Postmortem(3)

Marino’s “Yeah” was a confirmation.

Petersen’s eyes slowly lifted. Deep blue, bloodshot, they seemed relieved as they fixed on me. The doctor had arrived, a ray of hope where there was none.

He muttered in the truncated sentences of a mind fragmented, stunned, “I talked to her on the phone. Last night. She told me she’d be home around twelve-thirty, home from VMC, the ER. I got here, found the lights out, thought she’d already gone to bed. Then I went in there.” His voice rose, quivering, and he took a deep breath. “I went in there, in the bedroom.” His eyes were desperate and welling, and he was pleading with me. “Please. I don’t want people looking at her, seeing her like that. Please.”

I gently told him, “She has to be examined, Mr. Petersen.”

A fist suddenly banged the top of the table in a startling outburst of rage. “I know!” His eyes were wild. “But all of them, the police and everybody!” His voice was shaking. “I know how it is! Reporters and everybody crawling all over the place. I don’t want every son of a bitch and his brother staring at her!”

Marino didn’t bat an eye. “Hey. I got a wife, too, Matt. I know where you’re coming from, all right? You got my word she gets respect. The same respect I’d want if it was me sitting in your chair, okay?”

The sweet balm of lies.

The dead are defenseless, and the violation of this woman, like the others, had only begun. I knew it would not end until Lori Petersen was turned inside out, every inch of her photographed, and all of it on display for experts, the police, attorneys, judges and members of a jury to see. There would be thoughts, remarks about her physical attributes or lack of them. There would be sophomoric jokes and cynical asides as the victim, not the killer, went on trial, every aspect of her person and the way she lived, scrutinized, judged and, in some instances, degraded.

A violent death is a public event, and it was this facet of my profession that so rudely grated against my sensibilities. I did what I could to preserve the dignity of the victims. But there was little I could do after the person became a case number, a piece of evidence passed from hand to hand. Privacy is destroyed as completely as life.

Marino led me out of the kitchen, leaving the officer to continue questioning Petersen.

“Have you taken your pictures yet?” I asked.

“ID’s in there now, dusting everything,” he said, referring to the Identification section officers processing the scene. “I told ’em to give the body a wide berth.”

We paused in the hallway.

On the walls were several nice watercolors and a collection of photographs depicting the husband’s and the wife’s respective graduating classes, and one artistic color shot of the young couple leaning against weathered piling before a backdrop of the beach, the legs of their trousers rolled up to their calves, the wind ruffling their hair, their faces ruddy from the sun. She was pretty in life, blond, with delicate features and an engaging smile. She went to Brown, then to Harvard for medical school. Her husband’s undergraduate years were spent at Harvard. This was where they must have met, and apparently he was younger than she.

She. Lori Petersen. Brown. Harvard. Brilliant. Thirty years old. About to have it all realized, her dream. After eight grueling years, at least, of medical training. A physician. All of it destroyed in a few minutes of a stranger’s aberrant pleasure.

Marino touched my elbow.

I turned away from the photographs as he directed my attention to the open doorway just ahead on the left.

“Here’s how he got in,” he said.

It was a small room with a white tile floor and walls papered in Williamsburg blue. There was a toilet and a lavatory, and a straw clothes hamper. The window above the toilet was open wide, a square of blackness through which cool, moist air seeped and stirred the starchy white curtains. Beyond, in the dark, dense trees, cicadas were tensely sawing.

“The screen’s cut.” Marino’s face was expressionless as he glanced at me. “It’s leaning against the back of the house. Right under the window’s a picnic table bench. Appears he pulled it up so he could climb in.”

I was scanning the floor, the sink, the top of the toilet. I didn’t see dirt or smudges or footprints, but it was hard to tell from where I was standing, and I had no intention of running the risk of contaminating anything.

“Was this window locked?” I asked.

“Don’t look like it. All the other windows are locked. Already checked. Seems like she would’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make sure this one was. Of all the windows, it’s the most vulnerable, close to the ground, in back where no one can see what’s going on. Better than coming in through the bedroom window because if the guy’s quiet, she’s not going to hear him cutting the screen and climbing in this far down the hall.”