Prime Witness

by Steve Martini

  “It may explain,” says Lenore, “why Chambers was so willing to cop a plea on the Scofield counts. Maybe he knows his client did ’em,” she says.

  “Damn it,” I say. I’m up out of my chair, pacing behind the desk. “Why is this information just coming in now?” I say.

  “Took a while to find the flight attendant. She was out of town. Stays in Capital City on a rotating basis only once every three weeks.” Claude’s got a list of excuses. “Besides,” he says, “she’s equivocal. She thinks it’s him. Not absolutely certain.”

  “Still,” I say, “we should have talked to her sooner.”

  “Maybe we should charge him.” Lenore’s getting nervous.

  I look at Claude. “What kind of a witness would your flight attendant make?”

  “You want me to be honest.”

  “Brutally,” I tell him.

  “Not solid enough to put on the stand,” he says. “Chambers would have her for lunch, ‘maybe it’s him, maybe it’s not.”’

  I’m leaning over the desk, looking down at the two of them.

  “You can be sure if we charge him, Adrian will pull another witness from his hat,” I say, “some ten-time loser who will testify that he put Iganovich on the plane, kissed him on both cheeks and strapped him in his seat two days before the Scofields bought it.” Silence falls on our little group like a dark cloud. Given the evidence, I would rather have Chambers’s side of this case at this moment.

  “How much leeway will Ingel give to amend?” says Lenore. She’s talking about an amendment to add the Scofield charges against Iganovich.

  “Maybe to the close of our case-in-chief. Not beyond that,” I say. “Maybe not even that far. It would depend on the evidence. We’d have to have something hot.”

  “A percipient witness,” she says, “somebody who saw the Scofields go down, with their own eyes.”

  We both look at Claude. He knows what we’re thinking. The prime witness in the trees.

  “Give me a lead and I’ll chase it,” he says.

  “What have you got on him so far?”

  “The spotting scope. Couldn’t trace it to the point of purchase, no usable prints, just one smudged, looked like a thumb,” he says. “Same result with the climbing gear, too common to trace. According to the information from Rattigan at the Center for Birds of Prey, their best guess is that the witness was a poacher, using an owl to kill peregrine falcons, adults and chicks. He figures this was done so whoever it was could work under cover of darkness, with no noisy gunshots to rouse the neighbors. Why they were killing the birds, Rattigan has no idea. He says he could understand if they were taking ’em alive. The birds apparently have some value. In good condition, Rattigan says a mature peregrine is worth in the neighborhood of fifty thousand.”

  “Dollars?” I say.

  He nods. “We’re in the wrong business. From the bits and pieces,” he says, “bones and feathers we found up in the blind and on the ground, whoever was in those trees that night killed a cool half million on the wing.”

  But from what Claude is telling me, in terms of our search for a witness, it all adds up to zero.

  “Something I want you to check,” I tell Claude. “Have one of your guys do a title search, over at the county recorder’s office, on the property where the Scofields were killed. I’d like to know who owns it.”

  Claude makes a note. “Why?” he says.

  “Just a hunch,” I say. “Maybe we’ve been working from the wrong end on this.”

  Claude looks at me.

  “Maybe we should be working backward from the other end, from the Scofields on the ground back the other way,” I say. “What do we have there?”

  “Mice and pellets used to feed the birds, at least according to Rattigan,” says Claude. “Reams of working papers, unfortunately destroyed by Jeanette Scofield and Amara. And the travel claim I gave you. That’s it. Not much.”

  I spin around in my chair, paw through a pile of items on the credenza behind me and come up with a single manilla folder. I put it on the desk and open it. Inside is the travel claim made out for Abbott Scofield, but never signed, and the attached receipts. I pick through these. The hotel bill and restaurant receipts. When Lenore looks at me I’m holding the two torn tickets, the ones reading “San Diego Wild Animal Park.”

  “The zoo?” I say.

  She makes a face, like search me.

  I pull the AAA Tour Guide, something Mario left in the bottom drawer of his desk. I look in the front, under “San Diego” for attractions. Nothing. I look under “Other Points of Interest.”

  “San Diego Wild Animal Park—see Escondido.”

  I thumb back to the E’s. There it is, right under the “Lawrence Welk Resort Theatre.”

  I read to Lenore and Claude:

  San Diego Wild Animal Park embraces eighteen hundred acres about five miles east of I-fifteen, exit Rancho Parkway. More than twenty-five hundred animals, including elephants, tigers, rhinos, zebras, and giraffes roam over expanses of land that simulate Africa and Asia.

  Visitors can view the preserve on a fifty-minute monorail ride or from lookout points along a one-and-three-quarter mile hiking trail. Animal and bird . . .

  I stop in mid-sentence.

  bird shows are presented daily in Nairobi Village. . . .

  My voice trails off. I look at Claude.

  “You want me to get an airline ticket to San Diego?” he says.

  Claude is stuck here to testify.

  “Henderson on the next plane out,” I say. Something no doubt more to Denny’s liking than copying the reams that comprise James Sloan’s criminal history.

  Claude Dusalt makes an impressive witness on the stand. Even I am a bit surprised by the bearing he brings to this. Claude has one of those faces, craggy and benign, something aristocratic in that slender, jagged nose, the piercing emerald eyes. He has dressed for the occasion, his best gray pinstripe three-piece. No power suit for this man. He will let his position as chief of detectives speak for itself.

  He may be a little frazzled. It was a rush getting here from my office. Claude wanted to connect with the San Diego PD before Henderson’s trip south, a little diplomatic courtesy, and to coordinate in case Denny required assistance. We nearly ran the entire way here to avoid being late.

  I lead him through his résumé, thirty years on the force, more than a hundred homicide investigations to his credit, his own estimate. He is here to lay the groundwork for our case.

  Behind me, I am competing with the constant hum of human conversation, the undertone of the interpreter in Iganovich’s ear, calling the play by play to the defendant.

  We take the murders in chronological order, Julie Park and Jonathan Snider first. Claude tells the jury that he was on the scene in less than an hour after the bodies were discovered, that he took charge to seal off the immediate area along the Putah Creek, and personally supervised the collection of physical evidence at the site.

  “Did you oversee the taking of any photographs at the scene, by other officers?” I ask.

  “I did.”

  I move to the counsel table where Goya has these waiting for me. She hands me a file folder. Inside are three separate sets of photographs, one for the judge. I give these to the bailiff to deliver. A second set goes to Chambers, which I drop on his table, and the third I hand to Claude on the witness stand. I take my time allowing Ingel and Chambers to examine these, waiting for the screaming and gnashing of teeth from Adrian.

  These photos are nothing if not inflammatory. Several full-body shots of the victims staked out on the ground are likely to leave the jury wishing it had skipped lunch.

  Chambers fingers through them, dropping each facedown on the table after examining it. But he says nothing. Instead when he’s finished he looks at me standi
ng in front of the witness box. The lack of expression in his face forms a veritable green light to go ahead.

  This surprises me, but I’m beginning to understand his strategy here. Why bellow about the evidence, the gruesome nature of these crimes, if the premise of your case is that your client did not do them?

  The first rule of courtroom combat: don’t complain unless it serves your ends. A lot of whining about these photographs, quibbling over the angles, may leave the jury with the impression that Adrian is trying to mitigate unpardonable crimes.

  Instead he will distance the Russian from these acts. He will no doubt shower empathy on the victims’ families in his closing argument and administer a sound hiding to the police and prosecution for failing to find the true perpetrator of these horrid deeds.

  Claude makes quick work of the photographs, identifying each as having been taken at the scene. I have them marked for identification and make a motion to put them into evidence.

  Ingel looks at Chambers.

  “No objection?” The judge seems a little incredulous, but Adrian waves him off.

  “I’ll reserve judgment on the photographs until I have seen them all,” says Ingel. He wants a single motion for the photos in all four murders after he has seen the lot.

  We repeat the exercise for the photos of Sharon Collins and Rodney Slate. I note Ingel looking hard at the Collins girl, Acosta’s niece, as we go over this shot.

  “Is it necessary,” he says, “that we have such graphic pictures?”

  What I had not expected, objections from the bench.

  “There were brutal crimes committed here,” I tell him. “It’s appropriate that we do something to document that fact,” I say.

  “Still,” he says, “we should be sensitive to the survivors.” He paws through the photos to find the one of the Collins girl. “This one,” he says, “is particularly bad.” Then he looks at me to see if I’ve noticed. “And several of these others.” He reaches back into the stack of shots he has already reviewed up on the bench. “I think some of these we can do without.”

  Though it is rarely used, the court has the power, on its own motion, to limit evidence which is highly prejudicial in a case. Ingel cites the section of law here and begins winnowing out my photographs, a little cover for the one shot he really wants to exclude, the naked frontal photo of Sharon Collins. He is shameless in his pandering to the delicate sensibilities of Armando Acosta. The clan of the black robe.

  I am objecting from below the bench, but to no avail. With a quick slap of his gavel Ingel overrules my objection, and like that sanitizes the visual image of four grisly murders before this jury. He passes on the balance of the photos and lets them go to the jury.

  I look over at Chambers, a Cheshire grin painted across his face. The court has done a good day’s work for him, without his even entering the fray.

  I take Claude through the details of the crimes. He explains what he saw when he arrived at each of the murder scenes, how the victims were tied off with plastic-coated cord to metal stakes driven into the ground, and how a fifth stake was driven through the abdomen of each victim. He steers away from details, like the extrusion marks on the plastic coating. We will leave that for Kay Sellig and hope that we can find the missing piece of evidence before she testifies.

  Claude is leading off for other later witnesses, the campus cop and tow truck operator who first opened the van and found the evidence, and Sellig who will hit cleanup for us.

  When this is done in detail, I turn my attention to the one last item.

  “Lieutenant Dusalt,” I say, “was there another set of murders, similar in respects to the college students killed here, which you also investigated about this same time?”

  “There was,” he says. “The murder of Abbott Scofield, a member of the university faculty, and his former wife, Karen Scofield.”

  I cannot afford to leave this for Chambers to take up for the first time in his case-in-chief. To avoid the similarities of these murders would be to leave the impression with the jury that we have something to hide.

  “Lieutenant, can you tell the jury, at the time that the Scofield victims were first discovered, did your investigation initially operate on the theory that these crimes, the Scofield murders and the four student victims, were part of a series of crimes committed by a common perpetrator?”

  “We did. That was our theory, initially,” he says.

  “But as your investigation proceeded, facts came to light which caused you to alter that theory, is that correct?”

  “It is.”

  “Objection.” Chambers is up. “Leading the witness,” he says.

  “Maybe if you would place your question in that form,” says Ingel. He sustains the objection.

  I rephrase. “Did you alter your theory as to a single perpetrator in all of these crimes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why did you do that?”

  “Because certain facts came to light during our investigation, which caused us to suspect that this was not the case. That there was more than one killer at work here.”

  “Can you tell the jury what those factors were?”

  “There were several discrepancies with the Scofield murders that did not square with the others. The age of the victims for one thing. They were older than the college-age students taken in the first four murders. The method of killing was somewhat different,” he says.

  “Also,” he says, “there was considerable facial disfigurement on one of the Scofield victims, Karen Scofield, a practice that was not followed in the murders of any of the other victims.”

  He could reach for more, the blind in the trees, the dead birds at the site, the inkling that these have something to do with the Scofield crimes. But Claude is conservative. We have decided to stay away from these things for the time being.

  “And what did you conclude, based upon these differences?”

  “That there was a second killer, working independently, who was responsible for killing the Scofields, a copycat killer,” he says. “Someone who apparently had followed the details of the first four murders sufficiently to mimic them closely, but not precisely.”

  “In your years in law enforcement have you ever experienced or heard of such a so-called copycat crime?”

  “It’s not unheard of,” he says. “I’ve never investigated one before, but I know of cases.”

  “And at the present time, the officers investigating the Scofield murders, are they continuing to operate on the belief that another killer, not Mr. Iganovich, is responsible for the Scofield crimes?”

  “They are,” he says, “unless and until we receive other evidence, other information that may cause us to change our minds.”

  Claude and I have carefully gone over this, some middle ground giving us enough wiggle room to charge the Russian if the evidence turns up, if we can find our prime witness. I take my chair, turn Claude over to Chambers.

  Adrian is slow, deliberate in his movements toward the witness.

  “May I approach?” he says, asking permission of Ingel to walk up to Claude on the stand. Adrian’s holding photographs in his hand.

  “You may,” says Ingel.

  “Lieutenant Dusalt. I’m going to show you some photographs and ask you if you can identify these.” He hands three eight-by-ten glossies to Claude. About the same time Bob Haselid, Adrian’s Keenan Counsel, delivers a set to the judge and drops another on me. These are investigative photographs of the Scofield murder scene, subpoenaed from our files by Adrian during discovery. He has everything but pictures of the bird blind, which is still under wraps of Judge Fisher’s modified discovery order, at least until we can find the witness.

  “Do you recognize these photographs?” says Adrian.

  Claude studies them, turns them over to examine th
e evidence stamp on the back. “They’re taken by our department,” he says.

  “The Davenport County Sheriff’s Department?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do they depict? What are these pictures of?”

  “They are various angle shots of the victims, Karen and Abbott Scofield and the murder scene.”

  “Did you direct the taking of these photographs?”

  “I did.”

  “You have the other photographs there, next to you.” Adrian’s pointing to the shots I have already put into evidence, what is left of my legion of photographs.

  He reaches in and grabs one of these. “This is a good one,” he says. He holds it up from a distance to show the judge and me. It’s a closeup of a hand, a fist clenched in the agonies of death, flesh the color of blued steel. This is blood trapped, coagulated at the extremity by the confines of the cord, tightly coiled around the wrist.

  “What is this photograph?”

  Claude looks at it, reads the label on the back side. “That’s the right hand of Jonathan Snider.”

  “Good. Now look at this photograph.”

  Claude takes the second shot from Chambers, again reading the label on the back. He looks at the lawyer.

  “Can you identify that photograph, lieutenant?”

  “It’s the right hand of the victim Abbott Scofield.”

  “Looking at the two photographs side-by-side, can you tell me,” says Adrian, “is there any difference in the way the rope is tied around the wrist of each of the victims?”