Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta, #1)

by Patricia Daniels Cornwell

I strongly suspected he hadn’t been in the city long, he’d done this before somewhere else, and he’d never spent a day behind the locked doors of a prison or a forensic unit. He wasn’t disorganized, wasn’t an amateur, and he most assuredly wasn’t “crazy.”

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 grat...

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 ha...

The assailant was one of the twenty percent of the population who enjoyed the distinction of being a nonsecreter. This meant his blood-type antigens could not be found in his other body fluids, such as saliva or semen or sweat.

It is easy to be observant retrospectively. But most people don’t pay that much attention to every detail of their residences, especially to rooms scarcely used.

She was a Harvard graduate, a surgeon. She would attempt to use her mind against a force that is mindless.

She was not to be consoled. The story in the paper affected her in a deep and pernicious way. She read it with an adult intellect yet to be weaned from a child’s fearful imagination. This in addition to her insecurities and losses.

“What the hell. You die. Everybody dies. So you die healthy. So what?”

To think a thought is to express it verbally for people like him.”

It has been conjectured that at least one percent of the population is psychopathic. Genetically, these individuals are fearless; they are people users and supreme manipulators.

On the right side, they are terrific spies, war

heroes, five-star generals, corporate billionaires and James Bonds. On the wrong side, they are strikingly evil: the Neros, the Hitlers, the Richard Specks, the Ted Bundys, antisocial but clinically sane people who commit at...

Marino wasn’t playing by the rules. He wasn’t sharing information. He was ambushing us with it as if this were court and Wesley and I were opposing counsel.

Next he began reciting statistics. Twelve years ago the clearance rate for homicides averaged at ninety-five, ninety-six percent. Now it was more like seventy-four percent, and dropping. There were more stranger killings as opposed to crimes of passion, and so on. I was barely hearing a word of it.

peregrination.

These guys and their guns. It’s so Freudian it’s boring . . .”

This was a favorite rumination of death investigators: What if? What if the person had not decided to buy a pack of cigarettes at a convenience store where two armed robbers were holding the clerk hostage in the back? What if someone hadn’t decided to step outside and empty the cat-litter box at the very moment a

prison escapee was nearing the house? What if someone hadn’t had a fight with his lover, resulting in his driving off in a huff at the exact moment a drunk driver was rounding a curve on the wrong side of the road?

“All of the victims are career women,” I said, adding, “but then, most women who live alone work.”

The very sort of evening I would have found enchanting in the past was now unsettling.

We lie to children even though we didn’t believe the lies we were told when we were their age.

It gets under our skin, Kay. All of it does. We just manage to cage in most of the emotions so they don’t devour us.”