“I have been meticulous, Governor, and I have done nothing wrong,” I repeated. “The facts will bear this out, but I will not discuss the matter further until I speak with an attorney. And I will not make full disclosure unless it is through him and before a judge in a sealed hearing.”
“A sealed hearing?” His eyes narrowed.
“Certainly details of my personal life affect individuals besides me.”
“Who? Husband, children, lover? It is my understanding you have note of these, that you live alone and are - to use the cliche - wedded to your work. Just who might you be protecting?”
“Governor Norring, you are baiting me.”
“No ma'am. I'm simply looking for anything to corroborate your claims. You say you are concerned with protecting others, and I'm inquiring as to who these others might be. Certainly not patients. Your patients are deceased.
“I dog not feel that you are being fair or impartial,” I said and I knew I sounded cold. “Nothing about this meeing was fair from the outset. I'm given twenty minutes notice to be here and am not told the agenda -“
He interrupted. “Why, Doctor, I should think you might have guessed the agenda-”
“Just as l should have guessed that our meeting was a public event.”
“I understand the press came out in force.” His expression did not change.
“I'd like to know how this occurred,” I said heatedly.
“If you're asking if this office notified the press of ma meeting, I'm telling you that we did not.”
I did not respond.
“Doctor, I'm not certain you understand that as public servants we must operate by a different set of rules. In a sense, we are not allowed private lives. Or perhaps it would be better to say that if our ethics or judgment are questioned, the public has a right to examine, in some instances, the most private aspects of our existences. Whenever I am about to undertake a certain activity or even write a check, I have to ask myself if what I am doing will holdup under the most intense scrutiny.”
I noticed that he scarcely used his hands when he talked, and that the fabric and design of his suit and tie were a lesson in understated extravagance. My attention darted here and there as he continued his admonition, and I knew that nothing I might do or say would save me in the end. Though I had been appointed by the health commissioner, I would not have been offered the job, nor could I last long in it without the support of the governor. The quickest way to lose that was to cause him embarrassment or conflict, which I had already accomplished. He had the power to force my resignation. I had the power to buy myself a little time by threatening to embarrass him more.
“Doctor, perhaps you would like to tell me what you would do if you were in my position?”
Beyond the window rain was mixed with sleet, and buildings in the banking district were bleak against a dreary, pewter sky. I stared at Norring in silence, then quietly spoke.
“Governor Norring, I would like to think that I would not summon the chief medical examiner to my office to gratuitously insult her, both professionally and personally, and then demand of her that she surrender the rights guaranteed to every person by the Constitution. Further, I would like to think that I would accept this person's innocence until she had been proven guilty, and would not compromise her ethics and the Hippocratic oath she had sworn to uphold by demanding that she open confidential files to public scrutiny when doing so might do harm to herself and to others. I would like to think Governor Norring, that I would not give an individual who has served the Commonwealth faithfully no choice but to resign for cause.”
The governor absently picked up a silver fountain pen as he considered my words: For me to resign for cause after meeting with him would imply to all of the reporters waiting beyond his office door that I had quit because Norring had asked me to do something that I considered unethical.
“I have no interest in your resigning at this moment,” he said coldly. “In fact, I would not accept your resignation. I am a fair man, Dr. Scarpetta, and, I hope, a wise one. And wisdom dictates that I cannot have someone performing legal autopsies on the victims of homicide when this individual, herself, is being implicated in homicide or as an accessory to it. Therefore, I think it best to relieve you with pay until this matter is resolved.”
He reached for the phone. “John, would you be so kind as to show the chief medical examiner out?”
Almost instantly, the smiling press secretary appeared.
As I emerged from the governor's offices, I was accosted from every direction. Flashguns went off in my eyes, and it seemed that everyone was shouting. The lead news item the rest of the day and the following morning was that the governor had temporarily relieved me of my duties until I could clear my name. An editorial conjectured that Norring had shown himself to be a gentleman, and if I were a lady I would offer to step down.
11
Friday I stayed home in front of the fire, continuing the tedious and frustrating job of making notes to myself as I attempted to document my every move over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, I was in my car driving home, front the office at the time the police believed Eddie Heath wars abducted from the convenience store. When Susan was murdered, I was home alone, for Marino had taken Lucy shooting: I was also by myself the early morning that Frank Donahue was shot. I had no witnesses to testify to my activities during the three murders.
Motive and modus operandi would be significantly more difficult to sell. It is very uncommon for a woman to kill execution style, and there could be no motive at all in Eddie Heath's slaying unless I were a closet sexual sadist.
I was deep in thought when Lucy called out, “I've got something.” She was seated before the computer, the chair swiveled around to one side, her feet propped up on an ottoman. In her lap were numerous sheets of paper, and to the right of the keyboard was my Smith and Wesson thirty-eight.
“Why do you have my revolver in here?” I asked uneasily.
Pete told me to dry-fire it whenever I have a chance. So I've been practicing while running my program through the journal tapes.”
I picked up the revolver, pushed the thumb latch, and checked the chambers, just to be sure.
“Though I've still got a few tapes to run through, I think I've already gotten a hit on what we're looking for,” she said.
I felt a surge of optimism as I pulled up a chair.
“The journal tape for December ninth shows three interesting TUs.”
“TUs?” I asked.
“Tenprint Updates,” Lucy explained. “We're talking about three records. One was completely dropped or deleted. The SID number of another was altered. Then we have a third record which was a new entry made around the same time the other two were deleted or changed. I logged into CCRE and ran the SID numbers of both the altered record and the new record entered: The altered record comes back to Ronnie Joe Waddell.”
“What about the new record?” I said.
“That's spooky. There's no criminal history. I entered the SID number five times and it kept coming back to 'no record found.’
Do you understand the significance?”
“Without a history in CCRE, we have no way of knowing who this person is.”
Lucy nodded. “Right. You've got someone's, prints and SID number in AFIS, but there's no name or other personal identifiers to match him up with. And that would indicate to me that somebody dropped this person's record from CCRE. In other words, CCRE has been tampered with too.
“Let's go back to Ronnie Waddell,” I said. “Can you reconstruct what was done to his?”
“I've got, a theory. First, you need to know that the SID number is a unique identifier and has a unique index, meaning the system won't allow you to enter a duplicate value. So if, for example I wanted to switch SID numbers with you, I'd have to delete your record first. Then after I've changed my SID number to yours, I’d, reenter your record, giving you my old SID number.
“And that's what you think happened?”
I asked.
“Such a transaction would explain the TUs I've found in the journal tape for December ninth.”
Four days before Waddell's execution, I thought.
“There's more,” Lucy said. “On December sixteenth, Waddlels record was deleted from AFIS.”
“How can that be?”
I asked, baffled. “A print from Jennifer Deighton's house came back to Waddell when Vander ran it through AFIS a little over a week ago.”
'AFIS crashed on December sixteenth at ten-fifty-six A.M. exactly ninety-eight minutes after Waddell's record was deleted,” Lucy replied. “The data base was restored with the journal tapes, but you've got to keep in mind that a backup is done only once a day, late in the afternoon. Therefore, any changes made to the data base the morning of December sixteenth hadn't been backed up yet when the system crashed. When the data base was restored, so was Waddell's record.”
“'You mean someone tampered with Waddells SID number four days before his execution? Then three days after his execution; someone deleted his record, from AM?”
“That's the way it looks to me. What I can't figure is why the person didn't just delete his, record in the first place. Why go to all the trouble to change the SID number, only to turn around and delete his entire record?”
Neils Vander had a simple answer to that when I called him moments later.
“It's not unusual far an inmate's prints to be deleted from AFIS after he's dead,” Vander said. “In fact, the only reason we wouldn't delete a deceased inmate's records would be if it were possible his prints might turn up in any unsolved cases. But Waddell had been in prison for nine, ten years - he'd been out of commission too long to make it worthwhile to keep his prints on line.”
“Then the deletion of his record on December sixteenth would have been routine,” I said.
“Absolutely. But it would not have been routine to delete his record on December ninth, when Lucy believes his SID number was altered, because Waddell was still alive then.”
“Neils, what do you think this is all about?”
“When you change somebody's SID number, Kay, in effect you have changed his identity. I may get a hit on his prints, but when I enter the corresponding SID number in CCRE, it's not his history I'm going to get. I'll either get no history at all, or the history of somebody else.”
“You got a hit on a print left at Jennifer Deighton's house,” I said. “You entered the corresponding SID number in CCRE and it came back to Ronnie Waddell. Yet we now have reason to believe his original SID number was changed. We really don't know who left the print on her dining room chair, do we?”
“No. And it's becoming dear that someone has gone to a lot of trouble to make sure we can't verify who that person might be. I can't prove it's not Waddell. I can't prove that it is.”
Images flashed in my mind as he spoke.
. “In order to verify that Waddell did not leave that print on Jennifer Deighton's chair, I need an old print of his that I can trust, one that I know couldn't have been tampered with. But I just don't know where else to look.”
I envisioned dark paneling and hardwood floors, and dried blood the color of garnets.
“Her house,” I muttered.
“Whose house?” Vander puzzled.
“Robyn Naismith's house,” I said.
Ten years previously, when Robyn Naismith's house was processed by the police, they would not. have arrived with laser or Luma-Lite. There was no such thing as DNA printing then. There was no automated fingerprint system in Virginia, no computerized means to enhance a bloody partial pint left on a wall or anywhere else. Though new technology generally is irrelevant in cases that have long been closed, there are exceptions, I believed Robyn Naismith's murder was one of them.
If we could spray her house. with chemicals, it was possible we could literally resurrect the scene. Blood dots, drips, drops, spatters, stains, and screams bright red. It seeps into crevices and cracks, and sneaks under cushions and floors. Though it may disappear with washing and fade with the years, it never completely goes away. Like the writing that wasn't there on the sheet of paper found on Jennifer Deighton's bed, there was blood invisible to the naked eye inside the rooms where Robyn Naismith had been accosted and killed. Unaided by technology, police had found one bloody print during the original investigation of the crime. Maybe Waddell had left more… Maybe they were still there.
Neils Vander, Benton Wesley, and I drove west toward the University of Richmond, a splendid collection of Georgian buildings surrounding a lake between Three Chopt and River roads. It was from here that Robyn Naismith had graduated with honors many years before, and her love of the area had been such that she had later bought her first home two blocks from the campus.
Her former small brick house with its mansard roof was set on a half-acre lot. I was not surprised that the site should have been ideal for a burglar: The yard was dense with trees, the back of the house dwarfed by three gigantic magnolias that completely blocked the sun. I doubted the neighbors on either side could have seen or heard anything at Robyn Naismith's house, had they been home: The morning Robyn was murdered, her neighbors were at work.
Due to the circumstances that had placed the house on the market ten years ago, the price had been low for the neighborhood. We'd discovered the university had decided to buy it for faculty housing, and had kept much of what was left inside it. Robyn had been unmarried, an only child, and her parents in northern Virginia did not want her furnishings. I suspected they could not bear to live with or even look at them. Professor Sam Potter, a bachelor who taught German, had been renting the house from his employer since its purchase.
As we gathered camera equipment, containers of chemicals, and other items from the trunk, the back door opened. An unwholesome-looking man greeted us with an uninspired good-morning.
“You need a hand with that?” Sam Potter came down the steps, sweeping his long, receding black hair out of his eyes and smoking a cigarette. He was short and pudgy, his hips wide like a woman's.
“If you want to get the box here,’ Vander said.
Potter dropped the cigarette to the ground and didn't bother stamping it out. We followed him up the steps, and into a small kitchen with old avocado-green appliances and dozens of dirty dishes. He led us through the dining. roam;, with laundry piled on the table, then into the-living room at the front of the house. I set down what I was carrying and tried not to register my shock as I recognized me console television connected to a cable outlet in the wall, the draperies; the brown leather couch, the parquet floor, now scuffed and as dull as mud. Books and papers were scattered everywhere, and Potter began to talk as he carelessly collected them.
“As you can see, I'm not domestically inclined,” he said, his German accent distinct. “I will stick these things on the dining room table for now. There,” he said when he returned. “Anything else you would like me to move?”
He slipped a pack of Camels from the breast pocket of his white shirt and dug a book of mate from, his faded denim jeans. A pocket watch was attached to a belt loop by a leather thong, and I noticed a number of things as he slid it out to glance at the time and then lit the cigarette. His hands trembled, his fingers were swollen, and broken blood-vessels covered his cheekbones and nose. He had no bothered to empty ashtrays, but he had collected bottles and glasses and had been careful to carry out the trash.
“This is fine. You don't, need to move anything else,” Wesley said. “If we do, we'll put it back.” “
And you said this chemical you're using won't damage anything and isn't toxic to humans?”
“No, it's not hazardous. It will leave a grainy residue similar to when salt water dries,” I said to him. “We'll do our best to clean up.”
“I really don't want to be here while you do this, Patter said, flaking a nervous drag on the cigarette. “Can you give me an approximation of how much time it will require?”
“Hopefully, no more than two hours.”
>
Wesley was looking around the room, and though his face was completely devoid of expression, I could imagine what was going through his mind.
I took off my coat and didn't know where to put it, while Vander opened a box of film.
“Should you finish before I get back, please shut the door and make sure it's locked. I don't have an alarm to worry about.” Potter went back out through the kitchen, and when he started his car it sounded like a diesel bus.
“It's a shame, really,” Vander said as he lifted two bottles of chemicals from a box. “This could be a very nice house. But inside it's not much better than a lot of slums I've seen. Did you notice the scrambled eggs in the skillet on the stove? What more do you want to pick up here?”
He squatted on the floor. “I don't want to mix this up until we're ready.”
“I'd say we need to move as much, out o€ here as we can. You’ve got the picture. Kay?” Wesley said.
I got out Robyn Naismith's scene photographs “You've noticed that our professor friend is living with her furniture,” I said.
“Well, then we’ll leave it here.” Vander said as if it were common, for furniture from a ten-year-old murder scene to still be in place. “But the rug's got to go, I can tell that didn’t come with the house.”
“How?”
Wesley stared down at the blue and red braided rug beneath his feet. It was filthy and curling up at the edges. “If you lift up-the edge, you can see that the parquet is just as dull and scratched underneath as it is everywhere else. The rug hasn't been here long. Besides, it doesn't look very well made I doubt it would have lasted all this time.”
Spreading several photographs on the floor; I turned them this way and that until the perspectives were right and we could tell what needed to be moved. What furnishings were original to the room had been rearranged.
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