Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

"Literature," he said again, slowly enunciating each syllable.

"What sort of literature?"

His brown eyes finally fixed unemphatically on me. "American's what he told me. But I get the impression his main interest is plays. Seems he's in one right now. Shakespeare. Hamlet, I think he said. Says he's done a lot of acting, including some bit parts in movies shot around here, a couple of TV commercials, too." The ID officers stopped what they were doing. One of them turned around, his brush poised in midair.

Marino pointed toward the computer diskettes on the desk and exclaimed loudly enough to grab everybody's attention, "Looks like we'd better take a peek at what's on these suckers. Maybe a play he's writing, huh?"

"We can take a look at them in my office. We've got a couple IBM-compatible PC's," I offered.

"PC's," he drawled. "Yo. Beats the hell out of my RC: one Royal Crapola, standard issue, black, boxy, sticky keys, the whole nine yards."

An ID officer was pulling out something from beneath a stack of sweaters in a bottom drawer, a long-bladed survival knife with a compass built into the top of the black handle and a small whetstone in a pocket on the sheath. Touching as little of it as possible, he placed it inside a plastic evidence bag.

Out of the same dresser drawer came a box of Trojans, which, I pointed out to Marino, was a little unusual, since Lori Petersen, based on what I'd seen in the master bathroom, was on oral contraceptives.

Marino and the other officers began the expected cynical speculations.

I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them in the top of my bag. "The squad can move her," I said.

The men turned in unison, as if suddenly reminded of the brutalized, dead woman in the center of the rumpled turned down bed. Her lips were pulled back, as if in pain, from her teeth, her eyes swollen to slits and staring blindly up.

A radio message was relayed to the ambulance, and several minutes later two paramedics in blue jumpsuits came in with a stretcher, which they covered with a clean white sheet and placed Rush against the bed.

Lori Petersen was lifted as I directed, the bedclothes folded over her, the gloved hands not touching her skin. She was gently placed on the stretcher, the sheet pinned at the top to ensure no trace evidence was lost or added. Velcro straps made a loud ripping sound as they were peeled apart and fastened across the white cocoon.

Marino followed me out of the bedroom and I was surprised when he announced, "I'll walk you to your car."

Matt Petersen was on his feet as we came down the hall. His face wan, his eyes glassy, he stared at me, desperately, needing something only I could give. Assurance. A word of comfort. The promise his wife died quickly and did not suffer. That she was tied up and raped after the fact. There was nothing I could say to him. Marino led me back through the living room and out the door.

The front yard was lit up with television lights floating against the background of hypnotically flashing red and blue. The staccato voices of disembodied dispatchers competed with the throbbing engines as a gentle rain began to fall through a light fog.

Reporters with notepads and tape recorders were everywhere, waiting impatiently for the moment when the body was carried down the front steps and slid into the back of the ambulance. A television crew was on the street, a woman in a snappy belted trenchcoat talking into a microphone, her face serious as a grinding camera recorded her "at the scene" for Saturday's evening news.

Bill Boltz, the Commonwealth's attorney, had just pulled up and was getting out of his car. He looked dazed and half asleep and determined to elude the press. He didn't have anything to say because he didn't know anything yet. I wondered who notified him. Maybe Marino. Cops milled around, a few of them aimlessly probing the grass with their powerful Kel lights, some of them clustered by their white cruisers and talking. Boltz zipped up his windbreaker and nodded as he briefly met my eyes, then hurried up the walk.

The chief of police and a major sat inside an unmarked beige car, the interior light on, their faces pale as they periodically nodded and made remarks to reporter Abby Turnbull. She was saying something to them through an open window. Waiting until we were on the street, she trotted after us.

Marino warded her off with a flap of a hand, a "Hey, no comment" in a "screw yourself' tone of voice.

He stepped up the pace. He was almost a comfort.

"Ain't this the pits?" Marino said with disgust as he patted himself down for his cigarettes. "A regular three-ring circus. Jesus Christ."

The rain was soft and cool on my face as Marino held the station wagon door open for me. As I turned the ignition he leaned down and said with a smirk, "Drive real careful, Doc."

The white clock face floated like a full moon in the dark sky, rising high above the old domed train station, the railroad tracks and the I-95 overpass. The great clock's filigree hands stopped when the last passenger train did many years before. It was twelve-seventeen. It would always be twelve-seventeen in the city's lower end where Health and Human Services decided to erect its hospital for the dead. Time has stopped here. Buildings are boarded up and torn down. Traffic and freight trains perpetually rumble and roar like a distant discontented sea. The earth is a poisoned shore of weed-patched raw dirt littered with debris where nothing grows and there -are no lights after dark. Nothing moves here except the truckers and the travelers and the trains speeding along their tracks of concrete and steel.

The white clock face watched me as I drove through the darkness, watched me like the white face in my dream.

I nosed the station wagon through an opening in the chainlink fence and parked behind the stucco building where I'd spent virtually every day of the past two years. The only state vehicle in the lot aside from mine was the gray Plymouth belonging to Neils Vander, the fingerprints examiner. I had called him right after Marino called me. Set into effect after the second strangling was a new policy. If there was another, Vander was to meet me in the morgue immediately. By now he was inside the X-ray room and setting up the laser.

Light was spilling on the tarmac from the open bay, and two paramedics were pulling a stretcher bearing a black body pouch out of the back of an ambulance. Deliveries went on throughout the night. Anybody who died violently, unexpectedly, or suspiciously in central Virginia was sent here, no matter the hour or the day.

The young men in their blue jumpsuits looked surprised to see me as I walked through the bay and held open the door leading inside the building.

"You're out early, Doc."

"Suicide from Mecklenburg," the other attendant volunteered. "Threw himself in front of a train. Scattered him over fifty feet of tracks."

"Yo. Pieces an' parts…"

The stretcher bumped through the open doorway and into the white-tiled corridor. The body pouch apparently was defective or torn. Blood leaked through the bottom of the stretcher and left a trail of speckled red.

The morgue had a distinctive odor, the stale stench of death no amount of air deodorizer could mask. Had I been led here blindfolded, I would have known exactly where I was. At this hour of the morning, the smell was more noticeable, more unpleasant than usual. The stretcher clattered loudly through the hollow stillness as the attendants wheeled the suicide into the stainless steel refrigerator.

I turned right into the morgue office where Fred, the security guard, was sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup and waiting for the ambulance attendants to sign in the body and be on their way. He was sitting on the edge of the desk, ducking out of view, just as he always did when a body was delivered. A gun to his head wouldn't have been sufficient incentive to make him escort anybody inside the refrigerator. Toe tags dangling from cold feet protruding from sheets had a peculiar effect on him.