"No, she'd gone into the kitchen to say good-night to the chef. She left the restaurant after Petersen. We're not sure if he was still alive when she came out."
"So Merrill came out, possibly saw Tor die . . . then someone killed her with the only thing at hand."
April nodded. "That's my personal opinion."
"A double homicide, after al." Jason scratched his beard. "So, you don't think Merrill was killed in a jealous rage."
"No, I don't think she was killed in a rage, but that doesn't mean your friend didn't kill her. It just means her death may have been an afterthought."
Jason made some angry noises. "Rick Liberty would not have murdered his wife as an afterthought. That's just not sound psychological reasoning. I don't think he would have killed her for any reason—but to kill as an afterthought, that's outrageous."
"Jason, I may lose my job on this. The medical examiner found a natural cause of death, and I'm getting very unpopular with this line of—"
"You think Merrill Liberty saw something when she came out of the restaurant that made someone want to kill her?"
"Yes, and I need to talk to Liberty. I really need to find him."
"I don't know where he is." Jason's face was stony once more.
"You said that before."
"It's still true. By the way, did they x-ray Petersen's body?"
"Of course."
"And were the X rays negative for foreign objects?"
April started to sweat inside her sweater. "What are you getting at?"
"Didn't you tell me that Petersen's cause of death was a pericardial tamponade?"
"A what?"
"Perforated heart sac. That's when bleeding in the pericardium stops the heart from beating. In a massive heart attack, the heart loses its rhythm and runs amok, causing an appearance of perforation to the pericardial sac. If the perforation occurs first, the results can be the same."
April blinked. What?
"This reminds me of a case I had when I was a resident," Jason mused.
April watched the pendulum. Time was passing. She had to get moving. "Yeah?" she prompted, tapping her foot.
Jason frowned, remembering. "It was a very disturbed woman. She was brought into ER again and again, having to have objects removed from her body. Once she shoved a lightbulb up her anus, another time a broken Coke bottle up her vagina. She inserted pieces of broken glass in her breasts. We kept patching her up. Then she started weaving bent carpet needles into her skin. One day, she shoved a coat hanger up under her rib cage. We could see it in the X ray. The wire went behind her lung, so it didn't collapse her lung. But it went in so far and was so close to the pericardial sac around her heart that the surgeons were afraid they'd cause a pericardial tamponade and kill her in their attempt to get it out."
"Wow." April raised her hand to the place above her stomach where her rib cage flared out on both sides and there was a soft unprotected spot in the middle. It was the same place where Tor Petersen's corpse had a pimple. She felt a renewed respect for Jason. Even though he was an M.D., she had never thought of him as a real doctor.
"And did they kill her getting it out?" she demanded.
"No, they were first-rate surgeons."
"Jesus," she muttered. "A coat hanger. Look, I've got to go."
"Well, take this with you." Jason handed over the paper he'd been playing with. April read it. When she was finished, she swiveled back and forth, staring at the wall. "So Liberty's been corresponding with you on E-mail," she said finally.
"Only twice. This is the second time."
"What's this about giving Merrill's coat to Emma?"
"I don't know, it's odd."
It sure was. If he'd been wearing it and he was the killer, the coat would have traces of blood on it. April's scalp tingled. "Thanks." She hadn't thought of E-mail. She wasn't exactly sure how E-mail worked, but she figured with a warrant they could tap into the on-line system and trace the phone he was sending from. Jason probably didn't know that, though.
"What did you tell Liberty?" she asked quickly.
"I told him I'd talk to you."
"Thank you for showing me this," she said again.
"You said last night you don't have any evidence Liberty was the killer. No blood, no footprints. No witness who saw him on the scene. So you just want to talk to him, right?"
April nodded, even though the picture had changed a bit since then.
"What about your own suspicions, April? Why would anybody get in trouble for suspecting a double homicide instead of a single one in a very public case?"
April flinched at the attack. "All right, what's on your mind? Do you want to negotiate Liberty's return?" She waved the E-mail in the air. "Is that what this is about?"
Jason hesitated. "I'm not sure I trust the police."
"You can trust me. I'm the police. We need him back, Jason. We need to talk to him."
Jason looked down at the worn Oriental rug at his feet, then glanced at the clock. "Want to go out for a bite?"
"Thanks, I've already eaten." April smiled. With your wife. "But I could sit with you."
"Fine." He made a gesture with his hand for her to get up and get out of there. She did, figuring that for some reason of his own Jason had decided to forgive her.
37
At 3:31 P.M., Rosa Washington was alone in the women's room on the second floor. About twenty minutes earlier she'd finished doing the autopsy of a homeless woman who'd died of exposure in a doorway of a vacant building and gone unnoticed for some four days. Rosa had finished up, showered, and changed her clothes, but now she was on another floor, washing her hands again.
For her, the hardest thing about her job was the smell of the dead. She washed and washed, particularly her hands, but never felt cleansed of the stink. Nothing else about the dead traveled home with her. Not the colors—the greens and purples and blacks of skin stretched to the bursting point, the body fluids that streamed out like an endless polluted river, or the texture of tissue and fat so long dead it had turned into tallow. Neither was she much distressed by half-rotted corpses dressed in the rankest rags, or mummified babies. She attacked each former being with the same zeal, proud of what she could reveal about them from their remains.
She met the larva that was laid by flies in the eyes and mouths of corpses within minutes of death with particularly avid interest. She actually thought of the puffy maggots that emerged from the larval stage to begin feasting only a few hours later as her friends. The maggots reproduced rapidly. By calculating the number of generations thronging into the soft, wet, open places on a corpse, Rosa could count the hours and days since death occurred. The maggots were only one of many clues and signposts that helped pinpoint time of death. The hours since life stopped and the decomposition of body tissues began could also be estimated by the body's temperature falling to that of the surrounding environment, by the patterns of reds and purples on the skin that showed how the blood settled in the body, and many other ways.
There was always a great hurry to establish the time of death. Among the myriad revelations provided by an autopsy, the law cared the most about how and when the person had died and who he was if they didn't already know. An autopsy took from two to six hours, depending on who was doing it and how careful a job the medical examiner did. If the medical examiner's office was overwhelmed with bodies, Rosa could do an autopsy in two hours flat. She was especially proud of the six she'd done in a particularly active summer weekend back in '92.
The only hard part for her was living with the intensity of the smell. It was impossible to describe the stench of the dead, the way it invaded a space, penetrated every porous surface, and persisted despite all efforts to eradicate it.
Rosa dried her hands afld glanced at herself in the mirror. She didn't look like a regal African beauty now. Her hair was wispy and wild. Her eyes were red in a face that wore no makeup and offered no other relief from gloom. Oddly, she felt bereft, almost as if she'd just lost her best friend. But she knew that no friend of hers had died. She looked tired, sad, almost beaten. And this enraged her, for she was a success, not a failure. She was one of the world's winners. Her face, beautiful by anyone's standards, told her so. Her education and status in life told her so. But her face also told her she suddenly felt insecure, even frightened for the first time in her career, and she didn't like the feeling.