She arrived at the medical examiner’s office, only to be told there was no more chance of her attending the autopsy of her cat than there would be of her attending that of a human being.
“But it’s a cat!” Anne protested. “And it’s my cat! Doesn’t that make any difference at all?”
The young man behind the desk, whose name was David Smith according to a chipped plastic plaque propped up against a pen holder, shook his head. “Not around here. The rules are the rules. Only our staff and other authorized personnel can attend an autopsy.”
“Come on,” Anne began, using her best wheedling and subservient tones. “Surely just this once you could let me—”
“No exceptions,” David Smith told her in a voice filled with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that only career bureaucrats seem capable of producing.
Frustrated, but certain that there would be no changing David Smith’s mind, Anne dropped onto a hard bench, prepared to wait for the rest of the morning if that’s what it took. It turned out to be only forty-five minutes before Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly emerged from the double doors that led to the labs from which Anne had been denied admittance.
There was an uncomfortable moment as the reporter and the two detectives regarded each other uncertainly, their long-standing professional relationship having suddenly taken on a new aspect.
“Why don’t I meet you back at the shop,” Mark Blakemoor told his partner, breaking the silence. “I’ll have a cup of coffee with Anne and fill her in.” Lois Ackerly gave him a strange look, started to say something, then seemed to change her mind.
“See you when you get there,” she said. Nodding a greeting to Anne, she disappeared out the main door.
Mark led Anne to a small room equipped with two Formica-topped tables, a half-dozen chairs, and a counter on which sat a grease-splattered microwave oven and a crusted coffeepot. Fishing two mugs out of a badly stained sink, the detective rinsed them out, filled them with coffee, and handed one to Anne. “Not exactly a latte, but so far no one’s been able to convince Starbucks to take over this space. Sit?”
Anne settled onto a flimsy vinyl chair; Blakemoor leaned against the counter.
“So what’s the deal?” Anne asked. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing conclusive,” the detective replied. “In fact, no one’s even willing to say the same person who did the women did the cat, too.”
Anne’s brows arched as she recognized what she suspected was only the first of a series of noncommittal statements. Before she could begin questioning him, Mark Blakemoor went on.
“Here’s how it lays out,” he told her. “We’re pretty sure the same guy did both women. We’re pretty sure Shawnelle Davis let him into her apartment voluntarily — probably she picked him up thinking he was going to be a score. As for Cottrell, we found a key with a thumbprint on it, and the print isn’t Cottrell’s. So either she gave him the key or, more likely, he found it hidden in one of the usual places — the doormat, a planter. Everyone knows where to look, right?” Without waiting for Anne to reply, he went on. “Anyway, the only thing we really have to go on are the cuts, and they’re pretty much alike on both women. He used knives he found in their own kitchens, so the wounds aren’t exactly alike. But they’re close enough that Cosmo — that’s the M.E. who’s working this for us — is willing to say it’s the same perp in both homicides.”
“And my cat?” Anne asked as Blakemoor finished.
“That’s another story.” The detective’s expression tightened. “There are similarities to both the women. But the cut is—” He hesitated, then used the same word that had come into his mind the previous day, when he’d first examined the cat. “It’s a neater cut. Cosmo says it was done with a sharper instrument — a razor blade, possibly a scalpel. And he says the incision is straighter.” He paused again, his eyes avoiding Anne’s when he finally went on. “He says it could be the same guy, and that by the time he got to the cat he’d had more practice.”
“I see.” Anne felt numb.
“Or someone else could have done the cat,” Blakemoor finished. There was something in his voice that made Anne look up.
“Someone else, like my husband?” she asked, still remembering the silence that had fallen over Blakemoor and Ackerly as Glen had returned from the house with the plastic bag. When Blakemoor made no reply, Anne decided it was time to tell him about the note on her computer. “Whoever killed poor Kumquat put the note there,” she finished. “And whoever put the note on my computer knew a lot more about programming than Glen does. He can operate a couple of programs, but he doesn’t know the difference between an autoexec.bat and a config sys. At our house, I even install the programs.”
“But you thought of him,” Blakemoor pointed out.
Anne almost wished she hadn’t told the detective about the note at all. But it was too important to keep from him. “How could I not have?” she countered. “He was there by himself all day.” A dark and hollow sound that wasn’t quite a chuckle emerged from her throat. “I even searched the house, looking for signs that someone else had been there.”
“And you didn’t find anything,” Blakemoor surmised.
Anne shook her head. “So what’s next?” she asked.
“The same thing that’s always next in a case like this,” Blakemoor told her. Though she’d heard the words before — practically knew them by heart — this time they made Anne’s blood run cold. “We keep looking, even though we don’t have much of anything to go on.” He stopped speaking, and it was Anne herself who finished the recitation.
“And we wait for him to kill someone else, and hope that next time he makes a mistake.”
Blakemoor nodded, but said nothing. The silence between them stretched on until finally Anne could take it no longer.
“What if it’s me?” she asked, rising to her feet. “What if it’s me he kills, or one of my family?”
Without even thinking about what he was doing, Mark Blakemoor put his arms around Anne. “It won’t be you,” he said. “I won’t let it be.”
Struggling against an almost overpowering urge to cling to the big detective — even if just for a moment — Anne pulled away from him and picked up her coat and her large leather satchel. They left the medical examiner’s office in silence.
Neither of them could think of anything else to say.
CHAPTER 43
Glen Jeffers knew something was wrong the moment he woke up that morning. It was a feeling that flooded not only his brain, but his body as well — a feeling that although he was wide-awake, his mind was only half conscious; that although he’d slept through the night, his body was still exhausted. How could he possibly be so tired when he hadn’t done much of anything except rest since coming home from the hospital?
The reality was that he was just plain bored. He’d spent his life being active, rising early for his morning jogs with Anne, putting in long days at the office — days that were often broken only by a fierce lunchtime game of racquetball with Alan Cline — then coming home to work in the evening at the drafting table in the den, or, if it was summer and the evenings long, going up to the park to throw a ball around with Kevin.
What he wasn’t used to was inactivity, and this morning, after Anne and the kids had finally left, the house had begun to close in around him. Part of it, he reflected as he set about cleaning up the kitchen, was simply cabin fever. But there was more to it than that. It seemed to him that everything was getting tangled up in his mind. Just before he’d come fully awake this morning, he’d had a dream — one of those half-waking dreams in which you are unpleasantly aware that you’re dreaming, but are powerless to stop the unwelcome images parading before you.