There was a long, uncomfortable silence before she looked at me.
Her eyes were bloodshot, her face puffy. Bitterly, miserably, she said to me, “All those times I’ve wanted to talk to you. And now, here it is. This. You’re probably secretly glad. I know what your opinion of me is. You probably think I deserve it. I get a dose of what the people I write about must feel. Poetic justice.”
The remark cut me to the bone. I said with feeling, “Abby, you don’t deserve this. I would never wish this on you or anyone.”
Staring down at her tightly clenched hands, she painfully went on, “Please take care of her. Please. My sister. Oh, God. Please take care of Henna . . .”
“I promise I’ll take care of her . . .”
“You can’t let him get away with this! You can’t!”
I didn’t know what to say.
She looked up at me and I was startled by the terror in her eyes. “I don’t understand anything anymore. I don’t understand what’s going on. All these things I’ve been hearing. And this happens. I tried. I tried to find out, tried to find out from you. Now this. I don’t know who’s us or them anymore!”
Quietly, I said, “I don’t think I understand, Abby. What did you try to find out from me?”
She talked very fast. “That night. Earlier in the week. I tried to talk to you about it. But he was there . . .”
It was coming to me. I dully asked, “What night?” She looked confused, as if she couldn’t remember. “Wednesday,” she said. “Wednesday night.”
“You drove to my house late that night and then quickly drove off? Why?”
She stammered, “You . . . you had company.”
Bill. I remembered we stood in the glare of the front porch light. We were in plain view and his car was parked in my drive. It was her. Abby was the one who drove up that night, and she saw me with Bill, but this didn’t explain her reaction. Why did she panic? It seemed a frightened visceral reflex when she extinguished her headlights and slammed the car into reverse.
She was saying, “These investigations. I’ve heard things. Rumors. Cops can’t talk to you. Nobody’s supposed to talk to you. Something’s screwed up and that’s why all calls are being referred to Amburgey. I had to ask you! And now they’re saying you screwed up the serology in the surgeon . . . Lori Petersen’s case. That the entire investigation’s screwed up because of your office and if it wasn’t for that the cops might have caught the killer by now . . .” She was angry and uncertain, staring wildly at me. “I have to know if it’s true. I have to know! I have to know what’s going to happen to my sister!”
How did she know about the mislabeled PERK? Surely Betty wouldn’t tell her. But Betty had concluded her serology tests on the slides, and copies— all copies of all reports—were being sent straight to Amburgey. Did he tell Abby? Did someone in his office tell her? Did he tell Tanner? Did he tell Bill?
“Where did you hear this?”
“I hear a lot of things.” Her voice trembled. I looked at her miserable face, at her body drawn in by grief, by horror. “Abby,” I said very calmly, “I’m quite sure you hear a lot of things. I’m also quite sure a lot of them aren’t true. Or even if there is a grain of truth, the interpretation is misleading, and perhaps you might ask yourself why someone would tell you these things, what this person’s real motive is.”
She wavered. “I just want to know if it’s true, what I’ve heard. If your office is at fault.”
I couldn’t think how to respond.
“I’m going to find out anyway, I’ll tell you that right now. Don’t underestimate me, Dr. Scarpetta. The cops have screwed up big time. Don’t think I don’t know. They screwed up with me when that damn redneck followed me home. And they screwed up with Lori Petersen when she dialed 911 and no one responded until almost an hour later. When she was already dead!”
My surprise was visible.
“When this breaks,” she went on, her eyes bright with tears, with rage, “the city’s going to rue the day I was ever born! People are going to pay! I’ll make sure certain people pay, and you want to know why?”
I was staring dumbly at her.
“Because nobody who counts gives a damn when women are raped and murdered! The same bastards who work the cases go out on the town and watch movies about women being raped, strangled, slashed. To them it’s sexy. They like to look at it in magazines. They fantasize. They probably get their rocks off by looking at the scene photographs. The cops. They make jokes about it. I hear it. I hear them laughing at scenes, hear them laughing inside the ER!”