First degree ac-2

  I'm just finishing the file when Laurie enters along with her traitor companion, Tara. "How are we doing?" Laurie asks.

  It's probably the thousandth time she's asked me that question since this nightmare started, and my insides cringe when I hear it. She wants me to tell her that I've just come up with something, a breakthrough, that is going to bring us a quick, decisive, and startling victory.

  "We're getting there," I say without much enthusiasm, and then I try not to listen to the sound of her heart hitting the floor. "It's a process."

  "I know, Andy, I know it's a process," she says, partially venting her frustration. "You've told me a hundred times that it's a process, and I've got it down pat. It's a process."

  I can get annoyed, start an argument, and we can add "hurt" and "miserable" to our mental state, which alphabetically would follow smoothly after "depressed" and "frustrated." Instead, I put my arm around her shoulder and draw her to me.

  "I can say two things with certainty. Number one, this is not a process. Never has been, never will be. In law school that's the first thing they tell you: If you want a process, go to business school."

  She smiles, and I can see the anger melting away. "You said you know two things with certainty. What's the other one?"

  "That we are going to win. I'd be lying to you if I said I knew exactly how, but we are going to win."

  She starts to formulate a question, then changes her mind and rests her head on my shoulder. I know she doesn't fully believe in what I'm saying, but I hope she's getting there. It's a process.

  Dylan's first witness is a fourteen-year-old boy, one of a group that saw the smoke coming out of the warehouse that night and called the fire department. Dylan takes twenty minutes when he could have taken two, and since the kid never even saw the body, I don't bother to cross-examine.

  Next up is a rookie police officer, Ricky Spencer, who was the first to realize it was a body that was smoldering.

  "Did you immediately realize it was a body?" Dylan asks.

  "Well, it was dark, and I wasn't really sure. I couldn't see a head … a face." He seems shaken by the recollection, which most people would be. "When I shined a light on it, there was no doubt what it was."

  "Other than the fact that there was a body, was there anything else unusual that you noticed about this fire?"

  Spencer nods. "Yes. The fire seemed localized around the body, and there was a mostly empty gas can about ten feet away. It appeared to be arson, with the body the only target."

  "If you know, did subsequent tests show that the same material that was in the can was involved in the fire?"

  "Yes, it was. I saw the reports."

  I could object to this as hearsay, but the facts are true, and Dylan could bring the same information in with other, more polished witnesses.

  I rise to cross-examine. "Officer Spencer, that night at the warehouse must have been an upsetting experience for you."

  He nods hesitantly. Dylan has told him to be wary of the evil defense counsel, but this seems harmless enough. "It was. I've never …" He catches himself. "It was."

  "You said, 'I've never.' Did you mean you've never seen anything like it before?"

  He's caught, and he nods sheepishly. "I never have."

  "But you weren't so upset that your recollections might be incorrect, were you?" I ask.

  "No, sir. I remember everything very clearly."

  I nod. "Good. Now, before you knew it was a body that was burning, what did you think it might be? Any ideas?"

  He considers this. "Well, I thought it might be a mattress. Or maybe an old sofa. It sounds pretty awful to say that now, but …" He lets his answer trail off.

  "No, it's okay. I'm sure everybody understands." I look at the jury, and they are clearly joining me in sympathy for what this young man went through. "Now," I continue, "you say it seemed like a mattress, or a sofa … so whatever was on fire seemed fairly large?"

  "Yes. He was a big man."

  "Right. Now, the gasoline can … was that near the wheelbarrow?"

  "I didn't see any wheelbarrow," he says.

  "Really? Then where was the gurney?"

  "There wasn't any gurney."

  Now my surprise is showing through. "How about a cart or wagon of any kind?"

  "No."

  "Let me see if I understand this. Mr. Campbell said in his opening statement that the murder was committed behind Hinchcliffe Stadium, and then the body was brought to the warehouse. If that's true, are you saying that somebody carried it into the warehouse?"

  "It's possible."

  "How far was the body from the nearest door?"

  "About forty feet," he says.

  I back him further into the corner. "So the murderer is somebody strong enough to carry dead weight the size of an old couch more than forty feet?" I walk toward Laurie, to make it seem even more absurd that someone her size could have done this.

  "I assume the murderer had a cart of some kind and then took it with him when he left. Or when she left."

  "Then why would he leave the gas can?" I ask.

  Dylan objects that the witness couldn't possibly know the murderer's internal reasoning, and Hatchet sustains.

  "Did you see any wheel marks, or any tracks made by anything other than human feet?"

  "No, but you should ask the forensic people that."

  I smile, knowing that there were no such tracks. "Oh, I will. Believe me, I will."

  Dylan has a couple of questions on redirect, trying to repair whatever damage I may have caused.

  "Officer Spencer, do you know what kind of flooring there is in this particular warehouse?"

  "I believe it is cement."

  "So you wouldn't expect a gurney or a cart to leave tracks?"

  "I wouldn't think so, no."

  Dylan lets him off, and after Hatchet adjourns court for the day, I head home for what will become a nightly routine. Kevin, Laurie, and I have dinner, discussing the events of the day in court. Marcus will join us when he has something to add, which I hope will be soon. After dinner we move to the den, where we discuss our plans and strategies, and then they both leave me alone with my reading and preparations for the next day's witnesses. It's a grind, but experience has shown that it works for me.

  It's eleven o'clock, and I'm sitting on the couch surrounded by paperwork, when Tara comes into the room. She walks over to me and stands a couple of feet away, as if waiting for me to call her over.

  "It's obvious you're here only because Laurie's asleep," I say.

  She responds by jumping up on the couch, but sitting about six inches away from me. "I need two hands to read, so there's no way I'm petting you," I say.

  She tilts her head, as if puzzled by what I'm saying. It should be noted here that Tara has the cutest head tilt I have ever seen. If "head tilting" had been an Olympic sport in the eighties, even the East German judge would have given her a ten.

  Tara's next move is to come closer and snuggle up against me, her head resting on my thigh. It's a blatant attempt to receive pleasure, and I can see through it from a mile away. "Nice try," I say, "but I'm not buying it."

  She licks my hand, so I spend the next hour reading and petting her until we both fall asleep.

  I meet Kevin at the courthouse at nine in the morning, and we again go over how we're going to handle Nick Sabonis, the first witness to tie Laurie to the crime. It's important that we make a real dent in him.

  Dylan takes him through his being called to the warehouse the night of the murder, and the actions that he took. They're standard and proper, which is fine, because it has nothing to do with Laurie.

  Dylan then moves to the meat of the testimony, which covers the afternoon when Laurie, at my request, went to check out the evidence Stynes had said he left behind Hinchcliffe Stadium.

  "She was only there a few seconds before she went toward the clothing and the knife," Nick says.

  "So it seemed as if she knew where it was?" Dylan asks. />
  Nick nods. "Seemed like it to me."

  "Have you determined whose clothing it was?"

  "It was the defendant's clothing. Ms. Collins." I could argue this point, but the prosecution has fiber evidence and sales receipts, so it would seem like a losing battle to attempt to disprove that these were Laurie's clothes, especially since they were.

  "And the bloodstains? Were they the defendant's blood?"

  "No, the DNA report showed the bloodstains to be Alex Dorsey's."

  Dylan covers the gas can found in Laurie's garage, then starts to introduce the Oscar Garcia side of the equation, getting Nick to talk about the grudge Laurie had against Oscar. He will supplement this later with witnesses to confirm the grudge and to speak about Laurie being spotted near Oscar's apartment.

  Dylan, and Kevin for that matter, seem surprised that I'm not objecting more, since a good portion of this is hearsay, but my feeling is that this is all information that the jury will come to realize is true. I don't want to be seen as trying to bury the truth, especially since I can't.

  Dylan finally finishes with Sabonis and turns him over to me. I've always believed that a trial doesn't begin until there's a contentious cross-examination. If that's the case, the curtain's about to go up.

  "Lieutenant Sabonis, you knew Alex Dorsey fairly well, didn't you?"

  "We worked together."

  "That would be a really good answer if the question were, 'How did you and Alex Dorsey work?' You could say, 'We worked together,' and then we could move on. The problem, and I do hope it's not a recurring one, is that wasn't the question." I pause. "Am I going too fast for you?"

  Dylan objects to my tone, but Sabonis lets the insult roll off his back. He's an experienced witness; he's not going to be drawn into a fight with me. "I knew him fairly well, yes," he says.

  "So when you saw the body that night, you were upset that this person you worked with and knew so well was dead?"

  "I didn't realize it was him. He had been decapitated and his body badly burned."

  I nod. "So he couldn't be identified from the condition of the body?"

  "Not by me. It took the DNA tests." I can tell by Sabonis's self-satisfied expression that he's pleased to have gotten in the mention of the DNA. He no doubt thinks it makes my questioning about the body seem unimportant.

  "Yes," I say, "we'll get to that. So if there were no subsequent scientific tests, you still wouldn't know who that poor soul was?"

  "He was wearing that distinctive ring, which I noticed at the morgue. I've seen Alex wear that ring before."

  "You're not saying that you can identify a man's body by the ring on his finger, are you?"

  "I'm saying it makes it much more likely that it was him."

  I take the ring, which Dylan had introduced into evidence, and hand it to Nick. "Do you recognize this as the ring he had on that night?"

  He nods. "I believe so, yes."

  "Would you try it on, please?"

  Nick puts the ring on his finger and looks up at me, as if waiting for the next command.

  "Alex, we were so worried about you," I say, wiping my brow in mock relief. "They said you were dead."

  Hatchet admonishes me even before Dylan objects.

  "I'm sorry, Your Honor," I say, then I turn back to Sabonis. "You are Alex Dorsey, aren't you?" I ask.

  Dylan jumps up. "Objection, Your Honor, this is frivolous. Counsel knows who the witness is."

  "Sustained," says Hatchet, staring a hole through my forehead. "Be very careful, Mr. Carpenter."

  Undaunted, or at least only partially daunted, I try again. "Does it make it more likely that you are Alex Dorsey because you're wearing that ring?"

  Dylan objects again and this time Hatchet overrules him.

  "No, it does not."

  "But putting Alex Dorsey's distinctive ring on his otherwise impossible-to-identify body would be a good way to make you believe it was him, isn't that right?"

  "There is no evidence that happened. And we have the DNA results."

  It's my turn to be annoyed. "That's twice that you've mentioned DNA, just like Mr. Campbell asked you. Did he promise you a lollipop if you did what you were told?"

  I can see a flash of anger from Sabonis, which makes the question worthwhile, even though Hatchet sustains Dylan's immediate objection.

  I change the tempo and throw some questions at him in rapid-fire fashion. "Did you run the DNA test, Lieutenant?"

  "No."

  "Are you an expert on DNA?"

  "No."

  "Would you know a piece of DNA if it walked into this room, stood on the prosecution table, and sang, 'What kind of strand am I?'"

  Dylan objects again, and I move on. I like to jump around, moving from subject to subject, to keep the witness off balance. "You said that Ms. Collins didn't like Oscar Garcia, that she had a grudge against him. Do you know why?"

  "I was told it was because Garcia got the daughter of a friend of hers hooked on drugs."

  "When?"

  "I'm not sure. I think about two years ago."

  "Has Mr. Garcia ever filed a complaint that Ms. Collins attacked him? Tried to kill him?"

  "No."

  "So she carried this terrible grudge for two years, yet never cut off his head? Never set him on fire?"

  "No."

  I press on. "Was Oscar Garcia protected during those two years? Any police unit assigned to make sure Ms. Collins couldn't get to him?"

  "He wasn't under police protection."

  "Do you know if Ms. Collins is licensed to carry a gun?"

  He nods. "She is."

  A quick change in attack. "How did you happen to be there when Ms. Collins showed up in the area behind Hinchcliffe Stadium?"

  "We received some information linking her to the Dorsey murder. We initiated surveillance, and she led us to the stadium," he says.

  I react as if surprised by his response, though of course I'm not. "Information from who?"

  "It was a phone call from an anonymous informant."

  I nod. "You testified earlier that you received information from an anonymous informant initially linking Oscar Garcia to the murder. Is there an 'anonymous informant fairy' looking down on this case?"

  Dylan objects and Hatchet sustains; it's getting to be a pattern.

  I rephrase. "Was the extent of your investigative efforts in this case to sit by the phone and wait for someone to anonymously call you?"

  "It is not uncommon to get such information. People often know things, but don't want their identities to be known."

  "And sometimes the information is right, and sometimes it's wrong?"

  "Yes."

  "Lieutenant Sabonis, did I ask you to go over Ms. Collins's internal police records before you testified today?"

  "Yes. I did so."

  "Thank you. Would you please tell the jury how many times the then-Detective Collins was found to have committed any form of police brutality?"

  "None that I could see."

  "Any times that she was accused but not found guilty?"

  "No."

  "Is there anything in her record that could in any way have predicted she could be capable of a brutal act like this murder?"

  Sabonis looks at me evenly. He's pissed and he could waffle, but he doesn't. "No, there isn't."

  I end the cross there, and Dylan tries to patch up the holes I punched. Afterward, we break for lunch, and Laurie, Kevin, and I are all feeling pretty good about the Sabonis testimony. We cast some significant doubt in an area where there should automatically already be doubt: the question of whether someone like Laurie could have committed such a horrendous act.

  Kevin and I do some quick preparation for Dylan's next witness. It's the head of the police lab, Phyllis Daniels, who will be testifying to the DNA typing. She is our key to establishing doubt that the DNA evidence is reliable, and I think we've got a shot to do just that. Marcus, with some off-the-record help from Pete Stanton, has come up with some good informat
ion on lab practices to help me in that effort.

  Twenty years ago, Phyllis Daniels was a police lab technician, not particularly accomplished, who had the foresight to recognize the incredible implications the infant science of DNA would have in forensics. She successfully set out to make herself an expert, thereby putting herself on the fast track, or at least the fastest track a scientist in the Paterson Police Department can be on.

  I have come up against Phyllis on cases before. She can be long-winded and proud to show off her expertise, but her basic knowledge and honesty come through. In Dylan's hands she is an outstanding witness, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that the DNA from the body absolutely matched the blood labeled as Dorsey's in the police lab. This testimony comes as no surprise, nor do I have any intention of challenging it.

  "Ms. Daniels, you testified that Lieutenant Dorsey's blood sample was in room 21 of the police lab. How is that room guarded?"

  "There is always a person sitting at a reception desk at the entrance to the room. Twenty-four hours a day."

  "Is that person armed?"

  "No, it is a civilian job. But everyone entering must sign in."

  "If you know, is the evidence room entrance handled the same way?"

  "No," she says. "The evidence room has an armed officer assigned to it."

  "So an armed officer is considered more effective than a civilian sign-in monitor?"

  "I would say so, yes."

  "Who is allowed to enter room 21, after signing in?"

  "Police officers who need to access material in the room."

  "Thank you," I say. "Now, you testified that the DNA in the blood listed as Lieutenant Dorsey's matched that of the body in this case. Correct?"

  "Yes."

  "Allow me to present a hypothetical. If the blood in the lab had been changed or incorrectly marked--and in fact wasn't Lieutenant Dorsey's?--then the body also could not be his. Correct?"

  "That's certainly correct. But I saw the vial myself when I ran the test."

  I introduce a sign-in list from the lab into evidence and ask her to read a specific part of it. It shows that Alex Dorsey had entered the lab twice in the three weeks before his disappearance.