the "spread of pellet wounds" over the dead councilman's upper chest "indicates a shotgun blast at close range."

As diplomatically as possible, I explained when the reporters questioned me later that the "spread" of holes over the chest was actually marks of therapy made when ER attendants inserted large-gauge needles into the subclavian arteries to transfuse blood. The councilman's lethal injury was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.

The reporters had a field day with Amburgey's blunder.

"The problem is he's a physician by training," I was saying to Bill. "He knows just enough to think he's an expert in forensic medicine, to think he can run my office better than I can, and a lot of his opinions are flat-out full of shit."

"Which you make the mistake of pointing out to him."

"What am I supposed to do? Agree and look as incompetent as he is?"

"So it's a simple case of professional jealousy," he said with a shrug. "It happens."

"I don't know what it is. How the hell do you explain these things? Half of what people do and feel doesn't make a damn bit of sense. For all I know, I could remind him of his mother."

My anger was mounting with fresh intensity, and I realized by the expression on his face that I was glaring at him.

"Hey," he objected, raising his hand, "don't be pissed at me. I didn't do anything."

"You were there this afternoon, weren't you?"

"What do you expect? I'm supposed to tell Amburgey and Tanner I can't be in on the meeting because you and I have been seeing each other?"

"Of course you couldn't tell them that," I said in a miserable way. "But maybe I wanted you to. Maybe I wanted you to punch Amburgey's lights out or something."

"Not a bad idea. But I don't think it would help me much come reelection time. Besides, you'd probably let my ass rot in jail. Wouldn't even post my bond."

"Depends on how much it was."

"Shit."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"About the meeting. You must have known about it since yesterday."

Maybe you'd known about it longer, I started to say, and that's why you didn't so much as call me over the weekend! Restraining myself, I stared tensely at him.

He was studying his wineglass again. After a pause, he replied, "I didn't see any point in telling you. All it would have done was worry you, and it was my impression the meeting was pro forma-"

"Pro forma?"

I looked incredulously at him. "Amburgey's gagged me and spent half the afternoon tearing apart my office and that's pro forma?"

"I feel sure some of what he did was sparked by your disclosure of the computer violation; Kay. And I didn't know about that yesterday. Hell, you didn't even know about that yesterday."

"I see," I said coldly. "No one knew about it until I told them."

Silence.

"What are you implying?"

"It just seemed an incredible coincidence we discovered the violation just hours before he called me to his office. I had the peculiar thought that maybe he knew… "

"Maybe he did."

"That certainly reassures me."

"It's moot anyway," he easily went on. "So what if Amburgey knew about the violation by the time you came to his office this afternoon? Maybe somebody talked-your computer analyst, for example. And the rumor drifted up to the twenty-fourth floor."

He shrugged. "It just gave him one more worry, right? You didn't trip yourself up, if that's the case, because you were smart enough to tell the truth."

"I always tell the truth."

"Not always," he remarked slyly. "You routinely lie about usby omission-"

"So maybe he knew," I cut him off. "I just want to hear you didn't."

"I didn't."

He looked intensely at me. "I swear. If I'd heard anything about it, I would have forewarned you, Kay. I would have run to the nearest phone booth-"

"And charged out as Superman."

"Hell," he muttered, "now you're making fun of me."

He was in his boyish wounded manifestation. Bill had a lot of roles and he played all of them extraordinarily well. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe he was so smitten with me. Was that a role as well? I think he had a starring role in the fantasies of half the city's women, and his campaign manager was shrewd enough to take advantage of it. Photographs of Bill had been plastered over restaurant and storefronts, and nailed to telephone poles on virtually every city block. Who could resist that face? He was stunningly handsome, his hair streaked straw-blond, his complexion perpetually sunburned from the many hours he spent each week at his tennis club. It was hard not to stare openly at him.

"I'm not making fun of you," I said wearily. "Really, Bill. And let's not fight."

"Fine by me."

"I'm just sick. I don't have any idea what to do."

Apparently he'd already thought about this, and he said, "It would be helpful if you could figure out who's been getting into your data." A pause. "Or better, if you could prove it."

"Prove it?" I looked warily at him. "Are you suggesting you have a suspect?"

"Not based on any fact."

"Who?"

I lit a cigarette.

His attention drifted across the kitchen. "Abby Turnbull is top on my list."

"I thought you were going to tell me something I couldn't have figured out on my own."

"I'm dead serious, Kay."

"So she's an ambitious reporter," I said irritably. "Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of hearing about her. She's not as powerful as everyone makes her out to be."

Bill set his wineglass on the table with a sharp click. "The hell she isn't," he retorted, staring at me. "The woman's a goddam snake. I know she's an ambitious reporter and all that shit. But she's worse than anybody imagines. She's vicious and manipu- lative and extremely dangerous. The bitch would stoop to anything."

His vehemence startled me into silence. It was uncharacteristic of him to use such vitriolic terms in describing anyone. Especially someone I assumed he scarcely knew.

"Remember that story. she did on me a month or so back?"

Not long ago the Times finally got around to the obligatory profile of the city's new Commonwealth's attorney. The story was a rather lengthy spread that ran in the Sunday paper, and I didn't remember in detail what Abby Turnbull had written except that the piece struck me as unusually colorless considering its author.

I said as much to him, "As best I recall, the story was toothless. It did no harm; neither did it do any good."

"There's a reason for that," he fired back at me. "I suspect it wasn't something she wanted to write, particularly."

He wasn't hinting that the assignment had been a boring one. Something else was coming and my nerves were coiling tightly again.

"My session with her was pretty damn terrible. She spent an entire day with me, riding around in my car, going from meeting to meeting, hell, even to my dry cleaner's. You know how these reporters are. They'll follow you into the men's room if you let them. Well, let's just say that as the evening progressed, things took a rather unfortunate and definitely unexpected turn."

He hesitated to see if I got his implication.

I got it all too well.

Glancing at me, his face hard, he said, "It completely broadsided me. We got out of the last meeting around eight. She insisted we go to dinner. You know, it was on the paper and she had a few questions to finish up. We'd no sooner pulled out of the restaurant's parking lot when she said she wasn't feeling well. Too much wine or something. She wanted me to drop her off at her house instead of taking her back to the paper, where her car was parked. So I did. Took her home. And when I pulled in front of her house, she was all over me. It was awful."

"And?" I asked as if I didn't care.

"And I didn't handle it worth a damn. I think I humiliated her without intending to. She's been out to jerk the hell out of me ever since."

"What? She's calling you, sending you threatening letters?"

I wasn't exactly serious. Nor was I prepared for what he said next.

"This shit she's been writing. The fact maybe it's coming from your computer. As crazy as it may sound, I think her motivation is mostly personal-"

"The leaks? Are you suggesting she's breaking into my computer and writing lurid details about these cases to jerk you around?"

"If these cases are compromised in court, who the hell gets hurt?"

I didn't respond. I was staring in disbelief at him.

"I do. I'll be the one prosecuting the cases. Cases as sensational and heinous as these get screwed up because of all this shit in the papers, and no one's going to be sending me flowers or thankyou notes. She sure as hell knows that, Kay. She's sticking it to me, that's what she's doing."

"Bill," I said, lowering my voice, "it's her job to be an aggressive reporter, to print everything she can get her hands on. More important, the cases would get screwed up in court only if the sole evidence was a confession. Then the defense gets to make him change his mind. He takes it all back. The party line is the guy's psychotic and knows the details of the murders because he read about them in the paper. He imagined he committed the crimes. That sort of rubbish. The monster who's killing these women isn't about to turn himself in or confess to anything."

He drained his glass and refilled it. "Maybe the cops develop him as a suspect and get him to talk. Maybe that's the way it happens. And it might be the only thing linking him to the crimes. There isn't a shred of physical evidence that's amounted to anything-"

"No shred of physical evidence?" I interrupted. Surely I hadn't heard him right. Was the wine dulling his senses? "He's leaving a load of seminal fluid. He gets caught and DNA will nail him to-"

"Oh, yeah. Sure it will. DNA printing's only gone to trial a couple of times in Virginia. There are very few precedents, very few convictions nationwide - every damn one of them still being appealed. Try explaining to a Richmond jury the guy's guilty because of DNA. I'll be lucky if I can find a juror who can spell DNA. Anybody's got an IQ over forty and the defense will find a reason to exclude him, that's what I put up with week after week… "

"Bill…"

"Hell." He began to pace the kitchen floor. "It's hard enough to get a conviction if fifty people swear they saw the guy pull the trigger. The defense will drag in a herd of expert witnesses to muddy the waters and hopelessly confuse everything. You of all people know how complicated this DNA testing is."

"Bill, I've explained just as difficult things to juries in the past."

He started to say something but caught himself. Staring across the kitchen again, he took another swallow of wine.

The silence was drawn out and heavy. If the outcome of the trials depended solely on the DNA results, this placed me in the position of being a key witness for the prosecution. I'd been in such a position many times in the past and I couldn't recall it ever unduly worrying Bill.

Something was different this time.

"What is it?"

I forced myself to ask. "Are you unsettled because of our relationship? You're thinking someone's going to figure it out and accuse us of being professionally in bed together-accuse me of rigging the results to suit the prosecution?"

He glanced at me, his face flushed. "I'm not thinking that at all. It's a fact we've been together, but big deal? So we've gone out to dinner and taken in a few plays…"

He didn't have to complete the sentence. Nobody knew about us. Usually he came to my house or we went to some distant place, such as Williamsburg or D.C., where it wasn't likely we would run into anybody who would recognize us. I'd always been more worried about the public seeing us together than he seemed to be.

Or was he alluding to something else, something far more biting? We were not lovers, not completely, and this remained a subtle but uncomfortable tension between us.

I think we'd both been aware of the strong attraction, but we'd completely avoided doing anything about it until several weeks ago. After a trial that didn't end until early evening, he casually offered to buy me a drink. We walked to a restaurant near the courthouse and two Scotches later we were heading to my house. It was that sudden. It was adolescent in its intensity, our lust as tangible as heat. The forbiddenness of it made it all the more frantic, and then quite suddenly while we were in the dark on my living room couch, I panicked.

His hunger was too much. It exploded from him, invaded instead of caressed as he pushed me down hard into the couch. It was at that moment I had a vivid image of his wife slumped against pale blue satin pillows in bed like some lovely life-size doll, the front of her white negligee stained dark red, the ninemillimeter automatic just inches from her limp right hand.

I'd gone to the suicide scene knowing only that the wife of the man running for Commonwealth's attorney apparently had committed suicide. I did not know Bill then. I examined his wife. I literally held her heart in my hands. Those images, all of them, flashed graphically behind my eyes in my dark living room so many months later.

Physically, I withdrew from him. I'd never told him the real reason why, although in the days that followed he continued to pursue me even more vigorously. Our mutual attraction remained but a wall had gone up. I could not seem to tear it down or climb over it much as I wanted to.

I was scarcely hearing a word he was saying.

"… and I don't see how you could rig DNA results unless you're involved in a conspiracy that includes the private lab conducting the tests and half the forensic bureau, too-"

"What?" I asked, startled. "Rig DNA results?"

"You haven't been listening," he blurted out impatiently.

"Well, I missed something, that's certain."

"I'm saying no one could accuse you of rigging anything that's my point. So our relationship has nothing to do with what I'm thinking."

"Okay."

"It's just…" He faltered.

"Just what?" I asked. Then, as he drained his glass again, I added, "Bill, you have to drive."

He waved it off.

"Then what is it?" I demanded again. "What?"

He pressed his lips together and wouldn't look at me. Slowly, he drew it out. "It's just I'm not sure where you'll be in the eyes of the jurors by then."

I couldn't have been more stunned had he struck me with his open palm.

"My God… You do know something. What? What! What is that son of a bitch plotting? He's going to fire me because of this goddam computer violation, is this what he's said to you?"

"Amburgey? He's not plotting anything. Hell, he doesn't have to. If your office gets blamed for the leaks, and if the public eventually believes the inflammatory news stories are why the killer's striking with increased frequency, then your head will be on the block. People need someone to blame. I can't afford my star witness to have a credibility or popularity problem."

"Is this what you and Tanner were discussing so intensely after lunch?"

I was just a blink away from tears. "I saw you on the sidewalk, coming out of The Peking…"

A long silence. He had seen me, too, then but had pretended otherwise. Why? Because he and Tanner probably were talking about me! "We were discussing the cases," he replied evasively. "Discussing a lot of things."

I was so enraged, so stung, I didn't trust myself to say a word.

"Listen," he said wearily as he loosened his tie and unfastened the top button of his shirt. "This didn't go right. I didn't mean for it to come out like this. I swear to God. Now you're all upset, and I'm all upset. I'm sorry."

My silence was stony.

He took a deep breath. "It's just we have real things to worry about and we should be working on them together. I'm painting worst-case scenarios so we can be prepared, okay?"

"What exactly do you expect me to do?" I measured each word to keep my voice steady.

"Think five times about everything. Like tennis. When you're down or psyched you've got to play it careful. Concentrate on every shot, don't take your eye off the ball for a second."

His tennis analogies got on my nerves sometimes. Right now was a good example. "I always think about what I'm doing," I said testily. "You don't need to tell me how to do my job. I'm not known for missing shots."

"It's especially important now. Abby Turnbull's poison. I think she's setting us up. Both of us. Behind the scenes. Using you or your office computer to get to me. Not giving a damn if she maims justice in the process. The cases get blown out of the water and you and I are both blown out of office. It's that simple."

Maybe he was right, but I was having a hard time accepting that Abby Turnbull could be so evil. Surely if she had even a drop of human blood in her veins she would want the killer punished. She wouldn't use four brutally murdered young women as pawns in her vindictive machinations if she were guilty of vindictive machinations, and I wasn't convinced she was.

I was about to tell him he was exaggerating, his bad encounter with her had momentarily distorted his reason. But something stopped me.

I didn't want to talk about this anymore.

I was afraid to.

It was nagging at me. He'd waited until now to say anything. Why? His encounter with her was weeks ago. If she were setting us up, if she were so dangerous to both of us, then why hadn't he told me this before now?

"I think what you need is a good night's sleep," I said quietly.

"I think we'd be wise to strike this conversation, at least certain portions of it, go on as if it never happened."

He pushed back from the table. "You're right. I've had it. So have you. Christ, I didn't mean for it to go like this," he said again. "I came over here to cheer you up. I feel terrible… " His apologies continued as we went down the hall. Before I could open the door, he was kissing me and I could taste the wine on his breath and feel his heat. My physical response was always immediate, a frisson of spine-tingling desire and fear running through me like a current. I involuntarily pulled away from him and muttered, "Good night."

He was a shadow in the darkness heading to his car, his profile briefly illuminated by the interior light as he opened the door and climbed in. I was still standing numbly on the porch long after red taillights had burned along the vacant street and disappeared behind trees.