Postmortem (17 page)

"Lucy wouldn't do such a thing," I said with feeling. "And I'm not sure how I would be better off were it true."

"Better your ten-year-old niece than a reporter. It would get Amburgey off your back."

"Nothing would get him off my back," I snapped.

"That's right," he said dryly. "His reason for getting up in morning is to jerk you around."

"I'm frankly beginning to wonder that."

Amburgey was appointed in the midst of the city's black community publicly protesting that the police were indifferent to homicides unless the victims were white. Then a black city councilman was shot in his car, and Amburgey and the mayor considered it good public relations, I supposed, to appear unannounced at the morgue the next morning.

Maybe it wouldn't have turned out so badly had Amburgey thought to ask questions while he watched me perform the autopsy, had he kept his mouth shut afterward. But the physician combined with the politician, compelling him to confidently inform the press waiting outside my building that the "spread of pellet wounds" over the dead councilman's upper chest "indicates a shotgun blast at close range."

As diplomatically as possible, I explained when the reporters questioned me later that the "spread" of holes over the chest was actually marks of therapy made when ER attendants inserted large-gauge needles into the subclavian arteries to transfuse blood. The councilman's lethal injury was a small-caliber gunshot wound to the back of the head.

The reporters had a field day with Amburgey's blunder.

"The problem is he's a physician by training," I was saying to Bill. "He knows just enough to think he's an expert in forensic medicine, to think he can run my office better than I can, and a lot of his opinions are flat-out full of shit."

"Which you make the mistake of pointing out to him."

"What am I supposed to do? Agree and look as incompetent as he is?"

"So it's a simple case of professional jealousy," he said with a shrug. "It happens."

"I don't know what it is. How the hell do you explain these things? Half of what people do and feel doesn't make a damn bit of sense. For all I know, I could remind him of his mother."

My anger was mounting with fresh intensity, and I realized by the expression on his face that I was glaring at him.

"Hey," he objected, raising his hand, "don't be pissed at me. I didn't do anything."

"You were there this afternoon, weren't you?"

"What do you expect? I'm supposed to tell Amburgey and Tanner I can't be in on the meeting because you and I have been seeing each other?"

"Of course you couldn't tell them that," I said in a miserable way. "But maybe I wanted you to. Maybe I wanted you to punch Amburgey's lights out or something."

"Not a bad idea. But I don't think it would help me much come reelection time. Besides, you'd probably let my ass rot in jail. Wouldn't even post my bond."

"Depends on how much it was."

"Shit."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"Tell you what?"

"About the meeting. You must have known about it since yesterday."

Maybe you'd known about it longer, I started to say, and that's why you didn't so much as call me over the weekend! Restraining myself, I stared tensely at him.

He was studying his wineglass again. After a pause, he replied, "I didn't see any point in telling you. All it would have done was worry you, and it was my impression the meeting was pro forma-"

"Pro forma?"

I looked incredulously at him. "Amburgey's gagged me and spent half the afternoon tearing apart my office and that's pro forma?"

"I feel sure some of what he did was sparked by your disclosure of the computer violation; Kay. And I didn't know about that yesterday. Hell, you didn't even know about that yesterday."

"I see," I said coldly. "No one knew about it until I told them."

Silence.

"What are you implying?"

"It just seemed an incredible coincidence we discovered the violation just hours before he called me to his office. I had the peculiar thought that maybe he knew . . . "

"Maybe he did."

"That certainly reassures me."

"It's moot anyway," he easily went on. "So what if Amburgey knew about the violation by the time you came to his office this afternoon? Maybe somebody talked-your computer analyst, for example. And the rumor drifted up to the twenty-fourth floor."

He shrugged. "It just gave him one more worry, right? You didn't trip yourself up, if that's the case, because you were smart enough to tell the truth."

"I always tell the truth."

"Not always," he remarked slyly. "You routinely lie about usby omission-"

"So maybe he knew," I cut him off. "I just want to hear you didn't."

"I didn't."

He looked intensely at me. "I swear. If I'd heard anything about it, I would have forewarned you, Kay. I would have run to the nearest phone booth-"

"And charged out as Superman."

"Hell," he muttered, "now you're making fun of me."

He was in his boyish wounded manifestation. Bill had a lot of roles and he played all of them extraordinarily well. Sometimes it was hard for me to believe he was so smitten with me. Was that a role as well? I think he had a starring role in the fantasies of half the city's women, and his campaign manager was shrewd enough to take advantage of it. Photographs of Bill had been plastered over restaurant and storefronts, and nailed to telephone poles on virtually every city block. Who could resist that face? He was stunningly handsome, his hair streaked straw-blond, his complexion perpetually sunburned from the many hours he spent each week at his tennis club. It was hard not to stare openly at him.

"I'm not making fun of you," I said wearily. "Really, Bill. And let's not fight."

"Fine by me."

"I'm just sick. I don't have any idea what to do."

Apparently he'd already thought about this, and he said, "It would be helpful if you could figure out who's been getting into your data." A pause. "Or better, if you could prove it."

"Prove it?" I looked warily at him. "Are you suggesting you have a suspect?"

"Not based on any fact."

"Who?"

I lit a cigarette.

His attention drifted across the kitchen. "Abby Turnbull is top on my list."

"I thought you were going to tell me something I couldn't have figured out on my own."

"I'm dead serious, Kay."

"So she's an ambitious reporter," I said irritably. "Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of hearing about her. She's not as powerful as everyone makes her out to be."

Bill set his wineglass on the table with a sharp click. "The hell she isn't," he retorted, staring at me. "The woman's a goddam snake. I know she's an ambitious reporter and all that shit. But she's worse than anybody imagines. She's vicious and manipu- lative and extremely dangerous. The bitch would stoop to anything."

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.