“People are staring at you, Aunt Kay,” Lucy said under her breath.
I assumed the attention was due to our vibrant attire until I opened the morning's Washington Post and was shocked to discover myself on the front page. The headline read, “MURDER IN THE MORGUE,” the story a lengthy account of Susan's homicide, which was accompanied by a prominently placed photograph of me arriving at the scene and looking very tense. Clearly, the reporter's major source was Susan's distraught husband, Jason, whose information painted a picture of his wife leaving her job under peculiar, if not suspicious, circumstances less than a week before her violent death.
It was asserted, for example, that Susan recently confronted me when I attempted to list her as a witness in the case of a murdered young boy, even though she had not been present during his autopsy. When Susan became ill and stayed out of work “after a formalin spill,” I called her home with such frequency that she was afraid to answer me phone, then I showed up on her doorstep the night before her murder” with a poinsettia and vague offers of favors.
“I walked into my house after Christmas shopping and there was the Chief Medical Examiner inside my living room,” Susan's husband was quoted. “She [Dr. Scarpetta] left right away, and as soon as the door shut Susan started crying. She was terrified of something but wouldn't tell me what.”
As unsettling as I found Jason Story's public disparagement of me, worse was the revelation of Susan's recent financial transactions. Supposedly, two weeks before her death she paid off more than three thousand dollars in credit card bills after having deposited thirty five hundred dollars into her checking account. The sudden windfall could not be explained. Her husband had been laid off from his sales job during the fall and Susan earned less than twenty thousand dollars a year.
“Mr. Wesley's here,” Lucy said, taking the paper from me.
Wesley was dressed in black ski pants and turtleneck, a bright red jacket tucked under his arm. I could tell by the expression on his face, the firm set of his jaw, that he was aware of the news.
“Did the Post try to talk to you?”
He pulled out a chair. “I can't believe they ran the damn thing without giving you a chance for comment.”
“A reporter from the Post called as I was leaving the office yesterday, “I replied. “He wanted to question me about Susan's homicide and I chose not to talk to him. I guess that was my chance.”
“So you didn't know anything, had no forwarning about the slant of this thing.”
“I was in the dark until I picked up the paper.”
“It's all over the news, Kay.”
He met my eyes. “I heard it on television this morning. Marino called. The press in Richmond is having a field day. The implication is that Susan's murder may be connected to the medical examiner's office - that you may be involved and have suddenly left town.”
“That's insane.”
“How much of the article is true?” he asked.
“The facts have been completely distorted. I did call Susan's house when she didn't show up at work. I wanted to make certain she was all right, and then I needed to find out if she remembered printing Waddell at the morgue. I did go see her on Christmas Eve to give her a gift and the poinsettia. I suppose my promise of favors was when she told me she was quitting and I said for her to let me know if she needed a reference, or if there was anything I could do for her.”
“What about the business of her not wanting to be listed as a witness in Eddie Heath's case?”
“That was the afternoon she broke several jars of formalin and retreated upstairs to my office. It's routine to list autopsy assistants or techs as witnesses when they assist in the posts. In this instance, Susan was present for only the external examination and was adamant about not wanting her name on Eddie Heath's autopsy report.
I thought her request and demeanor were weird, but there was no confrontation.”
“This article makes it look as if you were paying her off,” Lucy said. “That's what I would wonder if I read this and didn't know.”
“I certainly wasn't paying her off, but it sounds as if someone was,” I said.
“It's all making a little more sense,” Wesley said. “If this bit about her financial picture is accurate, then Susan had gotten a substantial sum of money, meaning she must have supplied a service to someone. Around this same time your computer was broken into and Susan's personality changed. She became nervous and unreliable. She avoided you as much as she could. I think she couldn't face you, Kay, because she knew she was betraying you.”
I nodded, struggling for composure. Susan had gotten into something she did not know how to get out of, and it occurred to me that this might be the real explanation for why she fled from Eddie Heath's post and then from Jennifer Deighton's. Her emotional outbursts had nothing to do with witchcraft or feeling dizzy after being exposed to formalin fumes. She was panicking. She did not want to witness either case.
“Interesting,” Wesley said when I voiced my theory. “If you ask what of value did Susan Story have to sell, the answer is information. If she didn't witness the posts, she had no information. And whoever was buying this information from her is quite likely the person she was going to meet on Christmas Day.”
“What information would be so important that someone would be willing to pay thousands of dollars for it and then murder a pregnant woman?” Lucy asked bluntly.
We did not know, but we had a guess. The common denominator, once again, seemed to be Ronnie Joe Waddell.
“Susan didn't forget to print Waddell or whoever it was that was executed,” I said. ”She deliberately didn't print him.”
“That's the way it looks,” Wesley agreed. “Someone else asked her to conveniently forget to print him. Or to lose his cards in the event that you or another member of your staff printed him.”
I thought of Ben Stevens. The bastard.
“And this brings us back to what you and I concluded last night, Kay,” Wesley went on. “We need to go back to 'the night Waddell was supposed to have been executed and determine who it was they strapped in the chair. And a place to start is AFIS. What we want to know is if and what records were tampered with.”
He was talking to Lucy now. “I've got it set up for you to go through the journal tapes, if you're willing.”
“I'm willing,” Lucy said. “When do you want me to start?”
“You can start as soon as you want because the first step will involve only the telephone. You need to call Michele. She's a systems analyst for Department of Criminal Justice Services and works out of the State Police headquarters. She's involved with AFIS and will go into detail with you about how everything works. Then she'll begin mounting the journal tapes so you can access them.”
“She doesn't mind my doing this?” Lucy asked warily.
“On the contrary. She's thrilled. The journal tapes are nothing more than audit logs, a record of changes made to the AFIS data base. They're not readable, in other words. I think Michele called them 'hex dumps’ if that means anything to you.”
“Hexadecimal, or base sixteen. Hieroglyphics, in other words,” Lucy said. “It means that I'll have to decipher the data and write a program that will look for anything that's gone against the identification numbers of the records you're interested in.”
“Can you do it?” Wesley asked.
“Once I figure out the code and record layout. Why doesn't the analyst you know do it herself?'
“We want to be as discreet as possible. It would attract notice if Michele suddenly abandoned her normal duties and started wading through journal tapes ten hours a day. You can work invisibly from your aunt's home computer by dialing in on a diagnostic line.”
“As long as when Lucy dials in it can't be traced back to my residence,” I said.
“It won't be,” Wesley said.
“And no one is likely to notice that someone from the outside is dialing into the State Police computer and wading through the tapes?” I a
sked.
“Michele says she can maneuver it so there's no problem.”
Unzipping a pocket of his ski jacket, Wesley slipped out a card and gave it to Lucy. “Here are her work and home phone numbers.”
“How do you know you can trust her?” Lucy asked. “If tampering has gone on, how do you know she's not involved?”
“Michele has never been good at lying. From the time she was a little girl she would stare down at her feet and turn as red as Rudolf's nose.”
“You knew her when she was a little girl?” Lucy looked baffled.
“And before,” Wesley said. “She's my eldest daughter.”
9
After much debate, we came up with what seemed a reasonable plan. Lucy would stay at the Homestead with the Wesleys until Wednesday, allowing me a brief period to grapple with my problems without worrying about her welfare. After breakfast, I drove off in a gentle snow that by the time I reached Richmond had turned to rain.
By late afternoon, I had been to the office and the labs. I had conferred with Fielding and several of the forensic scientists, and had avoided Ben Stevens. I returned not a single reporters call and ignored my electronic mail, for if the health commissioner had sent me a communication, I did not want to know what it said. At half past four I was filling my car with gas at an Exxon station on Grove Avenue when a white Ford LTD pulled in behind me. I watched Marino get out, hitch up his trousers, and head to the men's room. When he returned a moment later, he covertly glanced around as if worried that someone might have observed his trip to the toilet. Then he strolled over to me.
“I saw you as I was driving past,” he said; jamming his hands into the pockets of his blue blazer.
“Where's your coat?” I began cleaning the front windshield.
“In the car. It gets in my way.” He hunched his shoulders against the cold, raw air. “If you ain't thinking about stopping these rumors, then you'd better start thinking about it.”
I irritably returned the squeegee to its container of cleaning solution. “And just what do you suggest I do, Marino? Call Jason Story and tell him I'm sorry his wife and unborn child are dead but I would certainly appreciate it if he would vent his grief and rage elsewhere?”
“Doc, he blames you.”
“After reading his quotes in the Post, I suspect any number of people are blaming me. He's managed to portray me as a Machiavellian bitch.”
“You hungry?”
“No.”
“Well, you look hungry.”
I looked at him as if he'd lost his mind.
“And if something looks a certain way to me, it's my duty to check it out. So I'm giving you a choice, Doc. I can get us some Nabs and sodas from the machines over there, and we can stand out here freezing our asses off and inhaling fumes while we prevent other poor bastards from using the self-service pumps. Or we can zip over to Phil's. I'm buying either way.”
Ten minutes later we were sitting in a corner booth perusing glossy illustrated menus offering everything from spaghetti to fried fish. Marino faced the dark-tinted front door and I had a perfect view of the rest rooms. He was smoking, as were most of the people around us, and I was reminded that it is hell to quit. He actually could not have selected a more ideal restaurant, considering the circumstances. Philip's Continental Lounge was an old, neighborhood establishment where patrons who had known each other all their lives continued to meet regularly for hearty food and bottled beer. The typical customer was good-natured and gregarious, and unlikely to recognize me or care unless my picture regularly appeared in the sports section of the newspaper.
“It's like this,” Marino said as he closed his menu. “Jason Story believes Susan would still be alive if she'd had another job. And he's probably right. Plus, he's a loser - one of these self-centered assholes who believes everything is everybody else's fault. The truth is, he's probably more to blame for Susan's death than anyone.”
“You're not suggesting that he killed her?”
The waitress appeared and we ordered. Grilled chicken and rice for Marino and a kosher chili dog for me, plus two diet sodas.
“I'm not suggesting that Jason shot his wife,” Marino said quietly. “But he set her up for getting involved in whatever it was that precipitated her homicide. Paying the bills was Susan's responsibility, and she was under big-time financial stress.”
“Unsurprisingly,” I said. “Her husband had just lost his job.”
“It's too bad he didn't lose his high dollar taste. We're talking Polo shirts and Britches of Georgetown slacks and silk ties. A couple weeks after he gets laid off, the jerk goes out and buys seven hundred bucks' worth of ski equipment and then heads off to Wintergreen for the weekend. Before that it was a two-hundred-dollar leather jacket and a four-hundred-dollar bicycle. So Susan's down at the morgue working like a dog and then coming home to face-bills her salary won't put a dew it”
“I had no idea,” I said pained by a sudden vision of Susan sitting at her desk. Her dally ritual was to spend her lunch hour in her office, and on occasion I would join her thereto chat. I remembered her generic-brand corn chips and the sale stickers on her sodas. I don't think she ever ate or drank anything she had not brought from home.
“Jason's spending habits,” Marino went on, “leads to the shit he's causing you. He's badmouthing you like hell to anybody who will listen because you're a doctor-lawyer-Indian chief who drives a Mercedes and lives in a big house bi Windsor Farms. I think the dumbass believes if he can somehow blame you for what happened to his wife, maybe he can get a little compensation.”
“He can try until he's blue in the face.”
“And he will.”
Our diet drinks arrived, and I changed the subject.
“I'm meeting with Downey in the morning.” Marino's eyes wandered to the television over the bar. “Lucy's getting started on AFIS. And then I've got to do something about Ben Steven,”
”What you ought to do is get rid of him.”
“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to fire a state employee?”
“They say it's easier to fire Jesus Christ,” Marino said. “Unless the employee is appointed and got a grade off the charts, like you. You still ought to find some way to run the bastard off.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“Oh, yeah. According to him, you're arrogant, ambitious, and strange. A real pain in the ass to work for.”
“He actually said something like that?”I asked in disbelief.
“That was the drift.”
“I hope someone is checking into his finances. I'd be interested to know if he's made any large deposits lately. Susan didn't get into trouble alone.”
”I agree with you. I think Stevens knows a lot and is covering his tracks like crazy. By the way, I checked with Susan's bank. One of the tellers remembers her making the thirty-five-hundred-dollar deposit in cash. Twenties, fifties, and hundred-dollar bills that she was carrying in her purse.”
“What did Stevens have to say about Susan?”
“He's saying that he really didn't know her, but that it was his impression there was some problem between you and her. In other words, he's reinforcing what's been in the news.”
Our food arrived, and it was all I could do to swallow a single bite because I was so angry.
“And what about Fielding?” I said. “Does he think I'm horrible to work for?”
Marino stared off again. “He says you're very driven and he's never been able to figure you out.”
“I didn't hire him to figure me out, and compared to him, I am certainly driven. Fielding is disenchanted with forensic medicine and has been for several years. He expends most of his energy in the gym.”
“Doc” - Marino met my eyes- “you are driven compared to anyone, and most people can't figure you out. You don't exactly walk around with your heart on your sleeve. In fact, you can come across as someone who don't have feelings. You're so damn hard to read that to others who don't know you, it sometimes
appears that nothing gets to you. Other cops, lawyers, they ask me about you. They want to know what you're really like, how you can do what you do every day - what the deal is. They see you as somebody who don't get close to anyone.”
“And what do you tell them when they ask?” I said.
“I don't tell them a damn thing.”
“Are you finished psychoanalyzing me yet, Marino?”
He lit a cigarette. “Look, I'm going to say something to you, and you ain't gonna like it. You've always been this reserved, professional lady - someone real slow to let you in, but once the person's there, he's there. He's got a damn friend for life and you'd do anything for But you've been different this past year. You've had about a hundred walls up ever since Mark got killed. For those of us around you, it's like being in a room that was once seventy degrees and suddenly the temperature's down to about fifty five. I don't think you're even aware of it.”
“So nobody's feeling all that attached to you right now. Maybe they even resent you a little bit because they feel ignored or snubbed by you. Maybe they never liked you anyway. Maybe they're just indifferent. The thing about people is, whether you're sitting on a throne or a hot seat, they're going to use your position to their advantage. And if there's no bond between you and them, that just makes it all the easier for them to try to get what they want without giving a rat's ass about what happens to you. And that's where you are. There's a lot of people who've been waiting for years to see you bleed.”
“I don't intend to bleed.” I pushed my plate away.
“Doc” - he blew out smoke - “you're already bleeding. And common sense tells me that if you're swimming with sharks and start bleeding, you ought to get the hell out of the water.”
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