Postmortem(31)

I knew instantly by her weighty pause and the grim set of her mouth that she had something on her mind I didn’t want to hear.

“Dr. Scarpetta, Margaret’s been looking for you and asked me to tell you the minute you came out of your meeting.”

My impatience showed before I could check it. There were autopsies to look in on downstairs and innumerable phone calls to return. I had enough to do to keep half a dozen people busy and I wanted nothing else added to the list.

Handing me a stack of letters to be signed, she looked like a formidable headmistress as she peered at me over her reading glasses and added, “She’s in her office, and I don’t think the matter can wait.”

Rose wasn’t going to tell me, and though I really couldn’t fault her, I was annoyed. I think she knew everything that went on throughout the entire statewide system, but it was her style to direct me to the source instead of filling me in directly. In a word, she assiduously avoided being the bearer of bad news. I supposed she’d learned the hard way after working for my predecessor Cagney most of her life.

Margaret’s office was midway down the hall, a small Spartan room of cinder-block walls painted the same insipid crème-de-menthe color as the rest of the building. The dark green tile floor always looked dusty no matter how often it was swept, and spilling over her desktop and every other surface were reams of computer printouts. The bookcase was crammed with instruction manuals and printer cables, extra ribbons and boxes of diskettes. There were no personal touches, no photographs, posters or knickknacks. I don’t know how Margaret lived with the sterile mess, but I’d never seen a computer analyst’s office that wasn’t.

She had her back to the door and was staring at the monitor, a programmer manual opened in her lap. Swiveling around, she rolled the chair to one side when I came in. Her face was tense, her short black hair ruffled as if she’d been raking her fingers through it, her dark eyes distracted.

“I was at a meeting most of the morning,” she launched in. “When I got here after lunch I found this on the screen.”

She handed me a printout. On it were several SQL commands that allowed one to query the data base. At first my mind was blank as I stared at the printout. A Describe had been executed on the case table, and the upper half of the page was filled with column names. Below this were several simple Select statements. The first one asked for the case number where the last name was “Petersen,” the first name “Lori.” Under it was the response, “No Records Found.” A second command asked for the case numbers and first names of every decedent whose record was in our data base and whose last name was “Petersen.”

Lori Petersen’s name was not included in the list because her case file was inside my desk. I had not handed it over to the clerks up front for filing yet.

“What are you saying, Margaret? You didn’t type in these commands?”

“I most certainly didn’t,” she replied with feeling. “Nobody did it up front either. It wouldn’t have been possible.”

She had my complete attention.

“When I left Friday afternoon,” she went on to explain, “I did the same thing I always do at the end of the day. I left the computer in answer mode so you could dial in from home if you wanted to. There’s no way anyone used my computer, because you can’t use it when it’s in answer mode unless you’re at another PC and dialing in by modem.”

That much made sense. The office terminals were networked to the one Margaret worked on, which we referred to as the “server.” We were not linked to the Health and Human Services Department’s mainframe across the street, despite the commissioner’s ongoing pressure for us to do so. I had refused and would continue to do so because our data was highly sensitive, many of the cases under active criminal investigation. To have everything dumped in a central computer shared by dozens of other HHSD agencies was an invitation to a colossal security problem.

“I didn’t dial in from home,” I told her.

“I never assumed you did,” she said. “I couldn’t imagine why you would type in these commands. You of all people would know Lori Petersen’s case isn’t in yet. Someone else is responsible, someone other than the clerks up front or the other doctors. Except for your PC and the one in the morgue, everything else is a dumb terminal.”

A dumb terminal, she went on to remind me, is rather much what it sounds like—a brainless unit consisting of a monitor and a keyboard. The dumb terminals in our office were linked to the server in Margaret’s office. When the server was down or frozen, as was true when it was in answer mode, the dumb terminals were down or frozen, too. In other words, they’d been out of commission since late Friday—before Lori Petersen’s murder.