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Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta Book 1) by [Patricia Cornwell]

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Patricia Cornwell

Postmortem (Kay Scarpetta Book 1) Kindle Edition

by Patricia Cornwell (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Book 1 of 25: Kay Scarpetta

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Discover the “dazzling…fascinating” (Los Angeles Times) novel that launched the New York Times bestselling Kay Scarpetta series from #1 bestselling crime writer Patricia Cornwell.

Under cover of night in Richmond, Virginia, a monster strikes, leaving a gruesome trail of stranglings that has paralyzed the city. Medical examiner Kay Scarpetta suspects the worst: a deliberate campaign by a brilliant serial killer whose signature offers precious few clues. With an unerring eye, she calls on the latest advances in forensic research to unmask the madman. But this investigation will test Kay like no other, because it’s being sabotaged from within—and someone wants her dead.

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449 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Scribner
Publication date

November 26, 2009
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2649 KB
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Editorial Reviews

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Newsday Excellent...well-paced, well-written...beautifully done.

About the Author

Patricia Cornwell is recognized as one of the world’s top bestselling crime authors with novels translated into thirty-six languages in more than 120 countries. Her novels have won numerous prestigious awards including the Edgar, the Creasey, the Anthony, the Macavity, and the Prix du Roman d’Aventure. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written a definitive book about Jack the Ripper, a biography, and two more fiction series among others. Cornwell, a licensed helicopter pilot and scuba diver, actively researches the cutting-edge forensic technologies that inform her work. She was born in Miami, grew up in Montreat, NC, and now lives and works in Boston. Find out more at PatriciaCornwell.com, at Facebook.com/Patricia.Cornwell, on Twitter: @1pcornwell, and on Instagram: @1pcornwell.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Postmortem

1

It was raining in Richmond on Friday, June 6.

The relentless downpour, which began at dawn, beat the lilies to naked stalks, and blacktop and sidewalks were littered with leaves. There were small rivers in the streets, and newborn ponds on playing fields and lawns. I went to sleep to the sound of water drumming the slate roof, and was dreaming a terrible dream as night dissolved into the foggy first hours of Saturday morning.

I saw a white face beyond the rain-streaked glass, a face formless and inhuman like the faces of misshapen dolls made of nylon hose. My bedroom window was dark when suddenly the face was there, an evil intelligence looking in. I woke up and stared blindly into the dark. I did not know what had awakened me until the telephone rang again. I found the receiver without fumbling.

“Dr. Scarpetta?”

“Yes.” I reached for the lamp and switched it on. It was 2:33 A.M. My heart was drilling through my ribs.

“Pete Marino here. We got us one at 5602 Berkeley Avenue. Think you better come.”

The victim’s name, he went on to explain, was Lori Petersen, a white female, thirty years old. Her husband had found her body about half an hour earlier.

Details were unnecessary. The moment I picked up the receiver and recognized Sergeant Marino’s voice, I knew. Maybe I knew the instant the telephone rang. People who believe in werewolves are afraid of a full moon. I’d begun to dread the hours between midnight and 3:00 A.M. when Friday becomes Saturday and the city is unconscious.

Ordinarily, the medical examiner on call is summoned to a death scene. But this wasn’t ordinary. I had made it clear after the second case that no matter the hour, if there was another murder, I was to be called. Marino wasn’t keen on the idea. Ever since I was appointed chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia less than two years ago he’d been difficult. I wasn’t sure if he didn’t like women, or if he just didn’t like me.

“Berkeley’s in Berkeley Downs, Southside,” he said condescendingly. “You know the way?”

Confessing I didn’t, I scribbled the directions on the notepad I always kept by the phone. I hung up and my feet were already on the floor as adrenaline hit my nerves like espresso. The house was quiet. I grabbed my black medical bag, scuffed and worn from years of use.

The night air was like a cool sauna, and there were no lights in the windows of my neighbors’ houses. As I backed the navy station wagon out of the drive, I looked at the light burning over the porch, at the first-story window leading into the guest bedroom where my ten-year-old niece, Lucy, was asleep. This would be one more day in the child’s life I would miss. I had picked her up at the airport Wednesday night. Our meals together, so far, had been few.

There was no traffic until I hit the Parkway. Minutes later I was speeding across the James River. Taillights far ahead were rubies, the downtown skyline ghostly in the rearview mirror. Fanning out on either side were plains of darkness with tiny necklaces of smudged light at the edges. Out there, somewhere, is a man, I thought. He could be anybody, walks upright, sleeps with a roof over his head, and has the usual number of fingers and toes. He is probably white and much younger than my forty years. He is ordinary by most standards, and probably doesn’t drive a BMW or grace the bars in the Slip or the finer clothing stores along Main Street.

But, then again, he could. He could be anybody and he was nobody. Mr. Nobody. The kind of guy you don’t remember after riding up twenty floors alone with him inside an elevator.

He had become the self-appointed dark ruler of the city, an obsession for thousands of people he had never seen, and an obsession of mine. Mr. Nobody.

Because the homicides began two months ago, he may have been recently released from prison or a mental hospital. This was the speculation last week, but the theories were constantly changing.

Mine had remained the same from the start. 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.”

Wilshire was two lights down on the left, Berkeley the first right after that.

I could see the blue and red lights flashing two blocks away. The street in front of 5602 Berkeley was lit up like a disaster site. An ambulance, its engine rumbling loudly, was alongside two unmarked police units with grille lights flashing and three white cruisers with light bars going full tilt. The Channel 12 news crew had just pulled up. Lights had blinked on up and down the street, and several people in pajamas and housecoats had wandered out to their porches.

I parked behind the news van as a cameraman trotted across the street. Head bent, the collar of my khaki raincoat turned up around my ears, I briskly followed the brick wall to the front door. I have always had a special distaste for seeing myself on the evening news. Since the stranglings in Richmond began, my office had been inundated, the same reporters calling over and over again with the same insensitive questions.

“If it’s a serial killer, Dr. Scarpetta, doesn’t that indicate it’s quite likely to happen again?”

As if they wanted it to happen again.

“Is it true you found bite marks on the last victim, Doc?”

It wasn’t true, but no matter how I answered such a question I couldn’t win. “No comment,” and they assume it’s true. “No,” and the next edition reads “Dr. Kay Scarpetta denies that bite marks have been found on the victims’ bodies . . .” The killer, who’s reading the papers like everybody else, gets a new idea.

Recent news accounts were florid and frighteningly detailed. They went far beyond serving the useful purpose of warning the city’s citizens. Women, particularly those who lived alone, were terrified. The sale of handguns and deadbolt locks went up fifty percent the week after the third murder, and the SPCA ran out of dogs—a phenomenon which, of course, made the front page, too. Yesterday, the infamous and prize-winning police reporter Abby Turnbull had demonstrated her usual brass by coming to my office and clubbing my staff with the Freedom of Information Act in an unsuccessful attempt at getting copies of the autopsy records.

Crime reporting was aggressive in Richmond, an old Virginia city of 220,000, which last year was listed by the FBI as having the second-highest homicide rate per capita in the United States. It wasn’t uncommon for forensic pathologists from the British Commonwealth to spend a month at my office to learn more about gunshot wounds. It wasn’t uncommon for career cops like Pete Marino to leave the madness of New York or Chicago only to find Richmond was worse.

What was uncommon were these sex slayings. The average citizen can’t relate to drug and domestic shootouts or one wino stabbing another over a bottle of Mad Dog. But these murdered women were the colleagues you sit next to at work, the friends you invite to go shopping or to stop by for drinks, the acquaintances you chat with at parties, the people you stand in line with at the checkout counter. They were someone’s neighbor, someone’s sister, someone’s daughter, someone’s lover. They were in their own homes, sleeping in their own beds, when Mr. Nobody climbed through one of their windows.

Two uniformed men flanked the front door, which was open wide and barred by a yellow ribbon of tape, warning: CRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS.

“Doc.” He could have been my son, this boy in blue who stepped aside at the top of the steps and lifted the tape to let me duck under.

The living room was immaculate, and attractively decorated in warm rose tones. A handsome cherry cabinet in a corner contained a small television and a compact disc player. Nearby a stand held sheet music and a violin. Beneath a curtained window overlooking the front lawn was a sectional sofa, and on the glass coffee table in front of it were half a dozen magazines neatly stacked. Among them were Scientific American and the New England Journal of Medicine. Across a Chinese dragon rug with a rose medallion against a field of cream stood a walnut bookcase. Tomes straight from a medical school’s syllabi lined two shelves.

An open doorway led into a corridor running the length of the house. To my right appeared a series of rooms, to the left was the kitchen, where Marino and a young officer were talking to a man I assumed was the husband.

I was vaguely aware of clean countertops, linoleum and appliances in the off-white that manufacturers call “almond,” and the pale yellow of the wallpaper and curtains. But my attention was riveted to the table. On top of it lay a red nylon knapsack, the contents of which had been gone through by the police: a stethoscope, a penlight, a Tupperware container once packed with a meal or a snack, and recent editions of the Annals of Surgery, Lancet and the Journal of Trauma. By now I was thoroughly unsettled.

Marino eyed me coolly as I paused by the table, then introduced me to Matt Petersen, the husband. Petersen was slumped in a chair, his face destroyed by shock. He was exquisitely handsome, almost beautiful, his features flawlessly chiseled, his hair jet-black, his skin smooth and hinting of a tan. He was wide-shouldered with a lean but elegantly sculpted body casually clad in a white Izod shirt and faded blue jeans. His eyes were cast down, his hands stiffly in his lap.

“These are hers?” I had to know. The medical items might belong to the husband.

Marino’s “Yeah” was a confirmation.

Petersen’s eyes slowly lifted. Deep blue, bloodshot, they seemed relieved as they fixed on me. The doctor had arrived, a ray of hope where there was none.

He muttered in the truncated sentences of a mind fragmented, stunned, “I talked to her on the phone. Last night. She told me she’d be home around twelve-thirty, home from VMC, the ER. I got here, found the lights out, thought she’d already gone to bed. Then I went in there.” His voice rose, quivering, and he took a deep breath. “I went in there, in the bedroom.” His eyes were desperate and welling, and he was pleading with me. “Please. I don’t want people looking at her, seeing her like that. Please.”

I gently told him, “She has to be examined, Mr. Petersen.”

A fist suddenly banged the top of the table in a startling outburst of rage. “I know!” His eyes were wild. “But all of them, the police and everybody!” His voice was shaking. “I know how it is! Reporters and everybody crawling all over the place. I don’t want every son of a bitch and his brother staring at her!”

Marino didn’t bat an eye. “Hey. I got a wife, too, Matt. I know where you’re coming from, all right? You got my word she gets respect. The same respect I’d want if it was me sitting in your chair, okay?”

The sweet balm of lies.

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 grated against my sensibilities. 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 hand. Privacy is destroyed as completely as life.

Marino led me out of the kitchen, leaving the officer to continue questioning Petersen.

“Have you taken your pictures yet?” I asked.

“ID’s in there now, dusting everything,” he said, referring to the Identification section officers processing the scene. “I told ’em to give the body a wide berth.”

We paused in the hallway.

On the walls were several nice watercolors and a collection of photographs depicting the husband’s and the wife’s respective graduating classes, and one artistic color shot of the young couple leaning against weathered piling before a backdrop of the beach, the legs of their trousers rolled up to their calves, the wind ruffling their hair, their faces ruddy from the sun. She was pretty in life, blond, with delicate features and an engaging smile. She went to Brown, then to Harvard for medical school. Her husband’s undergraduate years were spent at Harvard. This was where they must have met, and apparently he was younger than she.

She. Lori Petersen. Brown. Harvard. Brilliant. Thirty years old. About to have it all realized, her dream. After eight grueling years, at least, of medical training. A physician. All of it destroyed in a few minutes of a stranger’s aberrant pleasure.

Marino touched my elbow.

I turned away from the photographs as he directed my attention to the open doorway just ahead on the left.

“Here’s how he got in,” he said.

It was a small room with a white tile floor and walls papered in Williamsburg blue. There was a toilet and a lavatory, and a straw clothes hamper. The window above the toilet was open wide, a square of blackness through which cool, moist air seeped and stirred the starchy white curtains. Beyond, in the dark, dense trees, cicadas were tensely sawing.

“The screen’s cut.” Marino’s face was expressionless as he glanced at me. “It’s leaning against the back of the house. Right under the window’s a picnic table bench. Appears he pulled it up so he could climb in.”

I was scanning the floor, the sink, the top of the toilet. I didn’t see dirt or smudges or footprints, but it was hard to tell from where I was standing, and I had no intention of running the risk of contaminating anything.

“Was this window locked?” I asked.

“Don’t look like it. All the other windows are locked. Already checked. Seems like she would’ve gone to a lot of trouble to make sure this one was. Of all the windows, it’s the most vulnerable, close to the ground, in back where no one can see what’s going on. Better than coming in through the bedroom window because if the guy’s quiet, she’s not going to hear him cutting the screen and climbing in this far down the hall.”

“And the doors? Were they locked when the husband got home?”

“He says so.”

“Then the killer went out the same way he came in,” I decided.

“Looks that way. Tidy squirrel, don’t you think?” He was holding on to the door frame, leaning forward without stepping inside. “Don’t see nothing in here, like maybe he wiped up after himself to make sure he didn’t leave footprints on the john or floor. It’s been raining all day.” His eyes were flat as they fixed on me. “His feet should’ve been wet, maybe muddy.”

I wondered where Marino was going with this. He was hard to read, and I’d never decided if he was a good poker player or simply slow. He was exactly the sort of detective I avoided when given a choice—a cock of the walk and absolutely unreachable. He was pushing fifty, with a face life had chewed on, and long wisps of graying hair parted low on one side and combed over his balding pate. At least six feet tall, he was bay-windowed from decades of bourbon or beer. His unfashionably wide red-and-blue-striped tie was oily around the neck from summers of sweat. Marino was the stuff of tough-guy flicks—a crude, crass gumshoe who probably had a foul-mouthed parrot for a pet and a coffee table littered with Hustler magazines.

I went the length of the hallway and stopped outside the master bedroom. I felt myself go hollow inside.

An ID officer was busy coating every surface with black dusting powder; a second officer was capturing everything on videotape.

Lori Petersen was on top of the bed, the blue-and-white spread hanging off the foot of the bed. The top sheet was kicked down and bunched beneath her feet, the cover sheet pulled free of the top corners, exposing the mattress, the pillows shoved to the right side of her head. The bed was the vortex of a violent storm, surrounded by the undisturbed civility of middle-class bedroom furnishings of polished oak.

She was nude. On the colorful rag rug to the right of the bed was her pale yellow cotton gown. It was slit from collar to hem, and this was consistent with the three previous cases. On the night stand nearest the door was a telephone, the cord ripped out of the wall. The two lamps on either side of the bed were out, the electrical cords severed from them. One cord bound her wrists, which were pinioned at the small of her back. The other cord was tied in a diabolically creative pattern also consistent with the first three cases. Looped once around her neck, it was threaded behind her through the cord around her wrists and tightly lashed around her ankles. As long as her knees were bent, the loop around her neck remained loose. When she straightened her legs, either in a reflex to pain or because of the assailant’s weight on top of her, the ligature around her neck tightened like a noose.

Death by asphyxiation takes only several minutes. That’s a very long time when every cell in your body is screaming for air.

“You can come on in, Doc,” the officer with the video camera was saying. “I’ve got all this on film.”

Watching where I walked, I approached the bed, set my bag on the floor and got out a pair of surgical gloves. Next I got out my camera and took several photographs of the body in situ. Her face was grotesque, swollen beyond recognition and dark bluish purple from the suffusion of blood caused by the tight ligature around her neck. Bloody fluid had leaked from her nose and mouth, staining the sheet. Her straw-blond hair was in disarray. She was moderately tall, no less than five foot seven, and considerably fleshier than the younger version captured in the photographs down the hall.

Her physical appearance was important because the absence of a pattern was becoming a pattern. The four strangling victims seemed to have had no physical characteristics in common, not even race. The third victim was black and very slender. The first victim was a redhead and plump, the second a brunette and petite. They had different professions: a schoolteacher, a free-lance writer, a receptionist, and now a physician. They lived in different areas of the city.

Fetching a long chemical thermometer from my bag, I took the temperature of the room, then of her body. The air was 71 degrees, her body 93.5. Time of death is more elusive than most people think. It can’t be pinned down exactly unless the death was witnessed or the victim’s Timex stopped ticking. But Lori Petersen had been dead no more than three hours. Her body had been cooling between one and two degrees per hour, and rigor had started in the small muscles.

I looked for any obvious trace evidence that might not survive the trip to the morgue. There were no loose hairs on the skin, but I found a multitude of fibers, most of which, no doubt, were from the bedcovers. With forceps I collected a sampling of them, minuscule whitish ones and several seeming to have come from a dark blue or black material. These I placed in small metal evidence buttons. The most obvious evidence was the musky smell, the patches of a residue, transparent and dried like glue, on the upper front and back of her legs.

Seminal fluid was present in all of the cases, yet it was of little serological value. 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. Absent a blood sample, in other words, he couldn’t be typed. He could have been A, B, AB or anything.

As recently as two years earlier, the killer’s nonsecreter status would have been a crushing blow to the forensic investigation. But now there was DNA profiling, newly introduced and potentially significant enough to identify an assailant to the exclusion of all other human beings, provided the police caught him first and obtained biological samples and he didn’t have an identical twin.

Marino was inside the bedroom right behind me.

“The bathroom window,” he said, looking at the body. “Well, according to the husband in there,” jerking a thumb in the direction of the kitchen, “the reason it was unlocked’s because he unlocked it last weekend.”

I just listened.

“He says that bathroom’s hardly ever used, unless they got company. Seems he was replacing the screen last weekend, says it’s possible he forgot to relock the window when he finished. The bathroom’s not used all week. She”—he glanced again at the body—“has no reason to give it a thought, just assumes it’s locked.” A pause. “Kind of interesting the only window the killer tried, it appears, was that window. The one unlocked. The screens to the rest of ’em aren’t cut.”

“How many windows are in the back of the house?” I asked.

“Three. In the kitchen, the half bath and the bathroom in here.”

“And all of them have slide-up sashes with a latch lock at the top?”

“You got it.”

“Meaning, if you shone a flashlight on the latch lock from the outside, you probably could see whether it’s fastened or not?”

“Maybe.” Those flat, unfriendly eyes again. “But only if you climbed up something to look. You couldn’t see the lock from the ground.”

“You mentioned a picnic bench,” I reminded him.

“Problem with that’s the backyard’s soggy as hell. The legs of the bench should’ve left depressions in the lawn if the guy put it up against the other windows and stood on top of it to look. I got a couple men poking around out there now. No depressions under the other two windows. Don’t look like that killer went near ’em. What it does look like is he went straight to the bathroom window down the hall.”

“Is it possible it might have been open a crack, and that’s why the killer went straight to it?”

Marino conceded, “Hey. Anything’s possible. But if it was open a crack, maybe she would’ve noticed it, too, at some point during the week.”

Maybe. Maybe not. 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.

Beneath a curtained window overlooking the street was a desk containing other numbing reminders that Lori Petersen and I were of the same profession. Scattered over the blotter were several medical journals, the Principles of Surgery and Dorland’s. Near the base of the brass goose-neck lamp were two computer diskettes. The labels were tersely dated “6/1” in felt-tip pen and numbered “I” and “II.” They were generic double-density diskettes, IBM-compatible. Possibly they contained something Lori Petersen was working on at VMC, the medical college, where there were numerous computers at the disposal of the students and physicians. There didn’t appear to be a personal computer inside the house.

On a wicker chair in the corner between the chests of drawers and the window clothes were neatly laid: a pair of white cotton slacks, a red-and-white-striped short-sleeved shirt and a brassiere. The garments were slightly wrinkled, as if worn and left on the chair at the end of the day, the way I sometimes do when I’m too tired to hang up my clothes.

I briefly perused the walk-in closet and full bath. In all, the master bedroom was neat and undisturbed, except for the bed. By all indications, it was not part of the killer’s modus operandi to ransack or commit burglary.

Marino was watching an ID officer open the dresser drawers.

“What else do you know about the husband?” I asked him.

“He’s a grad student at Charlottesville, lives there during the week, comes home on Friday nights. Stays the weekend, then goes back to Charlottesville on Sunday night.”

“What is his discipline?”

“Literature’s what he said,” Marino replied, glancing around at everything but me. “He’s getting his Ph.D.”

“In what?”

“Literature,” he said again, slowly enunciating each syllable.

“What sort of literature?”

His brown eyes finally fixed unemphatically on me. “American’s what he told me. But I get the impression his main interest is plays. Seems he’s in one right now. Shakespeare. Hamlet, I think he said. Says he’s done a lot of acting, including some bit parts in movies shot around here, a couple of TV commercials, too.”

The ID officers stopped what they were doing. One of them turned around, his brush poised in midair.

Marino pointed toward the computer diskettes on the desk and exclaimed loudly enough to grab everybody’s attention, “Looks like we’d better take a peek at what’s on these suckers. Maybe a play he’s writing, huh?”

“We can take a look at them in my office. We’ve got a couple IBM-compatible PCs,” I offered.

“PCs,” he drawled. “Yo. Beats the hell out of my RC: one Royal Crapola, standard issue, black, boxy, sticky keys, the whole nine yards.”

An ID officer was pulling out something from beneath a stack of sweaters in a bottom drawer, a long-bladed survival knife with a compass built into the top of the black handle and a small whetstone in a pocket on the sheath. Touching as little of it as possible, he placed it inside a plastic evidence bag.

Out of the same dresser drawer came a box of Trojans, which, I pointed out to Marino, was a little unusual, since Lori Petersen, based on what I’d seen in the master bedroom, was on oral contraceptives.

Marino and the other officers began the expected cynical speculations.

I pulled off my gloves and stuffed them in the top of my bag. “The squad can move her,” I said.

The men turned in unison, as if suddenly reminded of the brutalized, dead woman in the center of the rumpled turned-down bed. Her lips were pulled back, as if in pain, from her teeth, her eyes swollen to slits and staring blindly up.

A radio message was relayed to the ambulance, and several minutes later two paramedics in blue jumpsuits came in with a stretcher, which they covered with a clean white sheet and placed flush against the bed.

Lori Petersen was lifted as I directed, the bedclothes folded over her, the gloved hands not touching her skin. She was gently placed on the stretcher, the sheet pinned at the top to ensure no trace evidence was lost or added. Velcro straps made a loud ripping sound as they were peeled apart and fastened across the white cocoon.

Marino followed me out of the bedroom and I was surprised when he announced, “I’ll walk you to your car.”

Matt Petersen was on his feet as we came down the hall. His face wan, his eyes glassy, he stared at me, desperately, needing something only I could give. Assurance. A word of comfort. The promise his wife died quickly and did not suffer. That she was tied up and raped after the fact. There was nothing I could say to him. Marino led me back through the living room and out the door.

The front yard was lit up with television lights floating against the background of hypnotically flashing red and blue. The staccato voices of disembodied dispatchers competed with the throbbing engines as a gentle rain began to fall through a light fog.

Reporters with notepads and tape recorders were everywhere, waiting impatiently for the moment when the body was carried down the front steps and slid into the back of the ambulance. A television crew was on the street, a woman in a snappy belted trenchcoat talking into a microphone, her face serious as a grinding camera recorded her “at the scene” for Saturday’s evening news.

Bill Boltz, the Commonwealth’s attorney, had just pulled up and was getting out of his car. He looked dazed and half asleep and determined to elude the press. He didn’t have anything to say because he didn’t know anything yet. I wondered who notified him. Maybe Marino. Cops milled around, a few of them aimlessly probing the grass with their powerful Kel lights, some of them clustered by their white cruisers and talking. Boltz zipped up his windbreaker and nodded as he briefly met my eyes, then hurried up the walk.

The chief of police and a major sat inside an unmarked beige car, the interior light on, their faces pale as they periodically nodded and made remarks to reporter Abby Turnbull. She was saying something to them through an open window. Waiting until we were on the street, she trotted after us.

Marino warded her off with the flap of a hand, a “Hey, no comment” in a “screw yourself” tone of voice.

He stepped up the pace. He was almost a comfort.

“Ain’t this the pits?” Marino said with disgust as he patted himself down for his cigarettes. “A regular three-ring circus. Jesus Christ.”

The rain was soft and cool on my face as Marino held the station wagon door open for me. As I turned the ignition he leaned down and said with a smirk, “Drive real careful, Doc.” --This text refers to the mass_market edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Cornwell, a former reporter who has worked in a medical examiner's office, sets her first mystery in Richmond, Va. Chief medical officer for the commonwealth of Virginia, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the narrator, dwells on her efforts to identify "Mr. Nobody," the strangler of young women. The doctor devotes days and nights to gathering computer data and forensic clues to the killer, although she's hampered by male officials anxious to prove themselves superior to a woman. Predictably, Scarpetta's toil pays off, but not before the strangler attacks her; a reformed male chauvinist, conveniently nearby, saves her. Although readers may be naturally disposed to admire Scarpetta and find the novel's scientific aspect interesting, they are likely to be put off by her self-aggrandizement and interminable complaints, annoying flaws in an otherwise promising debut.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Library Journal

This award-winning novel based on Richmond's real-life "South Side Strangler" case introduced Virginia's chief medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, and launched Cornwell's career. Narrator Lorelei King generally has a pleasant reading voice and uses good pacing to build suspense. However, this is not a successful merger of book and reader for American ears. Listeners may be confused to hear that Kay wears "cocky" (khaki), for instance, and accenting the second syllable of such words as modem and condom distract the listener from the story. Furthermore, the voices of supporting characters (such as Marino, a "stoopid" New Jersey cop, and Lucy, a fussy Southern child) are stereotypical. Fortunately, an unabridged version of Postmortem is available from several other producers, including Recorded Books (Audio Reviews, LJ 2/15/94). Not recommended.?Juleigh Muirhead Clark, Williamsburg, Va.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

The Bookcassette® format is a special recording technique developed as a means of condensing the full, unabridged audio text of a book to record it on fewer tapes. In order to listen to these tapes, you will need a cassette player with balance control to adjust left/right speaker output. Special adaptors to allow these tapes to be played on any cassette player are available through the publisher or some US retail electronics stores. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From the Publisher

7 1.5-hour cassettes --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002YPORR6
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Scribner; Reprint edition (November 26, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ November 26, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2649 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 449 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #35,731 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #118 in Medical Thrillers (Kindle Store)
- #121 in Medical Thrillers (Books)
- #922 in Serial Killer Thrillers

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2,758 ratings

About the author

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Patricia Cornwell
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In 1990, Patricia Cornwell sold her first novel, Postmortem, while working at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond, Virginia. An auspicious debut, it went on to win the Edgar, Creasey, Anthony, and Macavity Awards as well as the French Prix du Roman d’Aventure prize—the first book ever to claim all these distinctions in a single year. Growing into an international phenomenon, the Scarpetta series won Cornwell the Sherlock Award for best detective created by an American author, the Gold Dagger Award, the RBA Thriller Award, and the Medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for her contributions to literary and artistic development.

Today, Cornwell’s novels and iconic characters are known around the world. Beyond the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written the definitive nonfiction account of Jack the Ripper’s identity, cookbooks, a children’s book, a biography of Ruth Graham, and two other fictional series based on the characters Win Garano and Andy Brazil. While writing Quantum, Cornwell spent two years researching space, technology, and robotics at Captain Calli Chase’s home base, NASA’s Langley Research Center, and studied cutting-edge law enforcement and security techniques with the Secret Service, the US Air Force, NASA Protective Services, Scotland Yard, and Interpol.

Cornwell was born in Miami. She grew up in Montreat, North Carolina, and now lives and works in Boston and Los Angeles.
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5 star		72%
4 star		16%
3 star		8%
2 star		2%
1 star		1%

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Top reviews from the United States

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JKinSC

Love the Kay Scarpetta Series

Reviewed in the United States on December 26, 2018

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This is my second time around with Caldwell's Kay Scarpetta series. The first time was about 15 or 16 years ago on my own. Recently we started a local book club and, as the next hostess, I decided to introduce those not familiar with them, to the first two books in the series. I chose these so they could be introduced properly to the characters, careers, and relationships. Some book club members have read some of the series before, and they are telling me they are enjoying them all over again. If you like murder mysteries coupled with forensic science, police and Medical Examiner's investigations, and some intense situations, you will enjoy this series and enjoy watching the relationships change and grow through the years.

27 people found this helpful

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Sort of dated..

Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2017

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Rereading this book of the first time in years (maybe even since it originally came out). I remember loving the series at first, but then getting disenchanted with it when the later books focused more on the main character and less on solving a crime. The first book still holds up, but is seriously dated. Dial-up modems, monochrome screens, pay-phones, etc.. Not that big deal for me (since I lived through that time), but I would imagine someone who hadn't would be turned off a bit. I'm probably going to continue with the series, hopefully farther that I got before.

Also listening to the Audible audio book edition of this book off & on, the narrator does a good job at the voices of the different characters. I'd recommend it if you're looking for an audio book.

22 people found this helpful

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TVNerd95

Good but not great

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2016

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I really did enjoy listening to this book so much that I couldn't wait to get back in the car and finish it but once it was over I kept thinking did I really like it that much or was I just ready for it to be over. I am torn on this one. I just can't make up mind on this one which is why I gave it 3 stars.

I found the bad guy very amazing up until the end and then I found him to be very underwhelming. I did love the science (well my idea of science) on both sides -- the computer side and the medical side. I also found her niece very annoying and felt they were tiptoeing around her about everything so she wouldn't get upset.

The narrator did a good job on the book and the characters and I have to admit I have heard other books in this series but I felt the author kept the characteristics of the characters that I enjoyed in some of the later books. They sounded like the characters I already knew except the character of Benton which I found this version different than all the other versions I have listened to.

11 people found this helpful

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Mothram

SQUIRRELS IN THE MORGUE

Reviewed in the United States on January 11, 2014

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Social habits were different in 1990 when Patricia Cornwell wrote her first Kay Scarpetta mystery, "Postmortem." Many people smoked cigarettes and writers used their smoking mannerisms as a way to show mood, boredom, fear, relaxation, anger, personal habits--the list is endless. These descriptions took up a lot of space and time in the novel, and today many readers find it tiring, especially when nearly every character lights up.

This is not a criticism of "Postmortem" because it was used by many writers of the time. There are other distractions in the story, however, such as the ever popular fixing and drinking cups of steaming coffee, the changing weather patterns predicting or underlining the action, and the inevitable sidekick that is experienced but prejudiced and annoying.

All of this said, Cornwell has developed a sophisticated, strong and educated character in Kay Scarpetta. As the newly appointed chief medical officer of Virginia, her autopsies are meticulous and she is relentless in finding the cause of death. Her appointed partner in the Richmond police force is detective Marino, who knows the beat but expresses stereotypical opinions of different types of people. He and Scarpetta annoy one another immediately. Annoying the reader is Marino's misuse of the most common verb in English. He always uses "was" whether the subject is singular or plural. It makes him look stupid which he is not, and he proves to be quite valuable to Scarpetta in the end.

The mystery is well detailed and informative as Cornwell has experience both in the Virginia medical examiner's office and as a volunteer police officer. The plot is exciting, but slowed by lengthy red herrings, and the end is out of the blue

13 people found this helpful

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Top Dog

Why I'm Back

Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2014

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This is the fourth book in the Kay Scarpetta series that I've read having previously delved into "Body of Evidence", "From Potter's Field" and "Port Mortuary". I have flip-flopped from thinking that her writing is tedious to periods where I can't wait to see what happens next. Maybe she just needs a better editor.

But the fact is that I keep coming back. She knows how to tell a story and she is making the most out of her innovative slant on crime novels by bringing the reader into the story from the point of view of a Chief Medical Examiner. A good franchise to have.

This first of the Kay Scarpetta series has a freshness that is missing in some of her later books. It was like discovering a new writer, even though this book was released in 1991. The reader meets characters that recur in the later books. It's almost like watching a television series with a set cast of characters.

Yeah, I came back because despite the flaws I suppose Patricia Cornwell has my number.

6 people found this helpful

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Johnny B

The First Great Female Pathologists

Reviewed in the United States on August 23, 2015

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I just read this book although it was written almost two decades ago. The author's very first novel. Now I know why she has been so successful - a lot of work and effort obviously went into writing a very good book.

Many current TV shows (CSI, NCIS, etc.) owe a great deal to Patricia Cornwell as her pathologist does what they now do without a lot of the science and computer aids of today. It is important to remember the timeframe when novels are written - don't read everything with your present-day biases (i.e way more smoking than today) and you will enjoy this novel a great deal more..

I found it interesting that she did not make the heroes or villains wholly good or bad. The characters were more complex that I expected. Well worth reading.

4 people found this helpful

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Jim Bowen

An okay read I guess

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 19, 2021

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I read somewhere that the author Karin Slaughter recommended reading this book. Following this advice I've decided to start at the beginning of the Kay Scarpetta series.

I'm not sure it's going to be worth the effort.

In this book, we see the introduction of all the Scarpetta regulars (FBI analyst Benton Wesley, redneck cop Pete Marino, and, in this book, child genius Lucy Farinelli), as Scarpetta investigates a Richmond VA serial killer.

The book is... of its time. Everyone smokes in the offices (including Scarpetta, who berates an uncomfortably described technician about the idea that smokers will soon have to go outside to smoke). The offices are 1980s governmental/industrial concrete (it's set in 1991). The minorities talk different. Gay men are effeminate, lesbians are overly envious of their ex's who have moved on, and cross-dressers are... not fully understood. Oh, and the basis of Scarpetta's holier than thou attitude is there (despite the smoking inside, the assumptions above race, and the dubious views on the LGBT community).

In short, this book IS moderately different to the later books, but not in a wholly positive way.

The one problem is you'll struggle to work out whodunit, as this book is more of a character study of the future Cornwell leads, who are introduced here. The one thing I HAD forgotten was how competent a detective Pete Marino was. He still rednecks, but does investigations well enough for me to wonder why Scarpetta dislikes him so much.

One person found this helpful

Niall

Not a great start

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 14, 2018

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To be honest, two stars is being a little generous; I have a lot of trouble actually coming up with something I like about this book. It's quite possible that the later books in the series are better, and it's quite possible that the problem here is that this one has dated badly.
Ultimately, however, Scarpetta is not an especially likeable character here and she's basically impotent. I could see exactly which cliché ending was coming from about the first page. That would not be so bad if various plot threads dangled the possibility that I was wrong. But no. Maybe the trope wasn't so common back when this book was written, but now just about every book or TV series with a female lead has done this to death. Like I said, it's aged badly.

5 people found this helpful

BookishWoo

A step back in time!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 7, 2020

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I 1st read this back in the 90’s and was bowled over by it then! On picking this up again I enjoyed it for different reasons. Firstly because it was like taking a step back in time.

If you are a 1st time reader you have to remember that this was 1st published 29/30 years ago. The forensics, a far cry from what we are used to reading and watching today were true for the time and very well described.

I was also taken aback by the misogynistic undertones from colleagues that Kay Scarpetta has to battle against yet deals with in her stride. Something some of us will remember having to deal with back in the day!

Patricia certainly had me wrapped up in the storyline once more, I loved every page.

She certainly set the standard for female protagonists in this genre. We have a lot to thank her for!

4 people found this helpful

M Woodley

Great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 18, 2018

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With the speed and roar of an avalanche, this forensically terrifying thriller grips you from page one. There are “grasping a deadly cold hand in the dark” scenes, built with elegantly simple elements: female doctor working at night in a desolate morgue, violently shaken doors.

Women are being murdered in their homes. Dr Scarpetta will have to triumph over conflict to be able to do her job. There is a turbulent atmosphere and a general resigned acceptance with regards to an insensitive professional culture. But not every one’s eye will be blind; an unexpected character will give a ground shaking speech with the echo of past human kind struggles, worth waiting for. It brought the retribution of Ms Richardson’s cleaver to mind.
Some technical passages will need several re-reads if, like me, you find it difficult. Alternatively, dismiss without remorse in order to proceed with the riveting story. As the story was reaching its full orbit I was dreading being interrupted.

5 people found this helpful

Ian

Boring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2019

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I found this very dated(obviously given when it was written.) However given how much of the book relies on apparent highbrow medical and computer technology presumably trying to get the average reader to be impressed by the author’s knowledge, it was quite slow and boring adding little to the plot. There is not much of a plot in any case and I really did not care for most of the characters. Cornwell has been a successful author but on this showing I will not be rushing to get another one by her.

One person found this helpful

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