Postmortem (13 page)

"These what I collected from the knife?" I almost didn't want to ask.

"Yes. They're cotton. Don't be thrown off by the pinks and greens and white you're seeing. Dyed fabrics are often made up of a combination of colors you can't detect with the naked eye."

The gown cut from Lori Petersen was cotton, a pale yellow cotton.

I adjusted the focus. "I don't suppose there's any chance they could be from a cotton rag paper, something like that. Lori apparently was using the knife as a letter opener."

"Not a chance, Kay. I've already looked at a sample of fibers from her gown. They're consistent with the fibers you collected from the knife blade."

That was expert-witness talk. Consistent this and reasonable that. Lori's gown was cut from her body with her husband's knife. Wait until Marino gets this lab report, I thought. Damn.

Betty was going on, "I can also tell you right off the fibers you're looking at aren't the same as some of the ones found on her body and on the frame of the window the police think the killer came through. Those are dark-black and navy blue with some red, a polyester-and-cotton blend."

The night I'd seen Matt Petersen he was wearing a white Izod shirt that I suspected was cotton and most certainly would not have contained black, red or navy blue fibers. He was also wearing jeans, and most denim jeans are cotton.

It was highly unlikely he left the fibers Betty just mentioned, unless he changed his clothes before the police arrived.

"Yeah, well, Petersen ain't stupid," I could hear Marino say. "Ever since Wayne Williams half the world knows fibers can be used to nail your ass."

I went out and followed the hallway to the end, turning left into the tool marks and firearms lab, with its countertops and tables cluttered with handguns, rifles, machetes, shotguns and Uzis, all tagged as evidence and waiting their day in court. Handgun and shotgun cartridges were scattered over desktops, and in a back corner was a galvanized steel tank filled with water and used for test fires. Floating placidly on the water's surface was a rubber duck.

Frank, a wiry white-haired man retired from the army's CID, was hunched over the comparison microscope. He relit his pipe when I came in and didn't tell me anything I wanted to hear.

There was nothing to be learned from the cut screen removed from Lori Petersen's window. The mesh was a synthetic, and therefore useless as far as tool marks or even the direction of the cut was concerned. We couldn't know if it had been cut from the inside or the outside of the house because plastic, unlike metal, doesn't bend.

The distinction would have been an important one, something I very much would have liked to know. If the screen was cut from the inside of the house, then all bets were off. It would mean the killer didn't break in but out of the Petersen house. It would mean, quite likely, Marino's suspicions of the husband were correct.

"All I can tell you," Frank said, puffing out swirls of aromatic smoke, "is it's a clean cut, made with something sharp like a razor or a knife."

"Possibly the same instrument used to cut her gown?"

He absently slipped off his glasses and began cleaning them with a handkerchief. "Something sharp was used to cut her gown but I can't tell you if it was the same thing used to cut the screen. I can't even give you a classification, Kay. Could be a stiletto. Could be a saber or a pair of scissors."

The severed electrical cords and survival knife told another story.

Based on a microscopic comparison, Frank had good reason to believe the cords had been cut with Matt Petersen's knife. The tool marks on the blade were consistent with those left on the severed ends of the cords. Marino, I dismally thought again. This bit of circumstantial evidence wouldn't amount to much had the survival knife been found out in the open and near the bed instead of hidden inside Matt Petersen's dresser drawer.

I was still envisioning my own scenario. The killer saw the knife on top of Lori's desk and decided to use it. But why did he hide it afterward? Also, if the knife was used to cut Lori's gown, and if it was also used to cut the electrical cords, then this changed the sequence of events as I had imagined them.

I'd assumed when the killer entered Lori's bedroom he had his own cutting instrument in hand, the knife or sharp instrument he used to cut the window screen. If so, then why didn't he cut her gown and the electrical cords with it? How is it he ended up with the survival knife? Did he instantly spot it on the desk when he entered her bedroom? He couldn't have. The desk was nowhere near the bed, and when he first came in, the bedroom was dark. He couldn't have seen the knife.

He couldn't have seen it until the lights were on, and by then Lori should have been subdued, the killer's knife at her throat. Why should the survival knife on the desk have mattered to him? It didn't make any sense.

Unless something interrupted him.

Unless something happened to disrupt and alter his ritual, unless an unexpected event occurred that caused him to change course.

Frank and I batted this around.

"This is assuming the killer's not her husband," Frank said.

"Yes. This is assuming the killer is a stranger to Lori. He has his pattern, his MO. But when he's with Lori, something catches him off guard."

"Something she does . . . "

"Or says," I replied, then proposed, "She may have said something that momentarily stalled him."

"Maybe."

He looked skeptical. "She may have stalled him long enough for him to see the knife on the desk, long enough for him to get the idea. But it's more likely, in my opinion, he found the knife on the desk earlier in the evening because he was already inside her house when she got home."

"No. I really don't think so."

"Why not?"

"Because she was home for a while before she was assaulted."

I'd gone through it many times.

Lori drove home from the hospital, unlocked her front door and relocked it from the inside. She went into the kitchen and placed her knapsack on the table. Then she had a snack. Her gastric contents indicated she'd eaten several cheese crackers very close to the time she was assaulted. The food had scarcely begun to digest. Her terror when she was attacked would have caused her digestion to completely shut down. It's one of the body's defense mechanisms. Digestion shuts down to keep blood flowing to the extremities instead of to the stomach, preparing the animal for fight or flight.

Only it hadn't been possible for her to fight. It hadn't been possible for her to flee anywhere.

After her snack, she went from the kitchen to the bedroom. The police had found out it was her habit to take her oral contraceptive at night, right before bed. Friday's tablet was missing from the foil pack inside the master bathroom. She took her tablet, perhaps brushed her teeth and washed her face, then changed into her gown and placed her clothing neatly on the chair. I believed she was in bed when he attacked her not long afterward. He may have been watching her house from the darkness of the trees or the shrubbery. He may have waited until the lights were out, until he assumed she was asleep. Or he may have observed her in the past and known exactly what time she came home from work and went to bed.

I remembered the bedcovers. They were turned down as if she'd been under them, and there was no evidence of a struggle anywhere else in the house.

There was something else coming to me.

The smell Matt Petersen mentioned, the sweaty, sweet smell.

If the killer had a peculiar and pronounced body odor, it was going to be wherever he was. It would have lingered inside her bedroom had he been hiding there when Lori got home.

She was a physician.

Odors are often indications of diseases and poisons. Physicians are trained to be very sensitive to smells, so sensitive I can often tell by the odor of blood at a scene that the victim was drinking shortly before he was shot or stabbed. Blood or gastric contents reminiscent of musky macaroons, of almonds, may indicate the presence of cyanide. A patient's breath smelling of wet leaves may indicate tuberculosis - Lori Petersen was a physician, like me.

Had she noticed a peculiar odor the moment she walked into her bedroom, she would not have undressed or done anything else until she determined the source of it.

Cagney did not have my worries, and there were times when I felt haunted by the spirit of the predecessor I had never met, a reminder of a power and invulnerability I would never have. In an unchivalrous world he was an unchivalrous knight who wore his position like a panache, and I think a part of me envied him.

His death was sudden. He literally dropped dead as he was crossing the living room rug to switch on the Super Bowl. In the predawn silence of an overcast Monday morning he became the subject of his own instruction, a towel draped over his face, the autopsy suite sealed off from everyone but the pathologist whose lot it was to examine him. For three months, no one touched his office. It was exactly as he'd left it, except, I suppose, that Rose had emptied the cigar butts out of the ashtray.

The first thing I did when I moved to Richmond was to strip his inner sanctum to a shell and banish the last remnant of its former occupant including the hard-boiled portrait of him dressed in his academic gown, which was beneath a museum light behind his formidable desk. That was relegated to the Pathology Department at VMC, as was an entire bookcase filled with macabre mementos forensic pathologists are expected to collect, even if most of us don't.

His office - my office, now-was well-lighted and carpeted in royal blue, the walls arranged with prints of English landscapes and other civilized scenes. I had few mementos, and the only hint of morbidity was the clay facial reconstruction of a murdered boy whose identity remained a mystery. I'd arranged a sweater around the base of his neck and perched him on top of a filing cabinet where he watched the open doorway with plastic eyes and waited in sad silence to be called by name.

Where I worked was low-profile, comfortable but businesslike, my impedimenta deliberately unrevealing and bland. Though I somewhat smugly assured myself it was better to be viewed as a professional than as a legend, I secretly had my doubts.

I still felt Cagney's presence in this place.

People were constantly reminding me of him through stories that became more apocryphal the longer they lived on. He rarely wore gloves while doing a post. He was known to arrive at scenes eating his lunch. He went hunting with the cops, he went to barbecues with the judges, and the previous commissioner was obsequiously accommodating because he was absolutely intimidated by Cagney.

I paled by comparison and I knew comparisons were constantly being made. The only hunts and barbecues I was invited to were courtrooms and conferences in which targets were drawn on me and fires lit beneath my feet. If Dr. Alvin Amburgey's first year in the commissioner's office was any indication, his next three promised to be the pits. My turf was his to invade. He monitored what I did. Not a week went by that I didn't get an arrogant electronic memo from him requesting statistical information or demanding an answer as to why the homicide rate continued to rise while other crimes were slightly on the decline - as if somehow it was my fault people killed each other in Virginia.

What he had never done to me before was to schedule an impromptu meeting.

In the past, when he had something to discuss, if he didn't send a memo he sent one of his aides. There was no doubt in my mind his agenda was not to pat me on the back and tell me what a fine job I was doing.

I was abstractedly looking over the piles on my desk and trying to find something to arm myself with-files, a notepad, a clipboard. For some reason, the thought of going in there empty handed made me feel undressed. Emptying my labcoat pockets of the miscellaneous debris I had a habit of collecting during the day, I settled for tucking in a pack of cigarettes, or "cancer sticks," as Amburgey was known to call them, and I went out into the late afternoon.

He reigned across the street on the twenty-fourth floor of the Monroe Building. No one was above him except an occasional pigeon roosting on the roof. Most of his minions were located below on floor after floor of HHSD agencies. I'd never seen his office. I'd never been invited.