Defenseless

by Celeste Marsella

  “You guys done with her? The parents want her body transported to the funeral home ASAP, and I’m ready to start.”

  Murmuring a noncommittal something, I looked closely at her toenails, polished a purplish color my sister Cassie would have favored. Appallingly, I put myself in her parents’ place and, struggling against myself, imagined my mother in front of a mutilated Cassie or me. No wailing, no tears, just an icy calm that replaced the portion of my mother’s personality already beginning to die with her child. Under my breath I cursed myself for feeling anything at all, for projecting this upending scenario into my own so far straight-up, no-rocks life. I was supposed to be a professional.

  Dr. Gannon watched me. “You’re Mari Melone, aren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  While I retrieved the Polaroids from the table, he removed the sheet from under her body by rolling her over to her side. “Is something wrong?” he said.

  “She’s dead. And I’ve got this out-of-body feeling that I’ll be joining her soon.”

  “Do you always get emotional about your cases? You’ll burn out fast that way.”

  “I’m already charcoaled on this one.”

  Gannon lifted a scalpel from his table of tools.

  “What’s this white junk on her pubic hair?” I asked.

  “Semen, I’d guess. But nothing’s definitive. At least until the labs are processed.”

  Gannon wouldn’t look at me. Lifting a scalpel to the girl’s chest, he sank it deeply into her sternum and then smoothly dragged it through skin, fat, and muscle until he had opened the girl right down to her navel.

  “That’s it for me,” the up-to-now vigilant Detective O’Rourke announced softly. He pulled his hands out of his pockets and peeled off his pristine rubber gloves, throwing them into the hazardous waste can by the door. “See you all later. I don’t stay for the parts exhibit.”

  Gannon began an inspection of her organs through her ribs. I waited. I needed to know where the internal injuries were. How she’d been killed. Her whole nightmare might have been a matter of just seconds, but arguing to the jury that this kid was alive and conscious when she was raped and then hit by the SUV . . . Well, I was a prosecutor after all, and I liked an angry jury.

  “ Torso-wise we’ve got one punctured lung. I can see that already,” the doctor said. “A lot of broken ribs, but very little hemorrhaging. I got a feeling she was already dead when she was dumped and hit.”

  Yeah, we thought she was too.

  After the wave of nausea passed, I asked Gannon about the tremendous amount of blood in the second car. “Where’d that come from if she was already dead?”

  “Drained from the open skull. She wouldn’t need a beating heart for that. Gravity does the trick.”

  “So what then? Give me the timeline, Doc.”

  Gannon gave me a slightly sour look. “I’m waiting on toxicology.”

  “Will you call me as soon as you know?”

  “Why do you show up for these autopsies, Attorney Melone? The other assistant AGs just wait for the report.”

  “It impassions my trials. You know the old adage. A picture’s worth a thousand words. The sight of this poor girl makes me want to vomit. And the jury will see that in my face when I’m talking about her. I like bringing some death with me into the courtroom, but I have to come here and get it from you first.”

  And then there was that glaring issue of Vince ordering me there so he could one-up Carlyle on the findings.

  I pulled off my gloves and dropped them in the medical waste can. “What about you? Do you like cutting up dead bodies?”

  Gannon cracked an evil smile. “Less pressure than cutting up a live one. But after five years I’d expect you’d have become rather accustomed to death.”

  “Never. I still can’t believe we just disappear. That we take our last breath and that’s it.”

  “That’s what religion’s for. Some people feel compelled to believe in an afterlife.”

  “And you?”

  He shook his head. “Science does that to you. Nothing happens without a reason. There are no miracles. Until someone comes around and proves me wrong, I’m not going to church.”

  “How did you know I’ve been with the AG five years?”

  He resumed his cutting, mucking around in the girl’s abdomen. “I asked Lucky about you. He respects you a great deal. Says you’re the only one over there with a little class.”

  “No kidding? Class. Men so love that word. And all this time I thought it was my legs Lucky respected.”

  Young Dr. Gannon kept his blood-covered gloves plunged into the body but paused long enough to crack a smile.

  “Call me immediately when the labs and tox reports are back.”

  “You got it.”

  As Gannon lifted Melinda’s stomach into a dish, I flipped my cell phone open and punched speed dial.

  “Yo?” Shannon barked.

  “You, Laurie, Beth, my office, fifteen minutes.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Purgatory

  BY THE TIME I got back to my office Shannon had already made herself at home behind my desk.

  “This place is a dump. How do you function?”

  “Not well. Listen, before the other two get here, I got a plan about Hastings.”

  “Don’t scare me, Mari.”

  “I’m going to tell Vince about last night.”

  Shannon lowered her head and squinted. She was cool under pressure. That’s what made her such a great trial lawyer. She could keep her emotions buried, whereas mine were always a bubbling volcano.

  “I’ll tell him I was alone. Worst-case scenario, he fires me. But maybe I’ll get a slight reprimand and of course he’ll take me off the Hastings case—”

  “Shit.” She sat up straight. “He assigned the case to you?” I nodded while Beth and Laurie walked through my open doorway, looking from Shannon to me for an update on what they knew had to be about our most recent transgressions.

  “Close the door behind you, Beth,” Shannon ordered.

  Beth obliged and we all waited for Shannon to break the inevitable silence.

  “In a word,” she said, “absolutely not, Mari. You will do no such thing. And if you don’t understand that, let me put it another way. If you tell Vince about last night, I’ll break your fucking legs.”

  “A simple no would have sufficed, Shannon.”

  “Nothing is simple with you, Mari. I’ve never known anyone who could blow things as out of proportion as you can. Jesus goddamn Christ . . .”

  Finally Beth and Laurie got the gist of our meeting. Neither uttered a crippling word, lest it incite Shannon to physical action. I knew Shannon wasn’t finished, so I waited. Shannon was tough as an army sergeant breaking in new recruits, but she would never issue an edict and expect us to blindly follow her command. Mainly because, fear of death notwithstanding, we were, in the final analysis of our friendship, all equals. We expected Shannon to support her case, and we knew she would if we merely kept silent and let her continue.

  “Together we have more leverage. What’s Vince going to do? Fire his entire senior trial team? He’d be forcing his own downfall. He’d have to resign in disgrace. And that he would never do. If and when he finds out about this, he’ll rally behind us, you’ll see. If only to save his own fat butt, he’ll save ours too. But you alone, Mari? He’ll fire you to save the office. And it would work. You’d be the goddamn sacrificial lamb. And what’s the point of that? We’d all still be lying to him. We’d all still be guilty as hell, including you. We either lie together, or tell the truth together. It’s the only way through this.”

  Beth’s eyes had become wider and her breathing heavier as she listened to Shannon and realized I had decided to take the hit alone. I assumed Laurie had already figured it out and was doing mach-speed calculations in her head—the pros and cons of my plan. I had to admit, Shannon was winning this case hands down. Hence our continued silence after she closed her case.
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br />   “See what I’m saying, Mari? Do you all get it?”

  I nodded again. Beth and Laurie, still speechless, nodded too.

  “So, you go do whatever Vince wants you to do, and I swear on my old man’s soul, may he rest in peace”—she crossed herself—“if at any time we decide that what we did compromises this case, we’ll all go to Vince’s office, and we’ll tell him together.”

  Career-wise, Shannon was on the right track with her plan, but ethically she was asking me to stay on our circuitous road to purgatory—and possible disbarment. We remained at static odds, staring at each other until Laurie broke the silence.

  “Then may I respectfully suggest,” she said, “that we take a more active role in actually realizing what it is that we witnessed and how it might connect evidentially to the murderer.”

  It took us a minute to change gears from Shannon’s fury to Laurie’s calm conclusion. During our silence, Laurie cogently continued. “We need to keep on top of what the cops are coming up with and make sure that if we have any blanks to fill, we step in and do it. Maybe we did see something and we don’t know we saw it . . .”

  “And,” Beth added, “we won’t know that unless we know exactly what the police are finding out.”

  “Exactly,” Laurie said. “We have to help the cops without letting them—or anyone else—know what we’re doing.”

  Shannon wasn’t convinced. “Give me a for instance.”

  “I can’t,” Laurie answered. “Because if I could tell you that we know something the cops are missing, it would be time for us to go to Vince. But as you just said, we don’t know anything more than they do right now, so let’s shut our mouths and keep our jobs until we do.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dressed for Success

  THE NEXT MORNING I was at Holton College waiting to be ushered into Dean Carlyle’s office for my meeting with Melinda Hastings’s parents. Though I had no scheduled appearances that day, I was dressed up for court. I was most comfortable in Armani suits with loose trousers. Some days I’d don a bold striped tie and depress the thicker male cops with the possibility I was a cross-dresser. Faking androgyny had proved amusing until I started dating (big mistake) my AG colleague Jeff Kendall (the “freak” Shannon figured didn’t even belong in a courtroom and the “doorknob” of Vince’s reference). Exactly four and a half minutes into our very first date, while standing in the parking lot of Café Nuovo, and before pulling out his AmEx Preferred Rewards Gold Card for so much as a cheap glass of pinot grigio, Jeff cupped my breasts with both his hands and said, “Hmm . . . yeah . . . nice. These will do.”

  Because of Jeff ’s clear preference for sexy females, my cat was out of its bag, and chatty Jeff cleared up publicly the mystery of my sexual identity once and for all. With respect to emotional subtlety, working with men was a no-win situation. Any AKC-registered female standing upright with two arms, two legs, and one head was a potential object of heterosexual lust. Even after dating kiss-and-tell Jeff, I continued to wear my Marlene Dietrich costumes to work, but a closer look at the hem of my trousers would always reveal a spiked pair of Manolo Blahniks or some equally high-heeled podiatric disaster in the making. For the record, I’m philosophically opposed to high heels. Shoes hiked three inches or more are for sexually insecure women or those under five foot eight who are insecure with authority and need to look men in the eyes. Needless to say, I wore spikes so often that my feet ached only in sneakers.

  Outside Carlyle’s office on the third floor of Langley Hall, I was holding my hands in my lap while perching uncomfortably on the hard edge of a wooden captain’s chair padded with cracked red leather. Flanking me were mahogany tables graced with strategically low-lit brass lamps. The air was thick with an ambiance of stale cigar stubs, oiled leather, and musty oriental rugs. Smoking wasn’t allowed in campus buildings unless you were Dean Carlyle with your iron-fisted control over administrative personnel and your full professorship to boot. The upper-crusty dean relished lighting up post-embargo Cuban cigars while sitting around with the other big kahunas at Holton—or so Piganno spun it—tossing admission applications into piles labeled “Admit” and “Reject.” (Ethnic last name? Boom! Right into the trashcan with the butts of those bootlegged Havanas that rat-bastard smokes. . . .)

  The door of the dean’s sanctum swung wide and out wafted cold billows of hermetically sealed air tainted subtly by the odor of a humidor.

  Kenneth Oberlin Carlyle materialized wizardlike in the doorway.

  “Attorney General Melone.” He extended his long white fingers. “Welcome to Holton College. I appreciate your coming in on such short notice.”

  “Assistant AG, Dean Carlyle.”

  Nodding his acquiescence, he gestured me toward a couch, his eyes firmly fixed on my face. Surprisingly, Carlyle didn’t immediately neutron-scan my physique for an appraisal of leg length and breast size. Not even a casual ogling of the bosom, which was odd since he was presumably alive and male, though he looked as zaftig as a dried-out corpse. He was gangly and balding, maybe fifty years old, and really not too bad looking for a dead man.

  “Brad and Connie Hastings should be arriving momentarily. I’ll go check on them now,” he said, abruptly leaving the room.

  I glanced around his lair. Spread against the far wall was a work area whose computer, fax machine, and VoIP telephone (laid out like pristine surgical equipment on a long, wraparound mahogany desk) whipped up a high-tech effect that contrasted starkly but quite beautifully with the weathered Bokhara rug covering the floor. A Duncan Phyfe couch that I had no reason to believe wasn’t the real thing, plus four matching chairs, occupied the foreground. On the room’s opposite flank stood a newish-looking wooden conference table of lighter hue, with about a dozen high-backed, camel-colored leather chairs neatly tucked into it. A single long window was divided into a faux walnut gridwork of small panes intended to echo colonial-era New England, though it instead recalled this one particular state mental hospital in Far Rockaway, Queens, that had once scared the hell out of me during a circuitous taxi cab ride to JFK Airport. . . .

  Like a good lawyer I’d done my research. Quietly exclusive, Holton was a private four-year college that had been chartered in 1775 with testamentary funds from Jeremiah Dorr Holton’s will. Old J.D. had envisioned a free school where young gentleman could come from far and wide for instruction in all areas of “useful and polite literature.” Unlike the overwhelming majority of American colleges, Holton had so far resisted all federal and state pecuniary lures; instead of getting into the big-bucks swing of America’s diverse new ethnic society, it had resolved to survive on discreet private funding. And survive it did. Thanks to the eventual institution of tuition, Holton College proved able to exist on the interest generated by its nine-million-dollar endowment. And off the government dole, it could discriminate indiscriminately on the basis of race, religion, sex, or whatever the hell it pleased, all without constitutional interference.

  Plus the college had a trump card up its sleeve.

  Haughty Holton was, after all, a stepping-stone into a kingdom to which almost everyone secretly aspired. Shooting a brace or two of quail with the English gentry and then having the downstairs maids cook it up for dinner; accepting a knighthood alongside Mick Jagger; changing your name à la Ralph Lauren immediately following his bar mitzvah—didn’t everyone in his downtrodden heart of hearts want to be an old-money blue blood?

  And thereupon, speaking of the blues, mine had just materialized in the open doorway.

  The grieving parents of Melinda Hastings entered the room followed by a grayish-pallored Carlyle, whose facial features suggested a tightly wound jack-in-the-box. “Please, Brad, Connie, meet Miss Melone from the attorney general’s office.”

  I stood, and Mr. and Mrs. Hastings took turns shaking my hand. Carlyle pulled a couple of extra chairs from his conference table, and the Hastingses sat holding hands across the chair arms.

  Carlyle spoke first. “Miss Melone has kindl
y agreed to meet with us privately. First let me say—and I think I speak for the AG’s office as well—we’re all very sorry for your loss—”

  “Ken,” Brad Hastings interrupted him, “let’s dispense with the formalities.” He turned to me. “I—we—did not authorize this invasion of my daughter’s body. This damn autopsy—”

  His wife shuddered.

  “—I want this entire matter closed. Now. Immediately. I want my poor daughter to rest in peace. Is that clear?”

  I hadn’t uttered a word. Not that any words were coming to my lips. The more Hastings spoke, the less generous I found myself feeling and indeed the less inclined toward polite conversation, blue-blooded company notwithstanding. I was a bit in shock, to say the least. Hastings looked to Carlyle with surprise and concern, puzzled over how poorly groomed I was for our little meeting.

  “Ken?” Hastings sang through gritted teeth. “Is there going to be a problem here?”

  “Brad. Miss Melone arrived moments before you did. Let’s take a breath and relax.”

  “I’m relaxed,” I said. “Or at least I was before I got here. And, coincidently, I’ve been breathing all day, so why don’t you fine people tell me what I’m doing here?”

  Mrs. Hastings stood and walked over to sit beside me on the couch. She brushed my hand with hers. It was ice cold. “My daughter is dead. My family is devastated. I want it to end here.”

  Brad Hastings nodded solemnly.

  “Mrs. Hastings,” I said, “it isn’t my decision whether or not to investigate the black-hearted murder of a young woman. There’s a brutal maniac out and about in Providence. The city’s decision to proceed with an investigation is out of my hands. It’s a matter of the law and of public safety.”