Postmortem. Patricia Cornwell

But what if? What if the scenario were a more pernicious one? I silently argued. What if someone maliciously planted the file inside the refrigerator, and what if the glittery residue was from this person’s hands instead of mine? The thought was strange, the poison of an imagination gone berserk.

So far a similar residue had been found on the bodies of four murdered women.

I knew Wingo, Betty, Vander and I had touched the file. The only other people who might have touched it were Tanner, Amburgey or Bill.

His face drifted through my mind. Something unpleasant and chilling shifted inside me as Monday afternoon slowly replayed in my memory. Bill was so distant during the meeting with Amburgey and Tanner. He was unable to look at me then, or later when the three men were going through the cases inside my conference room.

I saw case files slipping off Bill’s lap and falling to the floor in a commingled, god-awful mess. Tanner quickly offered to pick them up. His helpfulness was so automatic. But it was Bill who picked up the paperwork, paperwork that would have included leftover labels. Then he and Tanner sorted through everything. How easy it would have been to tear off a label and slip it into a pocket . . .

Later, Amburgey and Tanner left together, but Bill remained with me. We talked in Margaret’s office for ten or fifteen minutes. He was affectionate and full of promises that a couple of drinks and an evening together would soothe my nerves.

He left long before I did, and when he went out of the building he was alone and unwatched . . .

I blanked the images out of my mind, refused to see them anymore. This was outrageous. I was losing control. Bill would never do such a thing. In the first place, there would be no point. I couldn’t imagine how such an act of sabotage could possibly profit him. Mislabeled slides could only damage the very cases he eventually would be prosecuting in court. Not only would he be shooting himself in the foot, he’d be shooting himself in the head.

You want someone to blame because you can’t face the fact that you probably screwed up! These strangling cases were the most difficult of my career, and I was gripped by the fear I was becoming too caught up in them. Maybe I was losing my rational, methodical way of doing things. Maybe I was making mistakes.

Vander was saying, “We’ve got to figure out the composition of this stuff.”

Like thoughtful shoppers, we needed to find a box of the soap and read the ingredients.

“I’ll hit the ladies’ rooms,” I volunteered.

“I’ll hit the men’s.”

What a scavenger hunt this turned out to be.

After wandering in and out of the ladies’ rooms throughout the building I got smart and found Wingo. One of his jobs was to fill all the soap dispensers in the morgue. He directed me to the janitor’s closet on the first floor, several doors down from my office. There, on a top shelf, right next to a pile of dusting rags, was an industrial-sized gray box of Borawash hand soap.

The main ingredient was borax.

A quick check in one of my chemical reference books hinted at why the soap powder lit up like the Fourth of July. Borax is a boron compound, a crystalline substance that conducts electricity like a metal at high temperatures. Industrial uses of it range from the making of ceramics, special glass, washing powders and disinfectants, to the manufacturing of abrasives and rocket fuels.

Ironically, a large percentage of the world’s supply of borax is mined in Death Valley.

Friday night came and went, and Marino did not call.

By seven o’clock the following morning I had parked behind my building and uneasily began checking the log inside the morgue office.

I shouldn’t have needed convincing. I knew better. I would have been one of the first to be alerted. There were no bodies signed in I wasn’t expecting, but the quiet seemed ominous.

I couldn’t shake the sensation another woman was waiting for me to tend to her, that it was happening again. I kept expecting Marino to call.

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