Proof of Intent

by William J. Coughlin

  “I bet it did.” Stash shook his head in disgust and sat down.

  Fifty-two

  “Son of a bitch!” Lisa said, slapping the table. “That pompous, bogus, boobs-hanging-out woman knew there was a time bomb in her past, and she never told us.”

  “Let it go,” Miles said.

  We were on recess waiting for my final expert witness.

  “Let it go,” Miles said again. “We’ve got to focus on what’s coming next.” He paused briefly, smiled glumly at me. “What is coming next, by the way? I’m waiting for the part of this trial where ace attorney Charley Sloan goes on a honking big tear and saves my ass.”

  “Can I go strangle that woman, Dad?” Lisa said.

  Anywhere but here, I was thinking. I turned around and looked around the courtroom, looking for inspiration. The first face I saw was that of Roger van Blaricum, Diana’s brother. He was no more than eight feet away, half of his face looking back at me with the careworn, injured expression of a grieving brother.

  And the other half of his face was smirking at me.

  Fifty-three

  “The defense calls JoEllen Flynn.”

  JoEllen Flynn had no great reputation, no publications, wasn’t an unusually forceful witness, and her experience in the field of crime scene investigation was unremarkable. But she was honest and diligent. And drop-dead gorgeous. Don’t bother calling me a chauvinist: Sex sells in the courtroom just as well as it does on the breath-freshener commercials.

  JoEllen Flynn was in her midthirties, black Irish—raven-haired, pale-skinned, high-cheekboned, tall. She’d been a crime scene investigator for the state police post in Lansing for a few years, then had quit her job to raise children. From what she told me, she testifies in a few cases a year to make gas money and pay for the annual family trip to Disney World.

  “Ms. Flynn,” I began, “have you had an opportunity to review the evidence in this case?”

  “Yes sir. I reviewed the entire police file, including the autopsy report, toxicology, the witness statements, and the crime scene reports, plus state police Agent Orvell Pierce’s blood spatter analysis report.”

  I began by using her to point out that the fingerprints found on the bokken were latent prints rather than impressions left in the blood. She made the point that the fingerprint evidence provided no clear evidence that Miles Dane had used the bokken as a murder weapon. I then moved on to the main reason I’d brought her to the stand.

  “I’m going to show you what has been marked as State’s Exhibit 60, Ms. Flynn,” I said. “Can you identify this document?”

  JoEllen Flynn examined the paper I handed her. “Yes sir. That’s Agent Pierce’s blood spatter analysis report.”

  “Let me direct your attention to page one of that report. There where it says ‘Methodology.’ Could you read that portion silently and then tell us whether you have any comments as to the soundness of his methods?”

  JoEllen Flynn looked at the paper for a while, chewing her lower lip. She looked a little nervous. “Yes sir. Well, it all looks about right. These are standard and accepted methods in the field of blood spatter analysis.”

  “Good.” I handed her more papers. These were covered with spatters of a dried red-brown liquid, the pig’s blood Agent Pierce had used to re-create the blood spatter from the crime scene. “Can you identify these items?”

  “Yes sir. These are the papers on which Agent Pierce spattered blood. In other words, those are his verification tests.”

  “And these? State’s Exhibits 15 through 27?”

  “These are photographs of the actual blood spatter from the room where Diana Dane was killed.”

  “Now, I know Agent Pierce has already testified on this subject, but could you just briefly recap the logical connection between the test sheets and the actual photographs?”

  “Sure. Basically the way this process works is you measure the size and shape of the blood spatter. Using a standard formula that you can punch into any scientific calculator, you can predict roughly where the drops came from and how fast they were moving. Working back from that, you can reconstruct the location and direction of motion of the object from which the blood was spattered. So the point of these”—she held up one of the spattered pieces of paper—“is just to verify that the calculations worked, that they correctly predicted what would happen in actuality.”

  “So have you had an opportunity to compare Agent Pierce’s blood spatter to those in photographs of the actual crime scene?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And what did your comparison reveal?”

  “Basically, that the test spatters are slightly shorter than the actual ones in the room. Here, see, in the crime scene photograph you have a blood drop that’s an inch and a quarter long, and here in the test, same size of drop, but it’s an inch and an eighth. I compared twenty-nine tested spatters against similar test spatters and I found that twenty-three of the twenty-nine were slightly shorter.”

  “What does this indicate to you, Ms. Flynn?”

  “Look, I can’t question Agent Pierce’s basic conclusion. There is a margin of error in these calculations. So when Agent Pierce here in conclusion number four on page one of his report states that the object used was approximately one and a half to three feet in length, I think he’s got it about right.”

  “Now the bokken, state’s exhibit one, it’s forty-one inches, is it not?” I said triumphantly.

  “That’s right. But as Agent Pierce pointed out, I think he was naturally referring to the amount of the weapon extending beyond the hand. Not the total length of the weapon. That’s the standard way of calculating this.”

  Thank you for that entirely unhelpful clarification, darling. Now would you like to shoot me in the head? Beautiful, she was. But not the most helpful witness I’ve ever had.

  I tried to smile. “Okay, Ms. Flynn. Fair enough. But even assuming he was talking about the length extending beyond his hand—and I’m not sure he was—were his conclusions accurate?”

  “Again, these are approximations. He estimated the weapon was one and a half to three feet in length. Hold the bokken with one hand, you’ve got more than three feet of weapon extending from the hand. Hold it like a baseball bat, you’re looking at right around three feet. Which is at the extreme end of his approximation. In my experience, when you do a series of tests and the tests show that the midpoint of an approximate range is shorter than the object you’re comparing with, there’s a good chance you’re dealing with the wrong object.”

  “Let me get this straight . . .”

  “I’ll try to say this in a simpler way, Mr. Sloan. If he’d done one test, and the spatters had been in the right range, but slightly low—hey, no problem. But if you do twenty-nine comparisons, and the tests consistently indicate something that’s slightly shorter, yeah, you’re probably looking at a shorter weapon.”

  I held up the black bokken in its plastic sleeve. “Simple English. You think she was hit by something shorter than this.”

  “Yes sir. If I were to guess, it was probably something just under two feet long. Highly unlikely it was three.”

  “Thank you. Mr. Olesky, she’s all yours.”

  Stash stood up. “Hi, Ms. Flynn, good to see you again.”

  “Hello, Mr. Olesky.”

  “You ever played softball, Ms. Flynn?”

  JoEllen Flynn smiled shyly. “Yes sir. My team was state champs in high school.”

  “If I may say so, you look as fit as a high school girl,” Stash said. The soft soap was making me nervous. Usually Stash likes to stampede right for the jugular.

  JoEllen Flynn blushed. “Thank you.”

  “You ever heard the expression ‘choking up on the bat’?”

  “Sure.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “Well, some hitters grip their bats farther up on the handle than others. That’s called choking up.”

  Stash handed the bokken to her. “Show me.”

 
She took the bokken and held it in a batter’s grip. “Normally, you’d hold it right down here on the end. But if you wanted to choke up, you’d just move your hands a few inches higher. Like this.”

  Stash pulled a neon green tape measure out of his coat pocket, extended it from the tip of the bokken to JoEllen’s thumb. “Could you read that off for me, Ms. Flynn?”

  “Twenty-nine inches.”

  “That’s just a hair over two feet, isn’t it?”

  JoEllen’s gaze flicked toward me, then back to Stash’s face. “More like two and a half,” she said.

  “But closer to two feet than three.”

  She shrugged. “As you say, by a hair.”

  Stash nodded, looking satisfied, then released the catch on the tape measure. It went zippppp back into the tape case.

  “Last question, Ms. Flynn. Why do people choke up on a bat anyway?”

  JoEllen Flynn looked at me helplessly. “It swings easier.”

  “It swings easier.”

  “Swings easier.”

  Stash took the bokken back, choked up on it about six inches, swatted once at the air. “You’re right. Swings nice and easy.”

  Fifty-four

  That night after trial recessed for the evening, I told Lisa that we were going to have to put Miles on the stand. We were sitting around the office eating what must have been our two hundredth pizza of the past two months.

  “Right now we barely have a theory for this case,” I said. “It’s all very well to stand up in front of a jury and say, ‘Well, maybe it was a police conspiracy, maybe he was framed by somebody, maybe it was a burglar, gee, we just don’t know.’ But if you really want reasonable doubt, you want a bad guy, a genuinely plausible alternative suspect. And right now, we don’t have one.”

  “So how does Miles on the stand help us with that?”

  I breathed out heavily. “I’ve got to get him to talk about Blair. It’s the only hope we have.”

  “He won’t do it,” she said. “You know he won’t.”

  “It’s all we’ve got.”

  “We’ve got Blair,” she said. “If we can find him.”

  “Forget about Blair,” I said sharply.

  She looked at me strangely. “What?” she said. I hadn’t told her about my little meeting in the office with Blair the other night. The way I looked at it, the less she had to worry about, the better.

  “I’ve got to prepare for tomorrow,” I said. “I don’t have time to try finding him.”

  “I’ll go,” she said.

  “Absolutely not. I need you here.”

  “I just need to lay a little of that famous Sloan charm on him,” she said, picking up my car keys. “Don’t worry, Dad, I can turn him around, I promise you.”

  Then she plunged a folded piece of pizza into her face, stood up, and headed for the door, sauce dripping down the side of her chin.

  “Lisa, dammit!” I yelled. “Bring back those keys.”

  “UHMMmmmhuh-huh,” she said. Then she was gone.

  I jumped up to go after her, but tripped over the pizza box and went down on both knees into a large deep dish supreme. By the time I’d gotten to the door, the taillights of my Chrysler were already heading up the road.

  I started shivering when I came back inside and couldn’t stop for almost an hour. I turned the heat up, which made the room hotter but did nothing to get rid of my memory of Blair Dane’s cold eyes, or the dead quality of his voice.

  Fifty-five

  I woke up in my office the next morning at around six and looked outside. My car was not in its space. I called my home number, but nobody answered. I felt a nervous tickle again. It would be fine, I told myself. She wouldn’t be able to find him, so she’d come home with her tail between her legs. Hell, she was probably driving over to the office right now.

  I tried to think about what was in front of me for the day. Worst-case scenario, I had to be ready to close before lunch. I started going over the questions I’d need to ask Miles.

  By seven o’clock I was getting antsy: I still hadn’t heard from Lisa, still didn’t know where my car was.

  My house is only about six blocks from the office, so I hiked over, grabbing a bag of doughnuts from the bakery at the IGA on the way. When I got to the house, there was no car. Inside, no coffee made, no messages on the phone, no evidence that Lisa had slept in her bed. Now I really was getting nervous.

  I looked at the clock. Seven-thirty-five. I was due in court at nine, so I called for a cab. I had to spell my name three times to the cab dispatcher. He was Indian or Pakistani, and I only understood about one word in three that he said. After I hung up the phone, I started pacing around the room, going over my closing in my mind. Problem was, I had to prepare two different arguments. One was the Blair-did-it speech. The other was the mushy reasonable doubt speech. I was feeling dreadfully, woefully underprepared.

  I got so absorbed in my speech that when I looked at the clock again I was surprised to see that it was eight-seventeen. The cab still hadn’t arrived. My house was about a ten-minute drive from the courthouse. Plus I had to drop by the office. Call it fifteen minutes.

  I picked up the phone to dial the cab company, but the line seemed dead when I held it up to my ear.

  “Hello?” a puzzled-sounding voice said after a moment.

  “Lisa,” I said. “Thank God. Where are you?”

  “Outside Saginaw.”

  “Saginaw!” Saginaw was almost two hours away. “What are you doing there?”

  “Long story. Anyway, I think I got Blair. He’s been crashing with some jailhouse buddy.”

  “You think?”

  “He’s here, okay? I’m with him. I think I can get him to testify.”

  “Leave him be. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I got to go before he skips on me.” She sounded harried and strung out. I was worried that she had been drinking—though it may have just been the fatigue in her voice.

  “I can’t put him on the stand if you’re in Saginaw.”

  “Then stall. Either we’ll be there or . . . Oh shit!”

  The phone went dead in my ear. I looked at the clock. Eight-twenty-one. My heart was beating like a trip-hammer. If the cab didn’t get here soon, I’d be late.

  I called the cab company. “Sloan,” I said. “Charley Sloan. Where’s my cab?”

  “Who?”

  Why oh why oh why had I not taken three hours out of my day at some point in the past two months to buy Lisa a car? We had talked about doing it every other day, but then something else always seemed to come up.

  It took another five minutes to impress on the Indian cab dispatcher the urgency of my situation. Finally, he assured me that a cab would be there in three minutes. Or maybe five. “But eight minutes, tops, my friend! Or nine! Absolute tops, nine! Or twelve!”

  I slammed the phone down before his numbers got any higher.

  The cab arrived fifteen minutes later, belching blue smoke. According to my calculations, if everything went perfectly, I’d be strolling into court at precisely one minute before nine.

  About halfway to my office, the ancient cab’s engine gave out and the cab settled on the side of the road. The driver began talking in excited Hindi or Bengali or Urdu on his radio.

  “How long?” I said.

  “Relax, my friend.” He turned and gave me a big smile. “The cavalry is on the way.”

  “How long?”

  He shrugged, easily. “Oh, certainly no more than an hour.”

  I dug my cell phone out of my briefcase. The battery, of course, was dead.

  Fifty-six

  “How pleased I am that you have condescended to join us, Mr. Sloan.” Judge Evola’s toothy smile was as cold as my fingers. The jury was already seated, the Court TV camera running, everybody looking ready for a hanging. I’d hitchhiked, grabbed a ride from a kid in a VW bug with a broken window and no heat. It was almost ten o’clock, and I was so cold I couldn’t feel my fingers.

&n
bsp; “My deepest apologies to the court,” I said. “I had car trouble and a broken cell phone, then the—”

  Evola interrupted me with a wave of his big hand. “Well I hope the cat didn’t eat your next witness.” Laughter from the jury box. I looked over at the jury. They were glaring at me. It was written all over their faces: I was the scumbag lawyer holding things up while his guilty client sat there trying to look innocent. I got the feeling that unless I did something awfully dramatic, Miles Dane was going down.

  Other than Blair Dane there was only one more witness on my list. The one witness I had prayed I wouldn’t have to use.

  “Your Honor, if I could beg the court’s indulgence, I’d like just the briefest of moments to confer with my client.”

  “No doubt you would. That privilege, however, is reserved for those who arrive on time to this court. Call your next witness, Mr. Sloan.”

  Notwithstanding the judge’s instructions, I leaned over and whispered to Miles, “It’s your call. Are you willing to roll the dice on reasonable doubt?”

  Miles knew what the score was. We’d discussed the pros and cons of his testimony several times. What I had said to him was that he would only testify if it seemed that the jury would really have to stretch to find reasonable doubt.

  Miles stared bleakly in front of him. “I don’t feel like rolling the dice on reasonable doubt right now,” he said finally.

  “I have to warn you,” I whispered, “this won’t be pretty.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning, if you go up there, you’re putting yourself in my hands. You just have to trust that I have your best interests at heart.”

  He stared straight ahead for a long time, his fingers gripping the table like someone was about to drag him away to his death. “Do it,” he said finally.

  “Whatever it takes?”