Postmortem. Patricia Cornwell

The spacious room had all the comforts of a living room, albeit a somewhat neutral, emotionally defused one.

I settled into a tan leather couch. Scattered about were pale abstract watercolors and several non-flowering potted plants. Absent were magazines, books and a telephone. The lamps on end tables were switched off, the white designer blinds drawn just enough to allow sunlight to seep peacefully into the room.

“How’s your mother, Kay?” Fortosis said as he pulled up a beige wing chair.

“Surviving. I think she’ll outlive all of us.”

He smiled. “We always think that of our mothers, and unfortunately it’s rarely true.”

“Your wife and daughters?”

“Doing quite well.”

His eyes were steady on me. “You look very tired.”

“I suppose I am.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“You’re on the faculty of VMC,” he began, in his mild unthreatening way. “I’ve been wondering if you might have known Lori Petersen in life.”

With no further prompting, I found myself telling him what I had not admitted to anyone else. My need to verbalize it was overwhelming.

“I met her once,” I said. “Or at least I’m fairly sure of it.”

I had probed my memory exhaustively, especially during those quiet, introspective times when I was driving to or from work, or when I was out in my yard, tending to my roses. I would see Lori Petersen’s face and try to superimpose it on the vague image of one of the countless VMC students gathered around me at labs, or in the audiences at lectures. By now, I’d convinced myself that when I studied the photographs of her inside her house, something clicked. She looked familiar.

Last month I had given a Grand Rounds lecture, “Women in Medicine.”

I remembered standing behind the podium and looking out over a sea of young faces lining the tiers rising up to the back of the medical college auditorium. The students had brought their lunches and were sitting comfortably in the red-cushioned seats as they ate and sipped their soft drinks. The occasion was like all others before it, nothing extraordinary or particularly memorable about it, except retrospectively.

I did not know for a fact but believed Lori was one of the women who came forward afterward to ask questions. I saw the hazy image of an attractive blonde in a lab coat. The only feature I remembered clearly was her eyes, dark green and tentative, as she asked me if I really thought it was possible for a woman to manage a family and a career as demanding as medicine. This stood out because I momentarily faltered. I managed one but certainly not the other.

Obsessively I’d replayed that scene, going over and over it in my mind, as if the face would come into focus if I conjured it up enough. Was it she or wasn’t it? I would never be able to walk the halls of VMC again without looking for that blond physician. I did not think I would find her. I think she was Lori briefly appearing before me like a ghost from a future horror that would relegate her to nothing but a past.

“Interesting,” Fortosis remarked in his thoughtful way. “Why do you suppose it’s important that you met her then or at any other time?”

I stared at the smoke drifting up from my cigarette. “I’m not sure, except that it makes her death more real.”

“If you could go back to that day, would you?”

“Yes.”

“What would you do?”

“I would somehow warn her,” I said. “I would somehow undo what he did.”

“What her killer did?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think about him?”

“I don’t want to think about him. I just want to do everything I can to make sure he is caught.”

“And punished?”

“There’s no punishment equal to the crime. No punishment would be enough.”

“If he’s put to death, won’t that be punishment enough, Kay?”

“He can die only once.”

“You want him to suffer, then.”

His eyes wouldn’t let me go.

“Yes,” I said.

“How? Pain?”

“Fear,” I said. “I want him to feel the fear they felt when they knew they were going to die.”

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