Postmortem. Patricia Cornwell

“What did you say to him?” I asked her in amazement.

“I told him I’d leave the message on your desk. When he threatened to have me fired if I didn’t hook him up with you immediately, I told him that was fine. I’ve never sued anybody before . . .”

“You didn’t.”

“I most certainly did. If the little jerk had another brain it would rattle.”

My answering machine was on. If Amburgey tried to call me at home he was only going to get my mechanical ear.

It was the stuff of nightmares. Each tape covered seven twenty four-hour days. Of course, the tapes weren’t that many hours long because often there were only three or four two-minute calls per hour. It simply depended on how busy the 911 room was on any given shift. My problem was finding the exact time period when I thought one of the homicides was called in. If I got impatient, I might whiz right on by and have to back up. Then I lost my place. It was awful.

Also, it was as depressing as hell. Emergency calls ranged from the mentally disenfranchised whose bodies were being invaded by aliens, to people roaring drunk, to poor men and women whose spouses had just keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke. There were a lot of automobile accidents, suicide threats, prowlers, barking dogs, stereos up too loud and firecrackers and car backfires that came in as shootings.

I was skipping around. So far I had managed to find three of the calls I was looking for. Brenda’s, Henna’s and, just now, Lori’s. I backed up the tape until I found the aborted 911 call Lori apparently made to the police right before she was murdered. The call came in at exactly 12:49 A.M., Saturday, June 7, and all that was on the tape was the operator picking up the line and crisply saying, “911.”

I folded back sheet after sheet of continuous paper until I found the corresponding printout. Lori’s address appeared on the 911 screen, her residence listed in the name of L. A. Petersen. Giving the call a priority four, the operator shipped it out to the dispatcher behind the wall of glass. Thirty-nine minutes later patrol unit 211 finally got the call. Six minutes after this he cruised past her house, then sped off on a domestic call.

The Petersen address came up again exactly sixty-eight minutes after the aborted 911 call, at 1: 57 A.M., when Matt Petersen found his wife’s body. If only he hadn’t had dress rehearsal that night, I thought. If only he’d gotten home an hour, an hour and a half earlier . . .

The tape clicked.

“911.”

Heavy breathing. “My wife!”

In panic. “Somebody killed my wife! Please hurry!”

Screaming. “Oh, God! Somebody killed her! Please hurry!”

I was paralyzed by the hysterical voice. Petersen couldn’t speak in coherent sentences or remember his address when the operator asked if the address on his screen was correct.

I stopped the tape and did some quick calculations. Petersen arrived home twenty-nine minutes after the first responding officer shone his light over the front of the house and reported everything looked “secure.”

The aborted 911 call came in at 12:49 A.m. The officer finally arrived at 1:34 A.M.

Forty-five minutes had elapsed. The killer was with Lori no longer than that.

By 1:34 A.M., the killer was gone. The bedroom light was out. Had he still been inside the bedroom, the light would have been on. I was sure of it. I couldn’t believe he could see well enough to find electrical cords and tie elaborate knots in the dark.

He was a sadist. He would want the victim to see his face, especially if it were masked. He would want his victim to see everything he did. He would want her to anticipate in unthinkable terror every horrendous thing he planned to do . . . as he looked around, as he cut the cords, as he began to bind her . . .

When it was over, he calmly flicked off the bedroom light and climbed back out the bathroom window, probably minutes before the patrol car cruised by and less than half an hour before Petersen walked in. The peculiar body odor lingered like the stench of garbage.

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