Postmortem

Scarpetta worries about who hacked the database and how they did it.

Before her meeting with Amburgey, Scarpetta meets with Betty, the chief serologist. She is testing the physical evidence recovery kit (PERK) from Lori Petersen’s case. Betty tells Scarpetta they should have DNA results back from the first two murders soon. Betty confirms that semen was found on Lori’s body. She also reports that the blue polyester blend fibers found on the windowsill where the murderer entered at the Petersen home do not match the cotton fibers found on the knife. Scarpetta reflects that Matt was not wearing blue polyester. Frank, the weapons analyst, reports that the survival knife was most likely used to cut Lori’s clothes and the cords used to bind her.

Scarpetta reflects that if the knife was in its usual place on the desk, the murderer could not have seen it until the lights came on, at which point, typically, Lori would have already been “subdued.” Scarpetta wonders if the killer was interrupted in his “ritual,” causing him to pause and see the knife on the desk. She wonders if Lori smelled the murderer’s distinct maple syrup odor before she saw him and that caused her to call for help.

Scarpetta worries about the meeting with Amburgey because she is not part of the “good ole boys” club like her predecessor, Cagney (72). She goes to his office. He keeps her waiting for half an hour before she is admitted into a room where Amburgey, Norman Tanner, and Bill Boltz have clearly already been meeting.

Scarpetta feels singled out as Amburgey accuses her office of being the source of leaks to the press. She denies it. He argues that a detail about Cecile Tyler being strangled with a “tan cloth belt” most likely came from her reports. He asks if her database is secure. She admits that there had been a hacking attempt the previous evening, but they had not accessed any files.

Amburgey tells Scarpetta that news will soon break that Lori Petersen called 911 at 12:49 am the night of her murder, but the call was ended before Lori said anything. The police operator categorized it as a low-priority call when such calls should be given high priority. The police quickly drove by the property 30 minutes later and did not see anything unusual. Scarpetta realizes that the murderer must have seen the knife because he came upon Lori not sleeping but sitting up and attempting to call 911.

Amburgey says that because he feels Scarpetta’s office has a risk of leaks, he wants all information to go through him. Scarpetta is outraged at the usurpation of her authority, but she concedes. She reasons that they want to put the focus on her as a scapegoat to draw attention away from the police’s failure to correctly respond to Lori’s 911 call. Amburgey wants to review the autopsy and physical analysis reports; she insists they do so in her office.

The four of them sit and review the files. At one point, Boltz drops a file, and Tanner helps him reorganize the pages. Amburgey points out that the detail about the tan belt has been entered into the digital database. Scarpetta says it must be an error, because her written notes state it was a “pair of nude pantyhose” (117). Amburgey wonders if the information came from the paramedics’ report. Scarpetta argues this was not normal procedure. Amburgey nevertheless points to it as evidence that the information is coming from Scarpetta’s office.

Scarpetta returns home and cooks pasta with Lucy as a stress reliever. Lucy seems disappointed when Bill Boltz, whom Scarpetta has been casually dating, stops by, but he wins her over with his charm. After Lucy has gone to bed, Scarpetta and Boltz talk about the meeting. He suggests that perhaps Lucy hacked into the morgue database. Scarpetta doubts it, but she has to admit it is possible. She wonders if Amburgey has it out for her because she publicly contradicted him about his conclusions in the murder of a Black city councilman last year. Scarpetta is angry that Boltz did not give her a heads-up about the meeting that afternoon. They argue.

Boltz suggests that perhaps the reporter Abby Turnbull hacked into the database because “she’s vicious and manipulative and extremely dangerous” (127). Scarpetta is surprised at his anger toward the reporter. He tells Scarpetta that Abby “was all over [him]” when she was tasked with writing a profile of him for the paper (128), and she wrote a bad profile of him after he rejected her. He thinks she might be hacking information to put in the paper to tank the case and make him, the prosecutor, look bad.

Scarpetta says the DNA results will confirm the conviction, regardless of press coverage. Boltz says that juries do not understand DNA evidence because “there are very few precedents, very few convictions nationwide” (129). He thinks that the DNA evidence will only be credible if Scarpetta herself is credible, and he thinks Amburgey is planning to pin the leaks on her. He advises her to be careful.

Boltz and Scarpetta started seeing each other after going for drinks after court. Scarpetta had been struck by his sexual aggression. His wife had died by suicide only a year earlier, but Scarpetta felt uncomfortable being sexually intimate with him so soon after his wife’s death. Now, she pulls away when he kisses her as he leaves the house.

Marino picks Scarpetta up in his very dirty duty car. He tells her he doesn’t bother cleaning it anymore because someone always dirties it again when he is off duty. They drive to the four crime scenes together. On the drive, he tells her that Matt Petersen passed a polygraph test. He also tells her that he looked into the rape allegations against Matt from several years ago. A fan had claimed Matt raped her, but there was no evidence, and the case was thrown out. He also says that there were three similar murders in Waltham, Massachusetts, around the time Matt was in the area attending Harvard, although they think one was a copycat killing. The murderer in that case was also a nonsecreter, and he had never been caught.

They note that all the victims are “career women” presumed to live alone. They suspect that the killer was monitoring the houses so he would know when they were alone and how to enter the houses. Marino notes that the first victim had gone to the hospital where Lori Petersen worked after a minor traffic accident. They wonder if the hospital is a point of connection between the victims. Marino notes that Cecile, the Black victim, was found by her white best friend, Bobbi, and wonders if Cecile was the only Black victim because the killer thought Bobbi lived in the house. They note all the victims were killed late Friday night or early Saturday morning, suggesting that the murderer works Monday through Friday.

Marino and Scarpetta discuss the allegations that leaks are coming from Scarpetta’s department. Marino suspects that Abby Turnbull has sources from within the police department, but he is not certain. He tells Scarpetta that Tanner, the police commissioner, had told him not to talk to her about the investigation, but he doesn’t “give a shit what Tanner says” (154). He wonders if there’s an alternative explanation for the focus on Scarpetta.