Postmortem(48)

I said as much to him, “As best I recall, the story was toothless. It did no harm; neither did it do any good.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he fired back at me. “I suspect it wasn’t something she wanted to write, particularly.”

He wasn’t hinting that the assignment had been a boring one. Something else was coming and my nerves were coiling tightly again.

“My session with her was pretty damn terrible. She spent an entire day with me, riding around in my car, going from meeting to meeting, hell, even to my dry cleaner’s. You know how these reporters are. They’ll follow you into the men’s room if you let them. Well, let’s just say that as the evening progressed, things took a rather unfortunate and definitely unexpected turn.”

He hesitated to see if I got his implication.

I got it all too well.

Glancing at me, his face hard, he said, “It completely broadsided me. We got out of the last meeting around eight. She insisted we go to dinner. You know, it was on the paper and she had a few questions to finish up. We’d no sooner pulled out of the restaurant’s parking lot when she said she wasn’t feeling well. Too much wine or something. She wanted me to drop her off at her house instead of taking her back to the paper, where her car was parked. So I did. Took her home. And when I pulled in front of her house, she was all over me. It was awful.”

“And?” I asked as if I didn’t care.

“And I didn’t handle it worth a damn. I think I humiliated her without intending to. She’s been out to jerk the hell out of me ever since.”

“What? She’s calling you, sending you threatening letters?” I wasn’t exactly serious. Nor was I prepared for what he said next.

“This shit she’s been writing. The fact maybe it’s coming from your computer. As crazy as it may sound, I think her motivation is mostly personal—”

“The leaks? Are you suggesting she’s breaking into my computer and writing lurid details about these cases to jerk you around?”

“If these cases are compromised in court, who the hell gets hurt?”

I didn’t respond. I was staring in disbelief at him.

“I do. I’ll be the one prosecuting the cases. Cases as sensational and heinous as these get screwed up because of all this shit in the papers, and no one’s going to be sending me flowers or thank-you notes. She sure as hell knows that, Kay. She’s sticking it to me, that’s what she’s doing.”

“Bill,” I said, lowering my voice, “it’s her job to be an aggressive reporter, to print everything she can get her hands on. More important, the cases would get screwed up in court only if the sole evidence was a confession. Then the defense gets to make him change his mind. He takes it all back. The party line is the guy’s psychotic and knows the details of the murders because he read about them in the paper. He imagined he committed the crimes. That sort of rubbish. The monster who’s killing these women isn’t about to turn himself in or confess to anything.”

He drained his glass and refilled it. “Maybe the cops develop him as a suspect and get him to talk. Maybe that’s the way it happens. And it might be the only thing linking him to the crimes. There isn’t a shred of physical evidence that’s amounted to anything—”

“No shred of physical evidence?” I interrupted. Surely I hadn’t heard him right. Was the wine dulling his senses? “He’s leaving a load of seminal fluid. He gets caught and DNA will nail him to—”

“Oh, yeah. Sure it will. DNA printing’s only gone to trial a couple of times in Virginia. There are very few precedents, very few convictions nationwide— every damn one of them still being appealed. Try explaining to a Richmond jury the guy’s guilty because of DNA. I’ll be lucky if I can find a juror who can spell DNA. Anybody’s got an IQ over forty and the defense will find a reason to exclude him, that’s what I put up with week after week . . .”

“Bill . . .”

“Hell.” He began to pace the kitchen floor. “It’s hard enough to get a conviction if fifty people swear they saw the guy pull the trigger. The defense will drag in a herd of expert witnesses to muddy the waters and hopelessly confuse everything. You of all people know how complicated this DNA testing is.”

“Bill, I’ve explained just as difficult things to juries in the past.”

He started to say something but caught himself. Staring across the kitchen again, he took another swallow of wine.

The silence was drawn out and heavy. If the outcome of the trials depended solely on the DNA results, this placed me in the position of being a key witness for the prosecution. I’d been in such a position many times in the past and I couldn’t recall it ever unduly worrying Bill.