Undue Influence

Chapter 23

Dr. Simon Angelo is the Capital County coroner hired two years ago from a state back east. He holds degrees from three universities and belongs to a score of professional societies. These litter his curriculum vitae, which Morgan Cassidy has just laid before me on the counsel table.

Angelo is mid-forties, though by dress and appearance he looks older. He has a fringe of graying hair that rings his head above the ears like clouds with their tops sheared in the jet stream. He is slight of build, with sharp features, a chin that finishes the face in a rounded point, and deep-set dark eyes that give the appearance of a mind engaged in perpetual deliberations. Simon Angelo is every man’s vision of intrigue at the Court of the Medici.

In front of him this morning, balanced on the railing that forms the front of the witness stand, is a square box, something that in the last century might have contained a woman’s hat.

I stipulate on his qualifications to testify as an expert, and Cassidy passes out copies of his résumé to filter through the jury box.

Under the framework of a dozen preliminary questions, Angelo re-creates the death scene: Melanie Vega, lying at the bottom of a dry bathtub, her eyes open, pupils fixed and dilated.

Time of death is the first evidentiary bridge he and Cassidy cross. It is a pivot point because of the argument between Laurel and Melanie on the front porch earlier in the evening. Cassidy would no doubt like to push the murder closer to that point in time.

‘Our original report placed it between eleven and eleven-thirty P.M,’ he says.

Alarms go off. Revision on the way.

‘And do you still consider that to be an accurate estimate?’

He talks about postmortem lividity and loses the jury in a sea of scientific jargon halfway through.

‘Could time of death have been earlier?’ says Cassidy.

‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘Lividity can vary from case to case, and the information here was at best sketchy.’ What he means is that it was based on observations by the EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) before Angelo arrived on the scene.

‘So fixing time of death is not an exact science?’ she says.

Angelo gives her a benign smile, something well planned.

‘Not at all,’ he says.

They are laying the groundwork for some major wiggle room. Before our pretrial motions, when Cassidy had Mrs. Miller to identify Laurel at the house near the eleven-thirty benchmark that appeared in the coroner’s report, the state was more than willing to live with their estimate as to the time of death. Now they would like to fudge a bit. Jurors might wonder why, if Laurel was so intent on killing Melanie, would she argue and then wait for three hours to carry out the deed?

‘Is it possible that the death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty?’ says Cassidy.

This is less than ten minutes after the two women argued on the porch, and three hours earlier than their original time estimate.

Angelo is a million pained expressions on the stand, the revisionist at work. He tells the court there are factors in this case that are unusual. Whether the body was wet or dry at the time of the crime. This could affect the cooling rate which normally goes into the equation, the fact that eye fluids — another measure of the time of death — were damaged by the fatal bullet. By the time he finishes he has thoroughly discredited his own earlier estimate.

‘Upon reflection,’ he says, ‘I suppose it is possible that death could have occurred as early as eight-thirty,’ he tells her.

‘Thank you, doctor.’

Indeed. It is why a court of law is not the place for unmasking truth. The two of them have now rewritten the initial coroner’s report to conform more closely to the evidence on Cassidy’s plate after our pretial motions.

Laurel leans into my ear, sensing that momentum on an item of import has shifted, asking me the significance. I wave her off. Things are moving too quickly.

‘Doctor, can you tell us the cause of death?’

‘Death was caused by a single gunshot wound to the head.’

‘Can you be more specific, describe the wound?’ she says.

‘If I may, your honor?’ Angelo is pointing to the square box in front of him on the railing.

Woodruff nods.

Angelo lifts the lid and pulls a human skull from the box. There are a few gasps, and a lot of murmuring in the courtroom, shifting weight and conversation in the press rows behind us. Laurel grips my leg hard under the table. Then I realize what all the commotion is about. I lean into her ear.

‘It’s not real,’ I tell her. ‘It’s only a model.’

Angelo has fashioned a plastic life-sized model of the human skull, into which he has drilled a hole approximating the path of the bullet, with parts of brain, bone, and other organs that can be removed. He offers this to me for examination before he testifies.

I rise from the table and take it. It looks identical in every respect to the human form that inspired it. I take it and hold it in my hand, turning it upside down, peering into its cavities and crevices. There are structures inside, visible to the eye, soft tissue that has been re-created and fastened to bone, the tongue and palate with neat holes bored through each, shattered bone I can see, through one eye socket. I would bounce the thing like a basketball if I could, to demonstrate for the jury that there is nothing sacred in this. It is not real.

We talk about what it is made of, resins and polymers.

‘Is it identical in every respect to the skull of the deceased?’ I ask.

Angelo makes a face. ‘As close as I could make it without severing the head, removing all the tissue, and making a death-mask mold,’ he says.

Leave it to me to suggest this. I glance at the jury. They are not happy at this moment. A lot of grim looks in my direction, although three minutes ago I would venture that some of them actually thought this was the severed head of Melanie Vega.

I pass on it for purposes of demonstration, and Angelo drifts into his narrative, explaining the fatal wound to the jury, holding the head like Señor Wences in one hand and a pointer in the other.

‘The bullet entered the soft tissue under the angle of the mandible — that’s the lower part of the jawbone,’ says Angelo. ‘Just to left of the midline. Here.’ Angelo points to the hole clearly evident under the chin. ‘It then proceeded in an upward and posterior direction toward the rear of the skull, passing through the sublingual gland, which is just under the tongue, piercing the tongue and the posterior tip of the soft palate.’

I can see several of the jurors swallowing hard, a sensation like ice cream glued to the roof of their mouth.

‘It then passed through the paranasal sinus cavities, impacted and fractured the sphenoid bone, which forms the floor of the brain pan. Here,’ he says. ‘The bullet splintered bone fragments, some of which became embedded in several areas of the brain. The bullet finally came to rest in the left temporal lobe. Here.’ He points one more time.

‘Doctor, can you describe the position — whether Melanie Vega was sitting or standing at the time she was shot?’

‘According to all of the evidence, we believe that at the time she was shot the victim was lying on her back, reclining on a slant of about forty-five degrees, against the back contour of the tub. Her head was tilted back, lying against the back edge of the tub.’ He holds the back of the skull in the open palm of his hand, the empty eye sockets facing up, toward the ceiling. ‘About in this position,’ he says.

He rotates the skull in his hand until the crown of the head is facing the far end of the jury box, and the feet, if they were attached, would be off in the direction of our table.

‘The fatal bullet was fired from off in about that direction,’ he says. Angelo points with an outstretched arm directly at Laurel. Everything calculated for effect.

‘I would estimate the range of fire to be about four to six feet.’

The picture they are painting is clear, a cold and calculating shot while Melanie Vega lay resting in the tub — a veritable execution.

‘The angle of fire would be roughly from this direction.’ Angelo brings the steel rod in on a slow line of flight with one hand, toward the skull resting in the other, until it passes between the curving bone of the mandible forming the chin and engages the structures of tissue. He finds the hole pre-drilled in these, and forces the rod past a few obstructions. You can hear the braiding of plastic as the rough steel pushes its way in. A few grimaces in the jury box. He jams the rod into the head, six inches or more, until it becomes lodged, leaving several inches protruding from under the chin at the base of the skull, tracing the line of fire.

I look, and all eyes are on him. The jurors are mesmerized by the clinical brutality of this, as if Angelo has just committed a second act of mayhem on the victim, retracing what the state says my client has done. One of the women, a divorcé I had fought to keep on the panel, is now looking at Laurel with eyes of wonder, how one woman could do this to another.

It seems Laurel herself is looking a little green.

‘Could you tell us, doctor, did this wound cause instantaneous death?’ says Cassidy.

‘If not instantaneous, the victim died within a very short period of time. Minutes,’ says Angelo. ‘There was massive brain damage,’ he says. ‘Not only from the bullet but from numerous bone fragments that invaded the brain tissue.’

He puts the plastic skull on the railing that forms the front of the jury box, where it rests like some wicked hologram, a head without a body.

Cassidy takes Angelo through some pictures, stills taken at the scene. The doctor identifies these, and after some objection and argument the court settles on five tasteful prints that it says should not enflame the emotions of the jury. These are put into evidence and begin to filter through the jury box. With each passing hand, as the prints make their way, there are eyes darting, quick stolen glimpses of Laurel.

Cassidy asks Angelo about the bullet retrieved from the wound. He describes it as a three-eighty or a nine-millimeter, he’s not exactly sure. But when Cassidy shows him a lead bullet in a plastic bag, he identifies it as the one taken from the head of Melanie Vega the morning of the autopsy, pried from her brain with gloved fingers so as not to scar it for possible ballistics comparisons should they later find the weapon.

Next, Cassidy bores in on the evidence Angelo used to determine the range of fire. This is critical to their case. She wants to avoid any hint that there could have been a struggle for the gun, some unintended mishap, or evidence of some lesser crime than capital murder.

Angelo confirms that without the murder weapon it was difficult for ballistics to perform the usual firing tests.

‘There was no “tattooing” around the wound,’ says Angelo. ‘But we did detect nitrates, evidence of gunpowder residue, on the upper part of the body. The limited amount of nitrates, and their pattern, some of it deposited in a spreading pattern around the level of the nipples on each breast, would indicate to me a range of fire of between four and six feet.’

Cassidy gets him to explain that tattooing is caused by unexploded grains of gunpowder expelled from the barrel under high pressure. At close range these will impregnate the skin, leaving the equivalent of a tattoo on the skin around the wound. The closer the range, the tighter the pattern.

‘Would the lack of tattooing, the probable distance involved in this shot — which you estimate to be between four to six feet — rule out any struggle for the gun?’

‘I would think so. If the victim were actually close enough to reach for the gun at the time it was fired, I would expect to see some tattooing on the body somewhere.’

‘Besides the absence of tattooing, in your examination of the wound did you find anything else that was in your view peculiar?’

‘Yes. I discovered microscopic pieces of metal in the tissues immediately inside the entrance wound.’

‘Do you have any opinion as to what caused these?’

‘No. Metallurgic reports indicate that the substance in these fragments is composed of a low-quality, low-carbon steel, minute shavings. Since this is not a steel-jacketed bullet, they could not have come from the bullet itself.’

‘Then where did they come from?’

‘It’s hard to say,’ says Angelo. ‘My best guess is from the barrel of the gun itself. Some defect,’ he says.

This is clearly lame. Soft lead does not cut case-hardened steel. Still they leave it at that.

Cassidy then turns her attention to the unborn child, the fact that Melanie Vega was pregnant at the time of her death. It is clear that she would end on a high point. In this case emotion.

‘Was there any way to tell the gender of this child?’

‘It was male.’

‘Doctor, can you tell us how far along fetal development was at the time of death?’

‘From all indications it was in the early stages of the second trimester. I would say about four months,’ he says.

‘And can you tell us the cause of death for this unborn child?’

‘Asphyxiation,’ he says.

‘Please explain?’

‘A fetus in the womb has no independent source of sustenance other than from the mother through the umbilical cord. This carries not only nutrition, but oxygenated blood, which keeps the child alive. If the mother dies, her heart ceases to pump blood, and the child’s oxygen supply is cut off. Unless the child can sustain life outside of the womb and is removed within minutes, it will suffocate.’

‘It must have been an agonizing death,’ she says.

‘Objection!’ I’m on my feet.

‘Is that a question for the witness?’ says Woodruff.

‘Yes, it is, your honor.’ Cassidy scrambles to cover up.

‘Do you have a medical opinion, doctor, would this be an agonizing form of death for the unborn child?’

‘There are no solid medical studies,’ he says. ‘We are not sure how much pain a fetus at that stage of development feels.’

I can think of a score of organizations that would be happy to supply him with literature.

There is a hush of voices in the audience, as if there is some serious division of views on this. Several jurors shake their heads. The only one, it seems, who doesn’t have an opinion is Laurel. She seems to sit, utterly dazed by the evidence of a dead child. Though we have discussed this several times, the effect on Laurel is always the same: to deliver her into a world of her own.

‘Doctor, is there any way to medically ascertain whether the child was potentially viable at the time of the mother’s death?’

‘Potential viability’ as used here means that if left undisturbed, if the mother had not been killed, the fetus would have had every chance of surviving to term, to being delivered healthy and alive.

‘It would be my considered medical opinion that this unborn child, the fetus carried by Melanie Vega, suffered from no deformities, no congenital defects or abnormalities that might have prevented a normal birth. For this reason it must be considered potentially viable,’ he says.

If this stands uncontested, Cassidy will be entitled to a jury instruction at the appropriate time regarding multiple murder — and invoking the death penalty.

When I look over, Morgan is scavenging one more time through the evidence cart, a large manila envelope from which she pulls what appear to be several large color photographs, hues of red and cyanotic blue.

I’m on my feet. ‘Your honor, if Ms. Cassidy has what I think she has, I’m going to request a recess and a conference in chambers.’

‘What is it you have there?’ says Woodruff.

‘Some pictures, your honor.’ She hands them up to the judge, three color glossies from what I can see, eight-by-ten.

The glasses propped on the end of Woodruffs nose nearly drop off on the bench as he gets a gander.

‘We’d better talk,’ he says.

We’re in chambers, Cassidy, Harry, the judge, the court reporter, and myself, all talking at once.

‘There’s no conceivable reason these shouldn’t come in,’ says Cassidy.

‘There’s every conceivable reason.’ I walk on her line.

‘Your honor, highly prejudicial,’ says Harry.

‘These are awful.’ Even Woodruff is on her case.

‘Well, excuse me, your honor, but removing a dead unborn child from the womb of its murdered mother can be a little messy.’ Cassidy leaning on the prerogatives of womanhood, trying to cow the judge. ‘The next time we’ll ask the M.E. to wash it off first, before they shoot pictures.’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’ This has Woodruff backpedalling, wondering no doubt what women who vote might think of his comment and whether Morgan might carry the message.

‘The child is dead,’ she says. ‘These pictures evidence that fact. It is a multiple murder and the state is entitled to produce the evidence.’

‘She has a point,’ says Woodruff.

‘The medical examiner has already testified,’ I say.

‘There’s no question that the child is dead. The state already has ample evidence. The question here,’ I tell him, ‘is whether the pictures are prejudicial. There’s no question, they are highly inflammatory.’

‘What about that?’ says Woodruff. He is rubbernecking now, like a zealot at a Ping-Pong tournament, playing for time, looking for some winning point, a backhand smash upon which to hang his decision.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘We concede we don’t need all three photographs. One will do,’ she says. ‘Surely one of these must be acceptable to the court. Under the law, there is a homicide here, and we are entitled to produce the evidence.’

Woodruff looks at the photos again. He puts one aside quickly and studies the other two, waffling motions with his head, wavering judgment written in his eyes.

Abstract arguments of unborn death I can deal with. Pictures of an embryonic infant, smaller than the palm of my hand, its oxygen-starved body turned the cyanotic blue of a night sky, is another matter. Confronted with such evidence, jurors become myopic. A terrible crime has been committed — not just an adult who could deal in the world, whose conduct may well have brought her own demise, but an innocent, an unborn infant. On such evidence juries are expected to act. They are not likely to be deterred by theories of another killer from whom they cannot exact justice. If these pictures come in, any one of them, the prosecution has become a locomotive moving on a single track, and Laurel Vega is tied to it.

Woodruff has a hand in the air, about to slap one of the pictures on the desk like a trump card in bridge.

‘We will stipulate.’ I speak before Woodruff can drop his hand.

He looks at me. ‘Stipulate to what?’ he says.

‘We’ll stipulate to the elements of multiple murder. In return the state puts on no more evidence regarding the unborn child, nothing until closing argument,’ I say.

Harry’s pulling on my arm — ‘Ullbay itshay’ — talking pig latin in my ear.

I pull away from him.

‘The prosecution insists that the photographs are necessary to establish the elements of multiple murder. We will concede that multiple murder has occurred here. Not that my client did it, but that whoever did is guilty of multiple murder.’

‘Do you understand what you’re offering?’ says Woodruff. ‘Once entered into, you can’t withdraw it. Giving up all right of appeal on the point later. If she’s convicted you’re conceding special circumstances, grounds for a capital sentence.’

Harry’s in my ear. ‘He’s right,’ he says. ‘If she goes down, there’s no room to wiggle.’

I look at him. ‘If the pictures come in, she goes down,’ I say. ‘And then we have to look at them again in the penalty phase. What do we do then?’ I ask him.

This, the limited options open to us, saps the wind from Harry’s sails.

The only one who seems to take much joy in all of this is Morgan. This is classic Cassidy: confront the court with the repelling images of unborn death, work the judge on all the angles political and legal, and then watch us scramble to make concessions.

‘The pictures,’ I tell Harry, ‘are all poison. If we have to swallow-’

I look at Woodruff. He gives me a judicial shrug, like fairness compels him to give her one of the photos.

‘Then the only question,’ I tell Harry, ‘is whether we swallow it now or later.’

‘We need to confer, your honor.’ The fight has gone out of Harry, but he’s still trying to get me out of the room to talk.

‘Either a stipulation or one of the photographs,’ says Cassidy. ‘One or the other. Make up your mind.’

‘Do you want to talk to your client?’ says Woodruff. ‘It’s a big point. I think maybe you should talk to her.’

Cassidy makes a face of exasperation.

From the glazed look in Laurel’s eyes when confronted with the cold evidence of the dead child, questions of a stipulation on points of law at this moment would be the most obtuse of abstractions. I am not likely to penetrate her shell of pain.

‘A lawyer’s call,’ I say. ‘A question of strategy,’ I tell Woodruff.

He makes a face, conceding the point. ‘Then what will it be?’

‘The stipulation,’ I tell him. ‘What else?’

‘You got it. The pictures are excluded,’ he says. ‘And I don’t want to hear anything more about the unborn fetus until closing argument. Is that understood?’ He’s looking at Cassidy. Woodruff knows what we have given up. He is going to make sure that we get every inch in return.

‘We should have the right on redirect with this witness, Dr. Angelo,’ she says. ‘To the extent the defense raises the issue on cross.’

‘For what purpose? You’ve got your evidence. The elements are proven by the stipulation,’ says Woodruff.

‘If the defense opens the issue-’

‘Read my lips, counsel. Not a single w-o-r-d or I will declare a mistrial. Do I make myself clear?’

Cassidy gives him a sick grin. ‘You won’t hear it from me,’ she says.

‘Just so we’re clear.’ At this moment Cassidy is staring into the bushy eyebrows of death. There is not a doubt in my mind that if she crosses him on this point, Austin Woodruff will draw and quarter her.

We huddle over the table to craft the language of a penned stipulation, something that Woodruff can read from the bench into the record.

Harry doesn’t have the heart for this. He wanders off, out of chambers, to talk to Laurel.

I’ve got Angelo on the stand, staring at his beady little eyes in the box.

I have told Laurel what I have done, the stipulation. She seems to accept this with equanimity.

Woodruff has read the stipulation to the jury, a lot of bobbing heads and wondrous looks like they don’t know exactly what to make of all this lawyer talk. But the consensus, if I am at all literate in idioms of body language, is that it was not good for the defense.

Angelo has done our case immense damage and he knows it. At this moment he is wary, though he has no reason. It is the first rule of cross-examination: if you can’t score, don’t wade in.

‘I have only a few questions,’ I tell him. ‘Points of clarification. ‘Doctor, you testified at length regarding powder residue, the lack of tattooing on the body.’

He nods at me.

‘Did you bag the hands of the victim at the scene before moving the body?’

‘I did.’

‘Can you explain to the jury why this is done?’

‘It’s a usual procedure,’ he says. ‘Paper bags are placed over the hands and tied or taped at the wrists to ensure than any microscopic evidence under the nails is not lost. It also protects the hands from becoming contaminated by fibers or other trace evidence during transportation.’

‘Did you check the victim’s hands for such evidence during the course of your examination of the body?’

‘I did.’

‘And did you find anything?’

‘Nothing of any consequence. The undersides of the fingernails were clean. No fibers or tissue. No hair samples. Nothing that might have indicated a scuffle or struggle by the victim prior to death.’

‘Did you examine the hands for gunpowder residue?’

He gives me a considered look. ‘No.’

“Why not?’

‘There didn’t seem to be any point. We determined the range of fire to be too far away to have deposited any substantial amounts of residue. And what was the point? She hadn’t shot herself. The gun wasn’t in her hand.’

‘You didn’t think it was important to determine if she had grabbed the gun, struggled with her assailant?’

‘No. I’ve already testified that wasn’t possible.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Absolutely,’ he says.

I nod and leave it.

‘Let me ask you, did you ever resolve in your own mind the caliber of the bullet?’

‘It’s difficult,’ he says. ‘Some calibers are very close. Looking at the bullet alone, you can’t always be sure.’

‘I understand. But have you resolved the question as you sit here now?’

‘I think ballistics has clearly indicated,’ he says. He looks in his notes. ‘Nine-millimeter,’ he says.

‘And you concur with that?’

‘I would defer to them on such questions,’ he says.

‘Have you dealt with such bullet wounds before? Nine-millimeter?’

‘Many times. It’s a common caliber in street crimes.’

‘Then you’re familiar with the type of wound a nine-millimeter bullet can make?’

‘Yes.’

‘The kind of damage it can inflict?’

‘At close range it can be very destructive, quite deadly.’

‘Would you say that the normal nine-millimeter round has good penetrating power? Have you ever seen a nine-millimeter wound that has passed completely through a body?’

‘I have seen such wounds.’

‘Even when the round strikes bone?’

‘On occasion, depending on the size of the bone, the girth of the body, it could pass through.’

‘You say that the shot that killed Melanie Vega was fired a distance of only four to six feet before it struck the victim, and yet it lodged in the midpoint of her brain. Can you explain that?’

‘Very few people can explain the course of a bullet. There are too many variables. The powder charge, the weight and substance of the bullet, the density of objects it strikes on its path. Any one of these can account for variations in the depth of penetration.’

‘So if a bullet passed through an object, it might slow it down?’

‘Depending on the object. Of course.’

‘Let’s talk a little about the unexplained fragments of metal in the wound. You testified that you found small specks of metal — steel, I think you said?’

‘Low-quality, low-carbon steel. Yes. There were I believe four or five of these.’

‘Did you conduct any kind of microscopic examination of these before submitting them to metallurgy for testing?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did they look like?’

‘Shavings. Like little twisted metal threads.’

‘And you have no idea what they are?’

‘As I said at first, I thought they were shavings of lead, from the bullet. Apparently that was not the case.’

‘Would you defer to ballistics on this?’

‘Sure. If they know what they are.’

‘Doctor, let me ask you, how did you first discover that the victim was pregnant?’

‘During the course of a complete autopsy it’s general procedure to enter the abdominal cavity-’

‘Then it wasn’t obvious to you from external examination that Melanie Vega was pregnant?’

‘No. She made extraordinary efforts to keep her weight down.’

‘Isn’t it strange that no one told you?’

‘What do you mean?’ he says.

‘I mean, this is a woman, four months pregnant, and her husband never told you?’

‘I never talked to Mr. Vega.’

‘But there was no record of such a disclosure by Mr. Vega in the investigative reports, as part of his interview on the evening of the murder? You read those reports, did you not?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘And there was no disclosure in the reports, was there?’

‘No. Not that I recall.’

‘Don’t you consider this unusual, doctor? I mean, a distraught husband, his wife murdered, talking to the police, and he doesn’t think to tell them about this double tragedy?’

‘Objection. Calls for speculation.’

‘It calls for expert opinion,’ I say. ‘The doctor has performed thousands of autopsies, read thousands of police reports in connection with those autopsies. I’m asking him if as an expert in the field he does not find the failure to disclose such information on the part of a distraught husband to be peculiar.’

‘I’ll allow the question,’ says Woodruff. ‘With reference only to your realm of experience, doctor?’

‘A little peculiar, perhaps,’ he says. ‘But I suppose the man was quite upset.’

‘Hmm.’ I do a little pirouette in front of the witness box, so that as I speak I am looking away from the witness and toward the prosecution’s table.

Harry and I have come up empty on the semen from the sheets of Melanie’s bed. The laboratory which examined these for us was unable to complete DNA testing. The dried semen was too old for a valid sampling. So we have finally come to the moment of confrontation. I can no longer conceal my hand.

‘Doctor. As part of your examination did you by any chance determine the paternity of the unborn child?’

Cassidy’s eyes flash and she grits her teeth. I have crossed the Rubicon, the first overt assault on Jack, the outlines of my defense now seeping through the fog.

Cassidy whispers into Lama’s ear. I suspect the same instruction I gave Harry this morning, a subpoena to take blood from Jack Vega. By the time we are finished Jack will have more holes than a pincushion.

There’s a stirring in the press rows. Notwithstanding admonitions by the court, it will not take long for this inquiry to filter back to Vega. As a witness he is sequestered outside, where our process server will no doubt find him this afternoon, ministrations with sharp needles to follow.

‘It’s a simple question, doctor. Did you determine the paternity of the child?’

‘To what purpose?’ he says.

‘Yes or no?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘There was no reason.’

Angelo may not think so, but as I look at them in the box, the question of this child’s origin is not lost on the jury.