Postmortem

"I thought he said something," I muttered to Marino. "I thought I heard him say something as he was falling. But I can't remember."

Hesitantly, I asked, "Did he?"

"Oh, yeah. He said one thing."

"What?" I shakily retrieved my cigarette from the ashtray.

Marino smiled snidely. "Same last words recorded on them little black boxes of crashed planes. Same last words for a lot of poor bastards. He said, 'Oh, shit.'

"One bullet severed his aorta. Another took out his left ventricle. One more went through a lung and lodged in his spine. The fourth one cut through soft tissue, missing every vital organ, and shattered my window.

I didn't do his autopsy. One of my deputy chiefs from northern Virginia left the report on my desk. I don't remember calling him in to do it but I must have.

I hadn't read the papers. I couldn't stomach it. Yesterday's headline in the evening edition was enough. I caught a glimpse of it as I hastily stuffed the paper in the garbage seconds after it landed on my front stoop: STRANGLER SLAIN BY DETECTIVE INSIDE CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER'S BEDROOM Beautiful. I asked myself, Who does the public think was inside my bedroom at two o'clock in the morning, the killer or Marino? Beautiful.

The gu

McCorkle wasn't on duty Friday night. He called in sick. He hadn't been to work since Abby's Thursday morning front page story. His colleagues didn't have much of an opinion of him one way or another except they found his CB phone ma

In the communications men's room was a dispenser of Borawash soap.

He was an "all-right guy."

No one who worked with him really knew him well. They assumed he had a woman he was seeing after hours, "a good-looking blonde" named "Christie."

There was no Christie. The only women he saw after hours were the ones he butchered. No-one who worked with him could believe he was the one, the strangler.

McCorkle, we were considering, may have murdered the three women in the Boston area years ago. He was driving a rig back then. One of his stops was Boston, where he delivered chickens to a packing plant. But we couldn't be sure. We may never know just how many women he murdered all over the United States. It could be dozens. He probably started out as a peeper, then progressed to a rapist. He had no police record. The most he'd ever gotten was a speeding ticket.

He was only twenty-seven.

According to his resume on file with the police department, he'd worked a number of jobs: trucker, dispatcher for a cement company in Cleveland, mail deliveryman and as a deliveryman for a florist in Philadelphia.

Marino wasn't able to find him Friday night but he didn't look very hard. From eleven-thirty Marino was on my property, out of sight behind shrubbery, watching. He was wearing a dark blue police jumpsuit so he would blend with the night. When he switched on the overhead light inside my bedroom, and I saw him standing there in the jumpsuit, the gun in hand, for a paralyzing second I didn't know who was the killer and who was the cop.

"See," he was saying,. "I'd been thinking about the Abby Turnbull co

He looked at me, his face thoughtful.

When Abby was followed from the newspaper late one night and dialed 911, it was McCorkle who answered the call. That was how he knew where she lived. Maybe he'd already thought of killing her, or maybe it didn't occur to him until he heard her voice and realized who she was. We would never know.

We did know all five women had dialed 911 in the past. Patty Lewis did less than two weeks before she was murdered. She called at 8:23 on a Thursday night, right after a bad rainstorm, to report a traffic light out a mile from her house. She was being a good citizen. She was trying to prevent an accident. She didn't want anybody to get hurt.

Cecile Tyler hit a nine instead of a four. A wrong number.

I never dialed 911.

I didn't need to.

My number and address were in the phone directory because medical examiners had to be able to reach me after business hours. Also I talked with several dispatchers on several occasions over the past few weeks when I was trying to find Marino. One of them might have been McCorkle. I'd never know. I don't think I wanted to know.

"Your picture's been in the paper and on TV," Marino went on. "You've been working all his cases, he's been wondering what you know. He's been thinking about you. Me, I was worried. Then all that shit about his metabolic disorder and your office having something on him."

He paced as he talked. "Now he's going to be hot. Now it's gotten personal. The snooty lady doctor here's maybe insulting his intelligence, his masculinity."

The phone calls I was getting at late hours "This pushes his button. He don't like no broad treating him like he's a stupid ass. He's thinking, 'The bitch thinks she's smart, better'n me. I'll show her. I'll fix her.'

"I was wearing a sweater under my lab coat. Both were buttoned up to the collar. I couldn't get warm. For the last two nights I'd slept in Lucy's room. I was going to redecorate my bedroom. I was thinking of selling my house.

"So I guess that big newspaper spread on him the other day rattled his cage all right. Benton said it was a blessing. That maybe he'd get reckless or something. I was pissed. You remember that?"

I barely nodded.

"You want to know the big reason I was so damned pissed?"

I just looked at him. He was like a kid. He was proud of himself. I was supposed to praise him, be thrilled, because he shot a man at ten paces, mowed him down inside my bedroom. The guy had a buck knife. That was it. What was he going to do, throw it? "Well, I'll tell you. For one thing, I got a little tip sometime back."

"A tip?"

My eyes focused. "What tip?"

"Golden Boy Boltz," he replied matter-of-factly as he flicked an ash. "Just so happens he was big enough to pass along something right before he blew out of town. Told me he was worried about you…"

"About me?" I blurted.

"Said he dropped by your house late one night and there was this strange car. It cruised up, cut its lights and sped off. He was antsy you was being watched, maybe it was the killer…"

"That was Abby!" I crazily broke out. "She came to see me, to ask me questions, saw Bill's car and panicked…"

Marino looked surprised, just for an instant. Then shrugged. "Whatever. Just as well it caught our attention, huh?"

I didn't say anything. I was on the verge of tears.

"It was enough to give me the jitters. Fact is, I've been watching your house for a while. Been watching it a lot of late nights. Then comes the damn story about the DNA link. I'm thinking this squirrel's maybe already casing the doc. Now he's really going to be off the wall. The story ain't going to lure him to the computer. It's going to lure him straight to her."