Chapter 33
I helped him as best I could, editing and often rewriting his sermons while participating in various church activities.
For a while I taught a young adult Sunday school class, and on occasion I wrote children’s sermons, reading them during the services.
I interviewed parishioners and wrote profiles of them.
Meanwhile, I was running around with the police and working full time at the OCME.
Charlie and I saw less of each other, rarely taking the time anymore.
I didn’t enjoy being a preacher’s wife, and he didn’t like the ministry but hadn’t admitted that to himself.
We’d moved into Honey Tree Apartments in Henrico County, an upgrade from seminary housing.
I no longer had to use a communal laundry.
We had a second bedroom that was my office.
We never took a vacation. But once a year we visited my father and Rita in Miami where Jim and his wife, Mary, also lived.
She worked in a law firm, and he was a carpenter on his way to becoming a gifted mill worker.
Charlie had encouraged me to get to know my father, and the two of them got along very well.
In fact, it irked me how much attention they paid to each other.
While in Miami I loved visiting G.G., but it was awful watching her get so old.
She’d tell me how desolate it was, showing me her address book, page after page of blacked-out names.
Whenever I visited, she’d pull out this same address book and show me the morbid progress made.
The last time I was there, every name had been redacted.
“The stupidest thing I ever did was quit smoking,” she once complained. “Who wants to live this long?”
Until her death in April 1987 at the age of ninety-six, she was still reading the Sunday New York Times and sipping an occasional glass of port or a pony-size Budweiser she’d drink with a straw.
She’d watch PBS, the news, the volume so high you could hear her TV across the street.
When taking out the garbage at night, she’d wear a “rape whistle” around her neck.
She wouldn’t bother with hearing aids. Burglarized one night, she slept through it.
I doubt the would-be thief found anything of value or lingered.
The police arrived, walking into her bedroom, looking at the clothesline strung across it.
Hung up to dry were large pairs of men’s briefs that she wore stuffed with diapers. She’d boil them clean in the kitchen.
Jim and I quit eating at her house when he discovered a Fruit of the Loom label in his bowl of cheese grits.
G.G. was too cheap and stubborn to buy Depends and fabricated her own.
One day Mary and I took her to the grocery store.
As we were cruising the aisles with our cart a safety pin sprung, and G.G. ’s rig began its descent.
We hurried into a utility closet to fix her wardrobe failure, the three of us laughing hysterically, making matters only worse.
G.G. saw the ridiculousness of life. She was funny and fearless with an insatiable sense of adventure.
I wish she’d lived long enough to see me published as a novelist. By the time she died, my future as an author wasn’t looking promising.
As the rejections continued, I realized that The Queen’s Pawn was going nowhere just like the other books.
My agent decided she didn’t want to represent me anymore, and I announced to Marcella, “Three strikes, I’m out.
” She told me the same thing she always did.
I mustn’t quit. I was going to make it one of these days. She knew it.
After my agent fired me, I was despondent, some of my black moods returning.
Once again, I wondered why I was on this Earth.
The only thing I’d been successful at was journalism, and I contemplated going back to it.
I thought about becoming a police officer, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Maybe I was destined to be a state employee barely making a living.
After my first three mysteries had been rejected, I’d done the gauche thing of calling an editor at the Mysterious Press. Sara Ann Freed had read my earlier attempts. Her responses were measured, even kind, and I took a chance, getting her on the phone.
“I know I shouldn’t do this,” I apologized right off. “But please tell me the truth. Should I quit?”
“No,” she surprised me by saying. “I don’t think you should.”
“Then what am I doing wrong?”
“You work in a medical examiner’s office, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“These things you write about, are they what you see there?”
“No.”
“Well, I want to see what you see.”
“What I see is pretty awful.” I was wondering if I could write about it.
“I want to see what you see,” she repeated. “And your best character is the lady medical examiner. You should write about her.”
“Okay. Thank you so much. I promise I’ll try.”
I was grateful for her advice. But what she’d suggested was a tall order.
By now I’d seen thousands of autopsies. There wasn’t much I hadn’t been exposed to, but I’d never allowed the reality to violate my imagination.
When I’d get home and sit at my desk, I didn’t want to envision what I witnessed at death scenes and inside the autopsy suite.
My first three novels didn’t include the graphic details that were part of my daily life.
I wasn’t telling my stories from Kay Scarpetta’s point of view.
I didn’t think it possible I could walk around in her shoes.
I was an English major, a former journalist, and not a doctor or scientist. The idea of writing about what I really saw through the medical examiner’s eyes was daunting.
Most of all I didn’t want to celebrate what should be condemned.
How could I tell the truth about violence without exploiting it and victims?
I decided there was only one way to do it.
I had to take on Scarpetta’s persona, not realizing I’d already done it years earlier.
I’d created her, and she’d created me. Our point of view was the same.
In the fall of 1987, a serial killer began his rampage in Richmond, what was referred to as a reign of terror.
On September 18, Debbie Dudley was murdered in her Westover Hills apartment on the south side of the James River.
The thirty-five-year-old was an account executive at Richmond’s Style Weekly magazine.
She was found partially nude on her bed, her arms bound with shoelaces.
She’d been strangled with a sock that the killer tightened with a metal vacuum cleaner attachment, creating a crude garrote.
Two weeks later, on October 2, Dr. Susan Hellams was murdered in Westover Hills, her body on the closet floor. She was hog-tied and strangled.
The killer fractured her nose and injured her bottom lip, perhaps to silence her before she screamed.
He’d gotten in by cutting the screen from the second-story window, and likely was inside the house when she got home from a dinner with friends.
Her husband discovered her body when he returned after midnight, and the police briefly landed on him as a suspect.
Richmond was in an uproar. People were buying guns, the hardware stores running out of locks, and I remember the mood at the OCME was tense.
Marcella was responding to the scenes and doing the autopsies the instant the bodies arrived at the morgue.
She locked the case files in her office credenza so that nobody could look at them.
I never saw the bodies, only photographs the police shared as we’d discuss the cases while I was riding with them at night.
Marcella didn’t offer details to me or anyone else in the office.
In fact, she and I rarely talked or saw each other while the murders were going on.
She began breaking out in hives. The police had no idea who the killer might be, and I was shaken to my core, most of all by Susan Hellams.
I was sure I’d seen her before at the Medical College of Virginia (MCV), where she was completing her neurosurgery residency.
She was attractive, with long red hair, and I noticed her one day while Marcella discussed pathological specimens with the students.
I can still envision Susan in a lab coat, standing on the other side of the room as I took notes.
I remember her well because I felt ill at ease and out of place among the young doctors attending to Marcella’s every word.
They were accomplished, and all I had to show for myself was three failed mystery novels.
Perhaps Susan Hellams sensed my discomfort and that’s why she gave me a warm smile.
I have no idea why. I was surprised she noticed me or cared.
I was riding with homicide detectives on weekends, haunted when we’d drive past her house, and where Debbie Dudley had been murdered, the lights out, no sign of life.
We cruised past, sometimes parking on the roadside, trying to get into the mind of a sadistic killer who strangled his victims, then resuscitated them, then strangled them, over and over.
The Southside Strangler, as he’d been dubbed, struck again on November 22.
This time he was even more brazen. Fifteen-year-old high school student Diane Cho lived with her family and was asleep in bed when the killer climbed through her second-story window.
He raped and murdered her while her parents were downstairs watching TV.
The next morning when she didn’t get up, her mother found her dead in bed, her hands bound.
She’d been strangled with rope, an infinity symbol painted on her hip with nail polish.
The police believed the killer may have spotted her recently at a mall where she’d noticed a young African American man staring at her in a way that was unnerving.