Lesser Crimes

by Aitana Moore

  Taking a few steps back, the professor combed his goatee with his fingers. "The question for me was: why was it thought that the bludgeoning took place on the stairs? Because it was the obvious conclusion when you find dollops of blood on the stairs, smears where the victim may have held on to keep climbing, a cast-off pattern consistent with coughing or spitting blood as he fell, and his own body lying at the bottom of the steps."

  Another tap, and the poker appeared.

  "And then there is the one thing that clinched it," Azulay pursued relentlessly, "at least in the eyes of those who cannot bother to truly see: a weapon lying next to the corpse, full of blood and fingerprints."

  He turned to look at the people held captive by his presentation. "A prop."

  Stepping forward, the professor ran his hand over the image of the poker. "Because I can categorically affirm, gentlemen and lady, that this is not the murder weapon at all."

  TWENTY-ONE

  A mind, stripped of facts it had deemed conclusive, went into overdrive. James began shuffling different possibilities as everyone in the room stared at Professor Azulay, who smiled at the effect of his revelation.

  Could he be mistaken — this precise man, this expert?

  If he weren't mistaken, who was lying?

  What was the point of a prop?

  "How sure are you of this?" Paxton asked.

  "One hundred percent," Azulay said. "I had the weapon and I had the skull. It's not a match."

  Ava snapped her mouth shut. "But the crime lab also had both things, and they had a recently deceased victim with the scalp still there. Could it be that time …"

  Azulay shook his head, clicking his tongue in denial. "Absolutely not. I told you, it was the will not to see. The medical examiners had the body and the police had what they thought was the weapon with the defendant's fingerprints on it. Lynn Miller had run away. The examiners shaved the victim's skull, saw the lacerations and went, bingo. The contusions on the body were consistent with the fall from the stairs, and the broken neck explained itself. Why would the lab bother with Keane’s shoes and the dollops of blood pointing inside when a woman had incriminated herself?"

  "The state lab at the time was constantly overwhelmed," Paxton said slowly. "It was before we got the regional one in the Triad. Still, if this negligence can be proved beyond all doubt, we might even be able to avoid a trial."

  Azulay's head oscillated from one side to the other as he pursed his lips. "The prosecution might fight the accusation that the lab disregarded the physical evidence in a felony. Apart from possible lawsuits, it would discredit them for many trials to come."

  “It will make them squirm a bit,” Paxton admitted.

  Again, Azulay looked at his notes and proceeded as if he were giving a lecture. “Let’s start with the single laceration, or rather avulsion, on Keane’s posterior skull: according to the report, this was the first blow, perpetrated from above and behind Keane as he descended the stairs and looked down. The report claims that this avulsion—” He projected the old image of a deep, horizontal cut showing Keane’s pink flesh beneath it “—matches the shape of the protruding end of the poker. It does not.”

  The next slide showed several surfaces of varying texture, from clay to bone itself, bearing marks.

  "Compare them. The lesion on the victim's skull is shaped like a crescent, whereas the poker would make a straight cut.” The top part of the skull appeared again. “Also, what the report assumed to be six separate lesions on the crown are a symmetrical parallel pattern of marks. It is even described correctly in the autopsy as 'tri-pronged linear lacerations'. They assumed these were multiple blows from the same object. In fact, the symmetry of these marks shows that the crime weapon does not have a single iron prong that sticks out as the fire poker has, it has three prongs."

  James leafed through the autopsy. "Symmetry? They state here that these lacerations had varying depths, lengths and widths."

  "Yes, which would still be consistent with a three-pronged weapon — it depends where most of the force is employed, normally in the middle if it’s a clean blow. The two sets of three lacerations are equidistant and linear. This would not be the case with a weapon like the poker falling willy-nilly to cause a laceration at a time. Furthermore, the absence of fractures and injury to the brain, which Dr. Koestler has already noted, would indicate that the crime weapon was a lighter object than an iron poker.

  “This is why these blows did not kill Mr. Keane or leave him prostrated where he was first struck. He received a first tentative blow that punctured him once, on the back of the head. The perpetrator might have held the weapon in an awkward grip and only one crescent-like — not straight — piece of metal punctured his posterior skull all the way to the bone. Perhaps scared of Joe’s reaction, his screams or the blood running, the killer strikes again, but only twice, with a three-pronged weapon. The long linear lacerations indicate that Joe moved after being hit each time, trying to get away. The prongs dragged across his scalp, scratching bone.”

  "Could it be something like a rake?" Paxton asked.

  "I have tried rakes and not found one I'm satisfied with yet, but yes. Something like a rake, or even a garden cultivator tool."

  James stood. "May we go back to the steps, leading in?”

  Azulay switched slides. "Here?"

  Nodding, James studied the image. "Are you saying, then, that the murder didn't take place in the house?"

  "I think the murder took place outside." Azulay pointed again. "I think these dollops of blood show Joseph Keane entering the house while bleeding from lacerations to his skull. He left this trail as he went toward the stairs. He must have been terrified by the attack and blinded by the blood running down his face. As he reached the halfway point in the stairs, he might have stumbled or missed a step. His hand was slippery from having touched his own blood. He tried to hold on to the wall and rail, fell, and as he hit the step, he exhaled the blood that had been running from his head over his mouth, which is why we get this spray pattern at the skirting board here. Then he kept falling until he landed badly and broke his neck."

  It was Paxton's turn to stand. "Why, why, why was the fire poker there, then? Why the prop?"

  "Ah, my friend," Azulay said. "There we enter in the territory of psychology. Not an exact science, so I cannot help you."

  "Psychology or deviousness," Paxton remarked.

  "Perhaps both," James said. "Could April Keane have followed her husband outside after the argument and delivered these blows with an object that had a long handle? Would that not explain the lack of force and of fractures?"

  Azulay pulled at his notes and looked at them as he talked. "April Keane is five foot five and the victim was five foot eight. If she had a rake, even with a long handle, she could not deliver clean blows from above such as these."

  "What if April stood somewhere high up, waiting for her husband to pass?" Ava asked. "Like on the porch, when he passed below?"

  "Someone on higher ground, on a porch on a step, would need Keane to just stand there, facing away. Once the first blow failed to render him unconscious he moved, hence the long lacerations, and a perpetrator who was shorter than him would then have to follow him. The next blows would have been dealt on his neck, but not on the top of his skull. All the blows were delivered from behind, by someone taller."

  Lee was five foot nine — a tall woman; taller than Joe. The light from the projection made James narrow his eyes as he turned. His own skull throbbed as if someone had relentlessly beat it.

  "So, Keane is attacked outside," James said as he paced. "I can't imagine that it was very far from the house if he was losing blood, getting weak and panicking. Any trail that could be found at the time, showing where he came from, was utterly ignored by the cops and the forensic unit and is long lost to us. Keane might have run over the lawn, or through the woods — it will be impossible to know now. In any case, let's say he managed to get away from the killer and into his house. As
far as I can see, there are only three possibilities."

  He leaned against the table and raised his fingers to enumerate them. "One, the killer knew Keane, and this was a premeditated attack. This person waited for him outside, perhaps even arranged to meet him. In this case, the person was profoundly inept, not having chosen a heavy enough object as a crime weapon and trying to kill Keane near his own house. It's not entirely out of the question, but I'd say it's unlikely.

  "Two, the killer knew Joe, but didn't premeditate the murder. He lost his head during some argument and, as Joe turned, he grabbed the first implement he found — something that would be at hand outside — and hit him with increasing determination and precision. That would probably mean the killer was not only taller than Keane but stronger, since Keane fled instead of attempting to fight."

  "Why didn't the killer finish him off?" Ava asked. "Keane got into his house, but why wouldn't the killer follow him? Look how feeble that door is, those windows."

  Koestler, who had been silent so far, piped in, "He'd have to go for broke and kill a woman and a little girl as well."

  "But that's what tends to happen when someone loses his head," James said. "He would have seen that his only chance was to get in the house, kill Keane, his wife and little stepdaughter, if they happened to wake up. Or—” He stopped for a moment, looking at the crime scene again. "Or he must have hoped that Keane wouldn't talk about the attack he had just suffered."

  "Because Keane had done him wrong and wouldn't want it to be known?" Paxton wondered.

  "Or because they were together in some sort of shady deal,” James explained. “April said in the hearing that Joe was bringing money home, but Joe was unemployed at the time.”

  Ava frowned. “I thought he was a traveling salesman on commission, maybe free-lancing? There has been quite a bit of that since the crisis.”

  “Yes, but during a bad recession, sales decrease,” James said. “Would a free-lance salesman be making good money? What if, instead, he had been doing something illegal? He and the killer disagreed over whatever this was, and once Keane got away, the killer knew he would keep quiet about the attack so as not to expose his own criminal activities."

  The people in the room considered the scenario in silence, until Azulay said, "A less extravagant alternative would be that the killer was a stranger. Some straggler who came upon Joe outside and saw the opportunity to rob him. This person grabbed a garden implement and hit Keane, hoping to stun him. He found that he hadn't knocked him out and tried again — and when Joe managed to somehow drive him back and get inside his house, he gave up and ran away."

  Paxton's tone was soft, "That is the worst possible theory for us, you know."

  "Because it's a flimsy alternative to the theory that Lynn Miller did it?" Azulay asked.

  "Exactly. In case we can't make the whole trial go away by threatening the prosecution with clusterfuck, the 'stranger who happened to be passing' is the worst alternative to offer a jury."

  Ava threw Paxton an amused look, and he winked at her. "Clusterfuck" described the case far too well for him to try and find another word.

  "We can't count on dismissal of the case," Paxton went on. "We need a good alternative or Lee isn't off the hook, I'm afraid. Above all, there is the prop." He pointed to the poker that lay next to Keane's dead body in the image. "Why was it there?"

  James knew April had put Cora’s fingerprints on the poker and dropped it over the rail, but he didn’t offer the information; Lee didn’t want her mother to be incriminated, although the key to the puzzle was the lovely Mrs. Keane. "What can we do to build a better case against the lab?" he wondered.

  "Our case for dismissal will be stronger if I keep looking for any kind of object or implement that could match these lesions," Azulay said. "But I haven't had any luck so far."

  "And I'm retesting what was found under the victim's fingernails and in the lacerations,” Koestler said. "This will take another week — but we know that some of the material already processed came from outdoors: splinters of wood, not consistent with the railing of the staircase, earth, gravel, etc.”

  “Joseph Keane was attacked outside, that much is certain.” The professor was already closing his files and shutting down his laptop. "Dr. Koestler and I will inform you of the next findings."

  "We still have a lot of work to do," Paxton warned James as they said goodbye.

  Once they were gone, James absentmindedly ate whatever he found in the fridge as he kept going over the events on the night of Keane’s death. The answer to the mystery was in the missing hours between the fight Joe had with April and his tumble down the stairs.

  Sitting at the long dinner table, James grabbed the different reports to read them.

  April had said that she and Keane had fought between six and eight in the evening. After that she claimed to have taken a Valium, which was a lie. She hadn't taken it then, because records showed that Cora called Lee at 10.37 p.m. Keane had already fallen down the stairs — the whole house had shaken, as Cora told Lee — and April had already made the girl touch the fire poker. Therefore, April hadn't been sedated at eight o’clock, right after the fight, as she claimed. Lee, however, had found her mother and sister asleep around eleven, when she arrived at the house.

  It was April who had decided to use the fire poker, which Azulay claimed with complete certainty was not the crime weapon but a prop. Could she be an accomplice in Joe's death, told by the real murderer to divert attention with a false weapon and her little daughter's fingerprints? Had she had a lover then, or had she been party to the shady business that was bringing money home?

  In short, had someone else told her to make a mess of the crime scene?

  The rest of the story had been told to him by Lee, and he had no reason to doubt her anymore. She had arrived perhaps a quarter of an hour after Cora's phone call, she had cleaned the poker and put more blood and her own fingerprints on it.

  But there was Joe's two-hour absence between the hours of eight and about ten.

  Where did he go? James wondered.

  Perhaps no farther than his front yard, or the woods on either side of his house — to meet someone, or to get hit on the head by a complete stranger.

  Perhaps he had gone farther.

  The words on the report got blurry as James' thoughts raced. The puzzle was about to lock into place, he could feel it, and maybe he was looking at everything the wrong way.

  Maybe the key to the murder wasn’t April, but Joe himself. People had done things that night, and there was a reason for everything they had done, even if that reason was mad or stupid. As usual, the human beings involved in the crime had all had their own needs, desires and motives — as usual, they had been at odds with each other.

  And there was a name, also neglected by all, which he now saw written in a report. A name he had heard from Paxton, from April during the preliminary hearing and from Lee.

  Jada Phillips. The woman Keane had probably been seeing behind his wife's back.

  TWENTY-TWO

  "If I hadn't brought you with me, sitting here and watching her would seem quite creepy," James said.

  From the passenger seat next to him, Ava stared at the restaurant before them. "Well, I'm not sure it's a very good idea."

  The wind buffeted the car, cold air seeping in through tiny cracks in the windows. Ten days before, the tiny town of Massey would have looked ready for spring. But the weather had turned again, even as March approached, and the wooden restaurant where Jada Phillips worked seemed about to fly off like Dorothy’s house in the Wizard of Oz.

  The athletic blonde woman they were watching moved around setting tables for lunchtime.

  When Jada's ex-husband told James that she had left for Massey in 2016, he had called Ava, requesting her to take a field trip with him and bill him for her time.

  "Don't you want a private investigator to do this?" she had asked. "We have two really good ones we work with."

  "No, I'd rath
er go myself. And she might open up a bit more easily if you come as well."

  They had driven beyond Raleigh that morning. Between the ages of three and eleven, Lee had lived around that area, but James would think about that later. Now he took the map of North Carolina from the glove compartment and put it in his coat pocket. "You should take the lead, if you don't mind.”

  "Good morning," Ava said in her sweetest voice as they reached the restaurant. "I'm wondering if you can help us? We're looking for Miss Jada Phillips?"

  "That's me." Jada wore a dark sweater and trousers, and a small striped apron with pockets. "Who are you?"

  "I'm Ava Sullivan, from Paxton and Associates, and this is James Bryce. We were wondering if we could have a quick word with you?"

  Jada looked from one to the other in slight alarm. "Associates? Like in lawyers? You coming about the alimony? I'm not talking 'bout that with you!"

  "Oh, no!" Ava waved her hand. "No, we don't have anything to do with that. We're representing Lynette Miller."

  The name stopped Jada mid-flight. "Lynette Miller? In Hawkshaw? The stepdaughter who killed Joe? They told me she had been caught.”

  "It's a bit of a long story," Ava said. "I think you open at twelve and it's ten-thirty, so can we take a moment of your time?"

  "I just don't see what I have to do with any of that."

  "It will only take a moment," James insisted.