“How were prints damning evidence if the crime scene was in his own home?”
“One print. On the electrical plug on the hair dryer. You know those rectangular flat plugs about one and a half by two inches? But Marcus said he never touched his wife’s hair dryer. Ever.”
“Is the man stupid? It would have been smarter to testify that he used it all the time so it didn’t prove anything. Or at least that he didn’t remember.”
“It wasn’t actual testimony; it was more like a blurt the night of the crime. The detective asked if he’d touched the hair dryer, and he blurted that he never had used it, ever. After his arrest he was questioned about it and he stuck by that. Then when Mack said his print was found on it he tried to backtrack, but it didn’t sound good.”
“Where was his defense in all this?”
“He kept telling Marcus there wasn’t enough evidence to convict him. The thing is, Will had shown the print as it was originally developed to an independent examiner, Frank Puccio, before he even agreed to take the case. Puccio said there aren’t enough matching points that you could prove the print is Creighton’s. Now that Mack has been indicted, they’ll probably let the guys with lesser convictions sit in jail. Most of them will just run out the clock and get released before the prints are even retested. But Marcus should get attention because they’re always real cautious with capital cases. Too high profile.”
“They don’t want to look bad, killing innocent people,” I agreed.
“Right. We get all our evidence together on Marcus and file an appeal for a retrial. And no, you don’t have to tell me I’m jumping the gun on that.”
That wasn’t what I was jumping to at all. Marcus, I thought. She kept saying that, not Mr. Creighton, or Creighton, but Marcus.
“What do you think of him?” I asked, taking a casual sip of my drink and staring at the horizon to avoid her thinking what I was thinking.
“Think of him?” she asked.
I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw her brush a hand over a copper-colored birthmark on her temple. I knew her well enough to know this was a tell when she was hiding something. I wondered if she was hiding this thing from me or herself.
“Yes, think of him,” I said, and nudged, “What’s your read?”
I could see her picking through possible responses in her head before choosing “He presents very well.”
I snarfed lightly. “You spend two years at Quantico and ‘presents very well’ is the extent of your profiling?”
Laura held up one index finger with which to indicate I should shut up. “I haven’t spent all that much time with him. Been focusing on the evidence.” She changed the subject. “Will is doing the paperwork. What I’m trying to do is get the hair dryer so our independent guy can redevelop the latent and examine the rest of the appliance. Now that Mack has opened the door for us, maybe we can find another print that would exclude Creighton altogether. Best case, point to the real killer.”
“Where’s the evidence?”
“There’s where you could help me. It’s being held at the Indian River County station. They’re stonewalling.”
“How?”
“They said they lost it. Then they said they destroyed it. Then they said they’ll look for it. Then the appellate judge said it probably wouldn’t prove anything.”
“Sounds like the legal shell game. You want to get what you need but play along so the judge won’t just say no dice. What you say, sounds like they didn’t destroy the evidence after the trial.” I considered her. “You really think it’s worth it, huh? You’re hot for this.”
Laura stared up at the sky a moment before answering. I think my nagging was wearing her out. “Brigid. Here’s what it is. Cold cases, you solve them and the victim’s still dead. Even economic crime, you seldom recover the money. But exonerations. Hey. You save a life.”
“But,” I said again. I had remembered Lancer’s summation of the state’s case, this mistress named Shayna Murry who denied he was with her while his family was getting murdered. “You’ve still got the fact that his mistress blew his alibi.”
Laura threw the remaining ice from her drink into the water, put the flimsy plastic cup on the wooden railing, and telescoped it with the flat of her hand. “Did I say we had other evidence besides the fingerprint? Oh, we’ve got Murry taken care of, too.”
Five
“The fingerprint is only half of what we’re basing the appeal on,” Laura said, opening her third little package of oyster crackers, leaving the crumbs and plastic wrappers strewn over her paper place mat with one of those ubiquitous maps of Florida on it, alligators and the Magic Kingdom out of proportion relative to the phallic outline of the state.
Laura had agreed to tell me the rest at the Tale of a Tuna across from the hotel. We both ordered seared tuna and brown rice. I ordered a glass of chardonnay, tasted it, and added some ice cubes from my water glass. Laura frowned. “You put ice in your wine?”
“Only when it tastes like this.” I was half paying attention to what she was saying and half doing a little profiling of my own now that we were face-to-face. What I could see in the light over the table was that she had dark rings under her eyes, as if she hadn’t been sleeping. That coupled with the strain in her voice and the new lines in her forehead told me she had that disagreeable combination of anxiety and fatigue, strung taut and worn out at the same time, and that she was putting a hell of a lot of energy into not showing either. I wouldn’t have thought she could be more intense than the last time I had worked with her, but there it was. Like she had something more personal at stake. For the time being I didn’t go there. “Okay, let me catch up with you. Give me the skinny on Creighton’s story the way he tells it.”
She reconstructed the story as follows:
Marcus Creighton, forty-two years old in 1999, had a fine home in Vero Beach, Florida, a couple of hours up the coast, nestled between the ocean and the Indian River, which took over for the Intracoastal Waterway for that stretch.
Marcus had three fine children, ages eight to fourteen, of whom he was said to be fond, and a wife he didn’t care for as much. He said they never argued. They never did much of anything, and an argument now and then might have lessened the boredom.
Their home was maybe a bit too fine. On prime coastal property, in an upscale area, the residents of which made self-referential jokes about being “Very Very Vero.” What made it Very Very? Dog breeds like Petit Basset Griffon Vendéen and Spinone Italiano. In strollers.
Up the road a bit, in a less upscale neighborhood in a town called Sebastian, Marcus kept a twentysomething mistress who spent her time making art from trash, what she called “assemblage.” Maybe Shayna Murry had loved him at some point, or at least he thought so.
It got a lot worse. Besides a marriage that had also soured, and a house that he couldn’t afford, and losing his shirt in the tech-stock market, Marcus had a wine import business that was about to go bankrupt due to the competition from the big chain stores. Under pressure, he said he had been to visit a short-term lender in Miami, to plead for more time on the quarter mil he had borrowed. He said he had lied at first about why he went to Miami, because he thought the money problems might make him look bad. He was right; they made him look very bad.
He had taken out a life insurance policy on his wife less than a year before.
“Did he give you a reason for that?” I asked.
“He said she was a serious alcoholic and had had a couple of bad accidents. He thought it was a responsible thing to do.”
The Fateful Night According to Creighton: That afternoon Marcus lucks into an earlier flight from Miami to Melbourne, the closest airport to Vero Beach, about thirty minutes north of his house. He isn’t expected home for a while, so he stops to visit Shayna for a little comfort. They spend several hours together in her house-slash-studio, and he doesn’t pull up to his more palatial residence until close to one thirty in the morning. Wearily, he kicks off his bus
iness shoes and shrugs his black suit jacket onto the couch in the living room and heads to the master area of the house, which, he is surprised to notice, has lights on. Kathleen, his wife, usually does not wait up for him.
When he sees the bed empty, neatly made, he goes into the bathroom and finds her in the Jacuzzi tub. He turns off the bubbler and sees that her hair dryer, while plugged into the outlet by the nearby sink, is resting on the bottom of the tub.
“Wait,” I said. “Is her hair wet?”
“Pretty dry. It was humid out, but the house is air-conditioned,” Laura said.
“Hair dryer submerged.”
“I’m already ahead of you on that one. The first examiner, I mean Tracy Mack, said it would have been a waste of time to look for prints on the submerged part of the dryer, and the defense never questioned that. Frank Puccio says it’s possible, especially given advanced techniques. Okay. So, Marcus calls nine-one-one. At first when the paramedics arrive, he’s just upset. But then he calls this community center where he thought his kids were spending the night, something called a lock-in, and is told they never showed up. That’s when he goes hysterical, at least apparently, and the cops get called. They do an Amber Alert to find the kids.
“When he’s questioned he panics. That’s when he confesses he was at his mistress’s house until well after his wife’s ‘accident.’ But the mistress blows his alibi when she says he wasn’t there at all that night.”
“That’s what I’d call being blindsided. Do you trust the mistress?”
“I never trust a mistress. I know, I was one once, remember?”
I did remember, and how it always reminded me of all I didn’t know about this upstanding young woman. I asked, “Motivation for lying?”
“I’ve gone over the textbook possibilities: Bribe. Threat. Revenge. Nothing yet. And I’ve tried repeatedly, but I can’t get her to talk. But that doesn’t matter, because I think we’ve got her on perjury.”
“How so?”
“During her testimony she said Creighton called her from his cell phone that night and said, quote, ‘If anyone asks where I was, tell them I was with you.’ I kept going over the transcripts, and it finally hit me. Called. The defense didn’t use cell phone evidence.”
“That’s typical. No one considered the potential evidence of cell phones in the nineties. I was working an abduction case in ’97 and watched a cop use the victim’s cell phone to call his office. Sometimes it’s still hard to get it accepted.”
“That’s right. But Marcus says that he didn’t call Shayna that night. She already knew he was coming over.”
“His word against hers.”
“Agreed. But what he did do is try to call his house from Shayna’s. On his cell phone. So if we can find the records that match to a cell tower near her, we can show what time he was at her house and prove she was lying under oath.”
“What are the chances after all this time?”
“They’re good. I did some homework and found out the same company still owns his service. They’re looking right now.”
“Who was his attorney? Didn’t he raise objections at any point?”
“Ronald Croft. Public defender.”
Public defender: not incompetent, just overworked and underpaid. “Why didn’t Creighton get decent counsel?”
“He says he wasn’t thinking clearly. All he was thinking about was where his children were and why no one was looking for them.”
Laura stared at the remains of her fish, like it was all the fish’s fault, or like the fish had the answers.
I thought of Carlo, how everywhere I turned there seemed to be these people who spoke to me like Jiminy Cricket. Sometimes it works, but sometimes it doesn’t. Rather than go all Old Wise Woman on her, it made so much more sense to convince Laura of Creighton’s guilt, and allow her to move on.
“What about contract murder?” I asked. “Creighton hires someone to do the deed for him, takes a convenient trip to Miami for part of his alibi. Then when he comes back he heartlessly screws his mistress while his family is being killed.”
“I already thought about that,” Laura said, attention back and cylinders firing.
I grinned. The woman had a fine mind to go with that passion. “I just bet you did.”
“Will and I talked out every angle over and over before he took the case. The medical examiner put the time of death, given the temperature of the water and how it affected the body, no sooner than midnight. If you had everything planned so carefully, would you have arrived within an hour and a half of the murders?”
“Are you sure he’s an intelligent man?”
“That’s a good question. I can’t tell you what he was like when he went in. Can you imagine what it’s like to spend fifteen years as a condemned man?”
I’d seen them and I remembered. After nine years Billy Wallace had no teeth from grinding them in his sleep. After just two years John Hughes tried to commit suicide by falling off his bed onto his head. “Yes, I can imagine,” I said. “They go nuts. I think there’s an official term for it.”
“Well, Marcus Creighton didn’t. The way he tells it, some literacy volunteer gave him a copy of a book about King Arthur called The Once and Future King shortly after he was put in his cell. He was struck by something Merlin said: ‘The best thing for being sad is to learn something.’ So Marcus, when he wasn’t working on his appeals, he set about learning things. He learned chess, playing the game in his head. He read the classics. Now he’s working his way through the modern literary canon. He says it keeps him relatively sane. You wanted a profile. I don’t think he’s merely highly intelligent. I think he’s heroic.”
Ignoring the fact that her eyes were glistening as she finished, and the contour of her shoulders had softened, I said, “All right, then. Except for thinking with his dick, I think any normal man of good intelligence would have arranged to miss his flight in Miami, stay the night there, and get home the next day. It’s a much neater alibi than the mistress. I wouldn’t have trusted the mistress for an alibi. It would just make me look bad.”
“Exactly.” Laura looked like she was about to say Gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case. “Then, if you could plan a murder so carefully, so cold-bloodedly, would you drop the ball when it came time for your defense? And on top of that, if it was a contract killing, why would he have not said that when he saw his case going south? Gone state’s evidence on the actual murderer? Made a deal for a lighter sentence? So many questions it makes my head spin. Except for the lame alibi, the prosecution’s case was very weak, and it’s driving me crazy that they rushed to conviction.”
Laura had said very much the same thing when someone had confessed to a crime she was certain he hadn’t committed, and there was much less certainty with that case than there was with this one. What to do? Support her wholeheartedly, distract her, or keep rubbing her face in what she already knew, the capriciousness of the system that could just as easily lead to Marcus Creighton’s death?
I said, “If you can stall the death warrant. If you can confirm the phone records. If you can reassess the fingerprints. If you can get a retrial based on perjury and flawed forensics. If Marcus Creighton is innocent.”
Under the weight of all the ifs, she looked a little more defeated, but she was nothing if not a fighter and was suddenly back for another round. “We can try. But listen, if none of that works for you, there’s also one more thing I haven’t mentioned. Have you heard about the progress with touch DNA?”
“I know defense is in love with it these days, because there are so many cases where you don’t have body fluids to test. You talking about where he was said to touch the hair dryer?”
Laura gave a cautious nod.
“You really think those skin cells will be viable after so many years?”
“Again, the odds are hard to call, but some time ago they developed touch DNA found on JonBenet Ramsey’s pajamas twelve years after her murder. They don’t know whose it is, but t
hey know it was no one in her family. The evidence finally cleared them. Technology has gotten better since then. So yeah.”
“I’d forgotten about that. Must have been around the time I had some problems of my own.”
“If Marcus is telling the truth about his not touching that hairdryer, and if we can capture some DNA from it…”
Two more ifs, I thought. But I couldn’t deny she had a point.
Six
Laura urged me to come to Hench’s office in the morning, and I really wanted to see if he had anything new to say about the case, but I waffled, saying I’d have to see how Dad was and let her know first thing. I didn’t have positive feelings about Dad’s condition, but you never know. I forced one of my sleeping pills on Laura with the command to get some rest for God’s sake, then went back to my room, where I laid out the same pair of travel slacks I’d worn on the plane and a fresh cotton blouse. Via FaceTime I found out that Carlo was doing well without me, and wasn’t going to eat the chili I left in the fridge for him. Somebody told me that leaving food for your husband was treating him like a child, and maybe that’s so, but like I said, I’m still learning how to do this marriage business.
“I thought you liked my chili,” I said.
“I’ll have it tomorrow.”
“So what did you eat?”
“Do you really care what I ate?”
“No. I just like the sound of your voice and want you to keep talking.”
“You talk. What’s happening over there?”
I told him about Dad first, then said, “Remember how you said Laura must have a good reason for taking on this case? Well, what if the reason is that she’s fallen in love with a condemned man?”
Carlo briefly pressed his lips together and shut his eyes, blocking out that possibility. When he opened them again he said, “That would be very bad.”
A Twist of the Knife Page 4