Dr. Kay Scarpetta is the Chief Medical Examiner for the state of Virginia. She has taken over the cases of a serial killer in Richmond who ties women's hands behind their backs, then uses an electrical cord from her bedroom to tie her up so that the cord is wrapped around her throat and will strangle her if she tries to straighten her legs out from being bent. The killer rapes them multiple ways and lets them strangle and die, leaving behind a substance from his hands and body that sparkles like the Fourth of July under the laser, which is used to pick up on fibers and other trace elements missed by the eye. The book opens with the fourth killing, a young surgeon whose husband spends the week away at school and comes home for the weekends. All the other women lived alone, and if the killer was staking out their houses, he would assume that the surgeon also lived alone. But nothing else connects the women; they are different sizes, different hair colors, and even different races, as in one case where the woman was African American.
Detective Marino, who is running these cases, strongly believes the fourth victim's husband killed her because she found out about him raping and killing these women. He does have greasepaint on his hands from acting in a play and was once accused of rape years ago. The charges were dropped for whatever reason. Marino does not want to let this go. This is your first meeting with him, and you tend to want to hit him. He is so annoying. He is a man of the streets from a working-class background who feels threatened by those who have higher degrees. Bill Botz, the Commonwealth Attorney (CA), is seeing Kay in secret (according to her wishes) and finds himself a suspect when someone comes forward to say he has roofied them. Kay doesn't know what to think, and Bill leaves for vacation to avoid talking to her, which is a rather guilty response.
Kay's niece, Lucy, is staying with her for vacation at her sister's insistence; then the sister runs off to travel with her new husband, the illustrator of her children's books. Lucy is a precocious ten-year-old with a very high IQ and knows how to work computers. Kay feels guilty that the cases keep her from spending time with her niece. When it appears that someone has tried to get into the computers at work, looking for information on the fourth case, which hadn't been entered in yet. Kay doesn't want to suspect Lucy, but it's the better option when otherwise it's possibly the killer or worse, a reporter.
Kay is also having trouble with Dr. Amburgey, the commissioner and her boss. She is summoned to his office, and her office is accused of leaking information to the press. From now on, she is not to release a press release. Instead, it will come from Amburgey's office. He has never cared for Scarpetta, and it shows in how he treats her. Kay feels as though her legs have been cut out from underneath her and that she may be set up to be the scapegoat.
This book is a hard-driving mystery that could have used a little more editing. It's a little long at 440 pages. Cornwell explains everything in depth, considering it was all new when this book was written in 1990. DNA, for example, only tells you so much, considering that the human genome hasn't been mapped yet. It also takes 4-6 weeks to get results at a lab in New York. Today's reader knows how lasers work and doesn't need a tutorial. But overall, it's a great read, and Dr. Kay Scarpetta makes a great detective, solving the case with a little help from Marino.
Quotes
I assumed when she came home from school most days, she walked into a quiet, indifferent house where dinner was a drudgery to be put off until the last minute. My sister should never have been a mother. My sister should never have been Italian.
Patricia Cornwell (Postmortem, pp. 164-5)
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