Postmortem(100)

Iflipped pages, scanning the autopsy report I’d dictated. I perused evidence receipts, call sheets and an old hospital chart from St. Luke’s, where she’d been treated five years earlier for an ectopic pregnancy. When I got to the police report, I looked at the name of the only relative listed, a sister in Madras, Oregon. From her Marino got information about Cecile’s background, about her failed marriage to the dentist now living in Tidewater.

X rays sounded like saw blades bending as I pulled them out of manila envelopes and held them up, one by one, to the light of my desk lamp. Cecile had no skeletal injuries other than a healed impaction fracture of her left elbow. The age of the injury was impossible to tell but I knew it wasn’t fresh. It could go back too many years to matter.

Again, I contemplated the VMC connection. Both Lori Petersen and Brenda Steppe had recently been in the hospital’s ER. Lori was there because her rotation was trauma surgery. Brenda was treated there after her automobile accident. Perhaps it was too farfetched to think Cecile might have been treated there as well for the fractured elbow. At this point, I was willing to explore anything.

I dialed Cecile’s sister’s number listed on Marino’s report.

After five rings the receiver was picked up.

“Hello?”

It was a poor connection and clearly I’d made a mistake.

“I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number,” I quickly said.

“Pardon?”

I repeated myself, louder. “What number were you dialing?” The voice was cultured and Virginian and seemed that of a female in her twenties.

I recited the number.

“That’s this number. With whom did you wish to speak?”

“Fran O’Connor,” I read from the report. The young, cultured voice replied, “Speaking.”

I told her who I was and heard a faint gasp. “As I understand it, you are Cecile Tyler’s sister.”

“Yes. Dear Lord. I don’t want to talk about it. Please.”

“Mrs. O’Connor, I’m terribly sorry about Cecile. I’m the medical examiner working her case, and I’m calling to find out if you know how your sister fractured her left elbow. She has a healed fracture of her left elbow. I’m looking at the X rays now.”

Hesitation. I could hear her thinking.

“It was a jogging accident. She was jogging on a sidewalk and tripped, landing on her hands. One of her elbows was fractured from the impact. I remember because she wore a cast for three months during one of the hottest summers on record. She was miserable.”

“That summer? Was this in Oregon?”

“No, Cecile never lived in Oregon. This was in Fredericksburg, where we grew up.”

“How long ago was the jogging accident?”

Another pause. “Nine, maybe ten years ago.”

“Where was she treated?”

“I don’t know. A hospital in Fredericksburg. I can’t remember the name.”

Cecile’s impaction fracture wasn’t treated at VMC, and the injury had occurred much too long ago to matter. But I no longer cared.

I never met Cecile Tyler in life.

I never talked to her. I just assumed she would sound “black.”

“Mrs. O’Connor, are you black?”

“Of course I’m black.” She sounded upset.

“Did your sister talk like you?”

“Talk like me?” she asked, her voice rising.

“I know it seems an odd question . . .”

“You mean did she talk white like me?” she went on, outraged. “Yes! She did! Isn’t that what education’s all about? So black people can talk white?”

“Please,” I said with feeling. “I certainly didn’t intend to offend you. But it’s important . . .”

I was apologizing to a dial tone.

Lucy knew about the fifth strangling. She knew about all of the slain young women. She also knew I kept a .38 in my bedroom and had asked me about it twice since dinner.

“Lucy,” I said as I rinsed plates and loaded them in the dishwasher, “I don’t want you thinking about guns. I wouldn’t own one if I didn’t live alone.”

I’d been strongly tempted to hide it where she would never think to look. But after the episode with the modem, which I had guiltily reconnected to my home computer days ago, I vowed to be up-front with her. The .38 remained high on my closet shelf, inside its shoebox, while Lucy was in town. The gun wasn’t loaded. These days, I unloaded it in the morning and reloaded it before bed. As for the Silvertip cartridges—those I hid where she would never think to look.

When I faced her, her eyes were huge. “You know why I have a gun, Lucy. I think you understand how dangerous they are . . .”