Fatal Flaw

by William Lashner

  “Let me see it. And the autopsy report, too.”

  “What for?”

  “Just haul them out and let me have a look-see.”

  The reports were in the trial bag I had brought with me from the office. Skink spread them out on the coffee table in front of the couch and riffled through them, one at a time, as he searched for the specific items he was interested in. It was a wonder to behold, Phil Skink in full calculating mode. His mouth twitched, his eyes blinked, he scratched his greased blue-black hair as if it were infested with lice—he looked like a deranged mainframe on the verge of a nervous breakdown. And the whole of the time he was letting out little verbal explosions. “Mmmmmbop,” he said, or “Blip, blip, blip,” or “Now, there’s something, innit?” or, most strangely, “Parlez-vous to me, you frog bastard.”

  Beth and I stood back and let him at it, both of us afraid to get too close in case he blew up.

  After a good twenty minutes he raised his head and said, “I think we got ourselves a G forty-eight.”

  “G forty-eight? Is that an exhibit or something?”

  “Don’t be daft. I’m talking those little balls what falls out of the cage. G forty-eight. G forty-eight. And you know what that gives us?”

  “What?” said Beth.

  Skink let a huge smile crease his battered face. “Bingo, mates. Bingo.”

  47

  “THAT’S RIGHT,” said the police technician from the stand, adjusting her glasses as she reviewed her report. “I determined that the gun was two to four feet away from the victim when it was fired.” She took off her glasses and looked up at me. “But as I said in my direct testimony, that’s only a rough estimate.”

  “Let’s be as precise as possible about this, Officer Cantwell,” I said. “You are estimating the distance from the victim to the end of the barrel, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “With the arm outstretched, the killer’s eyes would have been considerably farther away. As much as two feet, isn’t that right?”

  “It’s hard to tell how the gun was held, but that is certainly possible.”

  “So the killer, when he fired, could have been as much as six feet away from the victim?”

  “Yes, or closer.”

  “Six feet. That’s pretty far away with the light off, isn’t it?”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained,” said the judge.

  “But, Your Honor,” I said, “we have Mrs. Morgan’s testimony that the lights were out at some point before she saw Mr. Forrest on the steps.”

  “Sustained.”

  “And there is absolutely no evidence that the light was on at the time of the killing.”

  “Argue what you want, Mr. Carl, at argument, but you haven’t laid a foundation to allow this witness to testify what can or can’t be seen in that room with the lights out. Continue, please.”

  “Officer Cantwell, were you ever in that room with the lights out?”

  “No.”

  “With the lights on?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve never been in that room?”

  “I am a lab technician, Mr. Carl. I work in a lab. I of course consult the photographs and the police reports, but my job is a scientific analysis of the evidence.”

  “Then, Officer, let me ask you this. With any of your fancy lab equipment, your spectroscopes or infrared cameras, with your micron telescopes, with any of that stuff, is it possible for you to say whether the light was on or off at the time the shot was fired?”

  “No.”

  “Good enough. Let’s move on. Two to four feet from the end of the barrel to the victim, right?”

  “That was my estimate.”

  “And you made that determination from the gunpowder residue on the comforter, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Could you explain to the jury how the gunpowder residue ended up on the comforter?”

  “A bullet is fired by the ignition of smokeless gunpowder, or nitrocellulose, in a cartridge. As the powder ignites, there is a violent expansion of gas, which propels the bullet through the barrel and then out into the world. In this case, through the comforter and into the heart of the victim. Under perfect circumstances all the gunpowder would be turned into the propelling gases during ignition, but as we all know, our world isn’t perfect. Along with the bullet, the expanding gases discharge unburned powder, partially burned powder, and completely burned powder, or soot. If the barrel of the gun is close enough to the target, then some or all of these are deposited on the target’s surface. An examination of the pattern of these discharges can allow for an approximation of distance.”

  “Were all three types of powder found on the comforter?”

  “No, not on the relevant portion. Generally, if a shot is fired within a foot, there is what is called both fouling and stippling. Fouling, which can be wiped away easily, occurs when the completely burned powder is found on the surface. Stippling occurs from the unburned and incompletely burned particles of gunpowder. These particles become embedded in the surface or bounce off and abrade the surface, and their effects are not easily wiped off. From beyond a foot the soot generally is dispersed into the air and so no soot deposit is made. From the distance of a foot to maybe three or four feet, there will be stippling without fouling. When we examined the comforter, we found embedded unburned and partially burned powder, which gave us our approximate distance.”

  “How was this examination done?”

  “Because of the color of the comforter, a dark blue, and the encrusted blood staining it, it was difficult to see the residue with the naked eye. We took an infrared photograph of the comforter, but that didn’t prove very helpful, which isn’t surprising, since infrared is better at revealing fouling than stippling. Then we made a search for nitrates using a Greiss test. We pressed a series of gelatin-coated photographic papers onto the comforter with a hot iron and then treated the papers to find the presence of nitrates, which would be found if there existed nitrocellulose on the comforter that had been incompletely burned. Nitrates were found in a wide, elliptical pattern, from which we concluded that the firing range was two to four feet.”

  “All very technical, Officer Cantwell.”

  “Most of our work is. That’s why we’re called technicians.”

  “Now, you found these nitrates over a large part of the comforter.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what you found would qualify as stippling.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And this stippling would have been found not only over the comforter but also over the exposed surfaces of anything on the mattress.”

  “I would assume so, yes.”

  “Including the victim herself.”

  “Yes.”

  “And based on what you testified to earlier, this would have been clearly evident, as particles would be embedded in the skin or, in bouncing off, would have abraded the skin, isn’t that right?”

  “That is what you would expect, but I didn’t examine the victim.”

  “You examined her clothes, correct?”

  “She was wearing a short nightshirt, a teddy, it’s sometimes called. We found blood and some nitrate residue around the bullet hole, what is known as bullet swipe.”

  “But no stippling.”

  “Yes, no stippling.”

  “Now, let’s look at the autopsy report, shall we?”

  “Objection. It is not her report.”

  “The autopsy report was introduced through stipulation. I’m not asking her to lay a foundation, I’m asking her to use the information she has already provided to help us analyze the actual report.”

  “Is this going somewhere, Counselor?”

  “I hope so, Judge.”

  “Let’s get there soon.”

  “In the autopsy report Dr. Regent analyzed many of the organs of the victim in this case, including the skin, isn’t that right?”

  “Ye
s.”

  “On the first paragraph on page four he mentions the bruise beneath her left eye, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the second paragraph he mentions the general condition of the skin other than the bruise, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “No other sign of insult to the skin, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, that is what he wrote.”

  “Nothing about particles of gunpowder embedded in the skin, is there?”

  “No.”

  “And nothing about abrasions from particles bouncing off the skin, is there?”

  “Not from what I can see.”

  “So, in fact, in reading the autopsy, there is no evidence of stippling.”

  “That’s right.”

  “No evidence that her skin was in any way exposed to the nitrates released by the handgun.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Now, here is my question, Officer Cantwell. Based on the test you performed with the photographic paper and the comforter, and based upon the absence of stippling on the victim’s clothes or skin, isn’t it quite possible that all the stippling occurred on the comforter only because her entire body, including her face, was covered by the comforter?”

  “That might be one explanation.”

  “So, to summarize your testimony, the shooter might have been as far from the victim as six feet, you can’t in any way deny the possibility that it was dark in the room, and you maintain that it is quite possible that the victim was entirely hidden by her comforter.”

  “Yes, I suppose…”

  “With all that, Officer, isn’t it possible that the shooter didn’t even know who it was beneath that comforter? With all that, Officer, isn’t it possible the shooter murdered the absolute wrong person? Isn’t that possible?”

  There was to be no answer, of course. This was one of those obviously objectionable questions that lawyers throw in just so they can sneak in some argument in the midst of a cross-examination. But the point was made. It was the first time the jury had heard the possibility that maybe Hailey Prouix wasn’t the intended victim, and they listened to the whole examination with admirable interest. And so, I could tell, did Troy Jefferson.

  “I don’t think they bought it,” he said to me after Judge Tifaro had recessed for the day.

  “They don’t have to buy it, they just have to buy the possibility of it.”

  “So what are you going to argue, that the lover meant to kill Guy and killed his one true love instead?”

  “A sad tale worthy of Shakespeare, don’t you think?” I said. “The tragic story of one who loved not wisely but too well and threw it away by trying to kill off the competition and mistakenly murdering the woman he loved.”

  “Sounds like a movie of the week.”

  “Yes, it does. Maybe after this is over, I’ll option the story to ABC.”

  “We have a new witness to add to our list.”

  “Someone interesting, I hope.”

  “Oh, yes, interesting as hell. You should never have tried to backstab us like you did on that stipulation. We’re calling the victim’s uncle. He’s known her all her life and he is thrilled as hell to testify against the man who killed his niece. He’s going to identify her, and then he’s got a few more things to say, and I’m going to let him say them.”

  “Really?”

  “Count on it. He’s going to bury your boy.”

  “I certainly hope not. I’d like to speak to him before he testifies, if that’s all right. You know where he’s staying?”

  “He’s at the DoubleTree.”

  “Nice.”

  “But don’t waste your breath. He’s not going to speak to you. He’s not going to say a word until he’s on the stand.”

  “It shook you a little, didn’t it?” I said. “The wrong-victim theory.”

  “Not really. We had seen the possibility beforehand. We were just wondering what took you so long to figure it out.”

  As he walked out of the courtroom, I began to wonder the exact same thing. It must have always been a possibility, a close examination of the forensics reports would have shown it to me as clearly as they showed it to Skink. And if there was to be a parallel with the Jesse Sterrett murder, then it only made sense. The boy Hailey was planning to run away with, murdered. The man Hailey was planning to marry, an attempt on his life. It was so obvious. Why couldn’t I see it?

  Because of my obsession. I was obsessed with Hailey Prouix. Call it love, call it lust, call it what you will, but it was an obsession and it colored everything I had done in this case, for better or for worse. She was the focus of my interest, so I assumed she was the focus of the killer’s interest, too. My obsession had been like a set of blinders, but the blinders were off.

  Right from the courtroom I called Skink on my cell phone. “He’s at the DoubleTree.”

  “All right,” said Skink. “I’ll get my man on it.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not yet.”

  “You better hurry. He’ll probably go on tomorrow afternoon.”

  “It ain’t so easy. It’s a big desert.”

  “No excuses, Skink.”

  “I understand, mate.”

  And he did, we all did. It was no time for excuses, it was no time for sitting back and waiting, no time for mere hope. The blinders now were off and Roylynn had been right all along. There was indeed a primordial evil that had blown through Hailey Prouix’s life and caused a swath of destruction. And now, in a court of law, it and I were coming face to face.

  48

  “WE HAVE time for one more witness this afternoon, Mr. Jefferson,” said Judge Tifaro. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, Your Honor. The People call Lawrence Cutlip to the stand.”

  “Lawrence Cutlip? I don’t see a Lawrence Cutlip on your witness list, Counsel.”

  “It’s a late addition, Judge, in light of Mr. Carl’s decision to abrogate his agreement on the stipulation about the identity of the victim. Mr. Cutlip will identify her as Hailey Prouix.”

  “Ah, yes. Any objection, Mr. Carl?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “I thought not. All right, then, Mr. Jefferson, but keep it short.”

  “I aim to, Your Honor, yes I do.”

  The doors in the rear of the courtroom swung open and a cold breeze slipped in, followed by the decrepit remains of Lawrence Cutlip.

  Cutlip, in his wheelchair, was dressed in his good jeans, with a fresh flannel shirt and clean white sneakers, all spiffed for the occasion. His thick grizzle was shaved close, and his wild ruff of white hair was combed back and fastened to his skull with grease. Even his dentures were in place, clean white pieces of plastic interspersed among the brittle natural teeth to which his gums still hesitantly clung. The oxygen tank was sympathetically hanging from the rear of the chair, its clear plastic line hooked around his ears and under his nose. Cutlip occasionally and noticeably wheezed as he was pushed forward by a large woman in short-sleeved nursing whites.

  As the old man slid down the aisle between the benches and into the well of the court, he hunched in the chair, looking about himself suspiciously, not sure what to expect. When he saw Beth and me, he smiled awkwardly, as if we were old acquaintances of uncertain temper, and we smiled back warmly, as if we were old friends. We kept smiling even as the woman, biceps bulging, lifted Cutlip’s chair to the witness box, even as Cutlip raised his hand, even as Cutlip gave and spelled his name, gave his address, swore his oath to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing nothing nothing, so help him God, but the truth.

  “Mr. Cutlip,” said Troy Jefferson, “how are you related to Hailey Prouix?”

  “She was my niece, poor girl, the daughter of my sister.”

  “Does she have any other family?”

  “Well, her daddy was a Cajun boy who died when she was young, and her mama left off this earth not ten years back. That leaves just me and her sister, Roylynn. But Roylynn ain’t ex
actly all there, if you know what I mean, not even able to take care of herself. So that about leaves only me.”

  “Were you close to her?”

  “Yes, sir. You know, my sister wasn’t so disciplined, not really hard enough to get along in this world, so when her husband, he died in that lumber accident, she needed some help with them girls. I was living my life, minding my own business, but I saw that she and the girls needed me, and so I moved on in and supported them girls as best I could until they was old enough to take care of themselves.”

  “That was quite a thing, Mr. Cutlip.”

  “I couldn’t let them pretty little girls just drift away like that. The way I saw it, I never had no choice. I only done what I had to do. Anyone with half a heart would have done the same.”

  “Did you stay close to Hailey through the years?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Were you aware that she was engaged to Guy Forrest?”

  “Yes, I was. She told me all about him.”

  “So you knew he was married.”

  “Yes, with them kids, too. I told her it was a mistake to get involved with the likes of him. He didn’t seem the most stable, from what she told me, and from what he done to his wife and kids, not the most loyal neither. And then when she told me they was fighting over money, I got scared for her. I told her to get away from him, to get out before it was too late. There’s no telling what a man like that could do. I told her, I did, but when it came to boys, she never did listen to me. She never listened to nobody.”

  Through the whole of this little speech Judge Tifaro was staring at me, giving me that look of hers, the stare that made you want to check your law license just to prove to yourself you didn’t pick it up along with a screwdriver and a fifty-foot garden hose at Sears. She was wondering why I wasn’t objecting from the first word, why I had done what I had done to let this man on the stand in the first place.

  “No objection, Mr. Carl?” she said finally.

  “No, Your Honor, but thank you for your concern.”

  She stared, I shrugged, Jefferson continued.

  “And then what happened?”

  “What the hell do you think happened? She ended up dead.”