Postmortem

They were generic double-density diskettes, IBM-compatible. Possibly they contained something Lori Petersen was working on at VMC, the medical college, where there were numerous computers at the disposal of the students and physicians. There didn't appear to be a personal computer inside the house.

On a wicker chair in the corner between the chests of drawers and the window clothes were neatly laid: a pair of white cotton slacks, a red-and-white-striped short-sleeved shirt and a brassiere. The garments were slightly wrinkled, as if worn and left on the chair at the end of the day, the way I sometimes do when I'm too tired to hang up my clothes.

I briefly perused the walk-in closet and full bath. In all, the master bedroom was neat and undisturbed, except for the bed. By all indications, it was not part of the killer's modus operandi to ransack or commit burglary.

Marino was watching an ID officer open the dresser drawers.

"What else do you know about the husband?" I asked him.

"He's a grad student at Charlottesville, lives there during the week, comes home on Friday nights. Stays the weekend, then goes back to Charlottesville on Sunday night."

"What is his discipline?"

"Literature's what he said," Marino replied, glancing around at everything but me. "He's getting his Ph.D."

"In what?"

"Literature," he said again, slowly enunciating each syllable.

"What sort of literature?"

His brown eyes finally fixed unemphatically on me. "American's what he told me. But I get the impression his main interest is plays. Seems he's in one right now. Shakespeare. Hamlet, I think he said. Says he's done a lot of acting, including some bit parts in movies shot around here, a couple of TV commercials, too." The ID officers stopped what they were doing. One of them turned around, his brush poised in midair.

Marino pointed toward the computer diskettes on the desk and exclaimed loudly enough to grab everybody's attention, "Looks like we'd better take a peek at what's on these suckers. Maybe a play he's writing, huh?"

"We can take a look at them in my office. We've got a couple IBM-compatible PC's," I offered.

"PC's," he drawled. "Yo. Beats the hell out of my RC: one Royal Crapola, standard issue, black, boxy, sticky keys, the whole nine yards."

An ID officer was pulling out something from beneath a stack of sweaters in a bottom drawer, a long-bladed survival knife with a compass built into the top of the black handle and a small whetstone in a pocket on the sheath. Touching as little of it as possible, he placed it inside a plastic evidence bag.

Out of the same dresser drawer came a box of Trojans, which, I pointed out to Marino, was a little unusual, since Lori Petersen, based on what I'd seen in the master bathroom, was on oral contraceptives.

Marino and the other officers began the expected cynical speculations.

I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them in the top of my bag. "The squad can move her," I said.

The men turned in unison, as if suddenly reminded of the brutalized, dead woman in the center of the rumpled turned down bed. Her lips were pulled back, as if in pain, from her teeth, her eyes swollen to slits and staring blindly up.

A radio message was relayed to the ambulance, and several minutes later two paramedics in blue jumpsuits came in with a stretcher, which they covered with a clean white sheet and placed Rush against the bed.

Lori Petersen was lifted as I directed, the bedclothes folded over her, the gloved hands not touching her skin. She was gently placed on the stretcher, the sheet pi

Marino followed me out of the bedroom and I was surprised when he a

Matt Petersen was on his feet as we came down the hall. His face wan, his eyes glassy, he stared at me, desperately, needing something only I could give. Assurance. A word of comfort. The promise his wife died quickly and did not suffer. That she was tied up and raped after the fact. There was nothing I could say to him. Marino led me back through the living room and out the door.

The front yard was lit up with television lights floating against the background of hypnotically flashing red and blue. The staccato voices of disembodied dispatchers competed with the throbbing engines as a gentle rain began to fall through a light fog.

Reporters with notepads and tape recorders were everywhere, waiting impatiently for the moment when the body was carried down the front steps and slid into the back of the ambulance. A television crew was on the street, a woman in a snappy belted trenchcoat talking into a microphone, her face serious as a grinding camera recorded her "at the scene" for Saturday's evening news.

Bill Boltz, the Commonwealth's attorney, had just pulled up and was getting out of his car. He looked dazed and half asleep and determined to elude the press. He didn't have anything to say because he didn't know anything yet. I wondered who notified him. Maybe Marino. Cops milled around, a few of them aimlessly probing the grass with their powerful Kel lights, some of them clustered by their white cruisers and talking. Boltz zipped up his windbreaker and nodded as he briefly met my eyes, then hurried up the walk.

The chief of police and a major sat inside an unmarked beige car, the interior light on, their faces pale as they periodically nodded and made remarks to reporter Abby Turnbull. She was saying something to them through an open window. Waiting until we were on the street, she trotted after us.

Marino warded her off with a flap of a hand, a "Hey, no comment" in a "screw yourself' tone of voice.

He stepped up the pace. He was almost a comfort.

"Ain't this the pits?" Marino said with disgust as he patted himself down for his cigarettes. "A regular three-ring circus. Jesus Christ."

The rain was soft and cool on my face as Marino held the station wagon door open for me. As I turned the ignition he leaned down and said with a smirk, "Drive real careful, Doc."

Chapter 2

The white clock face floated like a full moon in the dark sky, rising high above the old domed train station, the railroad tracks and the I-95 overpass. The great clock's filigree hands stopped when the last passenger train did many years before. It was twelve-seventeen. It would always be twelve-seventeen in the city's lower end where Health and Human Services decided to erect its hospital for the dead. Time has stopped here. Buildings are boarded up and torn down. Traffic and freight trains perpetually rumble and roar like a distant discontented sea. The earth is a poisoned shore of weed-patched raw dirt littered with debris where nothing grows and there -are no lights after dark. Nothing moves here except the truckers and the travelers and the trains speeding along their tracks of concrete and steel.

The white clock face watched me as I drove through the darkness, watched me like the white face in my dream.

I nosed the station wagon through an opening in the chainlink fence and parked behind the stucco building where I'd spent virtually every day of the past two years. The only state vehicle in the lot aside from mine was the gray Plymouth belonging to Neils Vander, the fingerprints examiner. I had called him right after Marino called me. Set into effect after the second strangling was a new policy. If there was another, Vander was to meet me in the morgue immediately. By now he was inside the X-ray room and setting up the laser.