“I haven’t laid anything on the table,” I unemphatically replied. “I’m just stating a fact, for the record.”
With a light knock, the redheaded receptionist came in with coffee, and the room abruptly froze into a mute tableau. The heavy silence seemed completely lost on her as she went to considerable lengths to make sure we had everything we needed, her attention hovering about Boltz like a mist. He may not have been the best Commonwealth’s attorney the city had ever known, but he was by far the best looking-one of those rare blond men to whom the passing years were generous. He was losing neither his hair nor his physique, and the fine lines at the corners of his eyes were the only indication he was creeping close to forty.
When she was gone, Boltz said to no one in particular, “We all know the cops occasionally have a problem with kiss and tell. Norm and I have had a few words with the brass. No one seems to know exactly where the leaks are coming from.”
I restrained myself. What did they expect? One of the majors is in tight with Abby Turnbull or whoever and this guy’s going to confess, “Yeah, sorry about that. I squawked”? Amburgey flipped a page in his legal pad. “So far a leak cited as ‘a medical source’ has been quoted seventeen times in the papers since the first murder, Dr. Scarpetta. This makes me a little uneasy. Clearly, the most sensational details, such as the ligatures, the evidence of sexual assault, how the killer got in, where the bodies were found, and the fact DNA testing is in the works have been attributed to this medical source.”
He glanced up at me. “Am I to assume the details are accurate?”
“Not entirely. There were a few minor discrepancies.”
“Such as?”
I didn’t want to tell him. I didn’t want to talk about these cases at all with him. But he had the right to the furniture inside my office if he wanted it. I reported to him. He reported to no one but the governor.
“For example,” I replied, “in the first case, the news reported there was a tan cloth belt tied around Brenda Steppe’s neck. The ligature was actually a pair of pantyhose.”
Amburgey was writing this down. “What else?”
“In Cecile Tyler’s case, it was reported her face was bleeding, that the bedspread was covered with blood. An exaggeration, at best. She had no lacerations, no injuries of this nature. There was a little bloody fluid coming out of her nose and mouth. A postmortem artifact.”
“These details,” Amburgey asked as he continued to write, “were they mentioned in the CME-I reports?”
I had to take a moment to compose myself. It was becoming clear what was going through his mind. The CME-1’s were the medical examiner’s initial report of investigation. The responding ME simply wrote down what he saw at the scene and learned from the police. The details were not always completely accurate because the ME on call was surrounded by confusion, and the autopsy hadn’t been performed yet.
In addition, ME’s were not forensic pathologists. They were physicians in private practice, virtual volunteers who got paid fifty dollars a case to be jerked out of bed in the middle of the night or have their weekends wrecked by car crashes, suicides and homicides. These men and women provided a public service; they were the troops. Their primary job was to determine whether the case merited an autopsy, to write everything down and take a lot of photographs. Even if one of my ME’s had confused a pair of pantyhose with a tan belt, it wasn’t relevant. My ME’s didn’t talk to the press.
Amburgey persisted, “The bit about the tan cloth belt, the bloody bedspread. I’m wondering if these were mentioned in the CME-1’s.”
“In the manner the press made reference to the details,” I firmly replied, “no.”
Tanner drolly remarked, “We all know what the press does. Takes a mustard seed and turns it into a mountain.”
“Listen,” I said, looking around at the three men, “if your point is that one of my medical examiners is leaking details about these cases, I can tell you with certainty you’re way off base. It isn’t happening. I know both of the ME’s who responded to the first two scenes. They’ve been ME’s in Richmond for years and have always been unimpeachable. I myself responded to the third and fourth scenes. The information is not coming from my office. The details, all of them, could have been divulged by anyone who was there. Members of the rescue squads who responded, for example.”