He stared at me, bewildered.
I was laughing so hard I was crying. It must have been hysteria. I couldn’t stop. I was pounding the top of my desk and wiping my eyes. I’m sure people could hear me up and down the hall.
Wingo started laughing, uneasily, then he couldn’t stop either.
Marino scowled at both of us as if we were imbeciles. Then he was fighting a smile. In a minute he was choking on his cigarette and guffawing.
Wingo finally went on, “The thing is . . .”
He took a deep breath. “The thing is, Dr. Scarpetta, I waited until he did it and right after he left his car I ran over and collected the butt. I took it straight up to serology, to Betty, had her test it.”
I gasped. “You did what? You took the butt to Betty? That’s what you took up to her the other day? To what? Have his saliva tested? What for?”
“His blood type. It’s AB, Dr. Scarpetta.”
“My God.”
The connection was that fast. The blood type that came up on the mislabeled PERK Wingo found inside the evidence refrigerator was AB.
AB is extremely rare. Only four percent of the population has type AB.
“I was wondering about him,” Wingo explained. “I know how much he, uh, hates you. It’s always hurt me he treats you so bad. So I asked Fred . . .”
“The security guard?”
“Yeah. I asked Fred about seeing anybody. You know, if he’d seen anybody going inside our morgue who wasn’t supposed to be there. He said he saw this one dude on an early Monday evening. Fred was starting his rounds and stopped off to use the john down there. He’s coming out just as this white dude’s coming in, into the john, I’m saying. Fred told me the white dude had something in his hands, some paper packets of some sort. Fred just went on out, went about his business.”
“Amburgey? It was Amburgey?”
“Fred didn’t know. He said most white folks look alike to him. But he remembered this dude because he had on a real nice silver ring with a real big blue stone in it. An older guy, scrawny, and about bald.”
It was Marino who proposed, “So maybe Amburgey went into the john and swabbed himself-”
“They’re oral,” I recalled. “The cells that showed up on the slides. And no Barr bodies. Y chromosome, in other words male.”
“I love it when you talk dirty.” Marino grinned at me, and went on, “So he swabs the inside of his cheeks – the ones above his friggin’ neck, I hope. Smears some slides from a PERK, slaps a label on it-”
“A label he got from Lori Petersen’s file,” I interrupted him again, this time incredulously. “Then he tucks it inside the fridge to make you think you screwed up. Hell, maybe he’s the one breaking into the computer, too. Unbelievable.”
Marino was laughing again. “Don’t you love it? We’ll nail his ass!”
The computer had been broken into over the weekend, sometime after hours on Friday, we believed. Wesley noticed the commands on the screen Saturday morning when he came in for McCorkle’s autopsy. Someone had tried to pull up Henna Yarborough’s case. The call, of course, could be traced. We were waiting for Wesley to get the goods from the telephone company.
I’d been assuming it was McCorkle who might have gotten in at some point Friday evening before he came after me.
“If the commissioner’s the one breaking into the computer,” I reminded them, “he’s not in trouble. He has the right, ex officio, to my office data and anything else he cares to peruse. We’ll never be able to prove he altered a record.”
All eyes fell to the cigarette butt inside the plastic bag.
Evidence tampering, fraud, not even the governor could take such liberties. A felony is a felony. I doubted it could be proved.
I got up and hung my lab coat on the back of the door. Slipping on my suit jacket, I collected a fat folder off a chair. I was due in court in twenty minutes to testify in yet one more homicide case.