She didn’t mean it, but the remark stung.
“I had a shit-load of stuff to do,” she went on, sharply striking the Return key. “Your data base needed cleaning up. Bet you haven’t initialized it in a year.” She swiveled around in my leather chair and I moved to one side, crossing my arms at my waist.
“So I fixed it up.”
“You what?”
No, Lucy wouldn’t do such a thing. Initializing was the same thing as formatting, obliterating, erasing all of the data on the hard disk. On the hard disk were—or had been—half a dozen statistical tables I was using for journal articles under deadline. The only backups were several months old.
Lucy’s green eyes fixed on mine and looked owlish behind the thick lenses of her glasses. Her round, elfish face was hard as she said, “I looked in the books to see how. All you do is type IORI at the C prompt, and after it’s initialized, you do the Addall and Catalog.Ora. It’s easy. Any dick head could figure it out.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t reprimand her for her dirty mouth.
I was feeling weak in the knees.
I was remembering Dorothy calling me, absolutely hysterical, several years ago. While she was out shopping, Lucy had gone into her office and formatted every last one of her diskettes, erasing everything on them. On two of them was a book Dorothy was writing, chapters she hadn’t gotten around to printing out or backing up yet. A homicidal event.
“Lucy. You didn’t.”
“Ohhhh, don’t worry,” she said sullenly. “I exported all your data first. The book says to. And then I imported it back in and reconnected your grants. Everything’s there. But it’s cleaned up, space-wise, I mean.”
I pulled up an ottoman and sat beside her. It was then I noticed what was beneath a layer of diskettes: the evening paper, folded the way papers are folded when they have been read. I slid it out and opened it to the front page. The banner headline was the last thing I wanted to see.
YOUNG SURGEON SLAIN: BELIEVED TO BE STRANGLER’S FOURTH VICTIM
A 30-year-old surgical resident was found brutally murdered inside her home in Berkley Downs shortly after midnight. Police say there is strong evidence that her death is related to the deaths of three other Richmond women who were strangled in their homes within the last two months.
The most recent victim has been identified as Lori Anne Petersen, a graduate of Harvard Medical School. She was last seen alive yesterday, shortly after midnight, when she left the VMC hospital emergency room, where she was currently completing a rotation in trauma surgery. It is believed she drove directly home from the hospital and was murdered sometime between twelve-thirty and two this morning. The killer apparently got inside her house by cutting a screen to a bathroom window that was unlocked . . .
It went on. There was a photograph, a grainy black-and-white tableau of paramedics carrying her body down the front steps, and a smaller photograph of a figure in a khaki raincoat I recognized as me. The caption read: “Dr. Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner, Arriving at Murder Scene.”
Lucy was staring wide-eyed at me. Bertha had been wise to hide the paper, but Lucy was resourceful. I didn’t know what to say. What does a ten-year-old think when she reads something like this, especially if it is accompanied by a grim photograph of her “Auntie Kay”?
I’d never fully explained to Lucy the details of my profession. I’d restrained myself from preaching to her about the savage world in which we live. I didn’t want her to be like me, robbed of innocence and idealism, baptized in the bloody waters of randomness and cruelty, the fabric of trust forever torn.
“It’s like the Herald,” she quite surprised me by saying. “All the time there’s stuff in the Herald about people being killed. Last week they found a man in the canal and his head was cut off. He must have been a bad man for someone to cut his head off.”
“He may have been, Lucy. But it doesn’t justify someone’s doing something like that to him. And not everyone who is hurt or murdered is bad.”
“Mom says they are. She says good people don’t get murdered. Only hookers and drug dealers and burglars do.” A thoughtful pause. “Sometimes police officers, too, because they try to catch the bad people.”
Dorothy would say such a thing and, what was worse, she would believe it. I felt a flare of the old anger.
“But the lady who got strangled,” Lucy wavered, her eyes so wide they seemed to swallow me. “She was a doctor, Auntie Kay. How could she be bad? You’re a doctor, too. She was just like you, then.”
I was suddenly aware of the time. It was getting late. I switched off the computer, took Lucy’s hand, and we walked out of the office and into the kitchen. When I turned to her to suggest a snack before bed, I was dismayed to see she was biting her bottom lip, her eyes welling.