Prime Witness by Steve Martini

of the security door. From a distance she has the look of a secretary. Her eyes reading me as she walks tells me this is my escort. She is short and a little dowdy, to the far side of middle age. There’s something familiar about her, but I can’t place it.
    “Mr. Madriani.”
    She is stone-faced, seemingly preoccupied. But in her tone I sense this is no receptionist.
    “Kay Sellig,” she says. “The director has asked me to brief you.” Brown eyes caught between a few wrinkles and crow’s-feet look at me from under a salt and pepper wedge cut, something easy to care for. She doesn’t offer her hand, but instead reads my mind.
    “Not what you expected?” she says. She is a quick study.
    “I don’t know,” I lie.
    Finally there’s a smile, not amiability, but satisfaction at having read my thoughts.
    In the limited universe of criminal forensics the name Kay Sellig conjures legend, a reputation that belies the image standing before me now.
    We make small talk as she leads me through the labyrinth, the maze of little chambers inside this building.
    Then as I watch her walking from behind it settles on me, this sense that we have met before.
    “You were there,” I say. “On the creek.”
    She nods. “I processed the scene.”
    I have heard the name Kay Sellig for a dozen years, mostly banter in courthouse corridors, the war stories of lawyers, embellished with each telling. But I have always accepted as fact my good fortune that I have never had to cross this woman in court. In her time she has buried more than her share of criminal defendants behind the concertina-wired walls of Folsom and San Quentin.
    Three more turns, down a short hallway, we enter a larger room, and she slows to half speed. I sense that we have arrived.
    The place is not unlike a high school chemistry lab in one of the upscale suburbs. Bathed in fluorescent light are a dozen large stainless steel tables bolted to the floor.
    “Has Lieutenant Dusalt given you much detail so far?” she asks.
    “We’ve had one meeting,” I tell her. “What I know so far is what I read in the papers, and the few files that Mario—Mr. Feretti—compiled before his death.”
    “You want to ask questions, or should I do a narrative?” she asks.
    Not having read the file, I’d rather listen. I tell her so.
    “Fine.” Not looking at any notes she wings it, impromptu. “The killer usually doesn’t leave ID’s, wallets and purses. He takes them. Except for the last murders, we’ve never found any of them. He probably has a shrine somewhere, someplace where they’re all piled up. We’ve had to roll prints each time to identify the victims.”
    She moves toward a big chalk board, one of those things supported on a rolling wooden easel. She flips the board to the other side. Here the surface is cork. Pinned to it is an array of glossy colored pictures. Faces, head and shoulder shots of death, taken against the stainless steel autopsy tables of the county morgue.
    “The first one was nineteen—Jonathan Snider.” She points. Even in death this face has the artless countenance of youth.
    “His girlfriend was eighteen. Her name was Julie Park.” From her picture she was Asian, young and pretty. “They were found on the Putah Creek twelve days ago. The killer made no attempt to conceal the bodies.”
    She moves down with her pointer. “The next two were found four days later. Sharon Collins, twenty-two, Acosta’s niece, and Rodney Slate, same age. Again no ID’s. The bodies were left exposed on the ground.”
    She points to the next faces of death, more aged this time, staring out at me from the cork board. “The last two you saw at the scene, Abbott and Karen Scofield.”
    The woman’s head reveals a dark forlorn cavern on one side of her face, the grotesque image of an empty eye socket, several sharp cuts on the cheek and brow around the vacant cavity.
    “For some reason he left their wallets and her purse. Maybe something disturbed him, we