Postmortem (23 page)

When the saw was silenced and the skull cap removed, I stopped what I was doing to make a quick inspection of the brain. No subdural or subarachnoid hemorrhages.

"It isn't funny," Wingo began his indignant litany, "not the least bit funny. How can anybody laugh at something like that . . ."

The woman's scalp was lacerated but that was it. What killed her were multiple pelvic fractures, the blow to her buttocks so violent the pattern of the vehicle's grille was clearly visible on her skin. She wasn't struck by something low to the ground, such as a sports car. Might have been a truck.

"She saved it because it meant something to her. Like it was something she wanted to believe. Maybe that's why she went to the bar last night. She was looking for someone she'd been waiting for all her life. Her encounter. And it turns out to be some drunk driver who knocks her fifty feet into a ditch."

"Wingo," I said wearily as I began taking photographs, "it's better if you don't imagine some things."

"I can't help it . . ."

"You have to learn to help it."

He cast wounded eyes in the direction of Marino, who was never satisfied unless he got a rise out of him. Poor Wingo. Most members of the rough-and-tumble world of law enforcement were more than a little put off by him. He didn't laugh at their jokes or particularly relish their war stories, and more to the point, he was, well, different.

Tall and lithely built, he had black hair cropped close on the sides with a cockatoo spray on top and a rat tail curling at the nape of his neck. Delicately handsome, he looked like a model in the loose-fitting designer clothes and soft leather European shoes he wore. Even his indigo-blue scrubs, which he bought and laundered himself, were stylish. He didn't flirt. He didn't resent having a woman tell him what to do. He never seemed remotely interested in what I looked like beneath my lab coat or all-business Britches of Georgetown suits. I'd grown so comfortable around him that on the few occasions when he accidentally walked into the locker room while I was changing into my scrubs, I was scarcely aware of him.

I suppose if I'd wondered about his proclivities when he interviewed for the job several months ago I might have been less enthusiastic about hiring him. It was something I didn't like to admit.

But it was all too easy to stereotype because I saw the worst example of every sort in this place. There were the transvestites with their falsies and padded hips, and the gays who flew into jealous rages and murdered their lovers, and the chicken hawks who cruised parks and video arcades and got carved up by homophobic rednecks. There were the prisoners with their obscene tattoos and histories of sodomizing anything on two legs inside the cell blocks, and there were the profligate purveyors in bathhouses and bars who didn't care who else got AIDS.

Wingo didn't fit. Wingo was just Wingo.

"You can handle it from here?"

He was angrily rinsing off his gloved and bloody hands.

"I'll finish up," I replied abstractedly as I resumed measuring a large tear of the mesentery.

Walking off to a cabinet, he began to collect spray bottles of disinfectants, rags and the other odds and ends he used for cleaning. Slipping a small set of headphones over his ears, he switched on the tape player attached to the waistband of his scrubs, momentarily shutting out the world.

Fifteen minutes later he was cleaning out the small refrigerator where evidence was stored inside the autopsy suite over the weekend. I vaguely noticed him pulling something out and looking at it for a long moment.

When he came over to my table, he was wearing his headphones around his neck like a collar, and he had a puzzled, uneasy expression on his face. In his hand was a small cardboard slide folder from a PERK.

"Uh, Dr. Scarpetta," he said, clearing his throat, "this was inside the fridge."

He didn't explain.

He didn't need to.

I set down the scalpel as my stomach tightened. Printed on the slide folder label was the case number, name and date of the autopsy of Lori Petersen - whose evidence, all of it, had been turned in four days earlier.

"You found this in the refrigerator?"

There had to be some mistake.

"In the back, on the bottom shelf."

Hesitantly, he added, "Uh, it's not initialed. I mean, you didn't initial it."

There had to be an explanation.

"Of course I didn't initial it," I said sharply. "I collected only one PERK in her case, Wingo."

Even as I said the words, doubt wavered deep inside me like a windblown flame. I tried to remember.

I stored Lori Petersen's samples in the refrigerator over the weekend, along with the samples from all of Saturday's cases. I distinctly remembered receipting her samples in person to the labs Monday morning, including a cardboard folder of slides smeared with anal, oral and vaginal swabs. I was sure I used only one cardboard folder of slides. I never sent up a slide folder bare it was always enclosed inside a plastic bag containing the swabs, envelopes of hair, test tubes and everything else.

"I have no idea where this came from," I told him too adamantly.

He uncomfortably shifted his weight to his other foot and averted his eyes. I knew what he was thinking. I'd screwed up and he hated to be the one who had to point it out to me.

The threat had always been there. Wingo and I had gone over it numerous times in the past, ever since Margaret loaded the PC in the autopsy suite with the label programs.

Before one of the pathologists started a case he went to that PC and typed in information about the decedent whose autopsy he was about to perform. A run of labels was generated for every sample one might possibly collect, such as blood, bile, urine, stomach contents and a PERK. It saved a lot of time and was perfectly acceptable provided the pathologist was careful to stick the right label on the right tube and remembered to initial it.

There was one feature of this bit of automated enlightenment that had always made me nervous. Inevitably there were leftover labels because one didn't, as a rule, collect every possible sample, especially when labs were overworked and understaffed. I wasn't going to send fingernail clippings to trace evidence, for example, if the decedent was an eighty year-old man who died of a myocardial infarct while cutting his grass.

What to do with leftover labels? You certainly didn't want to leave them lying around where they might find their way onto the wrong test tubes. Most of the pathologists tore them up. It was my habit to file them with the person's case folder. It was a quick way to know what was tested for, what wasn't, and how many tubes of this or that I'd actually sent upstairs.

Wingo had trotted across the suite and was running a finger down the pages of the morgue log. I could feel Marino staring across the suite at me as he waited to collect the bullets from his homicide case. He wandered my way just as Wingo got back.

"We had six cases that day," Wingo reminded me as if Marino were not there. "Saturday. I remember. There were a lot of labels on the counter over there. Maybe one of them-"

"No," I said loudly. "I don't see how. I didn't leave any leftover labels from her case lying around. They were with my paperwork, clipped to my clipboard-"

"Shit," Marino said in surprise. He was looking over my shoulder. "That what I think it is?"

Frantically pulling off my gloves, I took the folder from Wingo and slit the tape with a thumbnail. Inside were four slides, three of which were definitely smeared with something, but they were not hand-marked with the standard "O," "A," or "V," designating which samples they were. They weren't marked at all, except by the computer label on the outside of the folder.

"So, maybe you labeled this thinking you were going to use it, changed your mind or something?" Wingo suggested.

I didn't reply right away. I couldn't remember! "When was the last time you went inside the refrigerator?"

I asked him.

A shrug. "Last week, maybe a week ago Monday when I got out the stuff so the doctors could take it up. I wasn't in this past Monday. This is the first time I've looked in the fridge this week."

I slowly recalled that Wingo had taken comp time on Monday. I myself had gotten Lori Petersen's evidence out of the refrigerator before making evidence rounds. Was it possible I overlooked this cardboard folder? Was it possible I was so fatigued, so distracted, I got her evidence mixed up with evidence from one of the five other cases we had that day? If so, which cardboard folder of slides was really from her case-the one I receipted upstairs, or this one? I couldn't believe this was happening. I was always so careful! I rarely wore my scrubs out of the morgue. Almost never. Not even when there was a fire drill. Several minutes later, lab workers glanced curiously at me as I walked briskly down the third-floor hall in my blood-spattered greens. Betty was inside her cramped office taking a coffee break. She took one look at me and her eyes froze.

"We've got a problem," I said right off.

She stared at the cardboard folder, at the label on it.

"Wingo was cleaning out the evidence refrigerator. He found it a few minutes ago."

"Oh, God," was all she said.

As I followed her into the serology lab, I was explaining I had no recollection of labeling two folders from PERKS in Lori's case. I was clueless.

Working her hands into a pair of gloves, she reached for bottles inside a cabinet as she attempted to reassure me. "I think the ones you sent me, Kay, have to be right. The slides were consistent with the swabs, with everything else you receipted. Everything came up as nonsecreter, was consistent. This must be an extra you don't remember taking."

Another tremor of doubt. I had taken only one folder of slides, or had I? Could I swear to it? Last Saturday seemed a blur. I couldn't retrace my every step with certainty.

"No swabs with this, I take it?" she asked.

"None," I replied. "Just this folder of slides. That's all Wingo found."

"Hmm." She was thinking. "Let's see what we have here."

She placed each slide under the phase microscope, and after a long silence, said, "We've got big squamous cells, meaning these could be oral or vaginal, but not anal. And "she looked up - "I'm not seeing any sperm."

"Lord," I groaned.

"We'll try again," she answered.

Tearing open a packet of sterilized swabs, she moistened them with water and began gently rolling one at a time over a portion of each smear on each slide-three in all. Next she smeared the swabs over small circles of white filter paper.

Getting out the medicine droppers, she began deftly dripping naphthyl acid phosphate over the filter paper. Then came the fast-blue B salt. We stared, waiting for the first hint of purple.

The smears didn't react. They sat there in tiny wet stains tormenting me. I continued to stare beyond the brief period of time the smears needed to react as if I could somehow will them into testing positive for seminal fluid. I wanted to believe this was an extra file of slides. I wanted to believe I had taken two PERKs in Lori's case and just didn't remember. I wanted to believe anything except what was becoming patently clear.

The slides Wingo had found were not from Lori's case. They couldn't be.

Betty's impassive face told me she was worried, too, and doing her best not to let it show.

I shook my head.

She was forced to conclude, "Then it doesn't seem likely these are from Lori's case."

A pause. "I'll do what I can to group them, of course. See if there are any Barr bodies present, that sort of thing."

"Please."

I took a deep breath.

She went on, trying to make me feel better, "The fluids I separated out from the killer's fluids are consistent with Lori's blood samples. I don't think you have a worry. There's no doubt in my mind about the first file sent in . . ."

"The question has been raised," I said, miserable.

Lawyers would love it. Good God, would they love it. They'd have a jury doubting any of the samples were Lori's, including the tubes of blood. They'd have a jury wondering if the samples sent to New York for DNA testing were the right ones. Who was to say that they weren't from some other dead body? My voice was on the verge of trembling when I told her, "We had six cases that day, Betty. Three of them merited PERKs, were potential sexual assaults."

"All female?"

"Yes," I muttered. "All of them women."

What Bill said Wednesday night when he was stressed, his tongue lubricated by liquor, was branded in my mind. What would happen to these cases should my credibility be compromised? Not only would Lori's case come into question, all of them would. I was cornered, absolutely and with no way out. I couldn't pretend this file didn't exist. It did exist and what it meant was I couldn't honestly swear in court the chain of evidence was intact.

There was no second chance. I couldn't collect the samples again, start from scratch. Lori's samples had already been handdelivered to the New York lab. Her embalmed body had been buried Tuesday. An exhumation, forget it. It wouldn't be profitable. It would be, however, a sensational event sparking enormous public curiosity. Everyone would want to know why.