Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  “Seems to me pain is the point of S-and-M.”

  “No pleasure was derived from this pain,” Scarpetta said. “Except by the person inflicting it.”

  The title page belonged to a revision dated about three weeks ago, December 10.

  “A really big file that we’re far from completely recovering yet,” Lucy said. “But this partial chapter gives you the picture.”

  She had spooled it into a text file, and Berger began reading to Lucy’s tap-taps of the down-arrow key:

  . . . While I’ve got my hands in a dead body, I imagine how I

  could have killed the person better. With all I know? Of course I

  could commit the perfect crime. When I’m with my colleagues

  and throw back enough whiskey, we love to come up with

  scenarios that we’d never present at professional meetings or

  mention to family, friends, certainly not to our enemies!

  I asked her what her favorite whiskey is.

  Maybe a toss-up between Knappogue Castle single-malt Irish

  whiskey and Brora single-malt Scotch.

  Never heard of either.

  Why would you? Knappogue is probably the finest Irish

  whiskey in the world and costs close to seven hundred dollars.

  And Brora is so rare and exquisite, each bottle is numbered and

  costs more than your schoolbooks in a year.

  How can you afford to drink such expensive

  whiskey, and don’t you feel guilty when there are so

  many people losing their homes and unable to fill their

  cars with gas?

  My turning down a magnificent Irish whiskey isn’t going to fill

  your car with gas—assuming you have a car. It’s a fact that the

  finer labels—whether it’s a Château Pétrus, a single-malt

  whiskey, or very fine pure agave tequila—are less damaging to

  your liver and brain.

  So wealthy people who drink the good stuff aren’t

  as affected by alcohol abuse? That’s something I’ve

  never heard.

  How many human livers and brains have you seen and

  sectioned?

  How about some other examples from the dark

  side? What else do you say behind the scenes,

  especially when you’re with your colleagues?

  We brag about famous people we’ve autopsied (all of us

  secretly wish we’d done Elvis or Anna Nicole Smith or Princess

  Diana). Listen, I’m no different from anybody else. I want the

  case nobody else gets. I want the Gainesville serial murders. I

  want to be the one who arrives at the scene and finds the

  severed head on a bookshelf staring at me when I walk through

  the door. I would have loved to have been cross-examined by

  Ted Bundy when he represented himself at his own murder trial.

  Hell, I would have loved to have done his autopsy after he was

  executed.

  Share some sensational cases you have worked.

  I’ve been fortunate to have a number of them. For example,

  lightning strikes, where nobody else could figure out the cause of

  death, because you’ve got this body lying in a field, her clothes

  ripped off and scattered. First thought? Sexual assault. But no

  sign of injury at autopsy. Dead giveaways, excuse the pun? The

  branching pattern known as the Lichtenberg figures or electrical

  treeing. Or if the person was wearing anything ferrous, such as

  a steel belt buckle, it would have become magnetized, or the

  wristwatch might have stopped at the time of death—I always

  check for things like that. Most medical examiners don’t because

  they’re inexperienced or naïve or just not very good at what

  they do.

  You don’t sound as compassionate as I expected.

  Let’s face it. Dead is dead. I can show all the empathy in the

  world and move any jury to tears. But do I really feel that my

  heart has been snatched out of my chest when the latest

  tragedy’s rolled in? Do I really care when the cops make

  comments that the public never hears?

  Such as?

  Typically, comments with sexual overtones. The size of the

  deceased’s penis—especially if it’s small or huge. The size of the

  deceased’s breasts—especially if they’re what I’d call centerfold

  material. I know plenty of medical examiners who take souvenirs.

  Trophies. An artificial hip from someone famous. A tooth. A

  breast implant, and it’s always the men who want those. (Don’t

  ask me what they do with them, but they’re usually within easy

  reach.) A penile implant—those are amusing.

  Have you ever kept a souvenir?

  Only one. This was twenty years ago, a case early in my

  career, serial murders in Richmond, where I was the brand-new

  chief. But the trophy wasn’t from a dead body. It was from

  Benton Wesley. The first time we met was in my conference

  room. When he left, I kept his coffee cup. You know, one of

  these tall Styrofoam cups from a 7-Eleven? I was totally in lust

  with him the first minute I saw him.

  What did you do with his coffee cup?

  I took it home with me and ran my tongue along the rim of it,

  as if by tasting it, I was tasting him.

  But you didn’t actually sleep with him until, what?

  About five years later?

  That’s what everybody thinks. But that’s not what really

  happened. I called him after that first meeting and invited him

  over for a drink—allegedly so we could continue discussing the

  cases in private, and the instant my front door shut behind us,

  we were all over each other.

  Who started it?

  I seduced him. That made it less of a moral struggle for him.

  He was married. I was divorced and not seeing anyone. His poor

  wife. Benton and I had been lovers for almost five years before

  he finally admitted it to her, feigning that his adultery had just

  begun because their marriage had gotten stale, lifeless.

  And nobody knew? Pete Marino? Lucy? Your

  secretary, Rose?

  I’ve always wondered if Rose suspected it. Just something

  about the way she’d act when Benton would show up for yet

  another case discussion, or when I was on my way to Quantico

  for yet another consultation. She died of cancer last summer. So

  you can’t ask her.

  Doesn’t sound as if working with the dead makes

  you sexually inhibited.

  Quite the opposite. When you’ve explored every inch of the

  human body so many times that you haven’t the least bit of self-consciousness or revulsion about it, there isn’t anything out of

  bounds sexually, and there’s plenty of experimentation to be had. . . .

  “Can you forward this to Kay?” Berger said when the section of text abruptly stopped. “So when she gets a chance, maybe she can give it her attention. Maybe she’ll have thoughts, insights we don’t.”

  “Supposedly from one of the interviews this past Thanksgiving,” Lucy said. “Which I know she didn’t give. Not that she’d ever talk like this to anyone.”

  “I’m noticing a creative use of fonts. Your opinion?”

  “The writer, Terri or whoever, does a lot with fonts,” Lucy agreed.

  She was doing her best to be calm, but she was outraged. Berger sensed it, and she was waiting. In the past, Lucy’s anger was something to be feared.

  “And in my opinion, there
’s symbolism involved,” Lucy was saying. “In this phony interview, for example, when Terri’s asking questions, I’m going to say it’s Terri, the font is Franklin Gothic and it’s in bold. Arial in smaller type for my aunt’s phony answers.”

  “Then symbolically, Terri has superseded Kay in importance,” Berger said.

  “It’s worse than that. For your purists in the word-processing world, Arial has a very bad rep.” Lucy studied text as she talked. “It’s been called homely, common, lacking in character, and is considered a shameless imposter. There are plenty of articles about it.”

  She avoided Berger’s eyes.

  “An imposter?” Berger prodded her. “As in plagiarism, copyright violation? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s considered a rip-off of Helvetica, which was developed in the nineteen-fifties and became one of the most popular typefaces in the world,” Lucy said. “To the untrained eye, there’s no difference between Helvetica and Arial. But to a purist, a professional printer or print designer, Arial’s a parasite. The irony? Some young designers think Helvetica is based on Arial instead of the other way around. Do you see the significance symbolically? Because it’s scary, at least to me.”

  “Of course I see it,” Berger said. “It could suggest that Terri and Kay have switched places in terms of their being world-renowned forensic experts. Rather much what Mark David Chap-man did before he killed John Lennon. He was wearing a name tag with Lennon’s name on it. Rather much what Sirhan Sirhan did when he allegedly made the comment that by assassinating Bobby Kennedy, he’d become more famous.”

  “The change in fonts is a progression,” Lucy said. “The more recent the drafts, the more pronounced it is, the prominence of Terri’s name and an implied negativity toward my aunt.”

  “A change that suggests Terri’s emotional attachment to Kay was turning hostile, dismissive. I should say the author. But for the sake of simplicity, I’ll keep saying Terri,” Berger speculated. “Rather much what happened between Kay and Marino, now that I think of it. He worshipped her. Then wanted to destroy her.”

  “It’s not that simple, and it’s not the same,” Lucy said. “Marino had a reason to be in love with my aunt. He knew her. Terri didn’t have a reason to feel anything about her. It was delusional.”

  “We’re assuming she was an aficionado of typefaces. Let’s go back to that,” Berger said, continuing her assessment.

  Lucy was different—genuinely so. Fiery, yes. But not reactive the way she used to be, and in Berger’s opinion, Lucy used to teeter on the edge of violence. That used to be her default, and it had made her completely unsafe.

  “I definitely think she was well versed in fonts,” Lucy said. “She uses different ones for footnotes, the bibliography, chapter headings, table of contents. Most people don’t do that when they’re writing a thesis. They might change point size and use italics but not all this artsy use of fonts. In fact, the most common typeface is usually the default on a number of word-processing packages, including the one Terri was using. For the most part, the actual text is in Times New Roman.”

  “Examples,” Berger said, writing on her legal pad. “What fonts does she use, and for what and why? Theoretically.”

  “For footnotes, Palatino Linotype, which is highly legible both on a computer screen and when printed. For the bibliography, Bookman Old Style. Also legible. Chapter headings, she picked MS Reference Sans Serif, which is typically used in headlines. Again, it’s rare to find this many different typefaces, especially in an academic paper. What it suggests to me is her writing was highly personalized. It wasn’t just about the writing.”

  Berger looked at her for a long moment.

  “How the hell do you know all this off the top of your head?” she said. “Fonts? I never even pay attention to them. I can’t even tell you what font I use when I’m writing my briefs.”

  “You use the same default for text that Terri did. Times New Roman, designed for the London Times. A typeface that’s narrow, so it’s economical, but very readable. I saw printouts on your desk when I was in your office earlier today. In forensic computer work, what seems the most trivial detail might be significant.”

  “Which may be the case here.”

  “I can tell you this much with certainty,” Lucy said. “These different fonts were deliberate choices, because she had to select them. Now whether she attached symbolism to them in terms of how she felt about herself or someone else, such as my aunt? Don’t know. But my opinion? The whole thing is sick, and it was well on its way to becoming sicker. If Terri really is the author and she were still around, I would consider her dangerous to my aunt. Maybe even physically dangerous. At the very least, she’s defaming someone she never even met.”

  “Kay would have to prove it was untrue. And how would she prove that the anecdote about the coffee cup isn’t true, for example? How do you know it isn’t true?”

  “Because she would never do anything like that.”

  “I don’t believe you’re in a position to know what Kay does in private,” Berger said.

  “Of course I’m in a position to know.” Lucy met her eyes. “So are you. Ask anyone if she’s ever made fun of dead bodies or allowed anyone else to. Ask anyone who’s ever been in the morgue with her or at a crime scene if she enjoys gruesome cases and wishes she’d autopsied people like Ted Bundy. I hope this doesn’t all come out in court.”

  “I was talking about the coffee cup. Why does it disturb you to imagine Kay as a sexual person? Have you ever allowed her to be human? Or is she the perfect mother, or worse, one who isn’t perfect enough?”

  “I admit I used to have a problem with that, competing for her attention, not allowing her to have flaws or real feelings,” Lucy said. “I was a tyrant.”

  “No more?”

  “Maybe Marino was the final radiation, the last dose of chemo. Unintentionally, he cured something somewhat malignant in me, and actually, my aunt and I are better off. I realized she has a life quite apart from mine, and that’s fine. It’s more than fine. It’s better. It’s not that I didn’t know it before. But in retrospect, I didn’t feel it. And now she’s married. If Marino hadn’t done what he did, I don’t think Benton would have gotten around to getting married.”

  “You act as if the decision was his alone. She had no input?” Berger studied her.

  “She’s always let him be what he is. She would have continued to. She loves him. She probably couldn’t be with anybody else, in truth, because there are three things she can’t abide and won’t tolerate. Being controlled, betrayed, or bored. Any one of them, and she’d rather be alone.”

  “Sounds like a few other suspects I know,” Berger said.

  “Probably true,” Lucy said.

  “Well,” Berger said, returning her attention to what was on the computer screen. “Unfortunately, what’s on these laptops is evidence, and people involved in the case will read it. And yes, it could become public.”

  “It would destroy her.”

  “It won’t destroy her,” Berger said. “But we’ve got to find out where this information came from. I don’t think it was fabricated from whole cloth. Terri, or whoever wrote this, knows too much. Benton and Kay’s first meeting in Richmond twenty years ago, for example.”

  “They didn’t start their affair then.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because I was staying in her house that summer,” Lucy said. “Benton never came over, not once. And when she wasn’t at the office or at a scene, she was with me. I was a screwed-up pudgy little brat, mad as hell and desperate for her attention. In other words, just looking to get into trouble, and not in a position to really understand that the kind of trouble she dealt with caused people to end up raped and murdered. She didn’t run around and leave me alone, not for a minute, not with a serial killer terrorizing the city. I never saw a Seven-Eleven coffee cup, just so you know.”

  “It means nothing that you didn’t see one,” Berger said
. “Why would she show it to you, much less explain why she’d carried it home from her office conference room?”

  “She wouldn’t have,” Lucy said. “But I’m sort of sorry I didn’t see one. She was really all alone back then.”

  20

  Scarpetta turned Terri Bridges’s body on its side to look at it, front and back.

  Other than the marks on the neck and a small cut on one wrist, the only injuries Scarpetta saw began mid-thigh, anteriorly, or on the front. These were long, narrow bruises with multiple linear abrasions that would have bled, most of them horizontal, as if she had been struck with something like a board that had a flat surface with an edge.

  Her knees were badly bruised and abraded, as were the tops of her feet, and under the magnification of the hand lens, Scarpetta discovered tiny blondish splinters as fine as hair embedded in each. The vivid redness and lack of swelling of the wounds indicated all of them had been inflicted close to the time of death. That could have been minutes. It could have been an hour.

  Dr. Lester’s response to the discovery of the splinters anteriorly, on the knees, on the feet, was that perhaps, at some point, the body was dragged, and only those areas of it had been in contact with a wooden surface, a floor. Scarpetta remarked that few wooden floors were rough enough to cause splinters, unless the wood was untreated.

  “You aren’t going to get me to rule out an accident yet,” Dr. Lester stubbornly asserted. “Bondage, beatings, whippings, severe spanking. And sometimes things go too far.”

  “What about a struggle?” Benton said. “Does that also factor into your theory that this might be an accident?”

  “Writhing, screaming in pain. I’ve seen it on videotapes that profilers like you show at meetings,” Dr. Lester said, and the crease between her eyebrows seemed deeper, like a crevice dividing her forehead. “Couples turn the camera on, never knowing their perverted rituals will end in death.”

  “If you could go through the photographs,” Scarpetta said to Benton. “The ones from the scene. Let’s look at a few things.”

  He retrieved an envelope from a counter and together they arranged photos of the bathroom. She pointed to one that showed the vanity, and directly above it, the oval mirror that was slightly askew.