Undue Influence

Chapter 24

This morning as the jury files into the courtroom, Dr. Angelo’s plastic skull of Melanie Vega rests on the top shelf of the evidence cart, its head pinioned by the steel rod which protrudes over the front edge of the cart, empty eye-sockets engaging each juror as they take their seats. Cassidy has no doubt arranged this grim greeting; Melanie’s plastic proxy silently asserting its own brief for justice.

Laurel seems gripped by this as she sits next to me, flanked by Harry on the other side; a gruesome visage, she seems to falter just a bit.

As Cassidy arrives in the courtroom, she goes through the same exercise she has performed each day for the past week. Dressed to kill, no pun intended, in a designer suit, she wears a pair of white running shoes. In full view of the jury she opens a paper bag and pulls her leather pumps with two-inch heels. She changes into these at the counsel table. This is a message to the jury that she is no Mercedes-minded lawyer, but just one of the folks, a working stiff like them.

This has several of the women looking, silently taking note. The subtle messages that influence.

As she tries her case, Cassidy is methodical in the way that Sherman was on his march to the sea. She leaves in her wake a scorched landscape of twisted testimony and half-told truths. If there is a single piece of physical evidence she suspects might give us comfort, she will torture it until any effort to explain its relevance is lost on the jury.

Yesterday Morgan brought on a fibers expert who identified the bits of fluff from Melanie’s bathroom floor. She goaded the witness until he finally identified the fibers as similar in all respects to carpet fibers taken from the rug found in Laurel’s possession at the time of arrest.

All during this Laurel was protesting in my ear that the carpet taken in Reno was hers, from her own apartment.

This seemed to be borne out by the witness’s later testimony. Three minutes later, under cross, I got him to concede that the fibers were as common as grains of sand on a beach, sold by a score of manufacturers and found in half the homes of America. The witness readily conceded that he could not state with scientific certainty that the fibers in the evidence bag came from Laurel’s rug. I could tell that by the time he left the stand the man was wondering why Cassidy had called him at all. But then she leaves no stone unturned. After all, the other side can always stumble.

For Morgan it was just one more reach, but no ring, so this morning we do ballistics.

Nico Perone is the resident ballistics expert. Short, balding, and with a gut that hangs over his belt like Santa’s toy bag. As a witness he does not make a good appearance. If you were selling scandal on a national scale and Nico had a corner on the market, you would not race to put him on the tube’s morning talk-show circuit. The man’s respiration is elevated by the two-step climb into the witness box. Perone could work up a good sweat in January on a stroll in the Arctic. As for his dress, Nico wears part of this morning’s breakfast and what looks like last evening’s dinner on his tie.

In the battle of cops against criminals, he is a partisan and a front-line fighter, a friend and follower of Jimmy Lama’s. There is nothing objective about Perone’s science. I have seen him slip and stumble in a few cases, usually into pits of his own making, stretching the evidence to fit the crime.

This morning he is on the stand, ready to swim in his own perspiration. The sleeve ends of his coat are already dripping from where they have mopped his head, and Cassidy, the friendly one, has merely asked him his name.

They cut through the preliminaries, the courses Nico has taken at the FBI Crime Lab in Washington and other places that qualify him as a witness. Morgan shows him the bullet in the little bag, and he identifies it as the one he examined and upon which he rendered a report in connection with Melanie’s murder.

‘Mr. Perone, what can you tell us about the characteristics of this bullet? Its caliber and weight?’

‘Nine-millimeter, Luger,’ he says.

‘Is that a make?’

‘Style,’ says Nico. ‘Some people call it a parabellum. First introduced for use in the Luger automatic pistol in the early part of the century,’ he says. ‘That one weighed in at a hundred and twelve grains. I’d be willing to bet, however, that it was a hundred and fifteen when it was made.’

‘Is that a professional opinion?’

‘Yeah. ’Cuz they don’t make it in a hundred-and-twelve-grain weight,’ he says.

There’s a few smiles in the jury box.

‘I’d take book,’ he says. ‘The rest of that bullet got itself lost somewhere inside the victim,’ he tells her.

‘You mean fragments that dislodged?’ says Cassidy.

‘Yeah.’

Watching them work together, Nico and Morgan, is an experiment in chemistry. Nico has never come across as professional. He has all the polish of a cast-off pair of shoes on the feet of some vagrant.

‘Besides its caliber, can you tell the jury what kind of bullet this is, what it’s made of?’ she says.

‘A lead alloy,’ he tells her. ‘That’s what is known as a lead hollow-point. That particular kind of bullet comes in three types,’ he says, ‘lead hollow-point, lead with a partial steel jacket, and a fully jacketed round. A jacket means the lead in the bullet is either partially or fully covered in a steel outer casing,’ he says.

‘What’s the difference in performance?’ says Cassidy.

‘Lead and partial-jacket have a tendency to jam, but they got more stopping power. Full jacket works smoothly through the action of the firearm, don’t jam as much, but it don’t spread either. Less stopping power. The lead, when it hits something hard, tends to spread. You can see on this one we got a little mushroom.’ Nico’s holding the bag with the bullet in his hand now.

‘A mushroom?’ says Cassidy.

‘Yeah. You can see where the bullet hit something, probably bone, and ballooned out at the tip.’ He points with his thumbnail.

‘See? Right there,’ he says.

‘And this would cause more damage?’

‘You bet. If a bullet spreads, it transfers more kinetic energy to the target. That causes more damage. What shooters call stopping power.’

‘Would you consider this a pretty deadly round?’

‘Sure. At close range it’s real effective. What many police agencies use today, though most of their bullets are jacketed.’

‘So in your professional opinion the bullet in this bag has more stopping power than bullets used in standard-issue police weapons of the same caliber?’

‘Oh, yeah. Whoever used this one was looking to do a number,’ he says.

‘Objection.’

‘Sustained. Just answer the questions,’ says Woodruff.

Cassidy moves away for a moment to regroup. This gives Nico a chance to wet his coatsleeve to the elbow.

‘Let me ask you, Mr. Perone, did you have occasion to perform any kind of microscopic examination of the bullet in that bag?’

‘I did.’

‘And what did you find?’

‘The lands and grooves, the marks left on the bullet from the barrel of the firearm, indicated a right-hand twist. Pretty common for many types of manufactured handguns.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Yeah. There was something wrong with the gun. Besides the lands and grooves, there were little ridges cut in the sides of the bullet, some kind of a defect in the bore of the weapon.’

‘Could you tell what caused this?’

He makes a face and shakes his head. ‘If I had to guess — ’

‘No guessing. Your professional opinion,’ she says.

‘Sure. My professional opinion. I would guess maybe some oxidation in the barrel. Little pits of rust,’ he says. ‘Sometimes these cause little microscopic ridges that drag on the bullet as it runs down the barrel.’

Cassidy’s giving him slow nods on all of this. Her task here is not to score any particular points. A bullet is a bullet. This particular one happened to kill Melanie Vega.

Instead Morgan’s role is to account for any anomalies in the evidence, to raise any possible inconsistencies before we can, and to resolve them as nothing unusual, to steal any wind we might try to use to puff up the sails of our case, to prevent us from making our own theory of what happened seem more plausible than hers.

She moves to the evidence cart and comes back with another little bag, this one containing the brass cartridge found on the floor at the scene.

‘Mr. Perone, I would ask you to look at the bullet casing in this bag and ask if you’ve had an opportunity to examine it.’

He turns the bag over, studies it for a moment.

‘Yeah. I have.’

‘Can you tell us what caliber it is?’

‘It’s a nine-millimeter Luger.’

‘The same as the bullet in the other bag?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Is there any way that you can tell whether this bullet and this cartridge were at one time part of the same loaded or complete bullet?’

‘Very difficult,’ he says. ‘Particularly with a nine-millimeter parabellum. Because they don’t generally crimp the round when they load ’em.’

‘What do you mean by “crimp the round”?’

‘When you load a cartridge, the last step in the process is called seating the bullet. This can be done manually, with a loading press, or by a machine in a plant. Either way, when the bullet is seated, the die, the part that presses it into the cartridge casing, either crimps the edge of the casing a little around the bullet to hold it or it doesn’t. On the nine-millimeter most dies don’t crimp.’

‘Why is that significant?’

‘If the casing is crimped, it’s difficult, but there’s a chance that you can match up irregularities around the mouth of the casing with impressions left on the bullet where it’s crimped. If it ain’t crimped you can forget it.’

‘And this one?’

‘You can forget it.’

‘So there’s no way you can tell us whether this bullet and this cartridge were part of the same complete unfired bullet at one point?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Let’s turn our attention to the cartridge casing,’ she says. ‘Is there anything you can tell us about this casing?’

‘It’s a reload,’ he says.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means the cartridge has been fired and reloaded — in the case of that one, many times.’

‘How can you tell this?’

‘Tool marks on the rim for one thing. A semiautomatic pistol — that bullet is generally fired from a semiautomatic — ’ discharges the casing after it’s fired. It ejects it from an ejection port, an opening in the side or the top of the firearm. To do that, an ejector has to grip the rim of the empty cartridge and pull it out of the chamber. This leaves little tool marks on the rim.’

‘How many tool marks did you find on the cartridge in question?’

‘At least eight that I could identify.’

‘Would this mean that the bullet was reloaded at least eight times?’

‘Not necessarily. Some of them could have been caused by whackin’ off.’

Cassidy looks at him like maybe she hasn’t heard him right. Harry starts to snigger. Cassidy shoots him a glance, and Hinds coughs to cover up.

‘Manual ejection,’ he says. ‘You put the bullet in the magazine, maybe with others, and then manually you work the bolt or the return back and forth, seating the bullets in the chamber and ejecting them one at time, without firing. Sometimes people do this to make sure a gun won’t jam when they go to fire it. In the trade, some people call it whackin’ off.’

‘No need to explain,’ she tells him.

Knowing Nico, he might show the jury.

‘But how do you know that all the tool marks on this casing weren’t caused by manual ejection?’

‘Because there’s other marks that tell us it’s a reload.’

‘What kind of marks?’

‘There’s stress and metal fatigue that you can see under a microscope, and what we call sizing marks, along the side of the cartridge. Bullet casings are usually made of brass or some other soft metal. They tend to expand when fired. Once they’re ejected, you ain’t gonna get ’em back into the chamber of the weapon unless you first put ’em in a sizing die and press them back down to size. When you do this, to reload the round, it leaves stress marks on the cartridge. Also, the end of the casing, the part that hits up against the breechblock, will start to show wear after it’s been fired a few times. On this one you can barely read the word Luger.’

‘What does that tell you, Mr. Perone?’

‘That tells me that the casing in your hand has been fired more times than some pimp’s pecker,’ he says.

Perone is Harry’s kind of witness.

‘Wonderful.’ A pained look from Morgan, like see what the state gives her to work with.

‘Let’s keep it on a professional plane,’ says Woodruff.

‘Sorry, your honor.’ Nico gives the judge a grin.

‘Assuming someone didn’t have the equipment to reload this type of ammunition, is it possible for a man or woman to obtain this kind of reloaded ammunition?’

‘Sure. You can get it at any shooting range. Some gun shops sell reloads. You can pick it up at gun shows by the bushel. A million places,’ he says.

This is the critical point that Cassidy is making with this witness — that anybody, including Laurel, could have obtained the bullet that killed Melanie Vega.

‘So there’s no way to tell where this ammunition might have come from?’

‘Not really.’

‘Let me ask you, is there any way to tell what kind of gun this bullet was fired from?’

‘We know that at one time or another it was fired from at least four different firearms. Tool marks, ejection marks, will sometimes give you a clue as to the make of gun. In this case there’s too many marks, some over others. There’s no way with a bullet that has seen that much wear.’

‘So you couldn’t tell us the make or model of the weapon used to kill Melanie Vega?’

‘No.’

‘If the gun were found, would it be possible to do a comparison to match the bullet to the firearm?’

‘Oh, sure. There’s enough of the bullet there. But we’d have to have the gun. Then we could try and do a match.’

Cassidy doing a lot of nodding, the message clear, of course they have no gun because the killer got rid of it.

‘Mr. Perone, have you ever performed gunpowder-residue tests?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you explain to the jury what such tests are designed to do?’

The hair on my neck starts to rise.

‘GSR is used to determine if nitrates or other residues from the discharge of a firearm have deposited themselves on the hands, face, or clothing of a suspect. The residues can be chemically collected and removed for testing.’

‘And let me ask you — did your office try to perform gunpowder-residue tests on the defendant, Laurel Vega, immediately following her arrest and removal to Capital County?’

‘Your honor, may we approach?’ I’m on my feet.

Woodruff waves us on, a sidebar to the other side of the bench, away from the witness.

‘What are you getting into, Ms. Cassidy? Remember we talked about inferences,’ says the judge.

There’s a lot of whispering at the bench, hands shading the side of mouths.

‘I haven’t said a thing about what happened to her hands,’ says Morgan.

‘But you’re getting pretty close,’ I say.

‘Your honor, we should have the right to ask the witness whether he was able to do GSR, and if not, why,’ she says. ‘Nothing more. Just that.’

‘Oh, sure,’ I say. ‘The defendant slopped her hands in solvents. Now, we don’t mean to infer anything by this, but it sure as hell screwed up our gunpowder tests. Sure, just let the jury form its own conclusions.’

‘Isn’t that what it’s all about?’ She looks at me and smiles.

‘I’m inclined,’ says Woodruff, ‘to let her ask. But keep it short and narrow,’ he says.

I’m rolling my eyes.

We’re back to the tables.

‘Did your office try to perform gunpowder-residue tests on the defendant, Laurel Vega, immediately following her arrest and removal to Capital County?’

‘Yes.’

‘And were you able to do so?’

‘No.’

‘Can you tell the court why not?’

‘The defendant’s hands had been chemically burned. Some laundry solvents had gotten all over them. Under the circumstances they were contaminated and GSR tests weren’t possible.’

‘These chemicals would interfere with the tests — is that right? Make it impossible to detect gunpowder residue?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Ms. Cassidy, you’re treading,’ says Woodruff.

She looks at him. ‘I’ll withdraw the question,’ she says. ‘I have nothing more of this witness.’

I’m chomping at the bit when I get to my feet.

‘Mr. Perone, let me ask you — you say that GSR tests are generally used to detect gunpowder residue from the clothing, hands, and face of a suspect. Is that right?’

He makes a face. ‘Yeah. More or less,’ he says.

‘Well, are they or aren’t they?’

‘Yeah. They are.’

‘Did you perform GSR tests on Laurel Vega’s clothing after her arrest?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And did you find any gunpowder residue, any evidence on her clothing that she had recently fired a firearm?’

‘Objection. Exceeds the scope of direct,’ says Cassidy. ‘Your honor, I limited my questions to the defendant’s hands.’

‘She questioned the witness about gunpowder residue,’ I say. ‘She opened the issue.’

Morgan’s getting into it with Woodruff, telling the judge that if I want to get into other areas I can call the witness in my own case-in-chief.

‘Overruled,’ says Woodruff. ‘The witness will answer the question.’ A lesson to Cassidy, one walk too many on the wild side with Chuckles.

‘Mr. Perone, did you find evidence of gunpowder residue on Laurel Vega’s clothing immediately following her arrest?’

‘No.’

‘After her arrest did you examine the area around the defendant’s face and neck for evidence of gunpowder residue?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I didn’t hear you,’ I say.

‘Yeah.’

‘And did you find any gunpowder residue on her face and neck, indicating that she might have recently discharged a firearm?’

‘No. But it had been a few days since the shooting to the point of arrest. She probably showered or bathed.’

I look at Cassidy. She is steaming at the table, looking at Woodruff, optic slits that could kill.

‘Mr. Perone, I call your attention to the little marks on the bullet. I think the district attorney referred to them as little ridges. Do you remember these?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You said that you weren’t sure how these were caused, but that it might have been the result of rust in the barrel of the firearm, is that correct?’

‘One theory,’ he says. ‘Unless you got a better one.’

‘I’m not here to answer questions,’ I say. ‘You are.’

Nico wipes some more sweat from his brow.

‘Let me ask you, are you aware of small fragments of metal found in the fatal wound of the deceased, Melanie Vega?’

‘Objection,’ says Cassidy. ‘Exceeds the scope of direct.’

‘I’m working on the little ridges, your honor. I think I can demonstrate a connection.’

‘If you can,’ says Woodruff, ‘subject to a motion to strike. Keep it short,’ he says.

‘Did you ever see a report regarding these metal fragments, Mr. Perone? The ones found in the victim?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Were the fragments sent to your office for analysis?’

‘Metallurgy,’ he says. ‘They consulted with us.’

‘And did you have an opinion as to the origins of these fragments?’

He makes a face. ‘Low-quality steel,’ he says. ‘Bullet could have passed through something.’

‘Where?’ I say. ‘The victim was completely unclothed at the time she was shot. The bullet wasn’t fired from outside, through a screen, was it?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Nothing was found at the scene with a bullet hole in it. Did you find a metal object that was shot up?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then, where did these metal fragments come from?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he says.

‘You’re the expert,’ I tell him.

‘They don’t give out crystal balls at the FBI ballistics lab,’ he says. ‘You guys got the corner on those.’ Nico does a gesture with one hand to his crotch, grabbing, something from Michael Jackson. This is all down below the railing of the witness box, where the jury can’t see it. When pushed on the stand, Nico will show you his credentials — a charter member of the fuck-the-lawyers club.

‘So you think it was something that the bullet passed through on its way to the target that caused these metal fragments to be deposited in the wound?’

‘Been known to happen,’ he says.

‘These, the fragments, are described as microscopic threads of low-carbon steel?’

‘That’s what they say,’ says Perone.

‘Metallurgy?’

‘Yeah.’

I take a little walk in front of the witness stand — some posturing for effect.

‘As a ballistics expert, is it safe to say that you come into contact with a good many assorted items besides guns and bullets?’

‘Like what?’ he says.

‘Like explosive devices, silencers, Taser weapons that fire projectiles?’

‘We see some of those.’

‘So you have pretty broad expertise?’

‘You could say that,’ he says.

‘You can’t generally buy this stuff? I mean, a good time-delay bomb or something detonated by remote control?’ I say. ‘Still, some people make them, don’t they?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ he says. ‘You can buy how-to books, get articles in the Soldier of Fortune press. If you’re good with your hands,’ he says, ‘and you don’t splatter yourself all over the ceiling, you might make a bomb that works.’

‘Your honor.’ Cassidy’s out of her chair. ‘Unless I’ve missed something, the victim wasn’t killed by a bomb.’

‘If you could bear with me, your honor.’

Woodruff motions with his hands, like hurry up.

‘So all this stuff — bombs and silencers — can be handmade if you have some skill and know what you’re doing?’

‘Sure.’

‘For example, if somebody came up to you and asked you how to make a silencer, what would you tell them?’

‘For starters that possession’s illegal,’ he says.

‘Of course. But just as an example, if you wanted to, you could tell them how to make one, couldn’t you.’

‘Sure.’

‘How?’

‘Right here?’ he says.

‘Why not? The information’s not illegal, is it?’

‘No.’

I motion for him to go on.

‘You get two pieces of metal tubing,’ he says. ‘One quite a bit larger in diameter than the other. You drill a lot of holes in the smaller tube, like Swiss cheese,’ he says. ‘Then you put the smaller tube inside of the bigger one. You gotta leave an air pocket between ’em. You find some way to fasten the two pieces of tube together, usually some kind of a flange. The inside tube has to be just a little bigger than the bore on the barrel of the firearm. You figure a way to fasten it to the end of the barrel. Usually threaded.’

‘That’s it?’

‘You’d want to pack some kind of material to deaden the sound. Put something into the air space between the two tubes,’ he says.

‘Like what?’

He makes a face. ‘Something that wouldn’t burn if it got hot. In the old days, the wise guys in New York and Chicago, some of ’em used little sheets of asbestos, rolled up,’ he says. ‘Guess if they did much business, their lungs went to shit.’ He laughs, all alone.

Nico gives Woodruff a nervous grin. ‘Sorry, your honor. My language. But I guess you could say poetic justice,’ he says.

‘So what do they use today? To deaden the sound?’ I ask him.

‘Whatever won’t burn. Steel woo-’ He stops before the words clear his lips.

‘Yes?’

‘Steel wool. Some people use steel wool,’ he says. The look in Perone’s eyes at this moment is perhaps the most I will receive by way of a fee in this case.

‘And when you pack that steel wool, pieces would work their way through the little holes of the inside tube, wouldn’t they?’

Nico’s nodding his head like he’s in a daze.

‘Wouldn’t they?’

‘They could,’ he says.

‘So that a bullet travelling down that tube might pick up tiny threads, small fragments of low-quality steel, steel wool,’ I say. ‘And the bullet might carry these, might deposit them in a wound. Isn’t that right?’ I say.

By now Perone is no longer responding to my questions. Instead he is looking at Cassidy, wondering what degree of wrath he will receive when she gets him outside of the courtroom. He has delivered to her doorstep, packaged and ticking, the one thing any good trial lawyer hates, surprise.

‘The steel wool of a silencer might leave little unexplained grooves and ridges in the lead of a soft, unjacketed bullet? Isn’t that right, Mr. Perone?’

He’s nodding — grudging concessions from the stand.

‘Answer the question,’ I say.

‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘It’s possible.’

‘A silencer would answer a lot of questions,’ I say. ‘Wouldn’t it? Like why there was no little soot or gunshot residue on the victim. Why there was no tattooing on the body.’

Much of this would have been filtered by the silencer, and Nico knows it.

‘It might,’ he says.

‘It would also explain why no one heard the shot that killed Melanie Vega, wouldn’t it?’

He looks at me, stone-cold eyes.

‘A possibility,’ he says.

‘That’s all I have for this witness.’

As I turn for the table it is with some sense of satisfaction. All of this leaves the prosecution to make a considerable reach if it is going to sell the theory that Laurel pulled the trigger. She must either run in circles of intrigue that rival James Bond or they must have the jury buy into notions that my sister-in-law is the modern merger of Henry Ford and Annie Oakley, a woman who not only loads her own ammunition, but is master of the tool and die, somebody capable of fashioning to tight tolerances a silencer for a semiautomatic handgun — the things that can stretch credulity in a trial.