Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (7 page)

“Thank you,” Mike said.

“I told her the same thing,” Paul said. “Though the big difference is that Brooke is a very pleasant person, and Sarah is a grade-A—”

“Don’t say it,” Mike said. “You two never liked each other. There’s no point in rehashing old differences.”

“You see?” Brooke asked me. “He defends her.”

“Oh, for the love of—” Mike broke off.

“The love of Mike?” I said. I gave him a smile, but really, he should have let Paul call Sarah whatever he wanted to.

“He usually says the love of Pete,” Paul said.

“So who is Pete, and why is Mike so fond of him? That’s the big question—don’t you think?” I looked at Brooke.

“You’re not taking this seriously,” she said.

“If they haven’t seen each other in nearly two years . . .”

“Then why hasn’t he told me about her?”

“Our engagement is about us,” Mike said. “It seemed too early to be rehashing old relationships. It’s hard even to think about them.”

“You’re saying you never think about her? Sarah never crosses your mind?”

“I haven’t asked you about your old boyfriends,” Mike said.

Brooke stood. “That’s because I haven’t had any,” she said. There were tears on her cheeks. She tossed her mane of red hair and stalked out of the kitchen. A few seconds later, a door slammed at the back of the house.

Deeks, who had gotten to his feet when she stood, looked at me anxiously. Paul and Mike were looking at me, too, Mike with an expression almost identical to Deeks’s.

“I have to say I didn’t see that coming,” Mike said.

“In college she told everyone she was dating a minor-league baseball player. I think it was a way of keeping guys at a distance.” I’d heard the story over glasses of wine late one night when she’d been rooming with me.

“She told people she was dating a baseball player, and she wasn’t?” Mike said.

“She knew a baseball player. I think they did something together once or twice. By telling people she was dating him, she could have guy friendships without all the pressure.”

“That girl has boundary issues,” Paul said.

“Whatever that means,” I said to him, conscious of the irritation in my voice. “I’ll go talk to her.”

I left the kitchen, and Deeks followed me.

It took me fifteen or twenty minutes to talk Brooke off the ledge. First she was angry with Mike, then with herself. When she got over both of those, she was too embarrassed to come back to the table. By the time we rejoined the others, my chicken marsala was cold. On the plus side, I had already eaten a bit over half of it, and even cold chicken marsala is still pretty good. Brooke went back to picking at her own food, and I covered my plate with plastic wrap and put it in the refrigerator. Then, thinking a little more social lubricant was called for, I added what was left of the second bottle of Chianti to our wineglasses.

The next morning I was at my desk when Brooke came in. She sat in one of my client chairs and let her purse and her computer bag droop to the floor beside her. “Sorry,” she said. “I know I behaved badly.”

I waved a hand. “You were upset.”

She nodded, mouth pursed.

“More upset than I would have expected from you running into one of Mike’s old girlfriends. There’re bound to be a few of those out there, you know.”

“Not that he was engaged to, hopefully.”

“What does it matter?”

“What kind of man goes around asking women to marry him?”

“One that wants to get married, maybe. I think what you really resent is that Mike proposed to you so soon.”

“Well? What’s wrong with dating awhile?”

“Love at first sight?”

“Yeah, you’d think that, but now we know this is just how Mike operates. He goes straight to the marriage proposal before the girl is ready for it—twice now that we know of.”

“He’s what, thirty-two years old? He may be at that point in his life when he’s done with dating.”

She took in a breath and blew it out, her gaze dropping to my desk.

“You know . . .” I let it hang there.

She raised her gaze.

“He might not be so anxious to buy the cow if he was getting a little milk on the side.”

“I’ll ignore the bovine metaphor,” she said, “but that’s really rich coming from you. And how do you know how much milk I’m giving away?”

I was suddenly embarrassed. “Mike and Paul are best friends,” I said. “They talk.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And Paul and I talk.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Besides, you evidently know something about the milk I’m giving away. It’s a two-way street.”

“You’re giving away diddly-squat. Paul goes panting around after you just like Deeks, and what does he get for it? An occasional peck on the cheek, maybe one that hits the corner of his mouth if you’re feeling generous.”

That stung.

“And Paul hasn’t asked you to marry him,” Brooke said. “He’s afraid to, actually. You know that, don’t you? He thinks if he rushes you, he’s going to spoil things. Well? Why can’t Mike be afraid of spoiling things? What gives him so much confidence in the woman department?”

She paused, but her complaints and observations had been tossed out so indiscriminately that I didn’t know where to start.

“You know I’m just following your lead,” Brooke said. “You’ve done the sex thing, and look where it’s got you.”

“I’m not doing so badly. I’ve got friends. I’ve got Paul . . .”

“The ongoing mystery! You don’t give him anything, and you promise him even less. Maybe if I was a six-foot goddess, I could get away with that with Mike.”

I was only five eleven, if
only
is a word that belongs in front of five eleven, and Aphrodite I was not, but I let it pass. “You are getting away with it. The whole premise of this conversation is that you’re getting away with it.”

“I promised to marry him.”

“Well, yes, but you didn’t have to.”

“Suppose he asked me, and I said no, and he left me? What then?” There were tears in her eyes.

“Mike wouldn’t leave you,” I said.

“He left Sarah, didn’t he?”

“She spent the night with her old boyfriend.”

“Well, at least he doesn’t have to worry about that with me, now does he?” Brooke spun out of her chair and left my office, slamming the door behind her.

I sighed.
Another abrupt departure.
If she’d asked me, I would have told her to leave the door open.

I didn’t see a compelling need to visit Bob Shorter in the Richmond city jail, so I didn’t. It might be fair to say I neglected him shamefully, even though I was working on his case. By the time the sheriff’s department brought him back to the courthouse for his preliminary hearing, I was feeling guilty about my failure to visit him, so I arranged to spend a few minutes with him before the start of his hearing. It was the least I could do—which is why I did it.

“If it isn’t the Wizard of Oz,” Shorter said when he saw me. “I was beginning to think you were a myth. I trust you’ve been hard at work behind the curtain?”

“Do you want his handcuffs off or on?” the deputy sheriff asked me.

“Off,” I said.

He nodded, and I waited while he unlocked them. When the deputy left the room and closed the door behind himself, Shorter took a seat at the scarred wood table. I remained standing.

“Well?” he said.

“Preliminary hearing today.”

“Thanks for the news flash. You said this is when I get out of here.”

I shook my head. “The judge will take another look at the question of bail. That’s all I can say.”

“So what have you been doing?”

“Filing discover motions and poring over what the prosecution gives me.”

He made a disgusted noise, his breath puffing out through his lips. “Like that’s gonna do me any good.”

“I talked to your neighbors. Some of them were rather insistent I spend time with them.”

“Warped bunch of busybodies. What did they want?”

“For you to fry in the electric chair. Life in prison might satisfy them. Whatever it takes for you never to return to their neighborhood.”

His smile was without humor.

“It would be an understatement to say that they hate you. Why is that, do you think?”

“They like neighbors who play nice. It gives them power. A person who feels no obligation to play nice is a person they can’t control.”

“I found your lawn decorations for Halloween. I assume the tombstones were for Halloween.”

This time his grin held a touch of humor.

“So you’re not above playing games of your own,” I said.

“When they amuse me.”

“What’s amusing about them?”

“Oh, come on. You saw the tombstones. They’re hilarious. You’ve got to admit that.”

“They’re witty,” I conceded. “You had to know they’d upset people.”

“A little clean fun, all perfectly legal.”

“Maybe.”

“They pooled their money to hire a lawyer to go after me. He wrote me a couple of threatening letters. I ignored them. After that, nada.”

“I might have had a go at proving libel. Maybe intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

“Fortunately, they didn’t hire you. The lawyer they got didn’t have your cojones.”

I ignored his dubious grasp of the female anatomy. “You don’t have a pleasant bone in your body, do you?”

“I told you, niceness is an obligation the weak impose on the people around them in an effort to control them. Why should I play?”

“Your natural disposition to benevolence?”

“Evidently, I have no such disposition.”

“And evidently, you don’t consider that a failing.”

“I consider it a strength,” he said.

“Suppose you’re wrong about that?”

“Some may find it undesirable. Who’s to say it’s a failing?”

“The great weight of public opinion?” I offered.

“What, majority opinion determines what’s right and wrong? You see how ridiculous that is, don’t you? All I have to do is convert enough people to my way of thinking, and I’ll have right on my side.”

“I can’t see you as that persuasive.” I stepped to the door and slapped my palm against it. The deputy sheriff had his hand on the butt of his gun as he pushed the door open.

“We might as well go,” I told him. “We’re not accomplishing anything here.”

“What?” Shorter asked from behind me. “We’re not going to go over my testimony?”

I turned to look at him. “To put you on the stand in a preliminary hearing, I’d have to be as bad a lawyer as you think I am.”

“I haven’t said you’re a bad lawyer. How would I know? So far I haven’t seen jack from you.”

At the hearing, the prosecution introduced evidence as to cause of death—a stab wound to the chest—and the presence of bloody clothing in Shorter’s closet. The blood’s DNA profile matched the profile of Hill’s blood, just as Shorter had suspected from the moment he saw it. I did find out something about the murder weapon, a stainless steel knife with a three-and-a-quarter-inch blade. Detective Ray Hernandez was on the witness stand when it was marked as a commonwealth exhibit and entered into evidence.

“Where was the knife found?” asked Ian Maxwell, the assistant district attorney currently in charge of the case.

“Beside the body.”

“Were there fingerprints on the knife?” Maxwell asked.

“Yes, on the handle.”

“But not on the blade?”

“No, not on the blade.” Hernandez shook his head.

“This was a wood handle?”

“Yes. Beechwood, according to the manufacturer. It held the prints just fine.”

“Whose fingerprints were they?”

Hernandez looked toward Shorter and me at the defense table. “The defendant’s, Robert Shorter. They were the prints of the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his right hand.”

I leaned toward Shorter, who sat beside me at the defense table. “Any thoughts?” I said.

“It could be my knife,” he said. “I told you I have a paring knife that looks like that.”

When it was my turn to cross-examine, I asked Hernandez, “Were the fingerprints imprinted in the blood that was on the knife?”

“They were not.”

“They were just prints consisting of the natural residues any of us might have on our fingers?”

“That’s right.”

“Any way to know how long they’d been on the knife?”

“No.”

When he seemed disinclined to say anything further, I said, “Please elaborate.”

“There are three factors that might determine how long a latent fingerprint would stay on a surface: the matrix of the print, the substrate, and the environment.”

I waited. “Okay,” I said finally. “Now you’re just playing with me.”

He grinned.

I said, “Since you seem disinclined to do it, let me elaborate, and you tell me where I’ve gone wrong. The matrix is the sweat or body oil that was on the fingers—”

“Or it could be some kind of contaminant,” Hernandez said. “Blood, dust, wet fingernail polish . . .”

“Was there fingernail polish on this knife? Or blood or dust?”

“There was blood on the knife, but, like I said, it wasn’t what held the print.”

“Okay,” I said. “So much for the matrix. The substrate would be the surface the print was found on, the beechwood handle.”

“That’s right.”

“And
environment
I think I understand without further explanation. Based on the three factors you mentioned, the matrix, the substrate, and the environment, these prints could have been on the knife how long?”

Hernandez shook his head.

“You can’t say?”

“I’d say the prints were made after the last time the knife went through the washer.”

“Or was washed in the sink with soap and water?”

“Or after that. If you can tell me when that was, I can give you the earliest possible date for the prints.”

“You’ve said that the defendant’s prints were on the knife. Were there anybody else’s?”

He hesitated. “We’re not sure.”

“What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

“There was one smeared print.”

“A print you couldn’t match to any of the defendant’s fingers?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you attempt to match it to anyone else’s?”

“The decedent’s.”