Bad Blood (7 page)

“You want a recess before you call your next witness?”

“May I have ten minutes?” I didn’t need the time, but I counted on it to let the jurors stretch their legs and come back fresh to a more compelling witness.

“Sure,” Gertz said. “Why don’t we give the jurors a short break.”

Max signaled me from her third-row seat that Jerry Genco had arrived and was waiting in the witness room. Artie Tramm let me slip out of the courtroom to the small cubicle off the locked hallway, and I confirmed with the pathologist the points that would be covered in his testimony.

“Dr. Genco,” I asked as the trial resumed, after he had completed the details of his medical education and training as a forensic pathologist and been qualified in his area of expertise, “for how long have you been employed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York?”

“Three years.”

“I’d like to direct your attention to a date last fall, the late afternoon of October third. Do you recall that day?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What was your assignment at that time?”

“I was catching cases,” he said, speaking to the jurors in the manner of a professional witness who had testified many times before, and explaining the steps that he was obligated to perform at a crime scene. “I was on call to respond to any homicides reported between eight a.m. and six p.m.”

Jerry Genco, expecting a day in the morgue’s lab, was casually dressed in a sports jacket and chinos. He was in sore need of a haircut and a small screw to replace the Band-Aid that held one earpiece of his glasses to the edge of the frame, but his smart, studied answers were in sharp contrast to the nervous manner of Kate Meade.

“Would you tell us, please, what time it was and who was present when you arrived at the Quillian town house?”

“It was four thirty, and I was admitted to the home by Detective Michael Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide Squad. There were two uniformed officers from the Nineteenth Precinct there, three other homicide detectives, and Hal Sherman, from the Crime Scene Unit.”

“Any civilians?”

“There was a woman identified to me as the housekeeper, but we never spoke. Someone had called her and she was brought in just as I arrived.”

“What happened when you entered?”

“Chapman led me through the vestibule into an adjacent room, like a small sitting area with several armchairs and a sofa. In the middle of the floor, on the carpet, was the body of Amanda Quillian.”

“Would you describe for us what you observed?”

Genco faced the jury box and gave a clinical description of the scene. “I saw the body of a Caucasian woman who appeared to be in her midthirties, fully clothed, lying on her back, apparently dead.”

He was more artful than Tim Denton in talking about the grotesque bruising on the slim neck of the victim, the protruding tongue hanging to the side of her mouth, and the pinpoint hemorrhages that dotted her still-open eyes.

Genco carefully described what he set about to do to pronounce the manner of Mrs. Quillian’s death, the legal classification that made it a homicide, rather than a natural event. The causation — the medical finding of the mechanism responsible for the death — was fairly obvious to anyone looking at the victim’s throat, but not able to be legally confirmed until autopsy.

This was not like the many cases in which the determination of the time of death played a critical role in the case, making measures of postmortem rigor, lividity, body temperature, and ocular changes significant. Here, instead, the parameters were tightly drawn by the hour and minute stamped on the digital photograph taken at the end of the ladies’ lunch, the phone records from Amanda Quillian’s cell as she was confronted by her killer, and the 911 call from Kate Meade.

So Dr. Genco moved his audience from the exquisitely appointed parlor in which he first saw the body of the deceased to the formaldehyde-scented room decorated only with a cold steel gurney in the basement of the morgue.

He described photographing his charge, undressing her, washing her body, and autopsying it. He didn’t need a receipt from the tony bistro where the friends had dined to assert that the victim’s last meal had been a Cobb salad with blue-cheese dressing. Stomach contents visible to the naked eye underscored that death had occurred within a short time after the ingestion of food. The two glasses of white wine she had sipped might have made it even more difficult for her to resist her attacker.

“Were you able to determine, Doctor, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, what caused the death of Amanda Quillian?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, I was.”

“Would you please tell the jury about your conclusions?”

“Mrs. Quillian died as a result of asphyxia, and in particular in this matter, by compression of the neck — or strangulation.”

“What is asphyxia, Dr. Genco?”

“It’s actually a broad term referring to conditions that result in the failure of cells to receive or to utilize oxygen, along with the inability to eliminate carbon dioxide. Body tissues simply cannot function without oxygen. Most especially the brain, since it uses twenty percent of the body’s total available oxygen.”

“Is there more than one category of asphyxia?”

“Yes, in general there are three. One would be chemical asphyxia — things like carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning, which operate by excluding oxygen from the brain. A second would be suffocation or obstruction of the airways.”

“Let me stop you here for a moment, Dr. Genco, at these first two categories. In the case of both chemical asphyxia and suffocation, is it correct to say that the resulting death might occur homicidally?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper. You’re right — in some circumstances. But in both instances death might also be accidental. And in the case of suffocation, it’s frequently self-inflicted.” Genco went on to give examples of each to the jury. “One may have a choking fatality because of the unintentional inhalation of an object — a wine cork or the cap of a pen that someone puts in his or her mouth temporarily, but then it gets sucked in and occludes the airway. Same thing happens with a piece of food.”

Several jurors nodded their heads in understanding.

“Now, Doctor, what is the third form of asphyxial death?”

“Compression of the neck, Ms. Cooper — usually by strangulation.”

“Are there different methods of strangulation?”

“Yes, there are. Again, we usually break these down into three varieties. Those would be hanging, ligature strangulation, and manual strangulation.”

“Can you distinguish between accidental, intentional, and homicidal deaths in the case of asphyxia by strangulation?”

Genco spoke confidently to the jurors farthest from the stand. “Most of the time, of course. The overwhelming number of hangings are suicides — it’s not a method frequently used as a means of killing someone.”

The jury was following his analysis. “With ligature strangulation, although you do get a few accidents, virtually all the cases are homicides — probably the most common form of homicidal asphyxia.”

“And by
ligature,
tell us what you mean exactly.”

“Certainly, Ms. Cooper. I’m referring to a bond of some kind — electrical cord, rope, wire, necktie — an object used to encircle the neck horizontally, occluding blood and oxygen from reaching the brain.”

“That’s distinguished from manual strangulation, is it not?”

“Quite easily, in fact. Manual strangulation — death caused by using one’s hands to compress the neck of another — can never be anything but homicide.”

“Would you please tell the jury why, Dr. Genco?”

He straightened his glasses and looked earnestly at the people in the box. “It’s not possible to use your own hands to strangle yourself. Pressure on the neck is a very intentional, deliberate action. The first thing such excessive pressure causes is a loss of consciousness. So that if you were holding your own throat until the point at which you passed out, you couldn’t possibly continue to keep the grip on. You’d regain consciousness as soon as your hands dropped away.”

I wanted him to go through every second of Amanda Quillian’s final agony. I wanted them to understand that her last moments were spent face-to-face with her attacker, at less than arm’s length, while he purposefully squeezed the life out of her body.

“Can you estimate for us, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, how long it was that Mrs. Quillian remained conscious while her neck was being compressed?”

Genco took his time with the answer, trying to explain the dynamic of this death mechanism without drawing an objection for any prejudicial statement. “Strangulation, you must understand, does not cause death as quickly, say, as a bullet to the brain or a stab wound to the heart. There is evidence here that despite her small stature and weight, the deceased put up a struggle — a fierce struggle — for her life.”

Several jurors began to wriggle in their seats as they followed his testimony. Genco paused, asking permission of Judge Gertz to step to the easel and refer to an enlargement of one of the autopsy photographs I had introduced through him half an hour earlier. I handed him a pointer and he got back to work.

“These marks on the neck of the deceased represent the force used by her assailant to subdue her, and then to cause her death.” He tapped at several large bruises on her throat as he spoke. “Repeated applications of force, actually, suggesting that she was struggling against him while he tried to fasten his grip more tightly. All of that fighting prolonged the process of the strangulation.”

The finger marks of the killer looked enormous to me, causing not only the external bruising but the hemorrhaging deep into the musculature that Genco’s dissection of the throat had revealed. I had studied the images for months, thinking constantly of someone with hands big enough, strong enough, to cause that damage. Someone with hands much larger than Brendan Quillian’s, which detectives had examined at the time of his arrest.

“Is there any other physical evidence to suggest that unconsciousness did not occur immediately after Mrs. Quillian was attacked?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper. All the medical hallmarks of manual strangulation are present.”

“Would you identify those to the jury?”

Genco pointed to the small, crescent-shaped marks that bordered the larger discolorations. “Can you see these small semicircles?” he asked the jurors, most of whom were nodding. “These abrasions weren’t made by the killer. They were left there by the fingernails of the deceased herself.”

Brendan Quillian had assumed a posture of faux anguish. His shoulders were slumped and he held his head in one hand, shaking it from time to time as though incredulous that someone could have done these things to his wife.

A few jurors seemed surprised, until Genco went on with his explanation. “Mrs. Quillian was struggling against her attacker to breathe, fighting for her very life. Like every victim of strangulation whose arms aren’t bound, she tried to free her airway of the hands that were restricting it. She didn’t mean to scratch herself, but each time her assailant increased the pressure on her neck, she fought to claw his hands off her — unsuccessfully despite a number of attempts.

“This is a very slow and deliberate way to kill someone,” Genco said. His glasses were cockeyed on his nose and he adjusted them again. He looked up. “Strangulation is an especially painful way to die.”

Howell knew better than to object. The damage had been done with the forensic pathologist’s assertion, and the defense position was simply to distance Brendan Quillian from the murderous act of whatever lone thug had committed the crime. Howell leaned over to stroke his client’s back, to suggest that he needed to be comforted during this graphic description of Amanda’s death.

I took Genco through each set of fingernail scratches, hoping jurors could imagine the fourth, fifth, and sixth times that Amanda Quillian scratched at the massive pair of hands to gasp for air. I looked for their reactions out of the corner of my eye as the doctor explained the abrasion on the tip of the young woman’s chin, which he said had been injured when she lowered it in the vain effort to protect her fragile neck.

“Back to the question I asked, Doctor, about whether you can estimate the length of time you believe Mrs. Quillian fought before losing consciousness?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, I can. Were there constant compression of the carotid arteries, for example, one might become unconscious in fifteen or twenty seconds. But that isn’t the case here.”

Genco repeated the rest of the autopsy findings: the congestion of Amanda’s face, which had become cyanotic — tinged with a blue cast — above the site of the compression; the pinpoint hemorrhaging in the whites of her eyes and densely spread throughout the eyelids themselves; and the fracture of the hyoid bone, a horseshoe-shaped structure at the base of the tongue, crushed by the deadly reapplications of force.

“I would say that the nature and number of injuries to Mrs. Quillian’s neck and face, as well as those she sustained internally, suggest that the struggle may have lasted for as long as two or three minutes. Perhaps even four,” Genco said, looking up at the clock above the doors at the rear of the courtroom.

In my closing argument, I would repeat the medical findings and stand silently in the well of the courtroom while the second hand swept slowly around the dial four times, reminding the jurors how very long that time took to elapse. The death throes of Amanda Quillian had been excruciating, and I would make that point at every possible opportunity.

I would also have the chance, then, to suggest to them our theory that as Brendan Quillian had ordered, the enormous sapphire ring was wrenched off Amanda’s finger, and the area around the still-warm body was ransacked to create the illusion of a botched burglary. The killer had the great good fortune to be out the door and away from the town house with barely two minutes to spare before the first cops came within half a block of the scene of the crime.

I was almost at the end of Jerry Genco’s direct exam, with just a few points to clean up. The jurors and indeed the spectators seemed sobered by his testimony, following the morning’s unexpected entertainment from Kate Meade. “Did you have an opportunity to meet Brendan Quillian?”