When he came over to my table, he was wearing his headphones around his neck like a collar, and he had a puzzled, uneasy expression on his face. In his hand was a small cardboard slide folder from a PERK.
“Uh, Dr. Scarpetta,” he said, clearing his throat, “this was inside the fridge.”
He didn’t explain.
He didn’t need to.
I set down the scalpel as my stomach tightened. Printed on the slide folder label was the case number, name and date of the autopsy of Lori Petersen – whose evidence, all of it, had been turned in four days earlier.
“You found this in the refrigerator?”
There had to be some mistake.
“In the back, on the bottom shelf.”
Hesitantly, he added, “Uh, it’s not initialed. I mean, you didn’t initial it.”
There had to be an explanation.
“Of course I didn’t initial it,” I said sharply. “I collected only one PERK in her case, Wingo.”
Even as I said the words, doubt wavered deep inside me like a windblown flame. I tried to remember.
I stored Lori Petersen’s samples in the refrigerator over the weekend, along with the samples from all of Saturday’s cases. I distinctly remembered receipting her samples in person to the labs Monday morning, including a cardboard folder of slides smeared with anal, oral and vaginal swabs. I was sure I used only one cardboard folder of slides. I never sent up a slide folder bare it was always enclosed inside a plastic bag containing the swabs, envelopes of hair, test tubes and everything else.
“I have no idea where this came from,” I told him too adamantly.
He uncomfortably shifted his weight to his other foot and averted his eyes. I knew what he was thinking. I’d screwed up and he hated to be the one who had to point it out to me.
The threat had always been there. Wingo and I had gone over it numerous times in the past, ever since Margaret loaded the PC in the autopsy suite with the label programs.
Before one of the pathologists started a case he went to that PC and typed in information about the decedent whose autopsy he was about to perform. A run of labels was generated for every sample one might possibly collect, such as blood, bile, urine, stomach contents and a PERK. It saved a lot of time and was perfectly acceptable provided the pathologist was careful to stick the right label on the right tube and remembered to initial it.
There was one feature of this bit of automated enlightenment that had always made me nervous. Inevitably there were leftover labels because one didn’t, as a rule, collect every possible sample, especially when labs were overworked and understaffed. I wasn’t going to send fingernail clippings to trace evidence, for example, if the decedent was an eighty year-old man who died of a myocardial infarct while cutting his grass.
What to do with leftover labels? You certainly didn’t want to leave them lying around where they might find their way onto the wrong test tubes. Most of the pathologists tore them up. It was my habit to file them with the person’s case folder. It was a quick way to know what was tested for, what wasn’t, and how many tubes of this or that I’d actually sent upstairs.
Wingo had trotted across the suite and was running a finger down the pages of the morgue log. I could feel Marino staring across the suite at me as he waited to collect the bullets from his homicide case. He wandered my way just as Wingo got back.
“We had six cases that day,” Wingo reminded me as if Marino were not there. “Saturday. I remember. There were a lot of labels on the counter over there. Maybe one of them-”
“No,” I said loudly. “I don’t see how. I didn’t leave any leftover labels from her case lying around. They were with my paperwork, clipped to my clipboard-”
“Shit,” Marino said in surprise. He was looking over my shoulder. “That what I think it is?”
Frantically pulling off my gloves, I took the folder from Wingo and slit the tape with a thumbnail. Inside were four slides, three of which were definitely smeared with something, but they were not hand-marked with the standard “O,” “A,” or “V,” designating which samples they were. They weren’t marked at all, except by the computer label on the outside of the folder.