Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

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-"