Postmortem

"You were right," I said, clearing my throat.

"You're damn right I was right."

Marino didn't have to kill him. No one would ever know except the two of us. I'd never tell. I wasn't sorry. I would have done it myself. Maybe I was sick inside because if I tried I would have failed. The.38 wasn't loaded. Click. That's as far as I would have gotten. I think I was sick inside because I couldn't save myself and I didn't want to thank Marino for my life.

He was going on and on. My anger started to simmer. It began creeping up my throat like bile.

When suddenly Wingo walked in.

"Uh."

Hands in his pockets, he looked uncertain as Marino eyed him in a

"Uh, Dr. Scarpetta. I know this isn't a good time and all. I mean, I know you're still upset…"

"I'm not upset!"

His eyes widened. He blanched.

Lowering my voice, I said, "I'm sorry, Wingo. Yes. I'm upset. I'm ragged. I'm not myself. What's on your mind?"

He reached in a pocket of his powder-blue silk trousers and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a cigarette butt, Benson Hedges 100's.

He placed it lightly on my blotter.

I looked blankly at him, waiting.

"Uh, well, you remember me asking about the commissioner, about whether he's an antismoker and all that?"

I nodded.

Marino was getting restless. He was looking around as if he were bored.

"You see, my friend Patrick. He works in accounting across the street, in the same building where Amburgey works. Well."

He was blushing. "Patrick and I, we meet sometimes at his car and go off for lunch. His assigned parking place is about two rows down from where Amburgey's is. We've seen him before."

"Seen him before?" I asked, baffled. "Seen Amburgey before? Doing what?"

Wingo leaned over and confided, "Seen him smoking, Dr. Scarpetta."

He straightened up. "I swear. Late morning and right after lunchtime, Patrick and me, we're sitting in the car, in Patrick's car, just talking, listening to tunes. We've seen Amburgey get into his black New Yorker and light up. He doesn't even use the ashtray because he doesn't want anybody to know. He's looking around the whole time. Then he flicks the butt out the window, looks around some more and strolls back toward the building squirting freshener in his mouth…"

He stared at me, bewildered.

I was laughing so hard I was crying. It must have been hysteria. I couldn't stop. I was pounding the top of my desk and wiping my eyes. I'm sure people could hear me up and down the hall.

Wingo started laughing, uneasily, then he couldn't stop either.

Marino scowled at both of us as if we were imbeciles. Then he was fighting a smile. In a minute he was choking on his cigarette and guffawing.

Wingo finally went on, "The thing is…"

He took a deep breath. "The thing is, Dr. Scarpetta, I waited until he did it and right after he left his car I ran over and collected the butt. I took it straight up to serology, to Betty, had her test it."

I gasped. "You did what? You took the butt to Betty? That's what you took up to her the other day? To what? Have his saliva tested? What for?"

"His blood type. It's AB, Dr. Scarpetta."

"My God."

The co

AB is extremely rare. Only four percent of the population has type AB.

"I was wondering about him," Wingo explained. "I know how much he, uh, hates you. It's always hurt me he treats you so bad. So I asked Fred…"

"The security guard?"

"Yeah. I asked Fred about seeing anybody. You know, if he'd seen anybody going inside our morgue who wasn't supposed to be there. He said he saw this one dude on an early Monday evening. Fred was starting his rounds and stopped off to use the john down there. He's coming out just as this white dude's coming in, into the john, I'm saying. Fred told me the white dude had something in his hands, some paper packets of some sort. Fred just went on out, went about his business."

"Amburgey? It was Amburgey?"

"Fred didn't know. He said most white folks look alike to him. But he remembered this dude because he had on a real nice silver ring with a real big blue stone in it. An older guy, scrawny, and about bald."

It was Marino who proposed, "So maybe Amburgey went into the john and swabbed himself-"

"They're oral," I recalled. "The cells that showed up on the slides. And no Barr bodies. Y chromosome, in other words male."

"I love it when you talk dirty." Marino gri

"A label he got from Lori Petersen's file," I interrupted him again, this time incredulously. "Then he tucks it inside the fridge to make you think you screwed up. Hell, maybe he's the one breaking into the computer, too. Unbelievable."

Marino was laughing again. "Don't you love it? We'll nail his ass!"

The computer had been broken into over the weekend, sometime after hours on Friday, we believed. Wesley noticed the commands on the screen Saturday morning when he came in for McCorkle's autopsy. Someone had tried to pull up He

I'd been assuming it was McCorkle who might have gotten in at some point Friday evening before he came after me.

"If the commissioner's the one breaking into the computer," I reminded them, "he's not in trouble. He has the right, ex officio, to my office data and anything else he cares to peruse. We'll never be able to prove he altered a record."

All eyes fell to the cigarette butt inside the plastic bag.

Evidence tampering, fraud, not even the governor could take such liberties. A felony is a felony. I doubted it could be proved.

I got up and hung my lab coat on the back of the door. Slipping on my suit jacket, I collected a fat folder off a chair. I was due in court in twenty minutes to testify in yet one more homicide case.

Wingo and Marino walked me out to the elevator. I left them and stepped inside.

Through the closing doors I blew them each a kiss.

Three days later, Lucy and I sat in the back of a Ford Tempo heading to the airport. She was returning to Miami, and I was going with her for two very good reasons.

I intended to see about the situation with her mother and the illustrator she had married, and I desperately needed a vacation.

I pla

We'd also talk about the shock of what she'd been through. Miraculously, she had slept through everything until Marino opened fire. But Lucy knew her aunt was almost murdered.

She knew the killer got in through my office window, which was closed but unlocked, because Lucy forgot to lock it after opening it several days earlier.

McCorkle cut the wires to the burglar alarm system outside the house. He came in through the first-floor window, walked within feet of Lucy's room and quietly went up the stairs. How did he know my bedroom was on the second floor? I don't think he could have unless he'd watched my house in the past.