Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

Decidedly lacking in enthusiasm, he did, and a lot of good it did. I didn't recognize most of the businesses except for the Department of Motor Vehicles, Central Supply for the city, and of course, HHSD. Collectively speaking, they included probably ten thousand employees, everyone from judges to public defenders to prosecutors to the entire police force to mechanics at the state and city garages. Somewhere within this great pool of people was a Mr. Nobody with a fetish for cleanliness.

I was returning to my desk a little after 3:00 P.M. with another cup of coffee when Rose buzzed me and transferred a call.

"She's been dead awhile," Marino was saying.

I grabbed my bag and was out the door.

According to Marino, the police had yet to find any neighbors who had seen the victim over the weekend. A friend she worked with tried to call Saturday and Sunday and didn't get an answer. When the woman didn't show up to teach her one o'clock class the friend called the police. An officer arrived at the scene and went around to the back of the house. A window on the third floor was wide open. The victim had a roommate who apparently was out of town.

The address was less than a mile from downtown and on the fringes of Virginia Commonwealth University, a sprawling physical plant with more than twenty thousand students. Many of the schools that made up the university were located in restored Victorian homes and brownstones along West Main. Summer classes were in session, and students were walking and riding bicycles along the street. They lingered at small tables on restaurant terraces, sipping coffee, their books stacked by their elbows as they talked with friends and luxuriated in the sunny warmth of a lovely June afternoon.

Henna Yarborough was thirty-one and taught journalism at the university's School of Broadcasting, Marino had told me. She had moved to the city from North Carolina last fall. We knew nothing more about her except that she was dead and had been dead for several days.

Cops, reporters were all over the place.

Traffic was slow rolling past the dark red brick, three-story house, with a blue-and-green handmade flag fluttering over the entrance. There were windowboxes bright with pink and white geraniums, and a blue-steel slate roof with an Art Nouveau flower design in pale yellow.

The street was so congested I was forced to park almost half a block away, and it didn't escape my notice that the reporters were more subdued than usual. They scarcely stirred as I passed. They didn't jam cameras and microphones in my face. There was something almost militaristic in their bearing-stiff, quiet, definitely not at ease-as if they sensed this was another one. Number five. Five women like themselves or their wives and lovers who had been brutalized and murdered.

A uniformed man lifted the yellow tape barring the front doorway at the top of the worn granite steps. I went into a dim foyer and up three flights of wooden stairs. On the top landing I found the chief of police, several high-ranking officers, detectives and uniformed men. Bill was there, too, closest to an open doorway and looking in. His eyes briefly met mine, his face ashen.

I was hardly aware of him as I paused in the doorway and looked inside the small bedroom filled with the pungent stench of decomposing human flesh that is unlike any other odor on earth. Marino's back was to me. He was squatting on his heels and opening dresser drawers, his hands deftly shuffling through layers of neatly folded clothing.

The top of the dresser was sparsely arranged with bottles of perfume and moisturizers, a hairbrush and a set of electric curlers. Against the wall to the left of it was a desk, and the electric typewriter on top of it was an island in the midst of a sea of paper and books. More books were on a shelf overhead and stacked on the hardwood floor. The closet door was open a crack, the light off inside. There were no rugs or knickknacks, no photographs or paintings on the walls-as if the bedroom had not been lived in very long or else her stay was temporary.

Far to my right was a twin bed. From a distance I saw disarrayed bedcovers and a splay of dark, tangled hair. Watching where I stepped, I went to her.

Her face was turned toward me, and it was so suffused, so bloated by decomposition, I could not tell what she had looked like in life except she was white, with shoulder-length dark brown hair. She was nude and resting on her left side, her legs drawn up, her hands behind her and tightly bound. It appeared the killer used the cords from venetian blinds, and the knots, the pattern, were joltingly familiar. A dark blue bedspread was thrown over her hips in a manner still ringing of careless cold contempt. On the floor at the foot of the bed was a pair of shorty pajamas. The top was buttoned, and it was slit from the collar to the hem. The bottoms appeared to be slit along the sides.

Marino slowly crossed the bedroom and stood next to me. "He climbed up the ladder," he said.

"What ladder?" I asked.

There were two windows. The one he was staring at was open and nearer the bed. "Against the brick outside," he explained, "there's an old iron fire escape ladder. That's how he got in. The rungs are rusty. Some of it flaked off and is on the sill, probably from his shoes."

"And he went out that way, too," I assumed aloud.

"Can't say for sure, but it would appear so. The door downstairs was locked. We had to bust it open. But outside," he added, looking toward the window again, "there's tall grass under the ladder. No footprints. It rained cats and dogs Saturday night so that don't help our cause worth a damn either."

"This place air-conditioned?" My skin was crawling, the airless room hot and damp and bristling with decay.

"Nope. No fans either. Not a single one."

He wiped his flushed face with his hand. His hair was clinging like gray string to his wet forehead, his eyes bloodshot and darkly ringed. Marino looked as if he hadn't been to bed or changed his clothes in a week.

"Was the window locked?" I asked.

"Neither of them was-" He got a surprised look on his face as we turned in unison toward the doorway. "What the hell…?"

A woman had started screaming in the foyer two floors below. Feet were scuffing, male voices were arguing.

"Get out of my house! Oh, God… Get out of my house, you goddam son of a bitch!" screamed the woman.

Marino abruptly brushed past me, and his steps thudded loudly on the wooden stairs. I could hear him saying something to someone, and almost immediately the screaming stopped. The loud voices faded to a murmur.

I began the external examination of the body.

She was the same temperature as the room, and rigor already had come and gone. She got cool and stiff right after death, and then as the temperature outside rose so did the temperature of her body. Finally, her stiffness passed, as if the initial shock of death vanished with time.

I did not have to pull back the bedspread much to see what was beneath it. For an instant, I wasn't breathing and my heart seemed to stop. I gently laid the spread back in place and began peeling off my gloves. There was nothing more I could do with her here. Nothing.

When I heard Marino coming back up the stairs, I turned to tell him to be sure the body came to the morgue wrapped in the bedcovers. But the words stuck in my throat. I stared in speechless astonishment.

In the doorway next to him was Abby Turnbull. What in God's name did Marino think he was doing? Had he lost his mind? Abby Turnbull, the ace reporter, the shark that made jaws seem like a goldfish.

Then I noticed she was wearing sandals, a pair of blue jeans and a white cotton blouse that wasn't tucked in. Her hair was tied back. She wasn't wearing makeup. She carried no tape recorder or notepad, just a canvas tote bag. Her wide eyes were riveted to the bed, her face twisted by terror.