At the Scene of the Crime

by Dana Stabenow

  Motive, Catt and Miles thought simultaneously. Kerrington might have killed Mitt to keep him from telling anyone about misdirected money or diamonds.

  Nora stretched her lithe body and leaned back in her chair. The solitary tear that had tracked down her cheek was no longer visible. “That’s really all I can tell you, unless you insist on the sordid details of our affair. You’ll be disappointed to learn that sex was pretty normal.”

  “We’re not into sordid yet,” Miles said, smiling. He thanked Nora and stood up.

  Catt slipped her notepad into her purse and stood up also. “I’m curious,” she said.

  “I noticed,” Nora said with a faint smile.

  “Why did you tell this to us and not to the police?”

  Nora shrugged again. She really was good at it. You could almost see what might have been bothering her running down off her shoulders. “You know how water dripping on stone will finally wear it away?”

  Catt nodded.

  “You were the last drip,” Nora said.

  Miles was about to pull the car away from in front of Nora’s condo when his cell phone vibrated. He did more listening than talking before breaking the connection and sliding the phone back in his pocket. “Loman’s got a witness who said he passed Mitt on the jogging trail at seven-twelve the morning of Mitt’s death.”

  “And the nine-one-one call came in at seven-twenty,” Catt said. “That pretty much brackets the time of death. Mitt must not have been dead long when his body was discovered.”

  “Progress,” Miles said. Though he wasn’t exactly sure how they were any closer to the killer.

  “If we can believe the witness,” Catt said, more realistically.

  Miles pulled away from the curb and drove toward the address of Roger Kerrington.

  “We gonna call and see if Kerrington’s home?” Catt asked.

  “It’s Sunday,” Miles said. “He should be there.”

  “Or in church,” Catt said. “Maybe confessing.”

  Roger Kerrington was home. His wife insisted on being present when he talked with Miles and Catt. The couple was childless and lived in a neat, well-furnished suburban house in keeping with Kerrington’s salary at Diamond Square. If he was stealing, he wasn’t using the proceeds to live large. Or maybe he was smart enough to salt it away until he had enough to live the luxurious life he imagined. Contrary to popular belief, some thieves did know when to quit.

  Kerrington was a short, squat man about forty, well-muscled, with a square jaw and square-rimmed glasses. Squared away, Catt thought. He was wearing khaki walking shorts, a brown knit pullover with a collar, and white jogging shoes. Catt wondered if their soles would show traces of Mitt’s blood.

  It didn’t take long to get to the meat of the interview.

  “You say Mitt was killed around seven-fifteen?” Kerrington asked.

  “Near as we can tell,” Miles said.

  Kerrington rubbed his square jaw, looking like a man pretending to think. “I was feeling ill that morning. Some kind of bug. I went in to work late.”

  “He didn’t get out of bed until after eight o’clock,” his wife said. Her name was Belinda and she was a smaller version of Kerrington only without the square glasses. “I know because I was in bed with him.”

  “Asleep?” Catt asked.

  “Reading a good mystery. My husband’s snoring was keeping me awake.” She smiled woman to woman at Catt. “You know how it is.”

  “No,” Catt said. “I wouldn’t put up with snoring.”

  Throughout the interview, Miles and Catt didn’t mention Nora’s belief that Mitt thought Kerrington was doing something detrimental to Diamond Square, Inc. Probably something illegal that provided a motive for murder.

  When they left the suburban ranch house, Catt said, “He’s got a solid alibi, even if Belinda’s lying.”

  “Was she lying?” Miles asked. He knew Catt had an uncanny ability to read body language.

  “Like a rug,” Catt said.

  After leaving the Kerringtons, they talked to the witness who’d seen Mitt jogging at seven-twelve the morning of his death. His name was Jack Ozman, and he was an insurance agent who ran in the park every morning. He had not a single hair on his head and sparse blond eyebrows. His smile was as expansive as his waistline, and he pumped Catt’s hand, then Miles’s, as if trying to draw water from wells. Catt thought somebody should tell him that after being shaken like that, the prospective customer’s hand might be too sore to hold a pen and sign on the dotted line.

  “How did you know the exact time you saw Mitt?” Miles asked Ozman.

  “I’d just checked my watch to make sure my run was on schedule, and when I looked up, there he was. We nodded at each other as we passed, like we do—did most mornings.”

  “Do you know any other people who jog or walk regularly in the park about that time?”

  “Lots of them,” Ozman said. “We’re all mostly from the neighborhood around the park. I’ve tried to sell most of them insurance.”

  Catt made a low grumbling sound, not a purr.

  “Then you know names?” Miles asked.

  “Like any good salesman, I know their names.”

  Miles and Catt exchanged glances.

  “Eureka,” Catt said.

  “Kerrington?” Miles said.

  Ozman beamed. “Sure, Roger Kerrington. I see him most mornings. He’s underinsured and doesn’t know it. But I didn’t see him the morning Mitt was killed.”

  “You’re sure about that?” Catt asked.

  Ozman looked insulted. “Hey, it’s the kind of thing a salesman remembers. Names and faces.”

  When they’d left Ozman, Catt said, “The salesman will be able to sell to a jury. The guy’ll make a great witness.”

  “For Kerrington,” Miles said. “Maybe Belinda Kerrington was telling the truth and her husband actually wasn’t in the park that morning.”

  “She was lying,” Catt said with her usual certainty.

  They drove silently for a while. They knew what they needed, but they also knew there wasn’t enough evidence to obtain a search warrant for the Kerrington residence.

  “What we could use are a few reliable witnesses who saw Kerrington in the park the morning of Mitt’s murder,” Catt said.

  “It should be possible,” Miles said. “Assuming he was there.”

  Catt wasn’t so sure, having little faith in the reliability, or believability, of eyewitnesses.

  At the next stop sign, she said, “I’d sure like to get my hands on Kerrington’s shoes.”

  Miles said, “Forget the shoes for now. Kerrington doesn’t live within easy walking distance of the park. Let’s find out what kind of car he drives.”

  “If there’s blood on the shoes,” Catt said with a grin, “there’s a good chance for blood in the car.”

  “Mitt’s blood.”

  “It’d be great if we could get enough on Kerrington to hold him overnight,” Catt said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “See if he snores.”

  Miles and Catt were just finishing a late lunch at a steakhouse not far from Speeders Park when Loman phoned Miles’s cell phone from police headquarters. Loman seemed upset.

  “Somebody in the department’s leaking to the media,” he said. “We’re gonna get some terrible press ’cause of that traffic cop writing a ticket nearby almost at the precise time Mitt was murdered.”

  “That seems to be the case,” Miles said. “But so what? The cop wasn’t a mind reader with X-ray vision.”

  “You know how it is, Miles. The news media’ll be bitching because of how we allocate our people, calling us incompetent, making life hell around here top to bottom to sideways.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s suddenly twice as much pressure on us to solve this murder. Pressure on me, pressure on thee.”

  “Downhill,” Miles said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. We’ll keep you informed, Wayne.”
Miles broke the connection.

  “What was that all about?” Catt asked.

  “Pressure,” Miles said.

  “Pass the artificial sweetener,” Catt said.

  Catt was right about the unreliability of witnesses. Six people in the park said they were reasonably sure they’d seen Roger Kerrington on the joggers’ path the morning Mitt was killed. The trouble was that seventeen joggers or walkers would testify they hadn’t seen him that morning. And of course, no one had seen anything relating to Mitt being killed except for the woman who’d noticed the body.

  Miles and Catt did run a Department of Motor Vehicles check on Kerrington. A black Ford Explorer SUV was registered to him.

  Late that afternoon, a messenger arrived at Miles and Catt’s office with a package. Miles smiled at Catt as he signed for it.

  “Blown up sequential photos from that traffic camcorder,” he explained, tearing open the package. “We can at least get a glimpse of every car coming or going at Speeders Park, from an hour before the murder to an hour after Mitt’s body was discovered.”

  “That could be a lot of vehicles,” Catt said.

  It turned out to be forty-seven. The relatively low number was due to the early hour of the photos, which were time-lapse stills, marked with the precise time and date, taken from the camcorder tape. Trouble was, thirty of the vehicles were SUVs. Fourteen of them could be eliminated because they were too light a color to be Kerrington’s black vehicle. The others were indistinctly shaded in the grainy black-and-white images. They might have been red, blue, green, or black. And because of distance and poor imagery, any number of them might have been Ford Explorers.

  “Narrowed down to sixteen,” Miles said, sitting back exhausted from examining the stills with a magnifying glass. “Not enough to implicate Kerrington and prove his wife is lying about him being home in bed.”

  “It doesn’t prove his SUV wasn’t in the park’s lot that morning,” Catt pointed out.

  “For all your skepticism,” Miles said, “you talk like an optimist.” He pulled his Rolodex across the desk and thumbed through the index cards for a number. He started to peck with a finger on his desk phone, but halfway through the number he hung up the receiver and used his cell phone.

  “Who are you calling?” Catt asked.

  “Worldwide Security,” Miles said.

  Catt was surprised. Worldwide was one of the largest private security firms in the world, providing every kind of protection for VIPs and their families, from corporate CEOs to potentates of major nations. “You know somebody there?”

  “The president, Willis Burr. We grew up in the same neighborhood, dated the same girls, and made some of the same mistakes.”

  “You think Worldwide can enhance those images so we can read a plate number?”

  “I doubt that,” Miles said, “but they might have some photos of their own. Worldwide has its own satellite. Three of them, in fact. And there’s a good chance one of them was in range of this city when the murder took place.”

  Catt wasn’t surprised when Miles didn’t get through to Burr. He didn’t get through even to an assistant. He left a message and hung up, noticing the expression on Catt’s face.

  “Not to worry,” he said.

  “Skepticism and worry,” Catt said. “Not the same thing.”

  When Catt went into the office the next morning, her skepticism disappeared at the sight of Miles’s extra-wide amiable grin. “Your guy came through,” she said.

  He nodded. “A messenger will deliver a DVD within the hour. There’ll be a slight angle, but a Worldwide satellite passed overhead just east of the area at the time of Mitt’s murder.”

  “Your old pal Willis Burr knows what friends are for.”

  “Don’t think I don’t owe him for this,” Miles said.

  “Wouldn’t dream of it. I know what friends are for, too.”

  When they viewed the satellite DVD an hour later, they were disappointed to find that, while the vehicles entering and leaving Speeders Park were in sharper focus than on the traffic cam photos, their license plates still couldn’t be read. However, it was possible to identify the make and comparative sizes of some of the SUVs and eliminate eight more. That meant six of them might be Kerrington’s Ford Explorer.

  But there was something else on the DVD, something that made it possible to determine the precise time of the murder. The satellite imagery was marked by a date-and-time bug in the lower right corner, ongoing in hundredths of seconds. The video stream enabled them to see Mitt’s murder. Well, almost. The zoomed-in aerial view of the park showed a tiny figure on the jogging trail standing motionless minutes before another, bulkier figure arrived, apparently at jog pace. Mitt. The bulkier figure slowed, moved close to the other figure. Then both disappeared into the darker area of the woods. Half a minute later, one of the figures emerged and began moving at a moderately fast pace along the jogging path, away from the scene. There was no doubt that Miles and Catt had just witnessed the murder of Mitt Adams.

  “After killing Mitt, the murderer jogged away along the trail,” Catt said. “Somebody must have seen him.”

  “We do have witnesses who’ll say Kerrington was jogging in the park that morning,” Miles pointed out.

  “And a ton more witnesses who say they never saw him there.”

  Miles and Catt viewed the video stream again, but from a wider angle. There were other joggers and walkers on the winding path, but none near the point of the murder at the time it happened. And from satellite distance, amazing as the enlarged imagery was, it was impossible to know one small dark moving figure from another. As far as anyone could judge from the DVD, the figure emerging from the woods might be Mitt. Only it wasn’t Mitt, because he was dead on the ground.

  “The fact is,” Catt said, “we’ve still only got a lot of circumstantial evidence, and Kerrington’s got a solid enough alibi to walk if there’s a trial. We still don’t have enough to obtain a search warrant for his house. And if we did have a warrant, we might not find anything incriminating unless there are blood stains on Kerrington’s shoes, or maybe the carpet of his car or house.” She stared out the window at a breeze barely moving the trees. “All that circumstance might be enough to get an indictment, but what we really need is something to sell a jury. Otherwise, the defense and prosecution will simply be playing dueling witnesses and paid experts, and you might have noticed our side’s outnumbered.”

  “We have enough for a conviction,” Miles said, leaning back in his desk chair almost far enough to tip.

  “You’ve figured a way to get Mrs. Kerrington to tell the truth?” Catt asked.

  “No,” Miles said, “but I might know how we can nullify the defense’s witnesses and place Kerrington in the park at the time of the murder.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  Halfway through the trial, it didn’t look good for the prosecution. Bo Hastings, the DA who led the prosecution team, was distraught. He was a small man with a barrel chest and a facial resemblance to Napoleon. The resemblance was made stronger by the black helmet of hair he wore Napoleon style. Catt knew it was a wig and figured she probably shared that knowledge with everyone else.

  “The fact that we found no blood on the shoes or in Kerrington’s SUV or house has just about killed us,” Hastings told Miles, Catt, and Loman, in his office in the Hall of Justice.

  Catt sat up straighter, arching her back. “There’s still a—”

  “I know,” Hastings said, “mountain of evidence. Take away the wife’s testimony that Kerrington didn’t leave her sight around the time of Mitt’s murder, and that mountain would bury Kerrington. But the evidence is circumstantial. The traffic camera’s got an SUV like his entering and leaving the park around the time of the murder. The satellite photos show somebody who could be Kerrington accosting somebody who could be Mitt on the jogging path, going with him into the woods, then emerging and driving away in an SUV that might be the same SUV we saw entering and leaving the park at a
time that suits our case, while we ignore all the other SUVs.”

  “Have we tried to get satellite shots of an SUV leaving and returning to Kerrington’s house that morning?” Catt asked.

  “That was going to be our ace in the hole,” Hastings said. “But timing and cloud cover worked for Kerrington. No such shots were taken that we could zoom in on.” Hastings made a tent with his fingers and looked as depressed as if Josephine had left him. “And tomorrow the defense is going to put on an almost endless parade of witnesses who jog or walk every morning in the park and will swear they don’t recall seeing Kerrington there.” He sighed. “We have only three who say they saw him, and three more who think they might have. Who you gonna believe if you’re a juror?”

  They all knew the answer.

  “Any ideas?” Loman asked.

  “I’d like to see some satellite shots of the jogging trail,” Miles said, “to make sure of something I noticed.”

  “What part of the trail?” Hastings asked.

  “Any part.”

  Everyone in the room stared at him.

  “I think,” Miles said, “I can give you the something that’ll sell the jury.”

  The next morning in court was the low point for the prosecution. One credible witness after another testified that he or she hadn’t seen Kerrington in the park the morning of Mitt’s death, lending more and more validity to Kerrington’s alibi. In a largely circumstantial case, the barrage of defense testimony should prove fatal to the prosecution.

  It didn’t help that Hastings chose to ask the witnesses only the same, single question in his cross-examinations.

  After a two-hour recess for lunch, it was the prosecution’s time for rebuttal.

  Hastings began by making a show of strutting before the jury and glancing at his watch. Miles noticed that he’d changed watches during the recess, from his gold Rolex to what looked like a bargain oversized watch with an obviously imitation leather band.

  “The prosecution has put witness after witness on the stand,” Hastings said, “regular joggers or walkers in Speeders Park, who testified they did not see the defendant in the park during the time frame of Mitt Adams’s murder.” Hastings tapped his watch’s plastic face several times sharply with a fingernail. “I believe them all.”