Guilt By Degrees

28

“So how did this go down?” I asked. “Did the defense try to claim this was a burglary gone bad?”

“No,” Larry replied. “They couldn’t. There was no evidence of ransacking at all.” He turned and pulled another binder out of the cabinet behind his desk. “Check out the crime scene photos.”

He flipped to the section and turned the binder around so we could have a look. The house was as neat as a pin.

“I’ll get you a copy of the murder books so you can see it all for yourself,” Larry said.

“But if it wasn’t a burglary, then the defense had to have claimed that someone targeted Zack,” I said.

“Sort of,” Larry replied. “You didn’t read the news articles?”

“I figured I’d get a straighter story from you,” I admitted.

That elicited a tiny smile. “Wise of you.” Larry stared over my shoulder, collecting his thoughts, then he began.

“Lilah claimed they had breakfast together and he was still in the kitchen when she left for the office. It was Zack’s day off. We know he went down to the basement to work on one of his projects. He was an amateur carpenter, and he’d set up a workbench down there. Lilah claimed that as she was pulling out of the garage, she noticed a new gardener at the house across the street, someone she hadn’t seen before.”

“You verify that?” I asked.

“Didn’t pan out,” Larry replied. “Neighbors all denied having hired someone new, but gardeners sometimes bring in temporary help, so we had all the gardeners haul in all their workers, and we took photos. Either one neighbor or another recognized all of them.” Larry narrowed his eyes, concentrating. “I think you have those photos in the murder books.”

“You showed them to Lilah?” Bailey asked.

“Of course. Said none of ’em looked like the guy she’d seen.”

Of course she did. If Lilah was the killer, it’d be pretty dumb to identify her straw man-what if he had an alibi?

Larry continued, “Lilah said that after she got to work, she realized she’d left a file she needed at home. She went to lunch, and when she came back for the file, she found the body.” He paused, his eyebrows drawn together. “As I recall, Rick-the IO-nailed her on an inconsistent statement about that, but you’ll have to ask him for the details. Anyway, she said when she saw it, she threw up.” Larry’s tone was sardonic. “It was a pretty grisly scene-if someone just stumbled on it without warning, that’d be a natural reaction.” He nodded toward the murder book. “Check out the photos.”

Of all the crime scenes I’d ever seen-and I’d seen plenty-this was one of the worst. The body lay on the basement floor in the middle of a sea of blood. The head was severed from the spine, the arms and legs had been chopped off at the joints, and the body was hacked up as well, leaving gaping mouths through which intestines extruded.

A wife throwing up at the sight of her husband’s mutilated body tended to show she’d been shocked by the sight-an implicit indication that she wasn’t the killer. She certainly could’ve thrown up after seeing what she’d done. But someone who has the stones to commit an ax murder doesn’t strike me as the squeamish type. Or she could’ve made herself throw up to create the impression that she was innocent-but it would’ve been pretty sophisticated to even think of, let alone have the presence of mind to do.

“What did the crime scene analyst say?” I said.

“Crime scene analyst confirmed there was emesis on the floor that probably came from Lilah, and the coroner confirmed that they’d both eaten the same breakfast.”

“Where’d the murder weapon come from?” I said, tapping the ax shown next to the body in the crime scene photograph.

“Their garage,” Larry replied. “Which was usually kept locked. And, no, there were no signs of forced entry into the garage.”

“Score another point for the good guys,” I said.

“Just a half point,” Larry said. “A neighbor-one who didn’t particularly care for Lilah-said Zack sometimes left it outside in the backyard. The ax did have some rust and weathering, so that much was true.”

“Did you get anyone to blow up her timeline for when she left for work, got to work, left work?” Bailey asked.

“That unfortunately came up equivocal.” Larry sighed. “One neighbor swore she saw Lilah pulling out later than usual, at ten a.m., which would’ve been right after the murder. But another one was fairly sure she saw Lilah driving down the street at nine fifteen a.m.”

“She could’ve driven out earlier, come back in time to do the murder, then left again,” I pointed out.

“Sure, and I argued that to the jury, but the coworkers’ testimony muddied the waters,” Larry replied. He paused and stared at the wall behind me as he recounted the statements in impressive detail. “She was normally due at work by eight thirty a.m. Some of the staff swore she wasn’t there until after ten a.m., but others were sure they’d seen her by nine at the latest.” Larry tilted his head. “The testimony wasn’t particularly helpful, but it didn’t kill me either.”

I tended to agree. Contradictory stories of that nature often canceled each other out in the minds of the jury.

“Blood? Hair? Fiber?” I asked. “Especially blood. I’d expect to find something on her clothing.”

Larry nodded. “You would, but we didn’t. It was my theory that she changed and dumped the clothes she wore when she killed him.”

“Anything to back that up?” I asked.

“Now we come to the good part,” Larry said, showing some enthusiasm for the first time. “We found fibers on the ax that didn’t match what Zack was wearing. And given the way that ax had been wielded, anything that had been on it before the murder would likely have been shaken off or buried in the body.”

“So they were most likely from the clothing worn by the killer.”

“Correct. Our hair and fiber guy was a whizbang. He looked at the five or ten fibers we had and offered a few suggestions as to what kind of fabric and the color of fabric they could’ve come from. Wanna know what we found?” Larry now had a real smile on his face.

“Nah,” I joked.

“A photograph of Lilah with Zack up in Lake Arrowhead, wearing what? A coat that fit the exact fabric and color description given by our whiz-bang analyst. And where was that coat?” Larry asked.

I had a pretty good guess but shook my head to give him the satisfaction.

“Nowhere. That coat was nowhere to be found.”

“But that wasn’t definitive,” I said, plugging in the language fiber guys always used in their testimony. “The most he could’ve said was that the fibers appeared to be of the type that came from a coat like that or any other coat of a similar-”

“Blah, blah, blah,” Larry interrupted, waving a hand. “Yeah. But there’s more. We had evidence of forced entry at a side door they seldom used. A small-I mean a pin dot-of blood with skin was lodged in the splintered wood. We had just enough for DNA-it came back to her.”

“But she could’ve scraped her hand on that spot before, or even shortly after, the murder-,” I began.

“And that’s what the defense argued,” Larry said. “Except we had a neighbor with a colicky baby who woke her up at two thirty a.m. She was walking the floor, trying to pat the baby to sleep, when she noticed our girl Lilah standing at that side door at about two thirty-five a.m. Looked like Lilah was jiggling the door handle.”

I sat back in my chair. Proof that Lilah had deliberately rigged up evidence of forced entry was pretty powerful stuff. So how the hell?

Larry watched my face and nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, first off, the neighbor went south on me when she took the stand. Said she was sure she saw someone at that door at two thirty-five, she just couldn’t be sure it was Lilah.”

I was perplexed. “What made her flip?”

Larry’s face darkened. “I never could figure that one out. She seemed sure of it during the interview. And when she flipped at trial, I questioned her up one side and down another, but there was nothing to indicate that she’d been bribed or threatened.”

“You don’t think Lilah got to her somehow?” Bailey asked.

Larry shook his head. “We checked the neighbor out. Went back as far as her freshman year in high school. Couldn’t find anything Lilah could’ve used against her, and I didn’t ever believe Lilah would’ve tried to physically threaten her.” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, that devil’s spawn wouldn’t have hesitated if she’d thought she could get away with it; but she was smart enough to know better.” Larry fell silent for a moment. “I guess I’ll never know why that neighbor went belly-up.”

Bailey was frowning. “They find blood anywhere else?” she asked.

“There was a small blood transfer on the wall next to the staircase that led up to the bedroom,” he replied. “But not enough to do any kind of typing. We questioned Lilah about it, but she didn’t take the bait. Said she didn’t know how it got there.”

Once again, an indication that Lilah was cool under pressure. Suspects often can’t resist the urge to explain everything in an effort to show how innocent they are, and those explanations can be the best gift the prosecution ever gets. A provably false story shows the defendant’s not only guilty but also a remorseless liar.

“The way it sounds from the cheap seats, even with the neighbor dumping you out, the case wasn’t a slam dunk, but it was there,” I said.

“It was,” Larry agreed. “But the defense had a helluva hole card.” I could hear the anger in his voice. “Six months before Zack’s murder, the Glendale Police Department had been targeted by PEN1, Public Enemy Number One, a skinhead group affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood. A lieutenant in Glendale had targeted them after they shot one of his officers during a pursuit. The Glendale cops made a lot of busts, mostly for meth, and that really messed up PEN1’s major source of income. So the skins declared war on the Glendale PD. They rigged a zip gun to the gate at the officer parking facility-just missed killing a sergeant. Redirected a gas pipe to shoot toxic fumes into the lunchroom, and then firebombed the evidence room.”

That was big-time…and outrageous. How come I’d never heard a word about it? Bailey looked equally shocked. As much as anything, the fact that we hadn’t gotten wind of this showed just how sprawling this county really was. But, intriguing as it seemed, I didn’t see how this tied into Zack’s murder.

“I get how the murder looked like the kind of overkill meth heads do,” I said. “But I thought you said Zack was a political player, not a big gun out in the field-”

“Yeah. No reason to think he got up in anyone’s face,” Larry confirmed.

“Then why Zack?” I asked, perplexed. “And why in his own home? I mean, it’s one thing to target the police at the station, but breaking into the man’s home and chopping him up in his own basement-”

“Is another,” Larry finished for me. “Which is, of course, what I argued.”

“Did the defense come up with anything to back up the ‘skinhead did it’ story?” Bailey asked.

“Sort of.” Larry sighed. “After they put the lieutenant on to testify about war with the skinheads, prison guards seized a kite between a couple of PEN1 inmates. Of course, the defense waved that puppy around the courtroom like it was their national flag. Which it pretty much was.”

A note between inmates could be pretty compelling evidence.

“What’d it say?” I asked.

“That PEN1 was getting the ‘credit’ for the hit and no asshole Nazi Low Rider better try and claim it-something to that effect. Rick’ll have the actual note if you want to see it.”

“No names mentioned?” Bailey asked.

“Nope,” Larry replied. “And it wasn’t even in code, which you know their stuff almost always is.”

That was significant. The white-supremacist gangs had an elaborate system of secret codes they used for all written communications. It usually took an FBI specialist to crack it. The fact that this note wasn’t coded was some evidence that it was just a couple of jerks bragging, rather than a real admission that PEN1 was behind Zack’s murder.

“And you let the jury know what that meant, I’m sure,” I remarked.

“Oh yeah,” Larry replied.

“Did you ever come up with any affirmative evidence to disprove that theory?” I asked.

“What was I going to do, put a bunch of skinheads on the stand to say they didn’t do it?”

I shook my head. “Probably only make the jury believe it more. Was there evidence connected to the scene that pointed to someone else being in the house besides Lilah?”

“Not really, but it played that way to the jury,” Larry responded. “There was a partial bloody print on the kitchen wall, but we couldn’t pin it to her. Insufficient ridge detail to rule anyone in or out-including Lilah. Basically, that print could belong to anyone. The defense went crazy with that.”

“Ouch,” I said.

Larry nodded his agreement. “Yeah. It hurt us. I remember thinking we were in trouble when the jury asked about that print during deliberations.”

A fingerprint in blood had the look of evidence that had to be connected to the crime. The failure to tie it to Lilah was a tough blow. That, plus the “blame the skinhead” defense, spelled big trouble for the prosecution. Then there was the neighbor who’d gone belly-up on the stand. No question about it, this was a tough case.

“Who represented Lilah?” I asked.

“Mike Howell. Know him?”

“Oh yeah.”

Mike and I had been hired at the same time, did Planning and Training together. But after packing in about a hundred trials, he’d decamped for the greater financial rewards and flexibility of private practice. Mike and I were still friendly, and it would’ve been nice to get his personal take on the case. But the attorney-client privilege lasts a lifetime-sometimes longer-so I knew there wasn’t much point in talking to him.

“The case had its problems, but even so, that defense probably never would’ve flown with another lawyer…” Larry trailed off.

We shared a look of understanding. Mike was one of the good guys who played it straight and fair, but he was unquestionably one of the best in the business. He knew how to zero in on every weak spot in the prosecution’s case, and how to play the jury. To call him a formidable opponent was like calling Bill Gates “comfortable.”

“And that’s not all,” Larry said. He reached out and flipped through the pages of the murder book in front of me to a single photograph.

Lilah’s face stared up at me. Fair-skinned, with a shining cap of black hair and large, azure eyes, she wasn’t just a looker; she was a stunner. I compared that photo to the woman shown in the surveillance video. The differences were subtle and, I had a hunch, deliberate: the woman in the footage had much longer hair, and she seemed to be a little thinner. But if you looked closely, you could see that the shape of the face and head was unquestionably the same. A jury had spent weeks looking at that face and trying to match it up with a decapitation ax murder. The skinheads gave the jury just the excuse they needed to resolve the contradiction.

“She take the stand?” I asked.

“Oh, you bet,” Larry said bitterly.

“And she did well.”

“Well enough.” He looked out the window, and I saw his jaw muscles clench.

His grudging tone told me I should look elsewhere if I wanted to get an accurate read on her performance.

“Any idea where we might find her now?” Bailey asked.

Larry shook his head and stood, signaling the end of our conversation. “None. After she got acquitted, she pulled up stakes and took off. Hasn’t even been a sighting.” He laughed, a mirthless bark. “Until now anyway.”

He escorted us out of the office and through the reception area, then stopped at the door to shake hands. “Hey, you want to hear the kicker?” Larry asked.

I stopped and met his gaze.

“Lilah clerked for about six months when she was in law school,” he said.

“Why’s that a kicker?” I asked.

“Because it was in the DA’s office.”