Postmortem(117)

The computer had been broken into over the weekend, sometime after hours on Friday, we believed. Wesley noticed the commands on the screen Saturday morning when he came in for McCorkle’s autopsy. Someone had tried to pull up Henna Yarborough’s case. The call, of course, could be traced. We were waiting for Wesley to get the goods from the telephone company.

I’d been assuming it was McCorkle who might have gotten in at some point Friday evening before he came after me.

“If the commissioner’s the one breaking into the computer,” I reminded them, “he’s not in trouble. He has the right, ex officio, to my office data and anything else he cares to peruse. We’ll never be able to prove he altered a record.”

All eyes fell to the cigarette butt inside the plastic bag.

Evidence tampering, fraud, not even the governor could take such liberties. A felony is a felony. I doubted it could be proved.

I got up and hung my lab coat on the back of the door. Slipping on my suit jacket, I collected a fat folder off a chair. I was due in court in twenty minutes to testify in yet one more homicide case.

Wingo and Marino walked me out to the elevator. I left them and stepped inside.

Through the closing doors I blew them each a kiss.

Three days later, Lucy and I sat in the back of a Ford Tempo heading to the airport. She was returning to Miami, and I was going with her for two very good reasons.

I intended to see about the situation with her mother and the illustrator she had married, and I desperately needed a vacation.

I planned to take Lucy to the beach, to the Keys, to the Everglades, to the Monkey Jungle and the Seaquarium. We’d watch the Seminoles wrestle alligators. We’d watch the sun set over Biscayne Bay and go see the pink flamingos in Hialeah. We’d rent the movie Mutiny on the Bounty, and then tour the famous ship at Bayside and imagine Marlon Brando on deck. We’d go shopping along Coconut Grove, and eat grouper and red snapper and Key lime pie until we were sick. We’d do everything I wished I could have done when I was her age.

We’d also talk about the shock of what she’d been through. Miraculously, she had slept through everything until Marino opened fire. But Lucy knew her aunt was almost murdered.

She knew the killer got in through my office window, which was closed but unlocked, because Lucy forgot to lock it after opening it several days earlier.

McCorkle cut the wires to the burglar alarm system outside the house. He came in through the first-floor window, walked within feet of Lucy’s room and quietly went up the stairs. How did he know my bedroom was on the second floor?

I don’t think he could have unless he’d watched my house in the past.

Lucy and I had a lot of talking to do. I needed to talk to her as much as she needed for me to talk to her. I planned to hook her up with a good child psychologist. Maybe both of us should go.

Our chauffeur was Abby. She was kind enough to insist on driving us to the airport.

She pulled in front of the airline gate, turned around and smiled wistfully.

“I wish I were going with you.”

“You’re welcome to,” I responded with feeling. “Really. We’d love it, Abby. I’ll be down there for three weeks. You have my mother’s phone number. If you can get away, hop a plane and we’ll all go to the beach together.”

An alert tone sounded on her scanner. She absently reached around to turn up the volume and adjust the squelch.

I knew I wouldn’t hear from her. Not tomorrow or the next day or the day after that.

By the time our plane took off, she would be chasing ambulances and police cars again. It was her life. She needed reporting like other people need air.

I owed her a lot.

Because of what she set up behind the scenes we discovered it was Amburgey breaking into the OCME computer. The call was traced back to his home telephone. He was a computer hack and had a PC at home with a modem.

I think he broke in the first time simply because he was monitoring my work, as usual. I think he was rolling through the strangling cases when he noticed a detail in Brenda Steppe’s record different from what Abby reported in the paper. He realized the leak couldn’t be my office. But he so desperately wanted it to be, he altered the record to make it appear that way.

Then he deliberately keyed on the echo and tried to pull up Lori Petersen’s case. He wanted us to find those commands on the screen the following Monday, just hours before he called me to his office in front of Tanner and Bill.

One sin led to another. His hatred blinded his reason, and when he saw the computer labels in Lori’s case file he wasn’t able to restrain himself. I’d thought a long time about the meeting in my conference room, when the men were going through the files. I’d assumed the PERK label was stolen when several cases slipped off Bill’s lap and scattered over the floor. But as I went over it I recalled Bill and Tanner sorting out the paperwork by the proper case numbers. Lori’s case was not among them because Amburgey was perusing it at the time. He took advantage of the confusion and quickly tore off the PERK label. Later, he left the computer room with Tanner but stayed behind alone in the morgue to use the men’s room. He planted the slides.