Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

"Well, let me just lay this one on you." The tirade wasn't about to end. "Pretty boy Matt, here - it just so happens he ain't exactly pure as the driven snow. While I was upstairs checking with serology, I buzzed by Vander's office again to see if he'd turned up anything else. Petersen's prints are on file, right? You know why?"

He stared hard at me. "I'll tell you why. Vander looked into it, did his thing with his gizmos. Pretty-boy Matt got arrested six years ago in New Orleans. This was the summer before he went off to college, long before he met his surgeon lady. She probably never even knew about it."

"Knew about what?" Wesley asked.

"Knew her lover-boy actor was charged with rape, that's what."

No one said anything for a very long time.

Wesley was slowly turning his Mont Blanc pen end over end on the table top, his jaw, firmly set. Marino wasn't playing by the rules. He wasn't sharing information. He was ambushing us with it as if this were court and Wesley and I were opposing counsel.

I finally proposed, "If Petersen was, in fact, charged with rape, then he was acquitted. Or else the charges were dropped."

Those eyes of his fixed on me like two gun barrels. "You know that, do you? I ain't run a record check on him yet."

"A university like Harvard, Sergeant Marino, doesn't make it a practice to accept convicted felons."

"If they know."

"True," I agreed. "If they know. It's hard to believe they wouldn't know, if the charge stuck."

"We'd better run it down" was all Wesley had to say about the matter.

With that, Marino abruptly excused himself.

I assumed he was going to the men's room.

Wesley acted as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about Marino's outburst or anything else. He casually asked, "What's the word from New York, Kay? Anything back from the lab yet?"

"DNA testing takes a while," I abstractedly replied. "We didn't send them anything until the second case. I should be getting those results soon. As for the second two, Cecile Tyler and Lori Petersen, we're talking next month at the earliest."

He persisted in his "nothing's wrong" mode. "In all four cases the guy's a nonsecreter. That much we know."

"Yes. We know that much."

"There's really no doubt in my mind it's the same killer."

"Nor in mine," I concurred.

Nothing more was said for a while.

We sat tensely, waiting for Marino's return, his angry words still ringing in our ears. I was perspiring and could feel my heart beating.

I think Wesley must have been able to read the look on my face that I wanted nothing more to do with Marino, that I had relegated him to the oblivion I reserve for people who are impossible and unpleasant and professionally dangerous.

He said, "You have to understand him, Kay."

"Well, I don't."

"He's a good detective, a very fine one."

I didn't comment.

We sat silently.

My anger began to rise. I knew better, but there was no stopping the words from boiling out. "Damn it, Benton! These women deserve our best effort. We screw it up and someone else may die. I don't want him screwing it up because he's got some problem!"

"He won't."

"He already is."

I lowered my voice. "He's got a noose around Matt Petersen's neck. It means he's not looking at anybody else."

Marino, thank God, was taking his sweet time coming back. Wesley's jaw muscles were flexing and he wouldn't meet my eyes. "I haven't dismissed Petersen yet either. I can't. I know killing his wife doesn't fit with the other three. But he's an unusual case. Take Gacy. We've got no idea how many people he murdered. Thirty-three kids. Possibly it was hundreds. Strangers, all of them strangers to him. Then he does his mother and stuffs pieces of her down the garbage disposal… " I couldn't believe it. He was giving me one of his "young agents" lectures, rattling on like a sweaty-palmed sixteen year-old on his first date. "Chapman's toting around Catcher in the Rye when he wastes John Lennon. Reagan, Brady get shot by some jerk who's obsessed with an actress. Patterns. We try to predict. But we can't always. It isn't always predictable."

Next he began reciting statistics. Twelve years ago the clearance rate for homicides averaged at ninety-five, ninety-six percent.

Now it was more like seventy-four percent, and dropping. There were more stranger killings as opposed to crimes of passion, and so on. I was barely hearing a word of it.

"… Matt Petersen worries me, to tell you the truth; Kay." He paused.

He had my attention.

"He's an artist. Psychopaths are the Rembrandts of murderers. He's an actor. We don't know what roles he's played out in his fantasies. We don't know that he isn't making them reality now. We don't know that he isn't diabolically clever. His wife's murder might have been utilitarian."

"Utilitarian?"

I stared at him with wide, disbelieving eyes, stared at the photographs taken of Lori Petersen at the scene. Her face a suffused mask of agony, her legs bent, the electrical cord as taut as a bowstring in back and wrenching her arms up and cutting into her neck. I was seeing everything the monster did to her. Utilitarian? I wasn't hearing this.

Wesley explained, "Utilitarian in the sense he may have had a need to get rid of her, Kay. If, for example, something happened to make her suspect he'd killed the first three women, he may have panicked, decided he had to kill her. How can he do that and get away with it? He can make her death look like the other ones."

"I've heard shades of this before," I said evenly. "From your partner."

His words were slow and steady like the beat of a metronome, "All possible scenarios, Kay. We have to consider them."

"Of course we do. And that's fine as long as Marino considers all possible scenarios and doesn't wear blinders because he's getting obsessed or has a problem."

Wesley glanced toward the open door. Almost inaudibly, he said, "Pete's got his prejudices. I won't deny that."

"I think you'd better tell me exactly what they are."

"Let it suffice to say that when the Bureau decided he was a good candidate for a VICAP team, we did some checking into his background. I know where he grew up, how he grew up. Some things you never get over. They set you off. It happens."

He wasn't telling me anything I hadn't already figured out. Marino grew up poor on the wrong side of the tracks. He was uncomfortable around the sort of people who had always made him uncomfortable. The cheerleaders and homecoming queens never gave him a second glance because he was a social misfit, because his father had dirt under his nails, because he was "common."

I'd heard these cop sob stories a thousand times before. The guy's only advantage in life is he's big and white, so he makes himself bigger and whiter by carrying a gun and a badge.

"We don't get to excuse ourselves, Benton," I said shortly. "We don't excuse criminals because they had screwed-up childhoods. We don't get to use the powers entrusted to us to punish people who remind us of our own screwed-up childhoods."

I wasn't lacking in compassion. I understood exactly where Marino was coming from. I was no stranger to his anger. I'd felt it many times when facing a defendant in court. No matter how convincing the evidence, if the guy's nicelooking, clean-cut and dressed in a two-hundred-dollar suit, twelve working men and women don't, in their hearts, believe he's guilty.

I could believe just about anything of anybody these days. But only if the evidence was there. Was Marino looking at the evidence? Was he even looking at all? Wesley pushed back his chair and stood up to stretch. "Pete has his spells. You get used to it. I've known him for years."

He stepped into the open doorway and looked up and down the hall. "Where the hell is he, anyway? He fall in the john?"