Patricia Cornwell - Postmortem

"Try the ligature around her ankles," I said quietly.

We moved down. The same white sparkles were there, too, but again, very few of them. There was none of this residue, whatever it was, anywhere on her face, none in her hair or on her legs. We found several of the sparkles on her forearms, and a spangling of them over her upper arms and breasts. A constellation of the tiny white stars clung to the cords savagely binding her wrists in back, and there was a scattering of the glitter over her cut gown as well.

I moved away from the table, lit a cigarette and began reconstructing.

The assailant had some material on his hands that was deposited wherever he touched his victim. After Lori Petersen's gown was off, perhaps he gripped her right shoulder and his fingertips left the smudges over her clavicle. One thing I felt sure of. For the concentration of this material to be so dense over her clavicle, he must have touched her there first.

This was puzzling, a piece that seemed to fit but didn't, really.

From the beginning, I'd assumed he was restraining his victims immediately, subduing them, perhaps at knifepoint, and then binding them before he cut off their clothing or did anything else. The more he touched, the less of the residue was left on his hands. Why this high concentration over her clavicle? Was this area of her skin exposed when he began his assault? I wouldn't have supposed so. The gown was an interlocking cotton material, soft and stretchy and fashioned to look almost exactly like a longsleeved T-shirt. There were no buttons or zippers, and the only way for her to have put it on was to pull it over her head. She would have been covered to her neck. How could the killer touch the bare skin over her clavicle if she still had her gown on? Why was there such a high concentration of the residue at all? We'd never found such a high concentration before.

I went out into the hallway where several uniformed men were leaning against the wall, chatting. I asked one of them to raise Marino on the radio and have him call me right away. I heard Marino's voice crackle back, "Ten fo'."

I paced the hard tile floor inside the autopsy suite with its gleaming stainless steel tables and sinks and carts lined with surgical instruments. A faucet was dripping somewhere. Disinfectant smelled sweetly revolting, only smelled pleasant when there were worse smells lurking beneath it. The black telephone on the desk mocked me with its silence. Marino knew I was waiting by the phone. He was having a good time knowing that.

It was idle speculation to go back to the beginning and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Occasionally I thought about it anyway. What it was about me. I had been polite to Marino the first time we met, had offered him a firm and respectful handshake while his eyes went as flat as two tarnished pennies.

Twenty minutes passed before the telephone rang.

Marino was still at the Petersen house, he said, interviewing the husband, who was, in the detective's words, "as goofy as a shithouse rat."

I told him about the sparkles. I repeated what I'd explained to him in the past. It was possible they might be from some household substance consistent in all of the homicide scenes, some oddball something the killer looked for and incorporated into his ritual. Baby powder, lotions, cosmetics, cleansers.

So far, we had ruled out many things which, in' a way, was the point. If the substance wasn't indigenous to the scenes, and in my heart I didn't think it was, then the killer was carrying it in with him, perhaps unaware, and this could be important and eventually lead us to where he worked or lived.

"Yeah," Marino's voice came over the line, "well, I'll poke around in the cabinets and so forth. But I got my own thought."

"Which is?"

"The husband here's in a play, right? Has practice every Friday night, which is why he gets in so late, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but actors wear greasepaint."

"Only during dress rehearsals or performances."

"Yeah," he drawled. "Well, according to him, a dress rehearsal's exactly what he had just before he came home and supposedly found his dead wife. My little bell's ringing. My little voice is talking to me-" I cut him off. "Have you printed him?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Place his card inside a plastic bag and when you come in bring it straight to me."

He didn't get it.

I didn't elaborate. I was in no mood to explain.

The last thing Marino told me before hanging up was "Don't know when that will be, Doc. Got a feeling I'm going to be tied up out here most of the day. No pun intended."

It was unlikely I would see him or the fingerprint card until Monday. Marino had a suspect. He was galloping down the same trail every cop gallops down. A husband could be St. Anthony and in England when his wife is murdered in Seattle, and still the cops are suspicious of him first.

Domestic shootings, poisonings, beatings and stabbings are one thing, but a lust murder is another. Not many husbands would have the stomach for binding, raping and strangling their wives.

I blamed my disconcertedness on fatigue.

I had been up since 2:33 A.M. and it was now almost 6:00 P.M. The police officers who came to the morgue were long gone. Vander went home around lunchtime. Wingo, one of my autopsy technicians, left not long after that, and there was no one inside the building but me.

The quiet I usually craved was unnerving and I could not seem to get warm. My hands were stiff, the fingernails almost blue. Every time the telephone rang in the front office, I started.

The minimal security in my office never seemed to worry anyone but me. Budget requests for an adequate security system were repeatedly refused. The commissioner thought in terms of property loss, and no thief was going to come into the morgue even if we put out welcome mats and left the doors open wide at all hours. Dead bodies are a better deterrent than guard dogs.

The dead have never bothered me. It is the living I fear.

After a crazed gunman walked into a local doctor's office several months back and sprayed bullets into a waiting room full of patients, I went to a hardware store and bought a chain and padlock myself, which after hours and on weekends were used to reinforce the front glass double doors.

Suddenly, while I was working at my desk, someone shook those front doors so violently the chain was still swaying when I forced myself to go down the hallway to check. No one was there. Sometimes street people tried to get in to use our restrooms, but when I looked out I didn't see anyone.

I returned to my office and was so jumpy that when I heard the elevator doors opening across the hall I had a large pair of scissors in hand and was prepared to use them. It was the dayshift security guard.

"Did you try to get in through the front glass doors a little while ago?" I asked.

He glanced curiously at the scissors I was clutching and said he didn't. I'm sure it seemed an inane question. He knew the front doors were chained, and he had a set of keys to the other doors throughout the building. He had no reason to try to get in through the front.

An uneasy silence returned as I sat at my desk trying to dictate Lori Petersen's autopsy report. For some reason, I couldn't say anything, couldn't bear to hear the words out loud. It began to dawn on me that no one should hear these words, not even Rose, my secretary. No one should hear about the glittery residue, the seminal fluid, the fingerprints, the deep tissue injuries to her neck-and worst of all, the evidence of torture. The killer was degenerating, becoming more hideously cruel.

Rape and murder were no longer enough for him. It wasn't until I'd removed the ligatures from Lori Petersen's body, and was making small incisions in suspicious reddish-tinted areas of skin and palpating for broken bones that I realized what went on before she died.