Prime Witness

Chapter Thirty-two

This noon Lenore and I order out for lunch from the office, sandwiches in brown bags from the greasy spoon a block away. While one of the secretaries is running for these we are talking strategy, and poring over the list of Adrian’s witnesses. Something which by law we are forced to exchange.

The artifice of his case at this point is beginning to emerge. The defense in a capital murder trial is always a variation on some age-old theme; in this case that somebody else did it.

Adrian will put his own flourish on this old saw. Using the unsolved Scofield murders as a diversion, he starts with our own hypothesis that someone else did the Scofield crimes. That we agree on this premise gives his case a gloss of legitimacy.

From his witness list, the experts assembled, we can surmise the main point of attack, an all-out assault on the factual distinctions that set the Scofield killings apart from the other murders. If someone else did the Scofields, and if the differences in the MO between these crimes and the others appears illusory, Adrian is halfway home.

The flanking move is his secret vandal. A planned coup de grace aimed at the head of our case. If credible, this witness can destroy the only link binding Iganovich to the incriminating evidence in the van.

Lenore and I study his list like some seer perusing tea leaves. There’s a lot of misdirection here. Both sides have seeded these with deliberate distractions, an ocean of red herrings, people with whom they have rubbed shoulders during their investigation, but who have nothing meaningful to offer in the case. In this way it is easy to conceal the handful of actual witnesses, to put the other side to a great deal of work before trial.

For my part, Adrian now has the name of Julie Park’s former hair-dresser, and the guy who read the gas meter at her apartment building, this along with two dozen others whose only knowledge of the facts in these cases is what they’ve read in the papers or seen on the tube.

But one reaps what he sows. For the most part, studying Adrian’s list is a barren exercise. It is a column of names and addresses, the bare minimum required by law. We are also entitled to any written reports of testimony prepared by witnesses. Adrian has kept all of this verbal.

In the frame for this trial we have had little time to check his witnesses, to send Claude and his minions to talk to many of these names, to winnow away the chaff. We are stabbing in the dark as to which of these people is Adrian’s magic pellet, his mystery vandal. I’m scoping down the column of names with the point of my pen, an idle exercise until I hit one that sounds familiar.

“James Sloan.” I look at Goya. “Any bells?”

She shakes her head.

I go down the balance of the sheet. Nothing.

I come back to “Sloan.” I’m wondering where I’ve heard this name. Something recent, in the last several weeks.

I pick up the phone, dial a number. A female voice answers.

“Ester, Paul Madriani across the street,” I say.

Ester Peoples is the docket clerk who handles filings for the criminal courts in the main lobby of the Davenport County Courthouse. I can hear her chewing on something. Another bureaucrat donating her lunch hour.

“Can you check a name for me, on the computer?”

“Sure. How far back?”

“A year,” I say.

I give her James Sloan, spelling the last name. I hear the clicking of keys. Then: “Which one do you want?” she says.

“More than one James Sloan?” I say.

“One guy,” she says, “three convictions.”

“What for?”

“One count arson, reduced to malicious mischief, two counts vandalism. .”

“Bingo,” I say. I get his social security number from Ester, thank her and punch the next line on the phone to call out again. This time I don’t dial, but hit one of the self-dialing numbers up top. Claude does not answer, but on the third ring I hear the voice of Denny Henderson.

He tells me that Claude is on his way over to my office. Dusalt is my first witness this afternoon. We will prep with him only briefly before heading back to court.

“Denny. I want you to pull the most recent booking sheet on one James Sloan.” I read him the social security number, and court file number from Ester.

“Right now?” he says.

“No, yesterday,” I say.

Some grumbling on the line, then dead air. I hold for what seems like ten minutes. Then he’s back on the line.

“Got it,” he says.

“See if there’s the mug photo,” I say.

Some shuffling on the other end. “Charming,” he says.

“You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me guess, a purple do, done up in spikes, pock marks on the face like the bubbles in a sulfur pot?”

“You know the guy?” he says.

“In a manner,” I say.

The porcelain prince, I think. The men’s john at the courthouse the day I ran into Adrian, the punk with his schlong caught in the mesh of his zipper, Chambers’s erstwhile client.

It was the zippered jacket and weird hair. There was something incongruous in the name “James Sloan” when Chambers went through the charade of introducing us that day. This it seems has held the name like some computer batch file at the edges of my recall ever since.

“I want everything you’ve got on him, every arrest file, as soon as you can get it over here. Then I want you to go by the courthouse and get the depositions, the court files on the charges.”

“They won’t let me take the originals,” says Henderson.

“Then copy them.”

He counts up the arrests. “It’ll take all day,” he says.

“You got something better to do?” I tell him he can draw straws with Claude as to who gets this duty. He gives me a groan knowing already that he will come up short in this contest. Claude is in court. I hear a lot of grousing, like he’s about to hang up.

“And Denny.”

“Yeah.”

“Run a current rap sheet on the guy. See if he has any felony convictions anywhere else.” We hang up.

“It would be nice,” I tell Lenore, “if we could hang him out on a felony conviction.” This would be something with which to impeach his credibility before the jury. Convicted felons carry the scar for life.

“Then you know who it is?” says Lenore. “Chambers’s witness.”

“If I know Adrian,” I say.

“But how did he find the guy when we couldn’t?”

“You’re assuming,” I say, “that he did.”

She gives me a look.

“Adrian’s famous for producing witnesses of convenience,” I tell her, “better at curing the blind spots in his case than a faith healer.”

Watching Adrian in court over the years I have learned that the margin of victory is too often measured by the preponderance of perjury emitted by his witnesses, a stench like a good dose of mustard gas from the stand.

She looks at me wide-eyed, that any lawyer, an officer of the court, would do this knowingly, as a matter of course. For all of her street-smarts and barrio background, if you scratch the hard surface of Lenore, underneath you will find a romantic.

“If Adrian Chambers ate nails,” I tell her, “he would pass corkscrews. He does not simply torture the truth, he is more devious.”

Because I have seen it before, I can predict Adrian’s tactic with some confidence.

“When we put Claude on the stand,” I tell her, “to lay the foundation for the evidence of our investigation, Adrian will ask him about our theories on the vandal who broke the window, our futile efforts to find this witness. Thanks to Roland,” I say, “he will build his defense by fulfilling our own prophesies, and modifying the message. In his version, the witness broke the window, but can attest that none of the evidence was inside. It is Adrian’s ethic, any means to defeat the perfidious powers of the state.”

There’s a knock on my door.

“Come in.”

It’s Claude. He’s got a number of files under his arm, folders containing police reports and other business documents compiled during the course of our investigations. He will use these on the stand to refresh his memory in case any details are hazy.

“Ready to do it?” I say.

He makes a face, like no big deal.

“Something for you,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper pulled from one of the files under his arm, a lab report from the State Department of Justice.

“Present from Kay Sellig,” he says.

I read, but it means nothing to me.

“Her people analyzed the paper and clippings that made up the note delivered to your house.” Claude’s talking about the threat delivered with the photo of Sarah.

“Whoever did it got a little sloppy,” he tells us. “One of the word groups clipped out and pasted to the note contained a trademark symbol and a small piece of a logo in one corner. Microscopic,” he says. “But we got lucky. A lab assistant recognized the snippet of logo.”

I look at him, like how was this possible?

“The guy has seen the publication a lot,” he says. “It’s off the title page, the cover sheet to a publication produced for law enforcement agencies. The state Criminal Law Reporter,” says Claude.

I know this publication. Cop shops around the state use it to keep abreast of the latest court decisions in the areas of arrest, and the search and seizure of evidence. I am a subscriber myself, as are a growing legion of lawyers practicing in the field.

“Any ideas?” I say.

Claude wrinkles an eyebrow, like he has his own theories. “We might want to check to see if the Davenport Police subscribe to this thing,” he says. I know what he is thinking: Jess Amara.

“Do it.”

We change gears for the moment, as we are running out of time. I warn him about Adrian’s likely tactic on cross, that he will fish for details on our theory that a vandal may have broken the window of the van, that thanks to the loose tongue of Roland, this now plays a part in the defense case.

He uses a few expletives to describe Overroy. But then he tells me that Roland may have problems of his own. One of the investigators Claude has assigned to Sellig to help her search for the missing piece of cord has talked to the photographer who was processing the stuff the day it disappeared.

“The guy tells us there was somebody hanging around in your library the day they were doing the job, shooting the cord. He was interested in cameras, taking up a hobby, fingering all of their lenses. They got to talkin’,” says Claude.

“Then this guy leaves and an hour later when they go to close up shop they notice that the cord is gone.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Roland.”

“Suddenly he’s a regular shutterbug,” says Dusalt.

This would not surprise me. Embittered by my rejection of his brokered settlement offer, it would be like Roland to take a half measure, not the cord that links all of the murders to the Russian, just some of them. Spread a little pain, sit back and watch.

We will probably find the missing cord the day before the close of our case when I will have to crawl on my knees to Ingel pleading.

Claude looks at Goya. “Did you tell him?” he says.

“Not yet.”

I look at them. “What now?”

It is what Lenore has been waiting to talk to me about. She and Claude have been paring down Adrian’s witness list for two days now, searching for the anticipated alibi, the person or persons who could testify to place Iganovich in Canada at the time of the Scofield murders. If we amend to charge his client, he will want this witness available. Even if we don’t charge he may use the witness, pour water on our case to erode the factual discrepancies between the murders, and then show that his client was out of town for the last one.

“There’s nobody that fits the bill,” she tells me.

We go over the list. Lenore is operating on the theory that any likely witness would be a resident of Canada, someone who saw him up there and who could testify as to the date. The list contains not a single Canadian address.

“What about ticketing agents in this country? Could be a local name who sold him the ticket and would remember him.”

She shakes her head. “We checked that. And something more,” she says. “Some weeks ago Claude checked with the airlines. They just got back to him yesterday. The flights out of Capital City to Canada, there’re four each day. One of the flight attendants on an Air Canada flight thinks she remembers seeing somebody who looked like Iganovich. From a picture,” she says.

“Well then that’s it,” I say.

“The problem is,” says Claude, “when the lady checked her flight schedule, the particular flight in question left Capital City the day after the Scofield murders. She’d been off on maternity leave until that date.”

This sets like molten lead in my veins. A moment of dazed silence. We have been operating from the beginning on the belief that Iganovich could produce an absolute alibi for his whereabouts on the day the Scofields were killed, that he was a thousand miles away. Now on the opening day of trial, Claude and Lenore are telling me that this assumption may be wrong. Our theory in Scofield is beginning to settle in deep squish, grounded on the touchy-feely surmises of the shrinks, their prognostications and profiles for the serial mind. The fact that the Russian was available in town at the time of the murders is, in my book, worth more than a thousand Rorschach tests and psych-evals.

“It may explain,” says Lenore, “why Chambers was so willing to cop a plea on the Scofield counts. Maybe he knows his client did ’em,” she says.

“Damn it,” I say. I’m up out of my chair, pacing behind the desk. “Why is this information just coming in now?” I say.

“Took a while to find the flight attendant. She was out of town. Stays in Capital City on a rotating basis only once every three weeks.” Claude’s got a list of excuses. “Besides,” he says, “she’s equivocal. She thinks it’s him. Not absolutely certain.”

“Still,” I say, “we should have talked to her sooner.”

“Maybe we should charge him.” Lenore’s getting nervous.

I look at Claude. “What kind of a witness would your flight attendant make?”

“You want me to be honest.”

“Brutally,” I tell him.

“Not solid enough to put on the stand,” he says. “Chambers would have her for lunch, ‘maybe it’s him, maybe it’s not.”’

I’m leaning over the desk, looking down at the two of them.

“You can be sure if we charge him, Adrian will pull another witness from his hat,” I say, “some ten-time loser who will testify that he put Iganovich on the plane, kissed him on both cheeks and strapped him in his seat two days before the Scofields bought it.” Silence falls on our little group like a dark cloud. Given the evidence, I would rather have Chambers’s side of this case at this moment.

“How much leeway will Ingel give to amend?” says Lenore. She’s talking about an amendment to add the Scofield charges against Iganovich.

“Maybe to the close of our case-in-chief. Not beyond that,” I say. “Maybe not even that far. It would depend on the evidence. We’d have to have something hot.”

“A percipient witness,” she says, “somebody who saw the Scofields go down, with their own eyes.”

We both look at Claude. He knows what we’re thinking. The prime witness in the trees.

“Give me a lead and I’ll chase it,” he says.

“What have you got on him so far?”

“The spotting scope. Couldn’t trace it to the point of purchase, no usable prints, just one smudged, looked like a thumb,” he says. “Same result with the climbing gear, too common to trace. According to the information from Rattigan at the Center for Birds of Prey, their best guess is that the witness was a poacher, using an owl to kill peregrine falcons, adults and chicks. He figures this was done so whoever it was could work under cover of darkness, with no noisy gunshots to rouse the neighbors. Why they were killing the birds, Rattigan has no idea. He says he could understand if they were taking ’em alive. The birds apparently have some value. In good condition, Rattigan says a mature peregrine is worth in the neighborhood of fifty thousand.”

“Dollars?” I say.

He nods. “We’re in the wrong business. From the bits and pieces,” he says, “bones and feathers we found up in the blind and on the ground, whoever was in those trees that night killed a cool half million on the wing.”

But from what Claude is telling me, in terms of our search for a witness, it all adds up to zero.

“Something I want you to check,” I tell Claude. “Have one of your guys do a title search, over at the county recorder’s office, on the property where the Scofields were killed. I’d like to know who owns it.”

Claude makes a note. “Why?” he says.

“Just a hunch,” I say. “Maybe we’ve been working from the wrong end on this.”

Claude looks at me.

“Maybe we should be working backward from the other end, from the Scofields on the ground back the other way,” I say. “What do we have there?”

“Mice and pellets used to feed the birds, at least according to Rattigan,” says Claude. “Reams of working papers, unfortunately destroyed by Jeanette Scofield and Amara. And the travel claim I gave you. That’s it. Not much.”

I spin around in my chair, paw through a pile of items on the credenza behind me and come up with a single manilla folder. I put it on the desk and open it. Inside is the travel claim made out for Abbott Scofield, but never signed, and the attached receipts. I pick through these. The hotel bill and restaurant receipts. When Lenore looks at me I’m holding the two torn tickets, the ones reading “San Diego Wild Animal Park.”

“The zoo?” I say.

She makes a face, like search me.

I pull the AAA Tour Guide, something Mario left in the bottom drawer of his desk. I look in the front, under “San Diego” for attractions. Nothing. I look under “Other Points of Interest.”

“San Diego Wild Animal Park-see Escondido.”

I thumb back to the E’s. There it is, right under the “Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre.”

I read to Lenore and Claude:

San Diego Wild Animal Park embraces eighteen hundred acres about five miles east of I-fifteen, exit Rancho Parkway. More than twenty-five hundred animals, including elephants, tigers, rhinos, zebras, and giraffes roam over expanses of land that simulate Africa and Asia.

Visitors can view the preserve on a fifty-minute monorail ride or from lookout points along a one-and-three-quarter mile hiking trail. Animal and bird. .

I stop in mid-sentence.

bird shows are presented daily in Nairobi Village. .

My voice trails off. I look at Claude.

“You want me to get an airline ticket to San Diego?” he says.

Claude is stuck here to testify.

“Henderson on the next plane out,” I say. Something no doubt more to Denny’s liking than copying the reams that comprise James Sloan’s criminal history.

Claude Dusalt makes an impressive witness on the stand. Even I am a bit surprised by the bearing he brings to this. Claude has one of those faces, craggy and benign, something aristocratic in that slender, jagged nose, the piercing emerald eyes. He has dressed for the occasion, his best gray pinstripe three-piece. No power suit for this man. He will let his position as chief of detectives speak for itself.

He may be a little frazzled. It was a rush getting here from my office. Claude wanted to connect with the San Diego PD before Henderson’s trip south, a little diplomatic courtesy, and to coordinate in case Denny required assistance. We nearly ran the entire way here to avoid being late.

I lead him through his résumé, thirty years on the force, more than a hundred homicide investigations to his credit, his own estimate. He is here to lay the groundwork for our case.

Behind me, I am competing with the constant hum of human conversation, the undertone of the interpreter in Iganovich’s ear, calling the play by play to the defendant.

We take the murders in chronological order, Julie Park and Jonathan Snider first. Claude tells the jury that he was on the scene in less than an hour after the bodies were discovered, that he took charge to seal off the immediate area along the Putah Creek, and personally supervised the collection of physical evidence at the site.

“Did you oversee the taking of any photographs at the scene, by other officers?” I ask.

“I did.”

I move to the counsel table where Goya has these waiting for me. She hands me a file folder. Inside are three separate sets of photographs, one for the judge. I give these to the bailiff to deliver. A second set goes to Chambers, which I drop on his table, and the third I hand to Claude on the witness stand. I take my time allowing Ingel and Chambers to examine these, waiting for the screaming and gnashing of teeth from Adrian.

These photos are nothing if not inflammatory. Several full-body shots of the victims staked out on the ground are likely to leave the jury wishing it had skipped lunch.

Chambers fingers through them, dropping each facedown on the table after examining it. But he says nothing. Instead when he’s finished he looks at me standing in front of the witness box. The lack of expression in his face forms a veritable green light to go ahead.

This surprises me, but I’m beginning to understand his strategy here. Why bellow about the evidence, the gruesome nature of these crimes, if the premise of your case is that your client did not do them?

The first rule of courtroom combat: don’t complain unless it serves your ends. A lot of whining about these photographs, quibbling over the angles, may leave the jury with the impression that Adrian is trying to mitigate unpardonable crimes.

Instead he will distance the Russian from these acts. He will no doubt shower empathy on the victims’ families in his closing argument and administer a sound hiding to the police and prosecution for failing to find the true perpetrator of these horrid deeds.

Claude makes quick work of the photographs, identifying each as having been taken at the scene. I have them marked for identification and make a motion to put them into evidence.

Ingel looks at Chambers.

“No objection?” The judge seems a little incredulous, but Adrian waves him off.

“I’ll reserve judgment on the photographs until I have seen them all,” says Ingel. He wants a single motion for the photos in all four murders after he has seen the lot.

We repeat the exercise for the photos of Sharon Collins and Rodney Slate. I note Ingel looking hard at the Collins girl, Acosta’s niece, as we go over this shot.

“Is it necessary,” he says, “that we have such graphic pictures?”

What I had not expected, objections from the bench.

“There were brutal crimes committed here,” I tell him. “It’s appropriate that we do something to document that fact,” I say.

“Still,” he says, “we should be sensitive to the survivors.” He paws through the photos to find the one of the Collins girl. “This one,” he says, “is particularly bad.” Then he looks at me to see if I’ve noticed. “And several of these others.” He reaches back into the stack of shots he has already reviewed up on the bench. “I think some of these we can do without.”

Though it is rarely used, the court has the power, on its own motion, to limit evidence which is highly prejudicial in a case. Ingel cites the section of law here and begins winnowing out my photographs, a little cover for the one shot he really wants to exclude, the naked frontal photo of Sharon Collins. He is shameless in his pandering to the delicate sensibilities of Armando Acosta. The clan of the black robe.

I am objecting from below the bench, but to no avail. With a quick slap of his gavel Ingel overrules my objection, and like that sanitizes the visual image of four grisly murders before this jury. He passes on the balance of the photos and lets them go to the jury.

I look over at Chambers, a Cheshire grin painted across his face. The court has done a good day’s work for him, without his even entering the fray.

I take Claude through the details of the crimes. He explains what he saw when he arrived at each of the murder scenes, how the victims were tied off with plastic-coated cord to metal stakes driven into the ground, and how a fifth stake was driven through the abdomen of each victim. He steers away from details, like the extrusion marks on the plastic coating. We will leave that for Kay Sellig and hope that we can find the missing piece of evidence before she testifies.

Claude is leading off for other later witnesses, the campus cop and tow truck operator who first opened the van and found the evidence, and Sellig who will hit cleanup for us.

When this is done in detail, I turn my attention to the one last item.

“Lieutenant Dusalt,” I say, “was there another set of murders, similar in respects to the college students killed here, which you also investigated about this same time?”

“There was,” he says. “The murder of Abbott Scofield, a member of the university faculty, and his former wife, Karen Scofield.”

I cannot afford to leave this for Chambers to take up for the first time in his case-in-chief. To avoid the similarities of these murders would be to leave the impression with the jury that we have something to hide.

“Lieutenant, can you tell the jury, at the time that the Scofield victims were first discovered, did your investigation initially operate on the theory that these crimes, the Scofield murders and the four student victims, were part of a series of crimes committed by a common perpetrator?”

“We did. That was our theory, initially,” he says.

“But as your investigation proceeded, facts came to light which caused you to alter that theory, is that correct?”

“It is.”

“Objection.” Chambers is up. “Leading the witness,” he says.

“Maybe if you would place your question in that form,” says Ingel. He sustains the objection.

I rephrase. “Did you alter your theory as to a single perpetrator in all of these crimes?”

“Yes.”

“And why did you do that?”

“Because certain facts came to light during our investigation, which caused us to suspect that this was not the case. That there was more than one killer at work here.”

“Can you tell the jury what those factors were?”

“There were several discrepancies with the Scofield murders that did not square with the others. The age of the victims for one thing. They were older than the college-age students taken in the first four murders. The method of killing was somewhat different,” he says.

“Also,” he says, “there was considerable facial disfigurement on one of the Scofield victims, Karen Scofield, a practice that was not followed in the murders of any of the other victims.”

He could reach for more, the blind in the trees, the dead birds at the site, the inkling that these have something to do with the Scofield crimes. But Claude is conservative. We have decided to stay away from these things for the time being.

“And what did you conclude, based upon these differences?”

“That there was a second killer, working independently, who was responsible for killing the Scofields, a copycat killer,” he says. “Someone who apparently had followed the details of the first four murders sufficiently to mimic them closely, but not precisely.”

“In your years in law enforcement have you ever experienced or heard of such a so-called copycat crime?”

“It’s not unheard of,” he says. “I’ve never investigated one before, but I know of cases.”

“And at the present time, the officers investigating the Scofield murders, are they continuing to operate on the belief that another killer, not Mr. Iganovich, is responsible for the Scofield crimes?”

“They are,” he says, “unless and until we receive other evidence, other information that may cause us to change our minds.”

Claude and I have carefully gone over this, some middle ground giving us enough wiggle room to charge the Russian if the evidence turns up, if we can find our prime witness. I take my chair, turn Claude over to Chambers.

Adrian is slow, deliberate in his movements toward the witness.

“May I approach?” he says, asking permission of Ingel to walk up to Claude on the stand. Adrian’s holding photographs in his hand.

“You may,” says Ingel.

“Lieutenant Dusalt. I’m going to show you some photographs and ask you if you can identify these.” He hands three eight-by-ten glossies to Claude. About the same time Bob Haselid, Adrian’s Keenan Counsel, delivers a set to the judge and drops another on me. These are investigative photographs of the Scofield murder scene, subpoenaed from our files by Adrian during discovery. He has everything but pictures of the bird blind, which is still under wraps of Judge Fisher’s modified discovery order, at least until we can find the witness.

“Do you recognize these photographs?” says Adrian.

Claude studies them, turns them over to examine the evidence stamp on the back. “They’re taken by our department,” he says.

“The Davenport County Sheriff’s Department?”

“Yes.”

“And what do they depict? What are these pictures of?”

“They are various angle shots of the victims, Karen and Abbott Scofield and the murder scene.”

“Did you direct the taking of these photographs?”

“I did.”

“You have the other photographs there, next to you.” Adrian’s pointing to the shots I have already put into evidence, what is left of my legion of photographs.

He reaches in and grabs one of these. “This is a good one,” he says. He holds it up from a distance to show the judge and me. It’s a closeup of a hand, a fist clenched in the agonies of death, flesh the color of blued steel. This is blood trapped, coagulated at the extremity by the confines of the cord, tightly coiled around the wrist.

“What is this photograph?”

Claude looks at it, reads the label on the back side. “That’s the right hand of Jonathan Snider.”

“Good. Now look at this photograph.”

Claude takes the second shot from Chambers, again reading the label on the back. He looks at the lawyer.

“Can you identify that photograph, lieutenant?”

“It’s the right hand of the victim Abbott Scofield.”

“Looking at the two photographs side-by-side, can you tell me,” says Adrian, “is there any difference in the way the rope is tied around the wrist of each of the victims?”

“No, a common loop,” says Claude.

“And the knot used to tie the cord, any difference between the two knots?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“Well, you’re the investigating officer, if there was a difference in the knots you’d be aware of it, wouldn’t you?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, is there a difference?”

“No, it’s a common knot. If I were to tie ten, I’d probably tie nine like that myself.”

“But there’s no difference?” says Adrian, coming back to the point at hand.

“No. There’s no difference.”

“Besides the knots and the way the victims were tied off on the ground, was there any difference in the position of the victims on the ground as between the college students and the Scofield victims?”

Claude thinks for a moment. “No appreciable difference.”

“Was there any difference?”

“No.” A grudging admission.

“The metal stake that was used to kill each of the six victims, the students and the Scofields, was there any difference in the positioning of this stake in the bodies, generally?”

“Objection. The witness is not a medical expert.” I’m up trying to give Claude a little close cover.

“I’m not asking for medical expertise,” says Chambers. He turns on me. “I assume the witness knows the difference between the head on the human anatomy, and the abdomen. Were all of the stakes driven into the abdomen in generally the same location, at roughly the same angle?”

“The witness may answer,” says Ingel.

Chambers smiles at me, tight, intense.

“Yes.” No more from Claude but the bare essentials.

He takes Claude over the falls on the arrangement of clothing, in an arc over the heads of all six victims, and draws a quick concession that there was no marked difference in the arrangement of these items in the Scofield cases from the others.

Chambers moves away from the stand, a few steps.

“Now the facial disfigurement,” he says. “You make a big thing of the facial disfigurement of Karen Scofield.”

“I guess I’m funny that way,” says Claude. “To me, tearing an eye from the head of a human being is a big thing.”

Ingel looks at him sharply, but says nothing.

“You know what I mean,” says Chambers. “Is it really that significant in terms of distinguishing one of these killings from the others?”

“According to some people,” says Claude. “The psychiatrists and psychologists who study such things.”

“Oh, so then you’re relying on the advice of others in this.”

“Yes.”

“So you yourself wouldn’t know whether such facial disfigurement is significant, a basis to distinguish these crimes?”

“Not really.”

Adrian seems happy with this.

“And of course,” he says, “if the facial disfigurement were incidental to the crime, an unintended consequence of other violence, it might take on less significance, perhaps no significance at all?”

“What do you mean?”

“Isn’t it possible that this injury could have happened during the physical altercation prior to death, perhaps when the victim was being initially attacked or restrained, that it was not specifically intended?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well surely, lieutenant, during your years as a law enforcement officer you’ve seen injuries arising from assaults, physical altercations between people? Haven’t you ever seen an injury to the eye occasioned during such an altercation?”

“I suppose,” he says.

“And if a perpetrator of a crime attacked six separate people assaulting each of them, and in one case he just happened to injure an eye, perhaps take an eye out during the altercation, would you attribute any particular significance to that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If it was unintended?” he says. “I mean if you knew it was unintended, you wouldn’t go running off and assume that because of the eye injury, that this crime necessarily was committed by a different perpetrator?”

“Not if I knew it was an unintended injury.”

“Then it would really be insignificant, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. I suppose.”

“Lieutenant Dusalt, do you know whether the loss of Karen Scofield’s eye was intentional or unintentional?”

Claude looks at me.

“I’m going to object to that,” I say. “Calls for medical expertise.”

“No. No,” says Chambers. “I’m not asking him for any opinion on his part. I want to know whether he has any facts, knows of any information from whatever source, that would inform him as to whether the eye of Karen Scofield was removed intentionally or was the result of some unintentional act.”

“The witness will answer the question,” says Ingel.

“I don’t know.”

“So you do not know whether it was the result of an intentional act?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know whether it’s really significant or not, do you?”

The many faces of pain from Claude on the stand. It is the problem with logic, how it has a way of coming around and biting you in the butt.

“Well?” says Chambers.

“No,” says Claude. “I don’t know for certain whether it’s significant.”

“Well, we can disregard that then, can’t we?”

Nothing but stone silence and deadly looks from Claude.

Like pulling a set of rear molars, Adrian has dragged him this far.

“Let’s talk,” he says, “about the cord used to tie the victims and the metal stakes. Let’s take the cord first,” he says. Adrian looks at me as he says this.

“This is pretty common stuff, isn’t it? I mean you or I could go out and purchase a similar type of cord in a dozen different stores in this town today if we wanted to, couldn’t we?”

“I haven’t counted the stores that sell it.”

“But it’s not just sold in one store?”

“No.”

“This is what we commonly refer to as clothesline cord, isn’t it?”

“I’ve heard it called that.”

“It’s made up of interior filaments and covered with a white plastic sheathing?”

“Yes.”

“And the metal tent stakes, these were common metal stakes, L-shaped, with a point at one end, what I would find if I went into a store that sold hiking gear, back-packing equipment?”

“I suppose.”

“Now you testified,” says Adrian, “that one of the factors that caused you to change your theory that it was a single common murderer who killed all of the victims, including the Scofields, was the fact that different cord and stakes were used in the Scofield case from the other murders?”

“That’s correct.”

“How did these differ?”

“They were made by different manufacturers.”

“And you could tell this when you looked at them?”

“No. I was advised by our lab.”

Adrian gives him a questioning look.

“The State Crime Lab,” says Claude.

I could object on grounds of hearsay, but what is coming in here is doing us no harm. It will only serve to reinforce what Sellig will tell the jury later.

“So the cord used in the student murders was all made by the same company, and the same is true about the stakes. Whereas the cord used to tie down the Scofield victims was made by another manufacturer, as were the stakes?”

“That’s correct.”

“There was nothing else, no other characteristic other than the point of manufacture that served to distinguish these items one from the other?”

Claude looks at me, a dilemma. He would, of course, like to tell the jury that all of the pieces of cord used in the student murders came from a common length, the balance of which was found in the defendant’s van, but he has a problem. Without the missing piece we cannot say this.

I’m out of my chair. “Your honor, may we approach the bench?”

Ingel waves us on.

Adrian and I huddle with the judge.

Ingel is being scrupulous here. He cannot allow the state to put testimony on the record concerning evidence we may not be able to produce. Adrian of course knows this, and has struck early to force the issue, to exploit this weakness in our case.

“Your honor, Mr. Chambers knows we have not had time to find the missing piece of cord. He knows there is a common link for all of these pieces. He’s trying to put the issue before the jury before we can locate it.”

Chambers looks at me. “You lost the cord,” he says.

I ignore him, appeal to the judge. “But the witness can’t answer the question truthfully,” I say.

Ingel puts a little pressure on Chambers, subtle hints that maybe he could withdraw this line of questioning, reserve it for a later witness, perhaps Sellig.

“It’s a fair question,” says Adrian. “Nothing improper,” he says. “It is one thing to ask the court to give some leeway, another to ask me to lay down and roll over.”

Ingel looks at me. “Does your witness have the missing piece of cord?”

“You know he doesn’t, your honor.”

“Then the truthful answer to the question is no.” He cuts me off before I can say more, puts an end to the little sidebar. We retreat.

Chambers has the question read to the witness by the court reporter.

Claude sits composed in the box. While we have been talking he has been thinking.

“The answer to your questions is yes,” he says, “there was another characteristic difference in these items,” he says.

Ingel nearly tears his head off, turning to look at the witness, ready to come out of his chair at the mention of the cord.

“The metal stakes,” says Claude, “the ones used to kill the students were each sharpened to a point, probably on a grinding wheel. The ones used to kill the Scofields were not.”

Adrian looks at him, dead in the eyes.

“I was thinking about the cord,” he says. “Were there any other differences, other than the common manufacturer, that would distinguish the cord in the student cases from the Scofield cord?”

Claude bites his lip.

“Answer the question,” says Ingel.

“Not at this time,” he says.

“Yes or no?” says Adrian. “Were there any other. .”

“No.”

“Thank you.”

Chambers moves away from the witness stand, takes a few seconds to regroup, and then comes back at Claude.

“Now, Lieutenant Dusalt, isn’t it possible under the circumstances that you describe that a single killer could have murdered all six of the victims in question, the students as well as the Scofields, and simply used different cord and metal stakes for the last two murders, the Scofields?”

“Possible,” he says.

“I mean these items are readily available to anyone who wants to purchase them at a number of stores, are they not?”

“Yes.”

“And if you did purchase them, there’s no absolute assurance that they would be of the same manufacture as the original cord and stakes used in the first four murders, is there?”

“I suppose not.”

“As long as we’re supposing,” says Adrian, “let’s suppose that whoever killed the students discarded his supply of cord and stakes after the second set of murders. Threw them away,” he says, “maybe dumped them in a trash can, or better yet, tossed them through an open window of a vehicle in a public garage, some stranger’s vehicle, to get rid of them,” he says. “Suppose this had happened. Wouldn’t it be necessary for this person to obtain other cord and stakes?”

I’m about to come up and object when Claude answers.

“Unless he had access to the vehicle where they were dumped,” says Claude. “Then I would think he would go back and get them.”

“Oh, but let’s suppose that he didn’t have access to such a vehicle. Then he’d have to get new cord, new stakes, wouldn’t he?”

“Objection, calls for speculation on the part of the witness.”

“Sustained.”

Claude does not answer. He does not have to. The picture painted by Adrian for the jury is clear, bold and blunt, all the finesse of a crayon wielded by a child. Still, it is effective, like any good defense, simple and consistent.

“Lieutenant Dusalt, you talked earlier about the defendant’s van, found in the public garage on the university campus. You’re aware that at the time the van was discovered by authorities that a rear window on the passenger side of that vehicle was broken, smashed out?”

“I am.”

“During the course of your investigation did you, your department, or the prosecutor form any theories as to how that window came to be broken?”

It is the problem when you follow a lead, search for evidence and come up empty. This is now pointed out to the jury.

“For a while we thought that perhaps the window had been broken as an act of random vandalism.” Claude does his best to make this sound as if we abandoned this theory. It doesn’t work.

“Did you conduct an investigation on the basis of that theory? Did you search for such a vandal?”

“We did.”

“And were you successful in finding that person, the person responsible for breaking the window of the van?”

“No.”

“I have nothing further of this witness,” he says.

From beyond the interpreter I can see a big smile, broken pickets and a lot of yellow to the gums, Andre Iganovich looking my way.

I look over at Lenore, at the sinking feeling written on the wrinkles of her brow. Many more days like this and Adrian will not need much for his case-in-chief. A few carefully crafted lies could break our back.