Postmortem

Lucy and I had a lot of talking to do. I needed to talk to her as much as she needed for me to talk to her. I pla

Our chauffeur was Abby. She was kind enough to insist on driving us to the airport.

She pulled in front of the airline gate, turned around and smiled wistfully.

"I wish I were going with you."

"You're welcome to," I responded with feeling. "Really. We'd love it, Abby. I'll be down there for three weeks. You have my mother's phone number. If you can get away, hop a plane and we'll all go to the beach together."

An alert tone sounded on her sca

I knew I wouldn't hear from her. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

By the time our plane took off, she would be chasing ambulances and police cars again. It was her life. She needed reporting like other people need air.

I owed her a lot.

Because of what she set up behind the scenes we discovered it was Amburgey breaking into the OCME computer. The call was traced back to his home telephone. He was a computer hack and had a PC at home with a modem.

I think he broke in the first time simply because he was monitoring my work, as usual. I think he was rolling through the strangling cases when he noticed a detail in Brenda Steppe's record different from what Abby reported in the paper. He realized the leak couldn't be my office. But he so desperately wanted it to be, he altered the record to make it appear that way.

Then he deliberately keyed on the echo and tried to pull up Lori Petersen's case. He wanted us to find those commands on the screen the following Monday, just hours before he called me to his office in front of Ta

One sin led to another. His hatred blinded his reason, and when he saw the computer labels in Lori's case file he wasn't able to restrain himself. I'd thought a long time about the meeting in my conference room, when the men were going through the files. I'd assumed the PERK label was stolen when several cases slipped off Bill's lap and scattered over the floor. But as I went over it I recalled Bill and Ta

That was his first mistake. His second mistake was underestimating Abby. She was livid when she realized someone was using her reporting to jeopardize my career. It didn't matter whose career, I suspected. Abby simply didn't cotton to being used. She was a crusader: truth, justice and the American way. She was all dressed up with rage with no place to go.

After her story hit the racks, she went to see Amburgey. She was already suspicious of him, she'd confessed to me, because he was the one who slyly gave her access to the information about the mislabeled PERK. He had the serology report on his desk, and notes to himself about the "fouled-up chain of evidence," and the "inconsistency of these results with those from earlier tests."

While Abby was seated on one side of his famous Chinese desk, he stepped out, leaving her alone for a minute-long enough for her to see what was on his blotter.

It was obvious, what he was doing. His feelings for me were no secret. Abby wasn't stupid. She became the aggressor. Last Friday morning she had gone back to see him and confronted him about the computer violation.

He was cagey, feigning horror that she might print such a thing, but he was salivating. He could taste my disgrace.

She set him up by admitting she didn't have enough to go on. "The computer violation's only happened once," she told him. "If it happens again, Dr. Amburgey, I'll have no choice but to print it and other allegations I've heard, because the public will have to know there's a problem at the OCME."

It had happened again.

The second computer violation had nothing to do with the planted news story, because it wasn't the killer who needed to be lured back to the OCME computer. It was the commissioner.

"By the way," Abby told me as we got the bags out of the trunk, "I don't think Amburgey's going to be a problem anymore."

"A leopard can't change its spots," I remarked, glancing at my watch.

She smiled at some secret she wasn't going to divulge. "Just don't be surprised when you come back to find he's no longer in Richmond."

I didn't ask.

She had plenty on Amburgey. Someone had to pay. She couldn't touch Bill.

He had called me yesterday to say he was glad I was all right, that he had heard about what had happened. He had made no references to his own crimes, and I had not so much as alluded to them when he calmly said he didn't think it was a good idea for us to see each other anymore.

"I've given it a lot of thought, and I just don't think it's going to work, Kay."

"You're right," I agreed, surprised by my own sense of relief. "It just isn't going to work, Bill."

I gave Abby a big hug.

Lucy frowned as she struggled with a very large pink suitcase.

"Shoot," she complained. "Mom's computer's got nothing but word processing on it. Shoot. No data base or nothing."

"We're going to the beach."

I shouldered two bags and followed her through the opening glass doors. "We're going to have a good time, Lucy. You can just lay off the computer for a while. It's not good for your eyes."

"There's a software store about a mile from my house…"

"The beach, Lucy. You need a vacation. Both of us need a vacation. Fresh air, sunshine, it will be good for you. You've been cooped up inside my office for two weeks."

We continued bickering at the ticket counter.

I shoved the bags on the scale, straightened Lucy's collar in back and asked her why she hadn't carried her jacket. "The air-conditioning in planes is always too high."

"Auntie Kay…"

"You're going to be cold."

"Auntie Kay!"

"We've got time for a sandwich."

"I'm not hungry!"

"You need to eat. From here we're stuck in Dulles for an hour and there's no lunch on the plane from there. You need something in your stomach."

"You sound just like Grans!"

Patricia Daniels Cornwell was an award wi