The Suspect

by John Lescroart

  “I do.”

  “When did you first see it?”

  “Inspector Juhle brought it to the morgue.”

  “At his request, did you compare it to the injury on the victim to determine if it could have caused that injury?” In this most clinical of settings, Caryn was “the victim,” and would be until the prosecutor used her name in front of a jury to humanize her at trial.

  “I did.”

  “What did you find?”

  “It was a perfect fit.”

  “Could you explain that further?”

  “Sure. Earlier, I had shaved the hair from the scalp to expose the fracture, which was pronounced and clearly defined. I compared it to the shape of the bottle and concluded that the bottle could definitely have caused the fracture.”

  “But Doctor, couldn’t any bottle of this size and shape have caused an identical injury?”

  “Of course. Any object could have caused the injury. But it would have had to have been the size and shape of this bottle.”

  “Doctor, was the blow to the victim’s head enough to render her unconscious?”

  “Yes. Certainly enough to stun her for some period of time, perhaps enough to knock her out.”

  “So the blow itself didn’t kill her?”

  “No. As I said, the cause of death was drowning. There was water in her lungs. She was definitely breathing when she went underwater.”

  “Thank you.” Abrams turned to Gina. “Your witness,” he said.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  GINA TOOK WHAT SHE HOPED WAS an invisible deep breath, pushed her chair back, and got to her feet. Her legs, much to her relief, felt strong. (Dismas Hardy had cautioned her to watch out about standing up too fast or moving too far away from her table before she felt her sea legs come in under her.) Wasting no time, she walked to the center of the courtroom. “Good morning, Doctor. Did you say that the blow from the bottle to the victim’s head rendered her unconscious?”

  “No. Not exactly. I said it could have.”

  “It could have. But not necessarily did?”

  “No, not necessarily.”

  “Was the blow hard enough to fracture the skull, Doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Doctor, how long before being submerged in the water did Ms. Dryden sustain this injury?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, wasn’t that fracture associated with the bloody wound on the scalp?”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “And would that injury have bled after she sustained it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now, typically, when you have a bloody injury, you can see by the clotting and scabbing how long the victim survived after the injury, isn’t that true?”

  Strout threw a glance over to Abrams. Neither of them was smiling now. “In some instances.”

  “Well, what you mean, Doctor, by ‘some instances,’ is that if there had been significant scabbing, an injury like this could have been sustained hours, or even days, before the drowning, isn’t that so?”

  “No. I don’t think days. If able to do so, the victim would have sought medical attention after receiving this injury.”

  “But certainly hours? Correct? Because this body was submerged in water, any evidence of clotting or scabbing would have washed away, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “So for all you know, Caryn Dryden could have sustained this injury hours before she was submerged in water. Isn’t that the truth?”

  “That would be accurate.”

  “Now also, Doctor, you can’t say that she was struck with the bottle, as opposed to striking the bottle with her head. Correct? Let me be clear. You don’t know if someone hit her with the bottle or if she stumbled and fell and hit her head on the bottle.”

  “I’m not sure that’s a likely scenario. We’re talking about an awful lot of force here.”

  “Are we, Doctor? This injury was in front of her ear, was it not? Right at one of the thinner parts of the skull?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, Doctor, it is true, is it not, that you cannot rule out the possibility that Ms. Dryden, for example walking on a slippery floor, full of alcohol and Vicodin, stumbled and hit her head on a bottle of wine that she was carrying?”

  “Well, no, I can’t absolutely rule that out.”

  “And by the way, Doctor, when you say the blow was enough to render her unconscious, I think you’ve already said it would not necessarily have done so.”

  “True.”

  “So having inflicted this injury on herself, she could have recovered from being stunned and thrown the bottle and the broken glass she was carrying into the trash compactor, true?”

  “I can’t absolutely rule that out.”

  “Well, Doctor, when you say you can’t absolutely rule it out, what you’re saying is that you can’t rule it out. Correct?”

  “That is correct. I can’t rule it out.”

  “All right. Leaving the fracture and the bottle for the moment, let me ask you what, if anything, you found on the victim’s body that indicated someone had pushed her under the water?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Other bruises, finger marks on her shoulders? Tissue under her fingernails? Other signs of a struggle?”

  “No. There were none of those.”

  “So, is it not entirely consistent with the medical evidence that Ms. Dryden could have injured herself and, not realizing the extent of the injury, got into the hot tub, passed out, and drowned?”

  “Well, counsel, I think anybody with this kind of an injury would have sought medical attention after a very short period of time if they were able to do so. It would have been a very painful injury.”

  “Doctor, what is Vicodin?”

  “It is a prescription drug.”

  “And isn’t that precisely the sort of prescription drug that a person might take if they’d just suffered a very painful injury?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you.” Although she knew exactly what her next question would be, Gina paused for the judge’s benefit, consciously frowning as though she were confused. Most uncharacteristically, Strout was showing small signs of discomfort. Shifting in the chair, straightening his rimless bifocals, adjusting his collar. He was so nearly always infallible, and considered so, that this type of minute questioning was a rare occurrence. And clearly an unwelcome one.

  If she were in front of a jury, Gina would have slowed down even more at this point. She wouldn’t have wanted to stack her own credibility against the kindly and obviously very knowledgeable older gentleman. But here she had no such concerns. Even though she believed that Caryn Dryden had been murdered, she needed to nail down the fact that the testimony of San Francisco’s medical examiner in no way proved that point. “All right, Doctor,” she said, “moving along to the question of the victim’s sobriety at the time of her death, you’ve testified that her blood alcohol level was point one one, is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this level is considered legally drunk in California?”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, isn’t the legally drunk standard actually quite a bit lower, at point zero eight?”

  “That’s true.”

  “So Caryn Dryden wasn’t just drunk, was she? She was smashed.”

  “Objection!”

  Gina knew this was coming from Gerry Abrams even before she’d finished saying her last words, and was frustrated that she’d allowed herself to get carried away and say them. She didn’t want anything to get in the way of her flow, her rhythm.

  Judge Toynbee didn’t even have to think about it. “Sustained,” he said.

  Gina came right back at Strout. “Doctor, you’ve already said the victim also had a narcotic in her blood, did she not? Is the use of alcohol contraindicated with the use of Vicodin?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because they’re both central nervous system depressan
ts.”

  “And when someone mixes Vicodin with alcohol, what is the result?”

  “It varies depending on the dosage of each, but certainly lethargy, respiratory depression, maybe extreme somnolence, skeletal-muscle flaccidity.” He shrugged. “It can bring on a host of problems up to and including cardiac arrest.”

  “And incidentally, Doctor, certainly the sort of thing that might make someone slip and fall down? Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Now, in your vast experience, and excluding Ms. Dryden, have you seen deaths that you attribute to excessive alcohol and drug consumption combined with hot tub use?”

  “I have.”

  “Can you explain?”

  “I sure can.” He sat back in the witness chair, crossed one leg over the other and gave a short course on the dangers of alcohol abuse in conjunction with extended time in water that was above 104 degrees: respiratory failure, collapse of the central nervous system. He ended with, “But that’s not what killed the victim in the case. She drowned.”

  “So you’ve testified, Doctor. But in this case, is there any way you can state with certainty that the victim, inebriated as she was and with Vicodin in her bloodstream, did not simply pass out and slip under the water, where she drowned?”

  “No. I cannot state that unequivocally. I can’t state it at all.” Strout could barely keep a straight face. He’d just been subjected to as good a cross as any in his career. He had to give the devil her due. This was still probably a murder, though his testimony had done little to prove it.

  But as he liked to say, this was his favorite sort of problem: somebody else’s.

  Abrams’ original battle plan had probably been to use Strout to establish the murder and make the connection between the bottle, the skull fracture, and the drowning. Then, never considering the possibility that Gina would do to Strout what she’d just done, he’d call Lennard Faro from the CSI team to establish the provenance of the bottle, the so-called foundation—what it was, where it came from, how it was relevant—and then move on to his heavy-duty motive evidence. Maybe Gina’s cross-examination of Strout had left him shell-shocked; in any event, Gina was pleasantly stunned when Abrams gave her the gift of calling Faro to the stand and putting him through his very short paces.

  Gina knew exactly how to take advantage of this strategic error. “Sergeant Faro,” she began, “you said that you found this wine bottle in the trash compactor in the kitchen, is that right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And you took it out and labeled and bagged it and sent it to the police lab for analysis?”

  “Well, not exactly like that. As I said earlier, I took the whole garbage bag to the lab and on my instructions, they took out the bottle and any other relevant items.”

  “And by ‘relevant items,’ you mean shards of glass in that same trash compactor, do you not?”

  “Yes. We compared those pieces with a part of another wineglass we found under the hot tub, and they matched.”

  “I see. And did you find fingerprints on any of these glass pieces?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find Stuart Gorman’s fingerprints on any of these glass pieces?”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  “Did you identify whose fingerprints they were?”

  “No. They didn’t appear in our database.”

  Having gotten all she could from that topic, Gina moved on.

  “Now. The bottle and the broken glass were in the trash compactor bag together, is that correct?”

  “Yes.” Faro didn’t seem to know where she was going with this line of questioning, and this suited Gina fine.

  “Was there anything else in the trash compactor bag, Sergeant?”

  “Any more glass, you mean?”

  “No. I mean anything at all.”

  “Well…sure. I mean, it was for garbage. There was other garbage in it.”

  His tone and attitude induced a small buzz of laughter from the gallery. He was trying to play the question as ridiculous.

  “And did you ask the lab to analyze this garbage as well?”

  The onlookers out in the theater seats, now somewhat primed for drama from Gina’s earlier performance with Strout, had been listening quietly, even intently, but at this question, another low hum of laughter rippled through the gallery.

  Thinking everyone was laughing at Gina—perhaps they were—Faro couldn’t quite hide a quick and confident smirk. “Did I ask the lab to analyze the rest of the garbage?” he repeated.

  “Right. That’s my question.”

  “For what?” Still playing it for a laugh.

  Gina shrugged. “I don’t know. Evidence?”

  Realizing that even if Gina’s question was ridiculous, she was serious about it, Faro sat up. “I was with the lab techs and watched as they went through the whole bag. We got the bottle and other pieces of glass, but there wasn’t anything else to look at.”

  “Just garbage?”

  “Yes. Just garbage.”

  “Hmm. Were there fingerprints on the bottle?”

  “No. It had been wiped.”

  “Now, by wiped, you mean that someone had taken a cloth or some other material and rubbed along the surface, presumably to remove evidence that was found there, right?”

  “Yes, correct.”

  “Can you distinguish between an object that just doesn’t happen to have any usable prints on it, and one that has been deliberately wiped down?”

  “Yes, we can. Typically an object such as a bottle will have something on it, unless it’s been washed down or wiped. Dust, debris, smudges, partial prints—even if those partials aren’t good enough to give us an ID. And that’s particularly true on a surface such as glass, which is a good medium to hold fingerprints. We found nothing like that on this bottle. In the absence of evidence that it had just, for example, been washed, it would appear that it had been wiped before it was put in the trash compactor.”

  “But there was still blood on it, isn’t that true? Caryn Dryden’s blood.”

  “Yes.”

  “So the wiping wasn’t completely successful, was it?”

  “No. Some microscopic traces had soaked into the label. And whoever wiped the bottle failed to remove them completely. But I have to tell you that otherwise, he did a pretty darn good job.”

  “Let me ask you this, Sergeant. Was there any indication in the trash bag of what had been used to wipe the fingerprints off the bottle? And presumably some of Caryn’s blood, as well?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Kleenex, or paper towels. Maybe a dish towel.”

  Faro looked confused. “Well, there might have been some paper towels, but there wasn’t any sign of blood on them.”

  “But do you remember any such towels specifically?”

  From behind her, Abrams objected. “Relevance, Your Honor. Where is this going?”

  Toynbee said, “I think I see where this is going. I’ll listen to a few more questions. Overruled.” Then he pointed a finger at Gina. “I said a few, Ms. Roake.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Back to Faro. “Sergeant, were there paper towels in the trash?”

  “I don’t specifically remember. Probably.”

  “If so, though, are they still available for analysis?”

  “No. As I said, it was just garbage. After we went through it, we tossed it out.”

  “Of course, Sergeant, you are aware you could get DNA from a paper surface, such as a paper towel?”

  Seeing the trap, Faro hesitated.

  Gina went right on. “So if someone indeed used that bottle to hit Ms. Dryden, and that same person wiped the bottle, at the same time that they were removing their fingerprints, they could have been leaving their DNA, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.” Suddenly Faro’s jokes about garbage weren’t feeling so funny.

  “But you didn’t either save or analyze any of those materials, did you?”

  Faro’s eyes
darted over to Abrams, out to the gallery. This was the crux of the matter—he hadn’t collected the most important evidence.

  “Sergeant, your answer.”

  It took him nearly a full minute, which is a long and eerily silent time in a packed courtroom, until finally he shook his head and said, “Uh, no.”

  “And if you had retained that ‘garbage,’ as you called it, and we had the paper towels used to wipe the bottle, we might be able to know whether my client was the person who’d wiped it down, wouldn’t we?”

  “Objection. Speculation.”

  It was, but Gina didn’t care what the ruling was. She’d made her point.

  From the bench, before Gina had even turned around to go back to her table, Toynbee tapped his gavel and called for the lunch recess. Standing at her place in front of the witness box, Gina let Faro walk by her and turned to watch him stop to say a few possibly uncharitable words to Gerry Abrams.

  She waited until Faro had let himself out through the bar rail, then on an impulse she walked the few steps to the prosecution table. Abrams was standing, head down, arranging his folders, but after a moment looked up. “Well,” he said, “looks like you drew first blood.”

  “It’s a bad case, Gerry.”

  He shrugged. “It’s what it is. And I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. It’s still going to go to a jury.”

  “Without a murder? You’re kidding yourself.”

  Another shrug. “We’ll see. It’s still a murder—you got nothing to rule it out, anyway.”

  “True, but traditionally, you’re supposed to be able to prove it.”

  “I intend to. And a jury will buy it. Your man’s guilty. Get used to it.” Dismissing her out of hand, he turned and walked through the gate in the bar rail out to the gallery, where he cracked some joke that got the uniformed policemen chuckling.

  Gina stood rooted, paralyzed with a sudden spike of anger. These guys, she thought. What were they basing their prosecution on if it wasn’t the facts of the case? Because surely the facts as she’d seen them couldn’t support anything approaching the bedrock certainty with which Abrams, Juhle, even Jackman obviously felt that they were right. Could it be that it was just a question of arrogance? She had the feeling that the pursuit of Stuart did not spring from any sense of justice, but from a belief that he was vulnerable, convictable, and that was all that mattered—he’d be another notch in the belt, that was all. A career step for Gerry Abrams, a timely closed case for Devin Juhle, proof that Clarence Jackman’s administration was equal-opportunity in prosecuting those who broke the law.