Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

When the light turned green after an interminably long time, I crossed the street, and Lucy came to mind as I approached a computer software store. Ducking in, I found something she was sure to like, not a video game but a history tutorial complete with art, music and quizzes. Yesterday we had rented a paddleboat in the park and drifted around the small lake. She ran us into the fountain to give me a tepid shower, and I found myself childishly paying her back. We fed bread to the geese and sucked on grape snow cones until our tongues turned blue. Thursday morning she would fly home to Miami, and I would not see her again until Christmas, if I saw her again at all this year.

It was quarter of one when I walked into the lobby of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, or OCME, as it was called. Benton Wesley was fifteen minutes early and sitting on the couch reading the Wall Street Journal.

"Hope you got something to drink in that bag," he said drolly, folding the newspaper and reaching for his briefcase.

"Wine vinegar. You'll love it."

"Hell. Ripple - I don't care. Some days I'm so desperate I fantasize the water cooler outside my door's full of gin."

"Sounds like a waste of imagination to me."

"Nawwww. Just the only fantasy I'm going to talk about in front of a lady."

Wesley was a suspect profiler for the FBI and located in Richmond's field office, where he actually spent very little time. When he wasn't on the road, he was usually at the National Academy in Quantico teaching death-investigation classes and doing what he could to coax VICAP through its rocky adolescence. VICAP is an acronym for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. One of VICAP's most innovative concepts was regional teams, which yoke a Bureau profiler with an experienced homicide detective. Richmond P. D. called in VICAP after the second strangling. Marino, in addition to being a detective sergeant for the city, was Wesley's regional team partner.

"I'm early," Wesley apologized, following me into the hallway. "Came straight here from a dental appointment. Won't bother me if you eat while we talk."

"Well, it will bother me," I said.

His blank look was followed by a sheepish grin - as it suddenly occurred to him. "I forgot. You're not Doc Cagney. You know, he used to keep cheese crackers on the desk in the morgue. In the middle of a post he'd take a break for a snack. It was unbelievable."

We turned off into a room so small it was really an alcove, where there was a refrigerator, a Coke machine and a coffeemaker. "He's lucky he didn't get hepatitis or AIDS," I said.

"AIDS." Wesley laughed. "That would have been poetic justice."

Like a lot of good ole boys I've known, Dr. Cagney was reputed to be acutely homophobic. "Just some goddam queer," he was known to say when persons of a certain persuasion were sent in for examination.

"AIDS…"

Wesley was still enjoying the thought as I tucked my salad inside the refrigerator. "Wouldn't I love to hear him explain his way out of that one."

I'd gradually warmed up to Wesley. The first time I met him I had my reservations. At a glance, he made one a believer in stereotypes. He was FBI right down to his Florsheim shoes, a sharp-featured man with prematurely silver hair suggesting a mellow disposition that wasn't there. He was lean and hard and looked like a trial lawyer in his precisely tailored khaki suit and blue silk paisley-printed tie. I couldn't recall ever seeing him in a shirt that wasn't white and lightly starched.

He had a master's degree in psychology and had been a high school principal in Dallas before enlisting in the Bureau, where he worked first as a field agent, then undercover in fingering members of the Mafia, before ending up where he'd started, in a sense. Profilers are academicians, thinkers, analysts. Sometimes I think they are magicians.

Carrying our coffees out, we turned left and stepped inside the conference room. Marino was sitting at the long table and going through a fat case file. I was mildly surprised. For some reason, I just assumed he would be late.

Before I had a chance to so much as pull out a chair, he launched in with the laconic announcement, "I stopped by serology a minute ago. Thought you might be interested in knowing Matt Petersen's A positive and a nonsecreter."

Wesley looked keenly at him. "This the husband you were telling me about?"

"Yo. A nonsecreter. Same as the guy snuffing these women."

"Twenty percent of the population is nonsecreter," I matter of factly stated.

"Yeah," Marino said. "Two out of ten."

"Or approximately forty-four thousand people in a city the size of Richmond. Twenty-two thousand if half of that number is male," I added.

Lighting a cigarette, Marino squinted up at me over the Bic flame. "You know what, Doc?"

The cigarette wagged with each syllable. "You're beginning to sound like a damn defense attorney." A half hour later I was at the head of the table, the two men on either side. Spread out before us were photographs of the four murdered women.

This was the most difficult and time-consuming part of the investigation-profiling the killer, profiling the victims, and then profiling the killer again.

Wesley was describing him. This was what he did best, and quite often was uncannily accurate when he read the emotion of a crime scene, which in these cases was cold, calculating rage.

"I'm betting he's white," he was saying. "But I won't stake my reputation on it. Cecile Tyler was black, and an interracial mix in victim selection is unusual unless the killer is rapidly decompensating."

He picked up a photograph of Cecile Tyler, dark skinned, lovely in life, and a receptionist at a Northside investment firm. Like Lori Petersen, she was bound, strangled, her nude body on top of the bed.

"But we're getting more of them these days. That's the trend, an increase of sexual slayings in which the assailant is black, the woman white, but rarely the opposite - white men raping and murdering black women, in other words. Hookers are an exception."

He glanced blandly at the array of photographs. "These women certainly weren't hookers. I suppose if they had been," he muttered, "our job would be a little easier."

"Yeah, but theirs wouldn'ta been," Marino butted in.

Wesley didn't smile. "At least there would be a connection that maybe makes sense, Pete. The selection."

He shook his head. "It's peculiar."

"So what does Fortosis have to say these days?" Marino asked, referring to the forensic psychiatrist who had been reviewing the cases.

"Not a whole hell of a lot," Wesley replied. "Talked to him briefly this morning. He's being noncommittal. I think the murder of this doctor's causing him to rethink a few things. But he's still damn sure the killer's white."

The face from my dream violated my mind, the white face without features.

"He's probably between twenty-five and thirty-five."

Wesley continued staring into his crystal ball. "Because the murders aren't related to any particular locality, he's got some way of getting around, a car versus a motorcycle or a truck or a van. My guess is he's stashing his wheels in some inconspicuous spot, going the rest of the way on foot. His car's an older model, probably American, dark or plain in color, such as beige or gray. It wouldn't be the least bit uncommon for him to drive, in other words, the very sort of car plainclothes law-enforcement officers drive."

He wasn't being funny. This type of killer is frequently fascinated by police work and may even emulate cops. The classic post offense behavior for a psychopath is to become involved in the investigation. He wants to help the police, to offer insights and suggestions, and assist rescue teams in their search for a body he dumped in the woods somewhere. He's the kind of guy who wouldn't think twice about hanging out at the Fraternal Order of Police lounge clacking beer mugs with the off duty cops.