BLACK NOTICE. PATRICIA CORNWELL

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

If she thought this an odd answer, she didn’t show it.

“Follow me, please, and we’ll talk as I clean up. Then get a coffee.”

She took me into a small dressing room and dropped her gown in a clothes bin. Both of us washed our hands with disinfectant soap, and she scrubbed her face, too, and dried it with a rough, blue towel.

“Dr. Stvan,” I said, “obviously I’m not here for a friendly chat or to dabble into what your M.E. system is like over here. We both know that.”

“Of course,” she replied, meeting my eyes. “I’m not friendly enough for a social visit.” She smiled a little. “Yes, we met in Geneva, Dr. Scarpetta, but we didn’t socialize. It’s a shame, really. There were so few women back then:’

She talked as we walked along the corridor.

“When you called, I knew what it was about because I’m the one who asked you here,” she added.

“It makes me a little nervous to hear you say that,” I replied. “As if I’m not nervous enough.”

“We’re after the same things in life. If you were me, I’d be visiting you, do you see? I would be saying, we can’t let this

continue. We can’t let other women die this way. Now in America, in Richmond. He’s a monster, this Loup-Garou: ”

We stepped inside her office, where there were no windows, and stacks of files and journals and memos spilled from every surface. She picked up the phone and dialed an extension, and asked someone to bring us coffee.

“Please, make yourself comfortable, if that’s possible. I’d move things out of the way but I’ve no place to put them.”

I pulled a chair close to her desk.

“I felt very out of place when we were in Geneva,” she said, her mind apparently jumping back to that memory as she shut the door. “And part of the reason is the system here in France. Forensic pathologists are completely isolated here and that’s not changed and perhaps never will in my lifetime. We’re allowed to talk to no one, which isn’t always so bad because I like to work alone.”

She lit a cigarette.

“I inventory the injuries and police tell the whole story,

if they choose. If a case is sensitive, I talk to the magistrate myself and maybe I get what I need, maybe I don’t. Sometimes when I raise the question, no lab is appointed for the tests, do you understand?”

“Then, in a sense,” I said, “your only job is to find the cause of death.”

She nodded. “For each case I receive a mission from the magistrate to determine the cause of death, and that’s all.”

“You don’t really investigate.”

“Not the way you do. Not the way I want to,” she replied, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth. “You see, the problem with French justice is the magistrate is independent. I can report to no one but the magistrate who appointed me, and only the minister of justice can take a case away and give it to another magistrate. So if there’s a problem, I don’t have the power to do anything about it. The magistrate does what he wants to my report. If I say it’s a homicide and he doesn’t agree, so be it. It’s not my problem. This is law.”

“He can change your report?” The idea was outrageous to me.

“Of course. I’m alone against everyone. And I suspect

you are, too. “

I didn’t want to think about how alone I was.

“I’m keenly. aware if anyone knew we were talking, it could be very bad, especially for you” I started to say.

She held up her hand for me to be quiet. The door opened and the same young woman who had escorted me came in with a tray of coffee, cream and sugar. Dr. Stvan thanked her and said something else in French I didn’t get. The woman nodded and quietly left, shutting the door behind her:

“I told her to hold all calls,” Dr. Stvan informed me. “I need to let you know right away that the magistrate who appointed me is someone I very much respect. But there are pressures above him, if you understand what I mean.