Assistant District Attorney for the County of Philadelphia Jessica Balzano considered her witness. He was darkly handsome, with coffee-brown hair, dark eyes, lashes to die for. He wore a navy-blue blazer, white Oxford shirt and tan slacks.
He was the kind of witness about whom attorneys dreamed – direct, polite, forthright and, most important of all, believable.
‘Tell us, in your own words, what happened that day,’ Jessica said. ‘And please take your time.’
The witness took the moment. ‘It was early,’ he said.
‘About what time was it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Was it still dark or was it light?’
‘It was light.’
‘So, around seven o’clock?’
‘I think so.’
‘And we’re talking about the Friday in question?’
The witness nodded.
‘I’m afraid you have to answer out loud,’ Jessica said.
‘It was Friday.’
‘And what happened?’
The witness shrugged. This was clearly not easy for him. ‘The window got broken.’
Jessica let the statement settle for a moment. ‘Do you know how the window got broken?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Now, you say the window was broken. Were both panes shattered?’
‘I don’t know what that is.’
‘The window has an upper part and a lower part,’ Jessica said. ‘Those are the panes.’
‘Okay.’
‘Were both of them broken?’
The witness shook his head. ‘Just the bottom part.’
‘Would you say that the majority of the broken glass was on the inside or the outside?’
Another shrug. ‘On the outside, I guess.’
‘Would you agree that the window did not break itself?’
‘Yes,’ he said softly.
‘And would you also agree that there is a very real possibility that the window was broken by a football?’
No answer.
‘A football you have been told many times not to throw in the house?’ Jessica added.
Still no answer. None was expected. Jessica walked around the table, leaned against it and crossed her arms.
‘What do you have to say for yourself?’ she asked.
‘Am I guilty?’
‘I think so, honey.’
Jessica’s seven-year-old son Carlos, perched on a barstool in their kitchen, studied his shoes.
‘What’s my sentence?’ he asked.
‘We’re considering time off for helping your mother with her cross-examination skills.’
‘Okay.’
Jessica glanced at her watch. ‘Let’s get you to school,’ she said. ‘We’ll consider the penalty phase when I get home from work.’
Carlos Balzano looked at his hands, as if they were in shackles. When he looked up and smiled, the City of Philadelphia, and his mother, forgave every one of his crimes.
The case was the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania versus Earl Carter. The charges were commercial robbery and misdemeanor assault.
When Judge Althea Gipson was seated, the opposing counsel put on their game faces.
Jessica had been ready for this moment for weeks.
Since leaving the police force, where she had been a homicide detective for nearly a decade, she had steadily risen through the ranks of newer ADAs, much to the consternation of some of her fellow prosecutors. Jessica had expected the palace intrigue. When she’d joined the homicide unit, she had pushed hard against those who whispered behind her back that she’d gotten the assignment due to her gender, or the fact that her father was one of the most decorated cops in the history of the PPD.
Back then she was more than ten years younger than most of her colleagues. Now she was at least ten years older. It just made her work that much harder. Since day one on this job she’d turned the lights on in the morning, and turned them off at night.
Because the defendant, a forty-six-year-old unemployed welder originally from Kentucky, was all but indigent, he had been assigned a public defender.
If ever there was a Hollywood prototype for the beleaguered public defender, Rourke Hoffman was that prototype. A PD for more than three decades, now pushing sixty, Hoffman, in his rumpled suits and soiled running shoes, was a fixture at the Criminal Justice Center at 13th and Filbert streets. Today was Jessica’s first time at the bar with the man.
As Judge Gipson finalized a few items on her laptop, Jessica went over her notes one last time.
What had put Earl Carter in this courtroom was a happy accident. Not for Earl, of course, but rather for the people of Philadelphia. His contact with the police department that fateful day began with a 911 call about a woman screaming in her dilapidated south Philly row house. When patrol officers arrived, they witnessed a highly intoxicated Earl Carter repeatedly punching his estranged wife.
While securing and processing the scene, the assigned detective, Victor Cortez, saw something in the front room closet that nudged a memory. On the closet floor was a rather unique red plaid flannel shirt with black pockets piped with gold thread. Beneath the shirt was a pair of worn Levi’s with a distinctive black stain on the left knee. Underneath the jeans were a pair of Timberland boots, tan in color, with red woven laces.
Cortez returned to the station house that day and rooted his hard drive for the raw footage of a strong-arm robbery from five months earlier. The footage had been uploaded to the Philadelphia Police Department’s YouTube channel, and posted on the PPD’s blog site. In the recording, a man was seen walking in the back door of DiBlasio’s, a popular Italian deli in South Philadelphia. Once inside, he began to help himself to items that were in the open floor safe. When confronted by the owner, seventy-two-year-old Lucio DiBlasio, the robber grabbed the older man by the throat and threw him into a shelving unit, bringing a large can of tomato sauce down onto DiBlasio’s head.
Then the thief ran out.
In the five months that the video had been on the PPD blog and the PPD YouTube channel, no leads had been generated.
Until the day Earl Carter lifted his hand in anger to his estranged wife and a solid detective named Victor Cortez got the case.
On direct examination, the state’s first three witnesses – the neighbor who made the 911 call, the responding officer and Detective Cortez – sailed through the process as Jessica had expected them to, all without a single objection from the defense.
As Cortez stepped down, Jessica sneaked a look at her watch. It was just shy of 4.30. She had thought about saving her fourth witness for the following morning, but she was on a roll.
‘The people call Reginald Kenneth Jones III.’
As Jones made his way across the courtroom, Jessica gently placed her pen on top of her legal pad, took a deep breath, looked up, smiled.
‘Good afternoon, sir.’
‘Afternoon, ma’am.
The man sitting in the witness chair in Courtroom 603 was African American, trim and fit, in his late forties.
‘Could you state your name for the record, please?’
‘Reginald Kenneth Jones III.’
‘Are you currently employed, Mr Jones?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Where do you work?’
‘I work for the Philadelphia Police Department, assigned to the crime scene unit.’
‘How long have you been there?’
‘Twenty-eight years as a police officer; twenty-two of those years in CSU.’
‘If you had to distill what CSU officers do, what would you say the job is about?’
‘It’s all about trace evidence. Hair, fingerprints, blood, skin cells, footprints. Our job is to collect it, document it, protect it and get it to the various labs for analysis.’
‘What about photographs?’
‘Yes, ma’am. We photograph and videotape every scene.’
Jessica glanced at her notes for effect. She knew every line on the page by heart. ‘Let me direct your attention to March 17 of this year. Were you working that day?’
‘I was.’
‘Were you called to a crime scene in the 500 block of West Porter?’
‘Yes, ma’am. We were requested by Detective Victor Cortez.’
‘When you arrived at the scene, what requests were made?’
‘Among other things, Detective Cortez requested photographs of the parlor,’ he said. ‘Specifically the closet next to the front door.’
‘What, if anything, did you notice about the closet itself?’
‘I noticed that the homeowner had removed the closet door.’
Rourke Hoffman leapt to his feet. ‘Objection. Calls for speculation.’
‘Sustained,’ the judge said.
‘I’ll rephrase,’ Jessica said. ‘Did you notice anything out of the ordinary about the closet?’
‘Ob
jection
,’ Hoffman repeated, still standing. ‘
Again
calls for speculation. How would the witness know what was ordinary or out of the ordinary in that house?’
‘Sustained.’
Jessica took a beat. ‘Officer Jones, when you looked at the closet, what did you see?’
‘There was no door.’
‘Thank you.’ Jessica walked over to the easel where she had earlier deployed three photographs.
‘I’d like to direct your attention to these three photographs. Specifically, this enlargement. Did you take this photograph?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
The photograph depicted a pair of Timberland boots. Folded on top of the boots was a pair of soiled Levi’s, and on top of the jeans was a red plaid shirt with black pockets and gold piping.
‘As regards these three items, did you receive any more requests or instructions from Detective Cortez?’
‘Yes. He asked that I collect these items as evidence.’
‘What happened next?’
‘I brought them back to the forensic lab at Eighth and Poplar, logged them into evidence and locked them down.’
‘Officer Jones, do you have any reason to doubt that these three evidentiary items were mishandled in any way, or in any way left the chain of evidence as regards this proceeding?’
‘Absolutely not, ma’am,’ he said.
At this, Jessica nodded to Amy Smith, a fellow ADA, who was standing by the door that led to chambers, waiting for the signal. Amy opened the door, and she and another ADA brought in what looked to be a life-size statue draped in a white sheet. As Jessica expected, this drew a reaction from the gallery, as well as the defendant. The two ADAs placed the item between the witness stand and the jury box, next to the TV monitor.
‘I would like to once again play the videotape of the defendant in the back room of DiBlasio’s,’ Jessica said.
She picked up the remote, started the tape. When the recording reached the point where Carter assaulted Lucio DiBlasio, she stopped it. She nodded at Amy Smith, who snapped off the white sheet.
There stood a mannequin, the precise height and weight of the defendant, wearing the same clothing the defendant was wearing in the surveillance video.
If the gallery and jury mumbled when the mannequin was brought in, they emitted a collective gasp now.
‘Do you recognize these items of clothing, Officer Jones?’
‘I do.’
‘Can you verify that they are indeed the same items collected from the defendant’s closet?’
Jones looked to the judge, who nodded. He rose from his seat, walked the few steps to the exhibit. Once there, he examined the bar-coded tags hanging from the shirt, jeans and each of the boots. He returned to the witness stand, sat down.
‘To answer your question, yes, these are the same items of clothing.’
Jessica knew that the judge was going to adjourn for the day in thirty seconds or so, which meant she had thirty full seconds for the jury to absorb the rather striking visual of the man on tape wearing the clothes on the mannequin belonging to the man sitting at the defense table.
ADA Jessica Balzano took the full thirty.
‘Don’t get mad,’ Jessica said.
‘When do I ever get mad?’
Jessica had to laugh. Despite being the warmest, sweetest man she’d ever known, her husband Vincent had the most volatile temper and quickest fuse. She’d long ago figured a way to harness the power.
She gripped the phone a little tighter. ‘I’m stuck in the office for a while.’
Silence. Then, ‘Okay. What did the kids eat yesterday?’
As a detective in Narcotics Field Unit North, Vincent Balzano worked his share of overtime too. It seemed they had just barely figured out how to not be crazy at the same time.
‘Chinese from China House,’ Jessica said. ‘Lemon chicken and vegetable lo mein, I think.’
She heard her husband open the kitchen drawer dedicated to takeout menus. ‘Santucci’s okay?’
Santucci’s square pizza was always a go-to. ‘Perfect. I won’t be late.’
‘I’ll try and save you a slice.’
‘Italians.’
‘I love you.’
Jessica clicked off her phone. She turned to the pile of folders on her desk. She was still new enough to the office to have to carry her share of water and conduct deep background and research for the superstars of the DA’s office.
She pulled the top folder, took out a legal pad and folded it over to a fresh page. She had five cases on her research plate. The first case being built was a firebombing of a small business in southwest Center City. The defendant, currently being held in Curran-Fromhold, was a career criminal named Daniel Farren.
Headquartered on the first floor of the Police Administration Building at Eight and Race streets – a building long ago nicknamed the Roundhouse – the PPD Homicide Unit employed more than ninety detectives, working all three tours, seven days a week.
On the day following the discovery of Edwin Channing’s body, Byrne met with John Shepherd and Joshua Bontrager in the duty room. There were two other detectives present.
Maria Caruso was one of the youngest members of the squad, and one of the few female detectives.
In addition was a detective named Bình Ngô, a second-generation Vietnamese American who had a few years earlier transferred over from the gang unit when an opening opened up in Homicide.
Both Caruso and Bình had led their own investigations in the past. Both were excellent detectives.
The officers compared notes.
‘I’ve got nothing linking the Rousseau family to Edwin Channing,’ Shepherd said. ‘The Rousseaus went to St James’s, shopped at the Whole Foods in Jenkintown, had season tickets to the Flyers. I interviewed the principal at Mark’s school, and as far as we know there is no relative of Edwin Channing who attends. They lived, shopped and socialized in different circles.’ He flipped a few pages. ‘Laura belonged to a knitting club with her sister-in-law Anne-Marie Beaudry, who discovered the bodies.’
‘Have you been able to interview her at length?’ Byrne asked.
Shepherd shook his head. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘As you might imagine, she’s devastated. She spent the first night in Hahnemann, under sedation.’
‘Has she been discharged?’
‘I just called over there,’ Shepherd said. ‘She went home yesterday.’
‘Do you want someone else to conduct the interview?’ Byrne asked.
Shepherd gave this a moment’s thought. ‘It might be best. Right now, I’m the face of the crime.’
‘I’ll get over there today,’ Byrne said.
He put a large photocopy of the handkerchief on the table, the square linen cloth bearing the bloody word
TENET
.
‘And we’ve combed every inch of the Rousseau property?’ he asked.
‘We did,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’ll go over it again.’
‘What about the word?’ Byrne asked. ‘Any ideas?’
Bontrager flipped through his notes. ‘
Tenet
, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a principle, belief, or doctrine generally held to be true; especially one held in common by members of an organization, movement, or profession”.’
‘A movement,’ Shepherd echoed. ‘I can see the execution-style MO as being political, but I don’t see Channing or the Rousseau family as being politically active or radical. They certainly showed no signs of being mobbed up.’
‘What about a religious angle?’
‘A few of the documents we found at Edwin Channing’s house were tax statements regarding donations to his church,’ Maria said.
‘The Rousseaus were Catholic,’ Shepherd said. ‘I’m not seeing any fringe or radical elements to either of them.’
Byrne nodded in agreement. ‘Then, of course, the word
tenet
is a palindrome,’ he said, ‘the same forward as backward. Let’s run that idea, see if there is a signature that has been used in the recent past.’
Maria Caruso made the note.
‘Have we run Tenet as a last name?’ Byrne asked.
Bình nodded. ‘Ran it through white pages in three counties, only a handful of results. Crossed those names with NCIC and PCIC and got nothing. Following up on the few who live in Philly. I found no commercial enterprise or public agency with that name.’
‘What about the Channing autopsy?’
The autopsy had taken place at 9.30 that morning. Bình had met with the medical examiner at the morgue on University Avenue.
Death for all four victims had come as a result of massive blood loss due to ballistic trauma. All four victims were shot at near point-blank range in the center of the chest. Because the projectiles were of a large caliber, the bullets had exited the victims and were recovered at the scene.
The only other marks on the bodies were ligature marks where the victims had been bound to a chair.
‘The preliminary on Edwin Channing was that he was relatively healthy for a man his age,’ Bình said. ‘He had mild emphysema, took Digoxin and Atenolol, and had a slightly enlarged prostate. Other than that, he was in pretty good shape.’
‘What about that Med-Alert button?’
‘The ME believes that as Edwin Channing’s muscles began to collapse, his weight against the chair activated the button. The only prints on the device were Channing’s.’
Byrne thought about this. If the button had not been activated, it might have been days or weeks before his body was discovered.
‘What about the Rousseaus?’
‘Not much. High blood pressure on the father. Laura Rousseau had bronchitis. The son was in perfect shape.’
Byrne made a note to try and red-line the toxicology reports pending on all four victims. Toxicology, like DNA matches, took time.
‘And we have no police or SafeCam footage from either scene?’ Byrne asked.
SafeCam was a fairly new citizen outreach program whereby the location of private surveillance cameras – those owned by homeowners and business owners – were mapped by the PPD and Homeland Security.
If and when a crime occurred near the location of a particular SafeCam camera, the department would contact the homeowner or business owner to see if there was any footage. Not all SafeCam participants had systems that recorded audio and video to a hard drive or Secure Digital card, and they were in no way legally bound by law to share the footage, if it existed.
Despite this, the program had, to date, been a resounding success, at least as far as the department was concerned. With more than three thousand SafeCams in existence, in a little over two years there had been nearly four hundred cases solved.
‘We have two police cameras on that street, which unfortunately have been down for almost a month,’ Maria said. ‘There are two people on the SafeCam program who might have been in range on the Channing case.’ She flipped a few pages in her notebook. ‘One is a resident, a Marcus Boulware. He checked his DVR for the time frame and there was nothing.’ A few more pages. ‘The other is a commercial establishment called Nail Island. They were closed for the weekend, and I haven’t been able to reach the owner.’
‘Is the store camera visible from the street?’ Byrne asked.
Maria nodded. ‘It’s attached to the small balcony on the second floor over the main entrance. If it was on, and recording, and the footage hasn’t been dumped, we might have something.’
‘Good,’ Byrne said. ‘Let’s stay on it.’
Maria made the note.
‘Edwin Channing was discovered wearing a blazer, dress shirt and tie,’ Byrne said. ‘He was also wearing pajama bottoms and slippers. A yellow cotton robe was found on top of a small pile of clothing in the corner of the living room.’
‘Maybe he was getting ready to go out,’ Maria said.
‘The man across the street, Perry Kershaw, said that Channing was pretty much a home body. I don’t see him getting dressed up like that to head out at night,’ Byrne said.
‘Maybe he’d just got home,’ Maria said.
‘It’s possible.’
‘I don’t know about you guys,’ Bontrager said, indicating Byrne and Shepherd, ‘but if I’m changing from pajamas, getting ready to go out, I put my pants on first, then shirt, then tie. If I’m out, and I’m wearing a coat and tie, the first thing I take off when I get home is my tie. Not my pants, shoes and socks.’
‘Same here,’ Shepherd said.
Byrne agreed. ‘What was Laura Rousseau wearing?’
Shepherd flipped through his notes. ‘She was barefoot, wearing a pair of dark brown… Monte Carlo pants? Maria?’
Maria nodded. ‘It’s a casual style. Mostly pull-on, elastic waist,’ she said. ‘Not quite like sweats or workout clothing, but casual.’
‘She was also wearing a white cowl-neck sleeveless top,’ Shepherd said. ‘Calvin Klein.’
The three men looked to Maria.
‘I suppose it’s not that strange, but the top is a lot dressier than the slacks. When I went through the scene, especially Laura Rousseau’s closet, she looked pretty well put together. It doesn’t seem like an outfit she would leave the house in.’
‘It looks like she was cooking dinner, or had just finished, when the home was invaded,’ Byrne said. ‘If she was in for the evening, you’d think she would have fully changed into loungewear.’
Maria nodded. ‘When I get home from work, I’m out of my work clothes in about ten seconds. Pet the dog, pour the Chardonnay, then it’s right into my sweats and a T-shirt. Some days it’s straight to the wine. I have a very forgiving dog.’
‘So you think the victims are being made to put these items of clothing on?’ Bình asked.
‘Just about anything is possible at this point,’ Byrne said. He tapped the photos of Laura Rousseau and Edwin Channing. ‘A big part of this is why was Laura Rousseau singled out to be mutilated? Why not her husband and son?’
No one had an answer to this.
Josh Bontrager’s cell phone chirped. He stepped away, answered the call. A few seconds later he returned.
‘We’ve got something on the ballistics,’ he said.
‘Channing matches the other three?’ Byrne asked.
‘Let’s go find out.’
The Forensic Science Center was a state-of-the-art, heavily fortified building at Eighth and Poplar streets. In the basement was the firearms identification unit. On the first floor was the crime scene unit, document examination unit, the chem lab – mostly used for the identification of drugs – as well as Criminalistics, which handled the processing of blood, hair and fiber. The first floor of the FSC was also home to the DNA lab.
Firearms, Documents and CSU personnel were all sworn law-enforcement officers. Everyone else was a civilian.
In his early fifties, Sergeant Jacob Conroy was the commander of FIU. After having spent years on patrol in southwest Philly, he’d transferred to evidence intake, the unit by which all evidence was stored, collated, handed out for court.
Based out of Fort Hood, Texas, Jake had risen through the ranks of the army’s 2nd Armored Division. This served him well when he applied to become a ballistics examiner in FIU. In the past few years he had consulted and worked with the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Homeland Security and any number of joint task forces.
Today he was giving a brief tour to a small group of visitors, law enforcement officers from mainland China.
‘The purview of the unit is to examine everything from firearms to firearm-related evidence: cartridges, cartridge cases, specimens,’ Jake said. ‘A lot of the time we attend autopsies, working with the ME as to ammo used, and what to look for.’
While Jake Conroy wrapped up the tour with a brief stop at the unit’s small but exotic museum of weaponry, Byrne made a phone call to Anne-Marie Beaudry, Angelo Rousseau’s sister. Once again, he got a voicemail recording.
He hung up just as Conroy returned.
‘Speak of the man,’ Conroy said.
‘And up he pops,’ Byrne said. ‘Good to see you, Jake.’
They shook hands.
‘Do you know Detective Bontrager?’ Byrne asked.
‘Only by reputation,’ Jake said. ‘Nice to meet you, detective.’
‘You as well,’ Bontrager said. ‘And please call me Josh.’
Jake gestured to the walls around them. There were no windows in FIU, of course. He looked at Byrne.
‘Haven’t seen you in daylight for a while.’
Byrne smiled. ‘It’s the garlic.’
Conroy nodded to the items on his examining table.
‘This one’s got me thinking,’ he said.
‘Channing?’
‘Yeah.’
Four bodies on one shooter got the attention of everyone, all the way to the federal level. The PPD wanted nothing more than to shut this psychopath down before there was any kind of intervention by the Feds.
‘I got together with Mark DeBellis on this.’ Sergeant DeBellis was the examiner working the Rousseau case. ‘I think we have something.’
Jake Conroy picked up a pair of envelopes on his desk, opened each of them, then unwrapped the contents from their tissue bindings. He walked over to the microscope against the far wall.
It was a state-of-the-art universal comparison microscope, which permitted comparative investigations of traces on fired ammunition, tool marks, documents and much more. With it, the examiner could inspect and correct images directly on a high-definition monitor and immediately print them.
Jake put one of the projectiles on the right-hand side of the stage, on a piece of wax; the other on the left. He then physically turned one bullet to match the markings on the other.
Byrne looked at the image on the screen. To his eye, they looked almost identical.
‘What are your thoughts?’ Jake asked.
‘I’m thinking a Mauser .380,’ Byrne said.
‘I was thinking that too.’
‘Great minds.’
‘But now I have other ideas.’
‘Such as?’
‘I’m thinking a Makarov.’
Byrne looked at Bontrager and back again. ‘A Makarov,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of them, but wouldn’t know one if I was firing one.’
‘It’s a Russian design, but it’s been manufactured in a lot of places over the years. East Germany, Bulgaria, Albania. China, too.’
‘Available here?’
‘Oh yeah. Very fine weapon. We’ve run across our share.’
Jake left the room for a moment, came back with a semi-automatic weapon. In the world of handguns, there was a lot of junk, but there were also works of art. The Makarov looked to be in the latter group.
He ejected the magazines, gently pulled back the slide, telling everyone present that the firearm was not loaded. They all knew as much, but the gesture was understood and always appreciated. As odd as it might sound, the FIU was one of the safest places in Philly.
‘The Makarov 9x18,’ Jake said.
Byrne took the weapon from the man, hefted it, sighted it. Jake Conroy was right. It had a beautiful balance. He handed it to Josh Bontrager.
‘I’m running them all through NIBIN later today,’ Jake said.