“From Joe Betts, you mean?”
“Yeah, and that waitress.”
“What waitress?” Darrow asked in surprise.
Simmons threw the stick still farther, grunting with exertion. “I forget her name—she worked the night shift at Donut King. As best I recall, she was taking a shortcut across campus. She claimed to have seen the outline of a man beneath the Spire laying down what looked like a body.”
“What time was it?”
“Shortly after three A.M., I think she said.”
Darrow struggled to reorganize the puzzle pieces to accommodate a new one. Joe Betts claimed to have seen Steve outside the dorm around three o’clock; apparently the waitress believed that an unidentified man had deposited Angela’s body a few minutes later. But, despite this contradiction, both accounts suggested that Angela had been carried to the Spire. At length, Darrow asked bluntly, “Was Angela raped?”
Simmons pursed her lips. “There was evidence consistent with rape. That the sperm was Tillman’s only proved they’d had sex. Ditto that both their pubic areas contained each other’s hair. But there were scratches on his back, and skin under her fingernails—Tillman’s, according to the DNA. Add the contusion on her cheek and you can come up with a sexual assault.”
“What about forcible penetration?”
“There weren’t any vaginal tears. That doesn’t mean the sex was consensual. Angela wasn’t a virgin, it’s clear. And she could have given in to avoid a beating, or just passed out. That’s still rape. But you just can’t know.”
“Yeah. I keep hearing that.”
Kneeling, Simmons took the stick from the terrier’s mouth, ruffling the fur on its neck. “Enough, Diablo. You’re wearing me out.” She stood again, gazing at the landscape in the gently slanting light. Evenly, she said, “We didn’t have all the medical evidence we might want. But there was an absence of any evidence helpful to Tillman. There was no one else’s DNA on Angela’s body. I tried to get something off her neck—the murderer’s fingerprint, or even DNA from the moisture on his fingers. Either one could have further inculpated Tillman or, conceivably, exculpated him. But those were long shots, and neither panned out.” She gave a fatalistic shrug. “So we lived with what we had. With the witnesses, it turned out to be enough.”
Darrow absorbed this in silence. After a moment, Simmons faced him again. “There’s something else you should think about,” she said. “Ever try to strangle someone?”
“I’ve considered it once or twice.”
Simmons’s expression became grim. “It’s an extremely unpleasant act—for both the victim and the murderer. To asphyxiate another human being by strangulation takes about three minutes. The killer doesn’t just need to be strong—he needs to be determined. Whoever decided that Angela Hall needed killing remained firm in his intentions despite ample opportunity to reconsider. Even a drunk had time for second thoughts.” Finishing, Simmons spoke coolly and incisively: “What that means, Mr. Darrow, is that first-degree murder was the appropriate verdict. This was an intentional homicide, carried out by someone who wanted to make sure this young woman never saw another day, or spoke another word. The murderer was either very cold-blooded or very angry. Maybe both.”
Darrow thanked her.
Driving to his empty residence, he watched the blue-gray of twilight envelop the horizon. He already knew what part of the trial transcript he would read.
12
I
N THE MORNING, DARROW TRIED TO SET ASIDE WHAT HE HAD discovered in the trial transcript. He began his workday by reviewing Joe Betts’s plan to tighten Caldwell’s financial safeguards; with one addition, which Darrow scrawled in the margins, it seemed prudent and comprehensive. Then he prepared to meet with Fred Bender, now Caldwell’s head of security, by scanning the campus safety program—which, he knew, tracked what Farr had suggested to Clark Durbin on the morning of Angela’s murder. Finishing, Darrow reflected that both plans, sound in themselves, existed to prevent disasters that had already occurred.
The next problem on his desk, though new, had been exacerbated by the old ones. The campus employees no one thought much about—the maintenance crew, cafeteria workers, and distributors of campus mail—were seeking a raise they clearly deserved; Caldwell had little money to give them. Picking up the phone, Darrow asked Farr what the employees might accept.
“Whatever we give them,” Farr answered bluntly. “The job market’s brutal; their skills minimal; the economic trends Darwinian, winnowing out the less gifted or educated. Your faculty—which also deserves more money—knows that. So does our board of trustees. Give them a choice between a happy maintenance staff or renovating a building, bricks and mortar will win every time.”
“Maybe so,” Darrow said. “But why should I choose for them? If they want to screw these people, let them say so.”
“Why expend your political capital on mere charity?” Farr replied sardonically. “Especially when you’re telling the board to put off a new capital campaign. Besides which, as of an hour ago, you can’t afford an act of human kindness.”
“Because?”
“A leaky pipe in the IT center has caused the supports to rot. Which means, I’m afraid, moving our entire computer system, at considerable expense, infuriating whatever department whose office space you jam it into. And, of course, the board will blame our maintenance crew, however underpaid and understaffed they happen to be. George Armstrong Custer himself wouldn’t ask Ray Carrick to approve a raise.”
The sense of choicelessness, Darrow found, deepened the depression seeping into his brain. “First things first, then. We’d better solve the IT problem.”
As though registering Darrow’s mood, Farr said equably, “It’s four-thirty now. Why not come for a drink at six. We can figure this out then.”
Why not? Darrow thought. A martini could not hurt, and he would not mind seeing Taylor. “By six,” he responded dryly, “I’ll expect you to have answers for all our problems.”
WHEN DARROW ARRIVED, Taylor was nowhere in sight.
The evening was warm and breezy. Ties loosened, Darrow and Farr sat in the intricately landscaped backyard, Anne Farr’s legacy—Farr drinking Scotch, Darrow a martini. By the second drink, the two men had moved the IT center to the basement of the old art building and resolved to defer any pay increases with a promise of better raises in better times. Sipping his martini, Darrow paused a moment, then spoke to the roots of his disquiet. “The last couple of nights,” he told Farr, “I’ve been reading Steve Tillman’s trial transcript.”
Farr’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
“Call it a professional compulsion. Now that I’m back, I can’t help thinking about how Steve got where he is.”
Farr studied him. “Reach any conclusions?”
“No. But I have some distinct impressions.”
“Such as?”
As Darrow ordered his thoughts, the door from the sunroom opened and Taylor Farr stepped onto the brick patio, miming shock at the sight of sunlight. “I’ve been locked up with my dissertation all day,” she announced. “Hibernation isn’t meant for summer.” Turning to Darrow, she said, “Hello, Mark. Hope you’ve taken the Reverend Caldwell off your wall.”
“I’m giving him to you,” Darrow answered her. “As thanks for all the advice you gave me the other night.”
Taylor laughed. Farr looked from Darrow to his daughter, eyes keen and head slightly tilted, as if listening to notes no one else could hear. After a moment, he asked, “Care for a drink, Taylor?”
“White wine, thanks. I’ll get it myself.”
As she left, Farr resumed his appraisal of Darrow. “You said you had ‘impressions.’ ”
“Several. What they add up to is whether Steve should have been convicted at all.”
Farr cradled his drink, unsipped for the last few moments. “The jury thought so. Frankly, so did I. The evidence seemed good enough.”
Taylor emerged with a glass of wine. Gauging
the two men’s expressions, she sat at the edge of the wooden table, watching them in silence. “Maybe in the abstract,” Darrow was saying to Farr. “The key witnesses against Steve were the two homicide cops, principally Fred Bender; Carly Simmons, the pathologist; a waitress returning home from the doughnut shop; and, critically, Joe Betts.”
“There were also Steve’s own statements to the police,” Farr amended.
“True, and they weren’t helpful to him. But the essence of the case was this: Angela left the party with Steve. They went to his room. They drank some more and had sex, leaving scratches on Steve’s back and, perhaps, a bruise on Angela’s face. To the police, that suggested rape, as did the fact that the room was disordered and Steve’s bedside lamp knocked over.
“Two witnesses strung these pieces together. The waitress claimed to have seen a man about Steve’s size and build setting down a body near the Spire around three A.M. But Joe Betts was the clincher: by swearing he saw Steve returning to his room from the direction of the Spire, he made Steve out to be a liar—and therefore a murderer. Without Joe, Steve might well have walked.”
Still quiet, Taylor looked from Darrow to her father. “But there was Joe,” Farr proferred mildly. “The only alternatives are that he was lying or that Steve didn’t remember leaving his room. The latter’s not plausible.”
“Assuming he’d returned from carrying a body. Suppose he was just a drunk in search of fresh air—which was Joe’s stated reason for sticking his head out the window.”
Left unanswered were the implications of Farr’s first alternative. Carefully, Farr asked, “Who else do you suppose wanted to kill Angela?”
“That is the question,” Darrow concurred, “as Dave Farragher emphasized in his closing argument. ‘Don’t leave your common sense at home,’ he told the jury. ‘Do you really believe Angela just wandered away and was strangled at random?’ ”
Narrow-eyed, Farr put down his tumbler, contemplating its contents. “Perhaps I’m out of my depth. But I was there, and I watched the jury’s faces. For me, the key was when Dave said something like ‘Sometime during your deliberations, I want you to remain silent for one hundred and eighty seconds, the time it took the murderer to choke the life from Angela Hall. Then ask yourself these questions: Was her death the product of a momentary impulse or was the murderer implacably determined to kill her? And would a murder so deliberate, so remorseless, so angry, and so intimate be committed by a stranger?’ What’s your answer, Mark?”
Darrow felt Taylor watching him closely, her own mind at work. “If that’s the question, Lionel, my answer is clearly no.”
Farr nodded briskly. “Meaning that whoever strangled Angela knew her and was driven by what seemed to him—and it’s fair to assume it was a him, given the strength it took—an extremely powerful motive. Who else but Steve Tillman?”
Darrow chose not to answer. During his silence, Taylor looked at the two men’s empty glasses. “Can I offer either of you a refill?” she asked. “Perhaps some wine?”
Intent now, Darrow shook his head, glancing at Farr.
“No,” Farr said curtly. “Thank you.”
After giving her father a swift glance, Taylor turned to Mark. “What did the defense lawyer do?” she asked.
“Nothing good,” Darrow replied. “If Nordlinger did any pretrial investigation, it isn’t evident from the transcript. When he called on Steve in his own defense, Steve wasn’t prepared for what happened to him.”
“Which was?”
“Accusations of racism,” Darrow said crisply. “Farragher went after all the times in high school someone heard him say ‘nigger.’ He also forced Steve to admit that he had confronted George Garrison about asking out his sister.”
Taylor finished her wine. “Not pretty. But that doesn’t make Tillman a murderer.”
“Exactly. If it did, back in the nineties a chunk of our population would have been on death row. At the least, Nordlinger should have objected like crazy.”
“On what grounds?” Farr inquired. “That there’s a difference between racial animus and murder? Or that wanting to sleep with a black woman is the opposite of wanting to kill her?”
“The legal frame,” Darrow answered, “is that racist statements are more ‘prejudicial than probative’—they create bias against Steve without providing any evidence of murder. I knew that much before I passed the bar.”
Farr sat back, emitting a barely audible sigh. “You drive me to a painful admission. During the trial, Griff Nordlinger didn’t look right to me—I thought he might be sick, literally. Months later I heard that his marriage was falling apart, and that the cause might be some serious substance abuse. If I’d suspected that Griff might have been impaired, I never would have suggested he take Steve’s case. But by then the trial was over.
“On appeal, the public defender’s office replaced Griff. I told myself his problems didn’t matter—or, if they did, that the appellate courts would consider them. And I believed then, as I do now, that Steve Tillman strangled Angela.” He glanced at Taylor, and his voice went softer still. “Racism makes savagery more thinkable. So do cocaine and alcohol—beyond question, Steve had overindulged in both. If he was guilty, I concluded, Griff’s overindulgence was beside the point.”
Uncharacteristically, Farr sounded pained. Choosing silence, Darrow felt Taylor watching his face. “If you had been Steve’s lawyer,” she asked him, “how would you have defended him?”
It was the same question Darrow had asked himself. Mindful of Farr’s sensitivities, he organized his thoughts. “It’s not an easy case,” he acknowledged. “There are only so many defenses: ‘somebody else did it’; ‘I did it, but I’m insane’; ‘I did it for a good reason’; or, as Nordlinger tried, ‘reasonable doubt.’ I would have combined ‘reasonable doubt’ with ‘somebody else did it.’
“You’d start by attacking the physical evidence. There’s no doubt Steve and Angela had sex. But she had no vaginal tears, and the scratches she left on his back might simply have reflected Angela’s involvement in the moment.”
A corner of Taylor’s mouth twitched. “Is that often your experience?”
Darrow smiled faintly. “As to Steve’s messy room, my experience—and I’m sure yours—is that college boys have messy rooms and drunks knock over lamps. The physical evidence, by itself, does nothing to establish murder.”
“What about the bruise on Angela’s face?”
“That’s more problematic, I’ll admit. But how did she get it? She could have bumped into a wall.”
“Or Tillman could have hit her,” Taylor interrupted coolly. “As a prelude to rape. And what about the witnesses?”
In the enveloping dusk, Darrow noted, Farr had dropped out of the conversation, watching the exchange between Darrow and his daughter. “Contrary to popular belief,” Darrow answered, “eyewitness testimony is pretty unreliable. And what did the witnesses actually say? The waitress merely claimed she saw a shadowy figure of about Steve’s size and stature—which, as it happens, could also describe the two men on either side of you.
“Only Joe Betts claims to have actually seen Steve. But Joe was neither reliable nor unbiased—he was as drunk as Steve, and they’d fought over Angela just hours before. Even if you believe Joe’s story, placing Steve outside the dorm doesn’t put his fingers around Angela’s throat.” After glancing at Farr to underscore his point, Darrow again faced Taylor. “Let me ask you this: If Steve Tillman raped Angela in his dorm room—given the freezing night, the only location that makes sense—what does it tell you that she was found by the Spire, fully dressed?”
“That Steve carried her there—”
“Despite his leg and his condition?”
Taylor gave him a mock-patient look. “What I was going to say, before being interrupted, is that what’s strange to me is the ‘dressed’ part.”
Darrow smiled again. “Why’s that?”
“Because it suggests that she dressed herself following s
ex, perhaps a rape. Which means that Steve didn’t kill her during, or immediately after, whatever happened in his bed.”
Beside her gifts in her chosen field, Darrow was perceiving, Taylor had Farr’s talent for linear thought—though not a lawyer, she had swiftly integrated the known facts with the probabilities of human nature. “Or,” Darrow added, “that she was dressed when they had sex.”
“Then why the scratches on his back? If it was consensual, they’d both be naked. And if it was rape, why would he undress?”
Darrow had considered this. “There’s a grim alternative—that Steve forced her to undress, raped her, then strangled her. After which he dressed her body and carried it to the Spire.”
Taylor shook her head. “Unlikely. Dressing a corpse can’t be easy. It also suggests a cold-blooded guy with real presence of mind. That doesn’t sound like a drunk to me.” Taylor’s face closed. “I can’t tell you about the scratches. But like most women, I’ve been in a couple of scary situations with a guy who couldn’t hear no. I’ve sometimes wondered what I’d have done if things had spun out of control.”
Darrow brushed away this unwelcome image. “What did you conclude?”
“That I might have given in, however much I hated it, rather than have someone beat me up or tear my vagina to shreds. She also might have passed out before penetration.” She turned to Farr. “Sorry, Dad. But the lack of vaginal injury tells me nothing.”
Both Farr and Darrow fell quiet again. “After all this it may seem odd,” Taylor told them, “but I’m getting hungry. You must be, too. Mind if I order a pizza?”
Farr looked distracted, as though lost in the exchange between Darrow and Taylor. “Pizza’s fine,” he said. “Mark?”
“Anything you want,” Darrow told Taylor. “Vegetarian’s okay with me.”
Taylor flashed a smile. “That’s very thoughtful. But I’m a carnivore, remember? On our first ‘date’ we both ate steak.”
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