Postmortem(116)

When suddenly Wingo walked in. “Uh.” Hands in his pockets, he looked uncertain as Marino eyed him in annoyance.

“Uh, Dr. Scarpetta. I know this isn’t a good time and all. I mean, I know you’re still upset . . .”

“I’m not upset!”

His eyes widened. He blanched.

Lowering my voice, I said, “I’m sorry, Wingo. Yes. I’m upset. I’m ragged. I’m not myself. What’s on your mind?”

He reached in a pocket of his powder-blue silk trousers and pulled out a plastic bag. Inside was a cigarette butt, Benson & Hedges 100’s.

He placed it lightly on my blotter.

I looked blankly at him, waiting.

“Uh, well, you remember me asking about the commissioner, about whether he’s an antismoker and all that?”

I nodded.

Marino was getting restless. He was looking around as if he were bored.

“You see, my friend Patrick. He works in accounting across the street, in the same building where Amburgey works. Well.” He was blushing. “Patrick and I, we meet sometimes at his car and go off for lunch. His assigned parking place is about two rows down from where Amburgey’s is. We’ve seen him before.”

“Seen him before?” I asked, baffled. “Seen Amburgey before? Doing what?”

Wingo leaned over and confided, “Seen him smoking, Dr. Scarpetta.” He straightened up. “I swear. Late morning and right after lunchtime, Patrick and me, we’re sitting in the car, in Patrick’s car, just talking, listening to tunes. We’ve seen Amburgey get into his black New Yorker and light up. He doesn’t even use the ashtray because he doesn’t want anybody to know. He’s looking around the whole time. Then he flicks the butt out the window, looks around some more and strolls back toward the building squirting freshener in his mouth . . .”

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!”