Defensive Wounds

by Lisa Black

  There were no other wounds on her body, no bruises, nothing but one chipped fingernail. Jenna had not been drunk. Normally the toxicology results would be in a separate report, but since the case had gone to trial and the results had become part of a public record, they remained in the file. Jenna Simone had had a small amount of alcohol in her system, equivalent to perhaps one beer, and no other narcotics or stimulants.

  Next came only a single page of laboratory notes, written in Don’s neat handwriting. He had examined the victim’s clothing—the DNA analyst had picked up Theresa’s slack while she’d been lost in a funk. Westlake PD had submitted four items: a turquoise shirt with thin straps and a built-in shelf bra; a pair of blue denim jeans, Tommy Hilfiger size four boot-cut; a pair of silky purple panties, no tag; and a pair of high-heeled leather sandals with black-and-white leopard-print uppers. These were worn but clean, with no bloodstains. The panties were free of blood and negative for semen. The jeans—how did teenagers stay so preternaturally thin? Theresa wondered; in her youth no one under the age of eight would have fit into a size four—were also unstained. The turquoise top had smears of blood, but no evidence of semen. All items had been taped for hairs and fibers and submitted to the hair/fiber analyst—Theresa, in other words. So she did not feel surprised when she turned to the next report to see her own handwriting, somewhat less tidy than Don’s.

  She had included a micrograph of matching carpet fibers and finally felt a glimmer of recognition at the gray, trilobal threads. Of the hairs found on the body, one was consistent with William, one with his mother, and one, short and black, matched no one. No conclusions could be drawn from this, as the body lay in the suspect’s own house and not in an isolated location—meaning that Theresa assumed the Rosedales had as many guests and visitors in their home as any other family. A wealthy family, probably quite social … How much had that changed? Had their friends stood by them, or did the incident cause a bit of coolness in the country club’s locker room?

  That concluded the reports. Two thick packets of photographs had been left in the file, most likely printed up for the prosecution’s review or at the pathologist’s request. Since the M.E.’s office had gone to digital instead of 35-millimeter, photos were stored and accessed through the computer network to save the cost of actually printing them. But some doctors still preferred to work with prints instead of their computer monitor, or the prosecutors tried to save money by asking the M.E.’s office to print the photos.

  Theresa skimmed through the autopsy photos with determined professionalism, making no connection between the raw flesh on the steel table and her own daughter. Not even a glimmer. Not even when she viewed the bare white bone of Jenna Simone’s skull, pieced back together for the photographer like a jigsaw puzzle.

  The other packet, much thinner, contained photographs of the clothing, each item front and back. No surprises. The bloodstains stood out in sharp relief against the bright blue, a large blotch at the hemline and then a series of three and a half lines under the right armpit. Something like Marie Corrigan—blood on the shirt only. As if the bludgeoning had been inflicted before the clothing had been removed. But if both females and their killer hadn’t been in the process of removing clothing, then what had provoked such a fatal argument? Because the women wouldn’t even consider removing it? Or because both killers didn’t even try to persuade them?

  A surprisingly brief newspaper clipping gave her only a few additional facts: Jenna had had no current boyfriend and had met up with her girlfriends at the dance. A friend of William’s had confirmed that they’d arrived at the dance together but then he’d lost track of William. William’s car was found in the school parking lot.

  And there the file of Jenna Simone’s death ended.

  Theresa moved to the cabinet and placed the folder back in numerical order.

  The case could not be more open and shut. And yet William Rosedale had walked out of the courtroom a free man. How?

  One person might have some insight. And, happily for her, he worked right upstairs.

  She pushed the file drawer to close it, then grabbed it again as a name caught her eye. It closed on her right thumb, not enough to bruise but enough to hurt like the dickens. She pulled out the new file with her left hand and read the name on the tab.

  Cases were filed by number, not name. Only one and a half months after Jenna Simone’s murder, Ellie Baker Britton had died. The first wife of her lawyer nemesis.

  CHAPTER 17

  *

  Frank slammed the door of the Crown Vic just a little too hard, and the sound rattled his eardrums. He’d developed a headache after the day spent inside the hotel, the air a little too stuffy, the witnesses a little too reticent. He needed to go home, where a shot of Jack Daniel’s and some satellite TV cured most ills. Maybe two shots.

  The house in front of him had high windows, an impeccable paint job, and columns. Actual freakin’ columns, white and tall.

  Maybe three shots.

  “We’re in the wrong line of work,” his partner, Angela, observed from the other side of the car.

  “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  “Meat Loaf.”

  He blinked at her for a moment before making the association. They had fallen into a habit of throwing out snatches of song lyrics as a challenge for the other to identify. It gave them something to do in the slow moments, when other detective teams might talk about sports, politics, or their personal problems. Angela didn’t follow sports, Frank ignored any politics that didn’t immediately affect him, and Angela kept most of her personal life to herself. Frank thought he did, too, but sometimes suspected that he simply didn’t have a personal life to keep.

  Dennis Britton, on the other hand, probably did. He certainly had the house for it.

  His sweeping three-story mansion in Gates Mills backed up to the Chagrin River, surrounded by oak trees, a five-car garage, and a smaller home that may once have belonged to servants and probably still did. Frank couldn’t picture Britton spending the weekend trimming the bushes or washing the windows. Frank couldn’t picture Britton without a suit and tie.

  An older BMW sat on the pristine driveway, next to a current-model Corvette. Hers and his, Frank guessed. Old money and new. Or maybe just old. No need to spend your own salary on your toys when your wife comes from one of the richest families in the country.

  Angela sighed.

  “Stop it,” he told her. She gave him a quizzical look, and he expounded, “Neither of us is looking forward to this, and we should be. Here’s our chance to put this asshole on the hot seat instead of him doing it to us. We should be breathing fire, not all depressed and intimidated. The man’s at the top of our list for two brutal murders, and we’re not leaving here without answers. Right?”

  She smiled. “Right. Should we give some sort of tribal yell, or say ‘hike’ or something?”

  Frank looked up at the high windows. “We’ll skip that part for now.”

  He walked briskly to the massive front door and knocked confidently, mainly confident that all the pep talks in the world weren’t going to help. He had nothing on Dennis Britton, nothing to implicate him in any real way, and Dennis Britton would know that as well as he would know the definition of “habeas corpus.” But the police shooting case was on temporary hiatus after the judge developed a case of food poisoning from a bad breakfast, leaving Britton an unexpectedly free afternoon. Frank wanted to make sure the lawyer didn’t enjoy it.

  The door swung open, revealing the expected towering foyer and sweeping staircase, marble tile, and a boy of about thirteen. He had the baggy pants and oversize T-shirt of his age group with twice the required sullenness. “Yeah?”

  “We’re here to see Dennis Britton.” Frank had expected either a maid complete with French outfit or the lord or lady him-or herself, and this kid threw him off. Britton and the current lady hadn’t been married long enough to have one this age, so he must be from a previous marriage or some
kind of houseguest. Frank searched the kid’s face for any sign that Britton had procreated, but nothing seemed familiar except the faint sneer. That was dead-on.

  “I think he’s in the garage,” the kid said, and shut the door.

  The smooth white surface now two inches from his nose, Frank said, “I guess we’ll try the garage. Wonder why Junior isn’t in school.”

  “He probably has private tutors,” Angela snapped out as they descended the front steps. Maybe the kid reminded her of her own, but Frank didn’t ask. Let people start talking about their kids and you’d wind up hearing about every scraped knee or school-yard bully or teacher who “just doesn’t get him” until you wanted to cover your ears and hum the theme from Barney. He never asked about Angela’s kids.

  Frank had been in garages with numbered slots for tools, garages impassable with stored junk, garages made of gaping planks that would fall over in the first strong wind, but he had never before been in a garage that required both a key card and a numeric code to enter. It appeared to be the emergency bunker to the main house’s headquarters. Frank tried the knob. It didn’t budge, leaving him no choice but to push the little metal button next to the little metal speaker plate. He refused to say anything, figuring the button would buzz and the two security cameras pointed at him would show Britton who they were.

  He should have known better.

  “Yes?”

  Frank repeated his objective.

  “What for?” the voice said.

  “What do you think?” He wasn’t going to get into a pissing contest with a disembodied voice no matter how much it would amuse the attorney. Problem was, he didn’t know what to do if Britton didn’t let them in. He had no warrant, and if he put his foot in this door, he’d have to go to the hospital.

  “I already talked to you,” Britton said, his voice calm and smarmy even after passing through several electronic components.

  “It’s okay, Britton,” Frank said. “We can wait.”

  Then he turned around, faced the meticulously landscaped area, and leaned his back against the building as if he had all the time in the world, not so much as glancing at the cameras. He lit a cigarette as a final show of nonchalance, making sure to scatter the ashes. Angela wandered over to the flower beds and appeared to examine the various flora.

  It took ten minutes and Frank grinding his menthol butt into the sparkling buff concrete before Britton apparently felt he had scored some sort of point and let them in. And lo and behold, he wore a plain T-shirt tucked into straining jeans. No suit or tie.

  Calling the space a garage seemed vastly inadequate. The ceiling rose at least thirty feet above them, and the walls sat in an enormous square, with space for five cars both front to back and side to side, so that with a little organization at least twenty-five could be parked inside. All of it had been painted a nearly blinding white. In the southwest corner stood a large metal lift, so that Britton could hoist his babies into the air instead of having to crawl under them like any average joe. Frank had never seen one in a private home before.

  Despite the space there were only three automobiles present: a brown Jaguar, a purplish thing that looked like it hailed from the early days of Motown and miniskirts, and a metallic blue Corvette with large pipes running along each side. It had suffered some sort of indignity to its right front fender, and a raw fiberglass hole gaped just behind the headlights. Britton trimmed pieces of it with a pair of gleaming side cutters. “Have you found out who killed Marie yet?”

  Just as well to skip the small talk. Pretending this was a friendly chat would be as pointless as Britton’s pretending that one of his depositions was a friendly chat. “You’re still our best suspect.”

  That didn’t even get a raised eyebrow. “Because we were friends?”

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days?” Angela asked.

  “No, they call it something that’s not repeatable in polite company.”

  “Didn’t think polite was your style.” She continued to observe the car instead of him.

  He seemed genuinely offended. “I’m always polite.”

  Frank said, “Then let me ask you, politely, to tell us about your relationship with Marie.”

  Britton picked up a vinyl block with sandpaper attached to the bottom of it. “We slept together.”

  “That’s it? Just slept together? You weren’t star-crossed lovers or anything?”

  This had the unintended effect of making Britton laugh. “Neither Marie nor I believed in stars. We enjoyed each other’s company and understood each other’s work. That’s it.”

  Maybe, Frank thought, that’s as good as it gets for him. Letting anyone closer than that would be dangerous—when you’re king of the hill, everyone’s looking to knock you off. And I thought my social life sucked.

  “I’m surprised you’re not using this break for some last-minute cramming, what with your client facing the death penalty and all.”

  “Helps me think.”

  Which meant he knew his client was doomed no matter what, or that he had a team of underlings to do all the work for him? Or he meant that working on cars helped him think. Frank returned to Marie Corrigan. “She have any enemies? I mean serious enemies, anyone she felt might physically harm her?”

  “ ‘To earn the enmity of some men is a compliment,’ ” Britton said, rubbing the sandpaper over the edges of the hole. “I forget who said that.”

  “I’m more interested in what Marie said.”

  “You won’t believe me, but I’ve thought of nothing else for two days. If she felt a threat from someone, she never told me about it. But she might not have. Marie didn’t show fear, ever. Not even to me.”

  “Maybe she didn’t express it as fear, exactly,” Angela qualified. “Were there any cases she talked about, maybe more than usual?”

  “No. We didn’t talk much about work, again believe it or not. Our time together was limited.”

  “Right, because of your wife.”

  “No.” He frowned, either at Angela or at the tough fiberglass. “Because of our schedules.”

  Frank said, “So fitting in sex with you could be tough. Is that why she went back to Bruce Raffel the second he got back into town?”

  “Raffel? Don’t make me laugh.”

  “It’s funny when your girlfriend’s old boyfriend comes sniffing around?”

  Britton sanded some more. “He was more of an unofficial co-counsel than a boyfriend, in my humble opinion. They thought alike, especially when it came to U.S. v. Booker issues. Anyway, Marie has lots of old boyfriends. Most still live here.”

  “How many of them got her pregnant?”

  Again the unintended effect. Britton snickered. “You’ve been listening to rumors. Marie was never pregnant, not by Bruce, not by anybody. Some frumpy secretary made that one up.”

  “Did you see Bruce Raffel at the convention?”

  “Yeah, he came to my seminar on the first day. I don’t think I ran into him after that. We didn’t speak.”

  “You didn’t hold any sort of grudge against Bruce Raffel?”

  Britton set down the sanding block, picked up a plastic jar of something or other. “Nope.”

  “He and Marie, they got along. Really well, more than one person told us—you just said so yourself. And things weren’t going so great for Raffel in the big city. Maybe he planned to come back home, pick up your girlfriend, start stealing your cases again?”

  If the idea bothered Britton, he hid it masterfully. “Let him try.”

  “So you weren’t angry at Marie, maybe for hooking up with him, maybe for hooking up with someone else at the convention?”

  A snort. “I wouldn’t be angry if Marie had hooked up with the Ohio Supreme Court. I’d be impressed. Besides, you know I couldn’t have killed her.”

  “Because you loved her too much?” Angela suggested.

  Again the quick frown. “No, because I was with other people the entire evening.”

  “Ab
out that,” Frank said. “Turns out your alibi isn’t quite as solid as it seemed at first.”

  CHAPTER 18

  *

  He waited until Britton looked up, then made a show of pulling out his palm-size notebook and flipping a few pages. “There were five of you who went to the hotel bar after attending the last session of the day—which was, I believe, ‘Strategies for Invoking the Fifth Amendment.’ From the bar you all went to Morton’s steak house, where you paid a big bill and a small tip, and then to House of Blues. They must make good drinks at the House of Blues, because that’s where people’s memories get a little fuzzy. Your alibi men are equally split—two say you went to the Crazy Horse with them, and two say you showed up later.”

  Britton set down the jar and returned to trimming his car’s gaping hole. “I’ll bet I can guess which two. The assistant registrar of the convention and our illustrious keynote speaker tried to outdo each other with blue martinis. They probably aren’t sure they were there, much less me.”

  “No, the two with bad hangovers insist you were with them every minute. It’s your more sober compatriots who think you did a disappearing act.” Slightly more sober. “And, you see, the cabdriver doesn’t remember you either.”

  Britton barely paused. “Because you can’t fit five guys into a cab. I grabbed another one.”

  “All by yourself?”