Postmortem

by Patricia Cornwell

  “I wasn’t sneaking,” Shrew said. “I was looking for the manager.”

  Her heart pounded like a kettledrum.

  “We’re closed,” the man said.

  “I came in to buy a puppy,” she said, and she started to cry.

  “There’s a closed sign in the door,” he said while the woman mutely stood by.

  “Your door’s unlocked. I came downstairs to tell you. Anybody could walk right in.” Shrew couldn’t stop crying.

  She couldn’t stop envisioning what she’d seen in the freezer.

  The man looked at the woman, as if demanding an explanation. He walked over to the front door and checked, then muttered something. It probably dawned on him that Shrew had to be telling the truth. How else would she have gotten in?

  “Well, we’re closed. It’s a holiday,” he said, and she guessed him to be about sixty-five years old, maybe seventy. He had a Midwest drawl that seemed to crawl off his tongue.

  She had a feeling he’d been doing the same thing she was a little earlier, drinking, and she noticed that the big gold ring he wore was shaped like a dog’s head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I saw the lights on and came in, thinking you were open. I really am sorry. I thought I might buy a puppy, and some food and toys and things. Sort of a New Year’s present to myself.”

  She picked up a can of food off a shelf.

  Before she could stop herself, she said, “Wasn’t this banned in that Chinese-import melamine scare?”

  “Believe you have that confused with toothpaste,” the man said to the woman in the gray frock coat, who had a lifeless jowly face and long dyed black hair straying from a barrette.

  “That’s right. Toothpaste,” she said, and she had the same accent. “A lot of people got liver damage from it. Of course, they never tell you the rest of the story. Like maybe they were alcoholics, and that’s why they had liver damage.”

  Shrew wasn’t uninformed. She knew about the toothpaste that had killed several people because it had diethylene glycol in it, and the man and woman knew that wasn’t what Shrew was talking about. This was a bad place—maybe the worst in the world—and she’d come at a bad time, the worst time imaginable, and she’d seen something so awful she’d never be the same.

  What was she thinking? It was the evening of New Year’s Day, and no pet store in the city was going to be open, including this one. So why were they here?

  After being down in the basement, she knew why they were here.

  “It’s important to clear up confusion,” the man said to Shrew. “You had no business down there.”

  “I didn’t see anything.” A clear indication she’d seen everything.

  The man in the cowboy hat and gold jewelry said, “If an animal dies from something contagious, you do what you got to do, and you got to do it fast to make sure the other animals don’t catch it. And once you do the merciful thing, you have to deal with temporary storage. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

  Shrew noticed six empty cages with their doors open wide. She wished she’d noticed them when she first walked in. Maybe she would have left. She remembered the other empty cages in the basement, and what was on the table, and then what was in the freezer.

  She started to cry again and said, “But some of them were moving.”

  The man said to her, “You live around here?”

  “Not really.”

  “What’s your name?”

  She was so scared and upset, she stupidly told him, and then stupidly said, “And if you’re thinking I’m some kind of inspector for the Department of Agriculture or some animal group?” She shook her head. “I just came in to get a puppy. I forgot it’s a holiday, that’s all. I understand about pets getting sick. Kennel cough. Parvovirus. One gets it, they all get it.”

  The man and woman silently looked at her as if they didn’t need to talk to come up with a plan.

  He said to Shrew, “Tell you what. We’re getting a new shipment tomorrow, all kinds to choose from. You come back and pick out whatever you want. On the house. You like a springer spaniel, a shih tzu, or what about a dachshund?”

  Shrew couldn’t stop crying, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk.”

  The woman retrieved the can of air freshener from the top of the cash register and headed back to the basement door. She closed it behind her, and Shrew could hear her on the stairs. Shrew and the man in the cowboy hat were alone. He took her arm and walked her out of the shop, where the black Cadillac sedan was parked. The driver in his suit and cap got out and opened the back door for them.

  The man in the cowboy hat said to Shrew, “Get in and I’ll drop you off. It’s too cold to be walking. Where do you live?”

  Lucy wondered if Oscar Bane was aware that his girlfriend had eighteen e-mail usernames. He was far less complicated and probably more honest. He had only one.

  “Each of hers was for a specific purpose,” Lucy was telling Berger. “Voting in polls, blogging, visiting certain chat rooms, posting consumer reviews, subscribing to various online publications, a couple of them for getting online news.”

  “That’s a lot,” Berger said, glancing at her watch.

  Lucy could think of few people she knew who had a harder time being still. Berger was like a hummingbird that never quite landed, and the more restive she got, the more Lucy slowed things down. She found that quite the irony. Almost always it was the other way around.

  “It’s really not a lot these days,” Lucy said. “Her e-mail service, like most of them, was free as long as she didn’t want additional options. But basic accounts? She could open as many as she wanted, all virtually untraceable because she didn’t need a credit card, since there’s no fee, and she wasn’t required to divulge any personal information unless she chose to. All anonymous, in other words. I’ve come across people who have hundreds, are a one-person crowd, their aliases talking to each other, agreeing, disagreeing, in chat rooms, comments sections. Or maybe they’re ordering things or buying subscriptions they don’t want easily linked to them, or who knows what. But with rare exception, no matter how many aliases a person has, usually there’s just one that’s really them, so to speak. The one they use for their normal correspondence. Oscar’s is Carbane, rather straightforward—as it’s the last part of Oscar appended to his surname, unless his hobby is organic chemistry and he’s referencing the systematic analogue of the mononuclear hydride CH-four, or he builds airfield models and is alluding to the carbane struts mounted to biplane wings. Which I sort of doubt. Terri’s is Lunasee, and we should look at those e-mails first.”

  “Why would a forensic psychology graduate student pick a username like that?” Berger said. “Seems extremely insensitive to make an allusion to lunatics or lunacy or any other disparagement from the Dark Ages. In fact, it’s worse than insensitive, it’s cold-blooded.”

  “Maybe she was an insensitive, cold-blooded person. I’m not one to deify the dead. A lot of murder victims weren’t necessarily nice people when they were alive.”

  “Let’s start with mid-December and work our way up to the most recent ones,” Berger directed.

  There were one hundred and three e-mails since December 15. Seven were to Terri’s parents in Scottsdale, and all the rest were between Terri and Oscar Bane. Lucy sorted them by time and date, without opening them, to see if there was a pattern of who wrote most often and when.

  “Far more from him,” she said. “More than three times as many. And it looks like he wrote her at all hours. But I’m not seeing any e-mails from her that were sent later than eight p.m. And in fact, most days of the week, nothing from her after four in the afternoon. That’s really strange. You’d think she had a night job.”

  “It could be they talked on the phone. Hopefully, Morales has already started on phone records,” Berger said. “Or he should have. Or maybe he went on vacation and didn’t tell me. Or maybe he’d better start looking for a new career. I like the last option best.”

/>   “What’s his problem, anyway? And why do you put up with it? He treats you with complete disrespect.”

  “He treats everyone with complete disrespect and calls it prioritizing.”

  “What do you call it?” Lucy continued opening e-mails.

  “I call it cocky and irritating as hell,” Berger said. “He thinks he’s smarter than everyone, including me, but what makes it complicated is he is smarter than most people. And he’s good at what he does if he chooses to be. And in most cases, his priorities end up making sense and he gets things done in a fraction of the time it takes someone else. Either that or somehow he manages to get people to do the work for him, then finagles accolades for it while managing to get that person into trouble. Which is probably what he’s doing now.”

  “To Marino,” Lucy said.

  It was as if she had decided it was easiest to think of Marino as just another detective she really didn’t know. Or maybe she didn’t hate him as much as Berger had assumed.

  “Yes, he’s putting Marino out on a limb,” Berger said. “Marino seems to be the only one doing anything that matters.”

  “He married?” As Lucy opened e-mails. “Obviously, I’m not talking about Marino.”

  “He’s not exactly the commitment type. Screws anything that stands still. Maybe even if it doesn’t stand still.”

  “I’ve heard rumors about the two of you.”

  “Oh, yes. Our famous Tavern on the Green tryst,” Berger said.

  They skimmed through the typical mundane electronic exchanges that people fire back and forth.

  “That murder in Central Park last fall,” Lucy said. “The marathon runner raped and strangled. Near the Ramble.”

  “Morales drove me to the scene. Afterwards, we stopped by Tavern on the Green for coffee and to talk about the case. Next thing, it’s all over the city that we’re an item.”

  “That’s because it was in Gotham Gotcha. One of the infamous sightings. Including a photograph of the two of you looking cozy,” Lucy said.

  “Don’t tell me you have search engines chugging after me morning, noon, and night.”

  “My search engines don’t chug,” Lucy said. “They’re a little faster than that. The source of information for that gossip column is mainly what the readers send in. Almost always anonymously. How do you know he didn’t?”

  “That would have been pretty clever of him. Taking a photograph of both of us while we were sitting across the table from each other.”

  “Or getting somebody else to,” Lucy said. “Quite a feather in his cap. The superstud detective having a cozy tryst at Tavern on the Green with the superstar DA. Be careful of him.”

  “In case you missed the important point, we weren’t having a tryst,” Berger said. “We were having coffee.”

  “I have a funny feeling about him. Maybe recognize certain traits even though I haven’t met him. Someone who should have complete power over him, outranks him, outclasses him, and he, quote, prioritizes. He makes you wait your turn in line? Makes himself the center of your attention in a negative way, because he aggressively trips you up at every chance? Who’s got the power? A tried-and-true trick. Assert dominance, be disrespectful, and next thing, the big boss is in your bed.”

  “I didn’t realize you’re such an expert,” Berger said.

  “Not that kind of expert. When I’ve had sex with a guy, it’s never been because he dominated me. It’s always been because I made a mistake.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I did,” Berger said.

  She skimmed through e-mails. Lucy fell silent.

  “I apologize,” Berger again said. “Morales makes me angry because, you’re right, I can’t control him and I can’t get rid of him. People like him shouldn’t go into policing. They don’t blend with the rank and file. They don’t take orders. They’re not team players, and everybody hates them.”

  “That’s why I had such a stunning career with the Feds,” Lucy said quietly, seriously. “Difference is, I don’t play games. I don’t try to overpower and belittle people so I can get what I want from them. I don’t like Morales. I don’t have to know him. You should be careful of him. He’s the sort of person who could cause you real trouble. It worries me that you never really know where he is or what he’s doing.”

  She got interested in four e-mails on a split screen—e-mails between Terri and Oscar.

  “I don’t think they were talking on the phone,” she then said. “Sent at eight-forty-seven, sent at nine-ten, sent at ten-fourteen, sent at eleven-nineteen. Why would he be writing her almost every hour if he’s talking to her on the phone? Notice that the ones from him are long, while hers are short. Consistently.”

  “One of those instances when what isn’t said matters more than what is,” Berger observed. “No references to phone calls, to any responses from her, any contacts with her. He’s saying things like I’m thinking of you. Wish I were with you. What are you doing? You’re probably working. There doesn’t seem to be any back-and-forth between them.”

  “Exactly. He’s writing to his lover several times a night. She’s not writing back.”

  “He’s obviously the more openly romantic of the two,” Berger said. “Not saying she wasn’t in love with him, because I don’t know. We don’t know. We may never know. But her e-mails are less demonstrative, more reserved. He’s comfortable making sexual references that are almost pornographic.”

  “Depends on your definition of pornographic.”

  Berger went back to an e-mail Oscar had written to Terri not even a week ago.

  “Why is that pornographic?” Lucy asked.

  “I think what I meant was sexually explicit.”

  “You work sex crimes?” Lucy said. “Or do I have you mixed up with a Sunday-school teacher? He’s writing about exploring her with his tongue. He’s writing about how writing about it arouses him.”

  “I think he was trying to have cybersex with her. And she was rebuffing him by not responding. He’s getting angry with her.”

  “He was trying to tell her how he felt,” Lucy pointed out. “And the less she responded, maybe the more he persisted out of insecurity.”

  “Or anger,” Berger emphasized. “And his increased sexual references are manifestations of his anger and aggression. That’s not a good combination when the person these feelings are directed at is about to get murdered.”

  “I could see how working sex crimes might take its toll. Maybe make it difficult to tell the difference between erotica and pornography, between lust and lewdness, between insecurity and rage, and accept that some instant replays are a celebration and not a degradation,” Lucy said. “Maybe you’re jaded because everything you see is disgusting and violent, and therefore all sex is always a crime.”

  “What I don’t see is any allusion whatsoever to rough sex, bondage, S-and-M,” Berger said as they read. “And I’d appreciate it if you’d refrain from analyzing me. Amateurishly, I might add.”

  “I could analyze you, and it wouldn’t be amateurishly. But you’d have to ask me first.”

  Berger didn’t ask, and they kept reading.

  Lucy said, “So far, no allusions to anything, quote, kinky, I agree. Nothing rough. Not a hint of handcuffs, dog collars, all that good stuff. Certainly no allusion to anything like the lubricant Aunt Kay told you about a little while ago. No body lotions, massage oils, nothing like that, and by the way, I text-messaged my pilots, and they’ll be waiting at La Guardia if there’s evidence to be flown to Oak Ridge. What I was saying, though, is lubricants aren’t compatible with oral sex unless they’re, bluntly put, edible. And what Aunt Kay described sounds more like a petroleum-based lubricant, which most people aren’t going to apply if they plan on having oral sex.”

  “The other puzzling part? The condoms in Terri’s nightstand,” Berger said. “Lubricated ones. So why would Oscar use a petroleum-type lubricant, saying he did?”

  “Do you know what type she had in her nightstand?”<
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  Berger opened her briefcase and pulled out a file. She looked through paperwork until she found a list of evidence collected from the scene last night.

  “Durex Love Condoms,” she said.

  Lucy Googled it and reported, “Latex, twenty-five percent stronger and a larger size than standard condoms, easy to roll on with one hand, good to know. Extra headroom with a reservoir tip, also good to know. But not compatible with a petroleum-based lubricant, which can weaken latex and cause it to break. That and the fact that no petroleum-based lubricant was found in her apartment, and you can read my mind. You ask me, everything keeps pointing away from Oscar and toward someone else.”

  More e-mails, getting closer to the day Terri was murdered. Oscar’s frustration and unrequited sexual love were becoming increasingly apparent, and he was beginning to sound more irrational.

  “A lot of excuses,” Lucy said. “Poor guy. He sounds miserable.”

  Berger read more and commented, “It’s almost annoying, makes me not like her very much and feel rather sorry for him, I must confess. She doesn’t want to rush into anything. He needs to be patient. She’s overwhelmed by work.”

  “Sounds like someone who has a secret life,” Lucy said.

  “Maybe.”

  “People in love don’t see each other only one night a week,” Lucy said. “Especially since neither of them had physical work-places outside the home. That we know of. Something’s not right. If you’re in love, in lust, you don’t sleep. You can hardly eat. You can’t concentrate on your work, and you sure as hell can’t stay away from each other.”

  “As we get closer to her murder, it gets worse,” Berger said. “He’s sounding paranoid. Really upset with how little time they spend together. Seems to be suspicious of her. Why will she see him only once a week? And only on Saturday nights, and why does she basically kick him out of bed before dawn? Why does she suddenly want to see his apartment when she’s never been interested in the past? What is it she thinks she’ll find in there? It’s not a good idea, he says. He would have told her yes in the beginning. But not now. He loves her so much. She’s the love of his life. He wishes she hadn’t asked to see his apartment because he can’t tell her why the answer’s no. One day in person he’ll tell her. God. This is weird. After three months of dating each other, sleeping with each other, she’s never set foot inside his apartment? And now suddenly she wants to go in there? Why? And why won’t he let her? Why won’t he explain it unless he does so in person?”