"I didn't sleep with him."

Her voice shook so badly she could barely talk. "I didn't. I didn't want to. He… he took advantage of me."

"Right."

Marino snorted.

She looked up and briefly shut her eyes. "I was with him all day. The last meeting we went to wasn't over until seven that night. I offered dinner, said the newspaper would buy him dinner. We went to Franco's. I had one glass of wine, that was all. One glass. I start getting woozy, just incredibly woozy. I hardly remember leaving the restaurant. The last thing I remember is getting into his car. Him reaching for my hand, saying something about how he'd never made it with a police reporter before. What happened that night, I don't remember any of it. I woke up early the next morning. He was there…"

"Which reminds me." Marino stabbed out the cigarette. "Where was your sister during all this?"

"Here. She was in her room, I guess. I don't remember. It doesn't matter. We were downstairs. In the living room. On the couch, on the floor, I don't remember - I'm not sure she even knew!"

He looked disgusted.

She hysterically went on, "I couldn't believe it. I was terrified, sick like I'd been poisoned. All I can figure is when I got up to go to the ladies' room at one point during dinner he slipped something in my drink. He knew he had me. He knew I wouldn't go to the cops. Who would believe me if I called and said the Commonwealth's attorney… he did such a thing? No one! No one would believe me!"

"You got that straight," Marino butted in. "Hey, he's a good looking guy. He don't need to slip a lady a mickey to get her to give up the goods."

Abby screamed, "He's scum! He's probably done it a thousand times and gotten away with it! He threatened me, told me if I mentioned a word he'd make me out to be a slut, he'd ruin me!"

"Then what?" Marino demanded. "Then he feels guilty and starts leaking information to you?"

"No! I've had nothing to do with the bastard! If I got within ten feet of him I'd be afraid I'd blow his goddam head off! None of my information has come from him!"

It couldn't be true.

What Abby was saying. It couldn't be true. I was trying to ward off the statements. They were terrible, but they were adding up despite my desperate inward denials.

She must have recognized Bill's white Audi on the spot. That was why she panicked when she saw it parked in my drive. Earlier she found Bill inside her house and shrieked at him to leave because she hated the very sight of him.

Bill warned me she would stoop to anything, that she was vengeful, opportunistic and dangerous. Why did he tell me that? Why really? Was he laying the groundwork for his own defense should Abby ever accuse him? He had lied to me. He didn't spurn her so-called advances when he drove her to her house after the interview. His car was still parked there early the next morning- Images were flashing through my mind of the few occasions early on when Bill and I were alone on my living room couch. I became sickened by the memory of his sudden aggression, the raw brute force that I attributed to whisky. Was this the dark side of him? Was the truth that he found pleasure only in overpowering? In taking? He was here, inside this house, at the scene, when I arrived. No wonder he was so quick to respond. His interest was more than professional. He wasn't merely doing his job. He would' have recognized Abby's address. He probably knew whose house it was before anybody else did. He wanted to see, to make sure.

Maybe he was even hoping the victim was Abby. Then he would never have to worry this moment would happen, that she would tell.

Sitting very still, I willed my face to turn to stone. I couldn't let it show. The wrenching disbelief. The devastation. Oh, God, don't let it show.

A telephone started ringing in some other room. It rang and rang and nobody answered it.

Footsteps were coming up the stairs, metal making muffled clangs against wood and radios blaring unintelligible static. Paramedics were carrying a stretcher up to the third floor.

Abby was fumbling with a cigarette and she suddenly threw it and the burning match into the ashtray.

"If it's true you've been having me followed" - she lowered her voice, the room filled with her scorn - "and if your reason was to see if I was meeting him, sleeping with him to get information, then you ought to know what I'm saying is true. After what happened that night I haven't been anywhere near the son of a bitch."

Marino didn't say a word.

His silence was his answer.

Abby had not been with Bill since.

Later, as paramedics were carrying the stretcher down, Abby leaned against the door frame, clutching it with white knuckled emotion. She watched the white shape of her sister's body go past, stared after the retreating men, her face a pallid mask of abject grief.

I gripped her arm with unspoken feeling and went out in the wake of her incomprehensible loss. The odor lingered on the stairs, and when I stepped into the dazzling sunshine on the street, for a moment I was blind.

Chapter 12

Henna Yarborough's flesh, wet from repeated rinsings, glistened like white marble in the overhead light. I was alone inside the morgue with her, suturing the last few inches of the Y incision, which ran in a wide seam from her pubis to her sternum and forked over her chest.

Wingo took care of her head before he left for the night. The skullcap was exactly in place, the incision around the back of her scalp neatly closed and completely covered by her hair, but the ligature mark around her neck was like a rope burn. Her face was bloated and purple, and neither my efforts nor those of the funeral home were ever going to change that.

The buzzer sounded rudely from the bay. I glanced up at the clock. It was shortly after 9:00 P.M.

Cutting the twine with a scalpel, I covered her with a sheet and peeled off my gloves. I could hear Fred, the security guard, saying something to someone down the hall as I pulled the body onto a gurney and began to wheel it into the refrigerator.

When I reemerged and shut the great steel door, Marino was leaning against the morgue desk and smoking a cigarette.

He watched me in silence as I collected evidence and tubes of blood and began to initial them.

"Find anything I need to know?"

"Her cause of death is asphyxiation due to strangulation due to the ligature around her neck," I said mechanically.

"What about trace?"

He tapped an ash on the floor.

"A few fibers-"

"Well," he interrupted, "I gotta couple of things."

"Well," I said in the same tone, "I want to get the hell out of here."

"Yo, Doc. Exactly what I had in mind. Me, I'm thinking of taking a ride."

I stopped what I was doing and stared at him. His hair was clinging damply to his pate, his tie was loose, his short-sleeved white shirt was badly wrinkled in back as if he'd been sitting for a long time in his car. Strapped under his left arm was his tan shoulder holster with its long-barreled revolver. In the harsh glare of the overhead light he looked almost menacing, his eyes deeply set in shadows, his jaw muscles flexing.

"Think you need to come along," he added unemphatically. "So, I'll just wait while you get out of your scrubs there and call home."

Call home? How did he know there was anyone at home I needed to call? I'd never mentioned my niece to him. I'd never mentioned Bertha. As far as I was concerned, it was none of Marino's goddam business I even had a home.