If I'm Dead
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If I'm Dead
Marcia Clark
IF I'M DEAD shows Deputy District Attorney Rachel Knight in her element - the courtroom - fighting to make the jury convict a man who killed his wife.
The one snag? No body...
IF I'M DEAD is a tense and compelling account of a high-stakes trial. Extracts from the two Rachel Knight novels are also included!
Also by Marcia Clark
Guilt by Association
Guilt by Degrees
If I’m Dead
A Rachel Knight Story
Marcia Clark
Contents
If I'm Dead: A Rachel Knight short story
Extract from Guilt by Association
Extract from Guilt by Degrees, coming soon
About the Author
If I'm Dead
Damp, salty ocean air is hell on everything. Especially evidence. If we hadn’t lucked out and found the car so fast, we’d never have had a shot at getting DNA results out of that little drop of blood on the passenger seat of the SUV. But a young surfer looking for a new break near Point Mugu had spotted the vehicle and decided to call the police; the sight of the abandoned car had given him a “bad feeling.” I found out what he meant when I went out to the scene. And I got that same bad feeling every time I looked at the photograph that’d been taken that night—something I’d done often and was in fact doing right now.
The white SUV glowed in the moonlight, a ghostly beacon on an outcropping above a rocky stretch of beach north of Point Mugu. The “soccer mom” vehicle wouldn’t have merited a second look had it been in the parking lot of any shopping mall in the San Fernando Valley. But there, in the limitless darkness of a remote overlook on the Pacific Coast Highway, it was an ominous misfit. A car like that did not wind up in a place like this. Not overnight. And not in the dead of winter.
I couldn’t help being transfixed by the sight of that Ford Explorer, iridescent and isolated, in the endless black maw of ocean and night sky. Chilling, eerie, the photo emanated a sense of menace, a prelude to a violent demise.
At least I hoped it did. I planned to use that photograph—now enlarged to poster size—in my opening statement. I figured it would help me hit the ground running with the jury. Get their minds in the right place. I’m Rachel Knight, and I’m a deputy district attorney assigned to the Special Trials Unit—a small group of prosecutors that handles the most high-profile, complex cases in Los Angeles. Unlike most deputies, we get our cases the day the body is found and work alongside the detectives throughout the investigation. And the detective I’ve been working with almost exclusively for the past few years, who also happens to be my best friend, is Bailey Keller, one of the few women to gain entrée into the elite Robbery-Homicide Division of the LAPD.
The white SUV had belonged to Melissa Gibbons-Hildegarde, the only daughter born to Bennie and Nancy Gibbons, who combined old family money (hers) and a real estate empire (his) to wind up one of the most wealthy, influential couples in Los Angeles. Which, of course, meant that Melissa stood to inherit a very sizable fortune upon their demise. They may as well have painted a bull’s-eye on her back. The arrow that found that target came in the form of Saul Hildegarde, a charismatic community activist whose passion for welfare reform inspired Melissa to abandon her jet-set lifestyle and devote herself to higher pursuits. Unfortunately, it was only after they’d married that Melissa realized the welfare Saul was most passionate about was his own. But while Saul discovered a taste for the easy life of tennis, clubs, and parties, Melissa discovered a burning desire to help the impoverished, and so she dedicated herself to the support and founding of charities around the world. Especially those devoted to the welfare of children. And it wasn’t enough for her to just send money. Melissa took the hands-on approach and accompanied her checkbook around the world, helping to build huts in Somalia and set up clinics in Nigeria. She’d even spoken of adopting some of the children she’d helped during her travels. Her friends were uniformly stunned at Melissa’s transformation. It seemed as though she’d gone from party girl to Mother Teresa virtually overnight. But Melissa didn’t see much of her friends anymore; her charity work kept her plenty busy—likely too busy to ask for a divorce. Right up until the day she’d come home early from a trip to Botswana to find Saul in flagrante with a young coed who’d apparently volunteered to work on a more personal style of welfare reform. Melissa had announced her intention to get a divorce that same night.
Three weeks later, Saul reported her missing. And when her SUV had been found abandoned on a lonely stretch of the Pacific Coast Highway, the contents of her purse strewn across the passenger seat and the glove compartment rifled, it was initially believed that Melissa had been the victim of a robbery-murder, and that her body had been dumped in the ocean.
But that made very little sense to Bailey and me. Why would a robber accost a woman in an SUV out on the Pacific Coast Highway? And even if he did, why bother to dump the body? Why not just kill her and take her money? We’d been skeptical, and so when Dorian Struck, our favorite criminalist, finished with the SUV, we made fast tracks to the house where Saul and Melissa lived. Sure enough, we found evidence of a struggle in the garage. And then Dorian went back over the car with a fine-tooth comb. Not only did she find a wad of money zipped into a pocket in Melissa’s purse (What robber would’ve left that money behind? Or the purse, for that matter?) but she also found blood on the passenger side of the car. Though we didn’t yet have DNA confirmation, preliminary tests indicated it was likely Melissa’s. And then we’d learned that Melissa had a prenup stipulating that in the event of divorce, Saul would only get a share of the money Melissa had earned on her own after the marriage—which was basically zilch. And finally we’d found out that Saul owned a boat that was docked in the marina close to their home but far from the place where Melissa’s car had been found. Which meant it would’ve been easy for Saul to dump her body in the ocean and then leave her car many miles away, north of Point Mugu. So even if a witness happened to see him in the marina that night, it would play like an alibi—putting him far from the scene of Melissa’s murder.
In short, we had a pretty decent case: evidence of a violent confrontation, a blood trace to show how the body had been moved, access to the means of body disposal, and motive up the wazoo. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we didn’t have a body, it would’ve been a no-brainer. But that fact was a real headache in this case, given Melissa’s globe-trotting lifestyle. And there was one additional wrinkle to the “she’s not dead” defense that was problematic: Melissa, having found Saul in bed with another woman, had a reason to disappear and let him take the fall for her murder. Besides, she didn’t have to be vindictive enough to send him away for life. She could always show up after a few months and tell everyone she hadn’t known what was going on over here; that she’d decided to cool off and spend time working for some new charity no one knew about in… Malaysia. It was a reasonable-doubt case that was tailor-made for a “not guilty” if the defense found the right jury. So Bailey had spent months contacting every friend, relative, and acquaintance who’d ever known Melissa, then scoured every database for hospitals, jails, and charities of all stripes around the world to prove that Melissa wasn’t just out feeding the starving children in Angola. But would it be enough to convince the jury? That was the big question.
“Damn it, have you heard a word I said, Knight?” Bailey asked, hands on hips.
“Almost all of ’em,” I lied. “Got any particular one in mind?”
Bailey gave me an exasperated look and pushed the photograph of the SUV facedown on the table next to my desk. “Quit staring at that thing and listen. I’ve got good news.”
I sat up straighter. “Why didn’t you say so?”
I crossed my arms, unimpressed. Bailey might be taller than me—and, okay, maybe she’s got a little more lean muscle—but I’ve got firearms, a great leveler. Even as we spoke, a .38 Special was resting peacefully in its holster in my bottom desk drawer.
This had never worried Bailey in the past, so I don’t know why I thought it would now. And it didn’t. Unperturbed, Bailey continued, “We got DNA on the spot of blood on the back of the passenger seat. It’s Melissa. So now it’s nailed down. They can’t claim ‘it could just be anybody, including the robber.’ ” She dropped the lab report on my desk.
“Not as good as finding her body, but better than nothing, I guess. How big’s the spot?”
Bailey held up her right thumb.
I sighed. “That’s it?”
It was good, don’t get me wrong. Especially because it was in a car that only Melissa drove, and it was on the passenger side. But a spot that small could be explained away as a random accident: So she cut herself, big deal. It happens. I wanted a piece of evidence that was a slam-dunk. This wasn’t it.
Bailey added, “And we haven’t had any of those BS ‘sightings’ for the last four months.”
That was true. The raft of phone calls we’d initially gotten from people who’d claimed to have seen Melissa in the weeks after her car had been found abandoned had largely dried up. The defense always loved to point to these folks to show the jury that there was reason to believe the victim was still alive. Most of them were either looking for their fifteen minutes or channeling their victim “sightings” through tinfoil hats. But in this case all things worried me.
“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t still come crawling out of the woodwork at trial.” I picked up the lab report. “And, of course, our DNA expert Albert Kwan can’t say when the blood on the seat was deposited.”
“Look, I’m a detective, not a magician. What do you want me to do? Go to the morgue and get you a body?”
“Gee, I didn’t think you’d want to. But if you’re up for it, I’m in.”
Bailey glared at me, then continued, “And I talked to Kwan. You’re right, he can’t say exactly when the blood got there, but he will say it had to have been left there fairly recently for it to yield so much DNA, given the conditions.”
“Yeah, that’s cool, but—”
“But what? What innocent explanation is there for her blood to be on the back of the passenger seat?” Bailey demanded. “It’s not like she would accidentally cut herself and then drip blood near the bottom like that.”
I held up my hand. “You’re preaching to the choir, Keller. I’ll be preaching to the twelve-headed monster. And that monster will be looking at Mr. Wonderful, never-had-a-parking-ticket, former Eagle Scout, now welfare-reform activist, and thinking, This guy killed his wife?”
“His rich wife, whose prenup cut him out if they divorced—”
“And whose family, even if we lose this case, will have lawyers who’ll know how to tie up all that money in litigation until the guy’s in assisted living.” I had no doubt the defense would find a way to get that little nugget in front of the jury so they could argue that the defendant had no motive to kill Melissa. Of course, I planned to take every opportunity I could to point out that he didn’t have the legal sophistication to anticipate any of that. But all the defense had to do was raise a reasonable doubt; they didn’t have to prove what Saul knew. It was yet another stumbling block in this obstacle course of a case. Dwelling on it wasn’t making me feel any better, so I did a quick mental review of my to-do list, searching for a reason to get optimistic. I remembered we hadn’t heard back from our criminalist. “Did Dorian turn in her report yet?”
Bailey pulled out her cell and tapped the screen, then scrolled for a moment. “She said it’d be done today. Why don’t we head over there? We’ve got to get out and see the family anyway.”
Melissa had a large and loving family who wanted minute-by-minute updates on the case. We’d been checking in whenever we could, but Saul had hired Ronnie O’Bryan, a street fighter of an attorney who believed in jamming the prosecution into trial as fast as possible. I’d told him we wouldn’t have all the evidence reports in until the first day of trial, and that some might even come in after that. He didn’t care. If I didn’t have the reports, that meant I couldn’t prepare either. I had to admit, it was a pretty effective strategy. If I’d had the stomach to be a defense attorney, I’d sure as hell have used it. And just as he’d intended, I was running at double speed, flogging my experts in an effort to get the most critical work done in time. But with the trial just two days away, the Gibbons family’s anxiety was mounting by the second. They needed some TLC.
I looked out the window of my office on the eighteenth floor of the Criminal Courts Building, trying to gauge whether I’d need to bring my sweater. It was a beautiful day: the sky was piercingly blue and the downtown air had been whipped clean by the hot, gusty Santa Ana winds that’d blown through last night. My walk from my room in the Biltmore Hotel to the courthouse this morning was pleasant enough, but that’d been hours ago. By now, the July sun had been radiating for more than five hours. I figured it was easily ninety degrees out there. Still, Bailey liked to crank the AC in the car, and I knew Dorian kept her office at meat-locker temperature. I grabbed the sweater.
The sprawling brick-colored building that houses the Scientific Investigation Division of the LAPD is just south and east of downtown Los Angeles, about a ten-minute ride from the courthouse. Bailey made the trip in less than five minutes. L.A. is a lot easier to navigate when you don’t have to worry about speeding tickets.
As we rode the elevator up to Dorian’s office, I braced myself for the encounter. Dorian Struck was one of the few veteran female criminalists, and she’d processed more crime scenes in her twenty-three years on the job than even the most seasoned detectives had ever seen. No one was better at the gig, and I was always glad to have her on a case. But she was a prickly pear who didn’t like to be rushed, and I’d rushed her. More accurately, I’d pestered Bailey into rushing her. The moment we stepped out of the elevator, I spotted Dorian’s short, square frame standing next to a young male criminalist whose head was bent over a microscope.
When we got to within five feet of her, she looked up. “Didn’t I tell you I’d call when the report was done?” She glared at Bailey.
Happy to be out of the line of fire, and to see Bailey in the center of it, I stepped back to watch the show. Bailey shot me a narrow-eyed glance before responding. “Yeah, but you also said the report would be done today. So I thought I’d save you the trouble.”
Dorian turned on her heel and headed toward her office, grumbling. “You want to save me some trouble, stay in your cop shop and wait for the report like everyone else.”
Her small, Spartan office was the picture of anal-retentive obsession. No paper out of place, no pens or paper clips lying around, no open books. Most of us have family photos or fun prints on our office walls. Dorian’s were covered—neatly, to a T-squared perfection—with crime scene photos that centered on a gloved hand (Dorian’s, of course) pointing to evidence: bloodstains, spent bullets, spent casings, paint chips, you name it. There was even one of a disembodied head. Dorian’s only nod to sentimentality was a photograph of Indiana Bones—a cadaver dog shown in the act of alerting to a mound of loose dirt. Dorian tapped her computer into life and hit some keys, and the printer whirred, then spit out two pages. Bailey took them and I leaned over her shoulder to see, ignoring her irritated glance.
I read aloud from the report: “ ‘… found evidence of wipe marks throughout the interior of the car… a cleanser was used.’ ” This was good stuff, but as always I wanted more. “If the wipe marks were still detectable, then that must mean he’d cleaned the car shortly before we found it, right?”
“First of all, I’m not saying it’s a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or an ‘it’ who did the wiping. That’s your pr
oblem. Second of all, I’m not saying anyone ‘cleaned’ the car. I’m saying exactly what you read in my report: there were wipe marks that appeared to be associated with a cleanser.”
It was the heaven and the hell of Dorian. She never stretched her findings. She reported literally what she saw and not one thing more. It was a great credibility booster but a minefield for the unwary prosecutor. So far, I’d managed to avoid that pitfall by making it a point to feel around for the parameters of Dorian’s opinion before we walked into court.
“Can you say anything about what kind of cleanser was used?” I asked.
“I can say there was bleach in it, but that’s about it.”
“Can you say that bleach is a particularly effective way to get rid of blood?”
“As opposed to what? Armor All? Your spit? No.”
“Okay, thanks, Dorian.” I’d been warned. But then I remembered the blood drop. I looked at Bailey, who picked up on my thought.
“If the car was wiped down, then how come there was still a visible drop of blood on the back of the passenger seat?” Bailey asked.
Dorian’s expression told me it was good that Bailey’d been the one to ask. “What do you do with my reports? Line the cat box?” I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. “The blood drop wasn’t on the back of the seat. It was on the undercarriage of the passenger seat.”
Would anyone else have found that little drop of blood in such a hidden location? I doubted it. And what a find it was. A blood drop in an accessible area is one thing. But a blood drop underneath the seat? That one was hard to explain. Especially with the evidence of cleanup. This new evidence would decimate any lingering hope the defense might’ve had at selling the BS story that Melissa had been killed in a robbery. It’d be a pretty rare thief who’d kill someone, dump the body, then take the time to wipe down the car out on the highway. Feeling cheered—maybe more than was justified—we thanked Dorian and headed out to see the Gibbons family one last time before the trial began.