Stash Olesky cut in. “Dr. Rey. I’ve got a large blowup of a chart you made in your report. If it would help your testimony, I’d be happy to put that on the easel next to you.”
“That would be very helpful, thank you.”
Stash’s paralegal, a very attractive young lady wearing a skirt that was just this side of immodest, put up the easel. There seemed to be a pleasantly unnecessary amount of bending over involved in the process. Stash used that distraction to accomplish the dull work of admitting the chart into evidence and marking it as State’s Exhibit 54.
“Please, Doctor, continue.”
The doctor took out the biggest red magic marker I’d ever seen, with a point about an inch wide. I took a deep breath. Here we go.
“As I said earlier, Diana Dane’s person presented in the form of someone who had obviously suffered severe trauma. ‘Trauma’ is a medical term that essentially refers to what happens to the human body when it’s struck by objects with sufficient force to damage tissues and/or bones. I examined the body carefully. With the court’s permission, I’m going use this chart to lay out my findings.”
Dr. Rey stood next to the chart. On the chart were line drawings of two female figures, front and rear, and two side views of female heads. The chart was full of small black marks that had obviously been drawn on the preprinted chart with a pen of some kind. “When you write a medical report, you’re supposed to use very precise medical terminology. Anterior, posterior, so on so forth. That’s all there on pages three through five of the report, but for the sake of clarity, I’m going to spell out what I found in plain old everyday language.”
Dr. Rey took his red pen and held it over the chart. “Based on the pattern of the wound, it is my belief that the first blow Diana Dane received was right here on the right temple. WHAM!” Rey slashed the red pen over a black mark across the temple.
“There’s a depression fracture, bruising, and massive damage to the brain tissue and blood vessels underneath. Based on the long, shallow depression, I would judge this blow to have been made by a long, thin item. Such as a stick.”
Olesky said, “You went WHAM when you drew the line. What are you suggesting about how hard this blow was?”
“Extremely hard. The cranium, the skull, is a very very tough structure. To break a hole in it with a stick requires a blow of great strength.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Stash said. “Back up here. I can see Mr. Sloan over there chafing at the bit to object that we don’t know if this was a stick or a poker or a steel I-beam.”
“Well, yes and no. If you’ll flip back to page two, you’ll see that I recovered what I characterize in the report as a ‘glossy black fragment’ from Diana Dane’s head. At the very location where this blow was made. I recovered several similar fragments from other locations on the body. At the time I was puzzled. To my eye, they looked like plastic. But if you’ll turn to page fourteen, the appendix consisting of a supplemental report from the state crime lab? You’ll see that all three of those objects were identified as being splinters of wood. Gabon ebony.”
Stash held up three plastic bags, each with a tiny dark splinter in it, took them over to the clerk, and had them marked as evidence. “I’ll call your attention, Dr. Rey, to what’s just been marked as State’s 55, 56, and 57. Are you familiar with these items?”
The doctor pretended to examine them with great skepticism. Finally, he looked up, and said, “Why, yes. Those are the three fragments I recovered from Mrs. Dane’s body.” He reached over and made some more red slashes on the body. “They were found here, here, here.”
“And did you find the presence of these fragments of ebony to be meaningful in any way?”
“Yes I did. As I noted in the addendum to the reports, page eight, signed and dated by me on November 1 of last year, the pattern of the wounds and the presence of the ebony fragments strongly indicate that Diana Dane was beaten with some sort of stick made from ebony.”
“Very good. Please continue.”
“Generally speaking, Diana Dane’s body was heavily bruised, and many of her bones were fractured. I’ve been a forensic pathologist for twenty-three years if you include my residency at the University of South Dakota, and—outside of a few car accidents—I can’t recall seeing a body more heavily bruised than hers. Which makes re-creating the exact order and location of the blows a bit difficult.
“But basically here’s what I think happened. The first blow, as I said, struck her here. On the temple. Based on the particularly lethal location of this first wound, and based on the lack of defensive wounds, fingernail scrapings, etc., I don’t believe Diana Dane defended herself. In fact, I suspect she was sleeping.
“Whether or not she was not sleeping to begin with, the first blow would likely have rendered her unconscious. It very likely would have proved to be a fatal wound over time even if she had not been struck again—though the fact that the killer then continued to strike Mrs. Dane renders the point moot. First he hit her several more times in the head and face.” More dramatic red slashes across the face of the line drawing. “Here, here, here, here, here, here, possibly here, possibly here. Broken jaw, broken nose, broken left orbit, crushed eyeball, left upper incisor and bicuspids knocked out, more potentially fatal trauma to the brain, here and here.” Suddenly Dr. Rey looked angry. “This was a savage, unnecessary beating. It just went on and on and on.”
Miles Dane stared at the chart, jaw clenched, face pale. But no expression. No expression. If I could have punched him to make him cry, I swear I would have done it. But, no, he looked cold as yesterday’s fish.
“Here! Here! There! Here! Again, again, again.” Dr. Rey’s face had gone slightly red. “Now the attacker began beating her in the torso. Broken ribs, punctured lung, ruptured spleen, bruised liver. Ah! Now . . . torn femoral artery!” He slashed red on the groin of the figure. “I’d like to make particular note of this wound to the femoral artery, the artery which runs from the torso down the groin into the leg. Why? Two reasons. First, it just requires a huge amount of force to tear that artery. And more important, because there is no hematoma accompanying that rupture.”
“Is that significant?” Olesky serving up another soft lob.
Rey’s eyebrows shot up. “Yes, it is. Very. Normally when an artery is torn inside the body, the heart drives blood out through the tear into the surrounding tissue. But in this case, it didn’t. What that means is that by the time this blow was administered, Diana Dane’s heart had stopped. She was already dead, and the attacker was still hitting her.”
“How long, Doctor, would it have taken her to die?”
“Hard to say. I would think a minimum of ten minutes. Maybe as much as half an hour.”
Olesky stood there staring at the doctor. He blinked once, then said, incredulously, “You’re saying that whoever killed Diana Dane, stayed in that room for at least ten minutes and maybe as long as half an hour . . . and continued hitting her all that time?”
“Not continuously, no. But, intermittently, yes, she was struck over a period of at least ten minutes. Probably a good deal longer. The killer stayed there and kept pummeling a dead body.”
“My God,” Stash Olesky said softly.
Next to me, Miles Dane didn’t even blink.
“How many blows, would you estimate?”
“Difficult to say with such extensive tissue damage. Probably between thirty and forty.”
Stash Olesky gathered up his notes and began walking back to his chair.
“Oh, one last thing,” Stash said. “I almost forgot . . . Were you able to make any estimate of the time of Mrs. Dane’s death?”
“Yes, I was. Our technician arrived at the scene to process the remains at four-fifty. He took a core temperature at that time, which was recorded as eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. He also recorded the temperature on the thermostat of Mr. Dane’s home at sixty-eight degrees. Using standard TOD—time-of-death—calculations for core body temperature decline versus a
mbient temperature, I concluded that Diana Dane had been dead for three to five hours at that time.” He paused significantly. “Meaning she was killed somewhere between midnight and 2:00 A.M.”
“Let me direct you to Mr. Dane’s witness statement, which has been marked as State’s 23. Could you read . . . yes, right there, the underlined portion.”
“It says, ‘Mr. Dane indicated that he had called Mr. Sloan within ten minutes of discovering his wife had been murdered, i.e. at approximately 3:30 A.M.’ ”
“And, Doctor, how does that jibe with your medical findings?”
“It doesn’t.”
“You’re saying he misspoke?”
“Or he lied.”
Stash Olesky stood silently, letting that one soak in for a while. Finally, he said, “Thank you, Doctor. I believe that will be all.”
Judge Evola eyed my client, then me, with a look of naked disgust. “Mr. Sloan?”
“The good doctor has done his usual thorough job, for which I thank him. Just a couple quick questions.” I didn’t stand, just leafed through a folder. “Ah, here we are. Time of death calculations. These are estimates, correct? Not accurate to the minute, right?”
“Not accurate to the minute, no.”
“And their calculation is based on a predictable rate of cooling based on ambient temperature, correct?”
“Correct.”
“So if it’s zero degrees in the house, the body’s going to cool faster than if it’s, oh, sixty-eight degrees, correct?”
“Right.”
“The colder it is, the quicker the body cools.”
“Exactly.”
“So if thirty-degree air pouring into the house from the broken window just down the hall had lowered the temperature in the room, that would throw off the calculations.”
“Slightly. But I gather that—”
“One other question.” I cut off his answer. “In the movies we’re always seeing medical examiners take out this little saw, you know with the rotating blade? Looks like something out of wood shop? And they use it to cut the top of the person’s skull off, and everybody winces? You ever see that in the movies?”
“Sure.”
“Did you do that? Did you cut open Diana Dane’s head?”
“No.”
“So you didn’t remove and examine her brain?”
“No.”
I raised my eyebrows, looking slightly puzzled. “Isn’t that pretty standard?” I said. “Examining the brain?”
Rey shifted backward in his seat, and his voice dropped slightly. “It’s a judgment call. It causes a rather gross disfigurement of the features and so out of respect for the survivors—”
“Into the microphone, please,” I said mildly.
“I’m sorry. So, yes, out of respect for the victim’s family, if there’s a fairly obvious call, we try not to open the cranium.”
I hefted a big book, dumped it on the table in front of him. “Recognize this book, Doctor?”
“Yes. It’s Krantz & Krantz, the standard textbook on autopsy technique.”
“There’s a paper clip there on page 276. Could you take a gander at the part that I’ve highlighted?”
Dr. Rey opened the book gingerly. “It says that opening of the cranium is a standard part of an autopsy, particularly in cases involving head trauma. But then it lists a number of exceptions which—”
“Opening the cranium is a standard part of the autopsy, particularly in the case of head trauma. But you didn’t do it.”
“As I said before, no.”
“Dr. Rey, can you tell us what the temporal artery is?”
The medical examiner tapped his laser pointer on the side of his head. “It’s a major vessel here under the temple.”
“And if that vessel ruptures, how quickly will it result in death?”
Rey swallowed. “Well, that really is quite a rare thing when . . .”
“Please. Simple question. How quickly will the rupture of the temporal artery cause death?”
“I couldn’t say exactly. But fairly quickly.”
“Meaning what? Five seconds? Ten? Thirty?”
“More likely it would be slower than that.”
“But it’s possible that a blow to the temporal area could cause someone’s heart to stop in well under a minute.”
Rey’s eyes cut from one side to the other. “Distantly. But as I say, it’s a very rare thing that the artery would rupture that way in the first place.”
“You yourself testified that the first blow was to her temple.”
“Yes.”
“Shattered the cranium, releasing needle-sharp fragments into the brain?”
“Yes.”
“But since you didn’t bother to examine her wound except in a purely superficial way, you can’t say for certain how long it took for her to die, can you?”
“My judgment is that . . .”
I wasn’t interested in his judgment, so I cut him off. “Dr. Rey, you just admitted you have no basis for that judgment, didn’t you? You didn’t bother to check. She could very well have died in seconds as a result of a ruptured temporal artery, couldn’t she?”
Rey sighed. “Possible. Distantly.”
“Could have died in seconds. Thank you.”
Thirty-nine
“You alright, Miles?” I said, after the jury had filed out. His face was bloodless, his lips almost blue.
“I’m okay,” Miles said. “I think maybe I need to walk around a little.”
I signaled to the bailiff. Walking around, for its own sake, was a luxury not afforded to criminal defendants who weren’t free on bond. “Could you take Mr. Dane to the rest room?”
The bailiff nodded. Miles stood slowly, walked three or four steps, paused as though considering something weighty and important, and collapsed.
The bailiff caught him on the way down, and we laid him out on the hard floor. Miles came to in a few seconds, but seemed content to lie there, looking up at the ceiling and saying, “I’m fine, I’m great, I’m okay,” until a doctor arrived five minutes later.
After the doctor had pronounced that his heart was fine and that he had probably fainted because of anxiety, I accompanied Miles to the secure bathroom in the basement of the courthouse.
He stood in front of the stainless-steel sink, shaking his head and looking at the fun house image of his face reflected in the warped steel mirror. “How is it possible?” he said finally. “A thing like that? What unleashes it?”
“I don’t know, Miles,” I said.
He closed his eyes for a moment. “I envy you,” he said finally.
“Oh?”
“I wish I had somebody like you do.”
“What do you mean?”
“You and Lisa. I know you’ve been through some things, you have a tough history, whatever. But it’s obvious that you two have really hit it off, that you lean on each other.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
I smiled sadly. “That’s nice to hear.” I wanted to say something reassuring, but what could you say in a situation like that? He had lost his wife, and his only son was a thug—a thug who might well have killed Diana—and there was nobody else at all. Nobody but me anyway. And however nice a guy I may be, a lawyer is a damn poor substitute for a friend.
Miles leaned over the steel sink, splashed some water on his face, then looked around for a towel. There were none, towels being another of those luxuries of which the accused are undeserving.
“Here,” I said. I blotted his face with the lining of my jacket.
“Hell, man, you didn’t have to do that.” Miles suddenly looked like he was going to cry.
“Part of the job.” I slapped him on the back. “Can’t have my client go back in there looking like he sat too close to the pool at SeaWorld.”
He seemed as though he was about to turn toward the door, but then stopped and looked me in the eye. “Don’t screw things up with your girl, Charley. Promise me th
at.”
“Does it seem like I might?”
He shrugged. “I’m just saying. Human relationships are fragile,” he said. “Don’t let them get away from you.”
I cleared my throat. “You ready to go back?”
He straightened, and his face changed. “Hell, no,” he said in the gruff combative voice he usually reserved for talk-show hosts. “Change of plan. It’s jailbreak time. I’ll be the first accused felon in history to escape by flushing his own ass down the crapper.”
It wasn’t a funny joke, but we both laughed anyway, with the mildly frantic laughter you drag out when things are looking really grim.
Forty
“The state calls Robert Gough.”
Robert Gough was a slight, vigorous-looking blond man, probably in his late twenties. He wore a beige, four-button suit that looked like something a pro basketball player would wear to a nightclub, and a long goatee sprouted from his lip. His hair had been tinted or highlighted to look slightly more blond than it was naturally, and it stuck up in a way that made him appear as though he’d just gotten out of bed . . . though I suspected the look had actually required a great deal of effort and hair gel. His shoes were two-tone, beige on cream.
He sat in the witness box as though he owned it, unintimidated at the prospect of appearing live on national television.
Stash Olesky said, “Mr. Gough, welcome to Michigan.”
“I’m sorry I have to be here under these circumstances.” He didn’t look especially sorry.
“I wonder if you could tell us your occupation.”
“My title is senior editor with Elgin Press in New York City.”
“What is your educational background?”
“I have a B.A. in English Literature from Harvard College, and I worked for several years toward my Ph.D. in English at Columbia University—though I never completed my degree. I’ve been in the publishing industry for seven years, first as an assistant, then as an editor. My current job title is senior editor.”
“So it’s fair to say you’re well versed in the interpretation of literature.”
Proof of Intent Page 21