Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Till next time,” Laura said to me.

  “Let’s hope for better circumstances.”

  It was another long wait. A female deputy sheriff came and went with the two other women who had been in the line-up, so both were evidently in custody. The police officer who remained with me looked as if she was getting as irritated as I was before McClane opened the door and came in.

  “You can go,” he told the police woman. “I’ll take her.”

  “It’s about time.”

  An assistant commonwealth attorney named David Miller was waiting for the elevator.

  “Hi, David,” I said. “What are you doing at police headquarters?” David was olive-skinned and had a full head of wavy black hair. Evidently I had chatted him up in a bar once, or vice versa, though I didn’t remember it. I did remember opposing him in court.

  “Working hard to stamp out crime,” he said. “You’ve got a trial tomorrow I understand.”

  “A preliminary hearing. Are you handling it?”

  “Nope. You drew the big guy again.”

  “Does he often handle prelims?”

  “Never. He’s doing it just for you.”

  “It’s nice to be loved.”

  “They say love and hate are two sides of the same coin.”

  “I don’t like that coin,” I said. “I think I’d like to give it back.”

  David reached out his finger and swiped it down my nose. The elevator doors slid open, and the three of us got on, me, David Miller, and Tom McClane.

  “What was that for?” I asked Miller. I swiped my finger along his nose, and he smiled.

  “Keep it clean,” he said.

  McClane’s car was in the parking garage. When we were in it and he had his arm hooked over the seat back to reverse out of his space, I said, “So don’t keep me in suspense. Did your witness identify me or not?”

  “I’m not arresting you, if that tells you anything. My instructions are to drop you back at your office or any place else you want to go.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 4:15. Images of home and Deacon beckoned me, but I had a trial tomorrow. “My office is fine.”

  We cut over to Cary Street and turned in the direction of downtown. I tried again. “It’s not like you to be so reticent. Don’t you want to gloat or anything?”

  He glanced at me and stretched his mouth in something that was not quite a smile.

  “Or maybe you’re pissed off because I’ve somehow slipped through your fingers again.”

  He kept his eyes on the road and shook his head.

  “Have it your way. Just remember that however it looks, I’m as pure as the driven snow. That thought will keep you on the path of righteousness.”

  He snorted, and I gave up.

  The next morning events seemed to conspire against me. My mother called while I was running Deacon. Her ringtone is the theme music from the movie Halloween, which is uncharitable of me, I know. I must have been in a mood when I selected it, though I really don’t remember. I dropped into a walk as I fished out my phone to talk to her. It’s not that I don’t like talking to my mother, but I was preoccupied with thoughts of trial. I forgot all about Deacon until I was nearly home.

  “Deacon! Deacon, old buddy.”

  I listened but didn’t hear anything. I retraced my steps for a block or so, looking out for him and calling, but with no result. I turned again and headed home. I didn’t like it, but it wasn’t the first time Deacon had gotten too interested in whatever he was doing to stay in voice range. When I went in to take my shower, I left the front door to the house standing open so Deacon could wander in when he got back, along with anyone else who might want to watch a woman shower.

  I was out of the shower and picking out my underwear when he trotted in, tongue lolling, looking pleased with himself and sure of his welcome. I had an uneasy thought.

  “It’s time to get you fixed, isn’t it?”

  He looked up at me with a happy, trusting expression, and I rubbed the top of his head.

  Anyway, by the time I’d dropped him off at Dr. McDermott’s, I was running late, and I walked into the courtroom right at nine o’clock to see the gallery half-filled with spectators, Aubrey Biggs hunched at his table like a arthritic gnome, and Willow Woodruff alone at the defense table. The judge was not on the bench, but the court reporter disappeared through a door as I came in, and when he came back the judge was right behind him.

  “Oyez, oyez, oyez. . .” Everyone stood as the bailiff called the court to order.

  Judge Cheatham looked at me as he thumped his files on the bench. “Glad you could join us.”

  “Glad to be here, your honor.”

  He grimaced at my cheerful tone and sat. “We’re here in case of Commonwealth vs. Willow Woodruff. The defendant is represented by Ms. Robin Starling; the Commonwealth is represented by Mr. Aubrey Biggs. Is the defense ready? Mr. Prosecutor?”

  We were both ready.

  “The charge is murder in the first degree. Will the defense waive the reading of the indictment?”

  I waived it to make up for keeping the judge waiting.

  “Mr. Biggs, do you have an opening statement?”

  “No, your honor.”

  “Call your first witness.”

  I looked at my watch. It was 9:05, and we were already into it.

  The prosecution’s first witness was a police officer named Dub Ahern. He looked about thirty, his skin pale and freckled and his hair flaming red. He had been with the Richmond Police Department for five years.

  “Have you ever seen the defendant Willow Woodruff before?” Biggs asked him.

  “Yes, sir. I saw her on April 11.”

  “How did you come to meet her?”

  “I went to her house as the result of a call from dispatch.”

  “What happened there?”

  “She answered the door. She didn’t say anything. She just opened the door for us and backed into the house, staring like, and she stopped by a doorway into a hall.”

  “When you say she opened the door for us. . .”

  “My partner and me. Logan Fisher.”

  “And when she stopped by that doorway into the hall?”

  “I said, ‘In there?’ or something like that, and she just kept staring.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Well, my partner Logan stayed with her, just kind of watching her, and I went into the hall. It was a short one with three doors opening off it. The one on the end to the left had the light on, so I went that way and found a man lying on the bed with blood all over the sheets and comforter. It looked like. . .well, I saw what I took to be a gunshot wound. There was an entrance wound on one side of his head and an exit wound on the other.”

  Willow’s clenched right hand was just inside my field of vision, the knuckles whitening.

  “Did you check to see if the man was alive, if he needed medical attention?”

  Officer Ahern’s mouth twisted. “No, sir. It was pretty obvious he was beyond help.”

  “Even to a nonprofessional like yourself?”

  He swallowed, his adam’s apple rising and falling. “There was all the blood, but more than that. . . the man’s head had kind of lost its shape. It was distorted somehow.”

  I glanced at Willow, sitting rigidly with her fisted hands, holding on, but maybe not by much.

  “What did you do?” Biggs asked Officer Ahern.

  “I changed places with my partner, let him see what had happened while I called in the homicide. Then we all ended up in the living room while we waited for the M.E. and the detectives from homicide. Ms. Woodruff sat by herself on the sofa. She still hadn’t said anything.”

  “Did she ever say anything?”

  “Yes. She did say one thing.” Ahern glanced at Willow, his tongue moistening his lower lip. “She said she had blood on her hands.”

  “Thank you, officer. Your witness.”

  I went to the podium. “Officer Ahern. Can you tell us
whether Willow Woodruff did have blood on her hands?”

  “You mean literally? You mean could I tell whether she’d killed her husband?”

  “I do mean literally, but you’re taking my question metaphorically.”

  “Ma’am?”

  I had lived to be ma’amed by a cop. I held up my hand, the palm facing Officer Ahern. “Do you see my hand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is there blood on it?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “So I don’t have blood on my hand.”

  “No.”

  “Let me ask you again. When you saw Willow Woodruff in the early afternoon of April 11, did she have blood on one or both of her hands?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, I think she may have. And there was a streak of something that might have been blood on her cheekbone.”

  I asked a few more questions, but that was the big shining moment in my cross-examination of Officer Ahern. Aubrey Biggs might try to argue that Willow had made a confession, but I thought I had at least as strong an argument that, still dazed from finding her husband’s body, she had simply noticed blood on her palm or on her fingers.

  Biggs’s next witness was a pathologist from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, a man I hadn’t encountered before, though he looked as though he’d been around since World War II. He took the witness stand in a rumpled lab coat with several strands of his dirty-gray comb-over hanging down past his left ear. He blinked at Aubrey Biggs through heavy-framed glasses.

  “Dr. Murray. Could you tell us your full name please? And your occupation?”

  He was Dr. Michael Murray, and he had been with the Office of Chief Medical Examiner for forty years. Biggs walked him through the rest of his credentials, which included medical school at the University of Virginia and a pathology residency at Johns Hopkins. Dr. Murray didn’t know how many autopsies he’d done—hundreds, maybe thousands.

  “Did you have occasion to go to 4524 West Seminary Avenue on the afternoon of April 11?”

  “Did I have occasion. . .yes. Yes, I did.” His voice had a dusty, wheezy quality. “I was on-call that day.”

  “What did you find there?”

  The doctor began to fumble with the papers in a folder. “I found,” he began. “I found. . .ah, here we are. One Caucasian male, late twenties or early thirties, deceased. He was sprawled in a supine position on a full-size bed in one of the bedrooms.”

  “When you say sprawled. . .”

  “He was sideways on the bed, legs hanging off, feet almost touching the floor.”

  “Did you make any preliminary determinations as to the cause of death?”

  Dr. Murray blinked at him, his eyes magnified by thick lenses. “Gunshot wound,” he said in his wheezy voice. “Gunshot wound to the head.”

  “Was it a contact wound?”

  “No. Not a contact wound.”

  Biggs waited, but that seemed to be all of it.

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “The appearance of the wound.”

  Again Biggs waited. Finally, he said, “Could you possibly be more specific?”

  The ghost of a smile touched Dr. Murray’s mouth, almost as if he was messing with Aubrey Biggs and was enjoying it. “Yes, I could, possibly.” But he made us wait while he cleared his throat and worked his mouth to moisten it. “There wasn’t any of the tearing and peeling of the skin that you find when a gun is fired at a range closer than about twelve inches. There wasn’t the muzzle print or the star pattern you’d expect from a contact wound.”

  “So what was the distance of the shot?”

  “Between twelve and thirty-six inches, probably toward the upper end of that range. There was a little tattooing from the particles of burning gunpowder, but not much.”

  Biggs nodded, swallowed, took a breath. “What do you estimate was the time of death?”

  “Time of death. Let’s see.” Dr. Murray flipped through a couple of pages, then flipped back to what may have been the same place he started. “I saw the body at 2:22. The decedent had been dead at that point. . .” He flipped back a page. “. . .between six and eight hours.

  “So the time of death was between 6:22 and 8:22,” Biggs said.

  The doctor blinked, once, twice. “Approximately.”

  “On what do you base this determination?”

  Dr. Murray closed his folder and sat back with it resting on his crossed legs. “Oh, a number of things.” He looked around the courtroom, then seemed to realize we were waiting for him to elaborate. “Body temperature, rigor mortis, contents of the stomach,” he said. “You know.”

  Biggs’s smile looked pained. “Whatever we know or don’t know, we have to get it in the record.”

  “Oh, quite right.”

  “The body was transported to the Office of Chief Medical Examiner, and you performed the autopsy, is that right?”

  “Yes, my autopsy began. . .” He uncrossed his legs and reopened his folder. We watched him flip pages. “At 4:44.”

  “Did you recover a bullet from the decedent’s body?”

  “No, I didn’t. There was an exit wound, quite a large one really. The bullet would have remained at the scene.”

  “And there was just the one gunshot wound?”

  “Yes, just the one.”

  “Did the police subsequently give you a bullet for analysis?”

  They did. Biggs presented it to him. The doctor identified it. Biggs got it marked for identification.

  “What kind of analysis did you perform on the bullet?” he asked.

  “We compared the DNA profile of blood traces found on the bullet with blood samples from the body of the decedent Christopher Woodruff. They were a match.”

  Biggs rolled his head in my direction and gave me a look that suggested now it was my turn to suffer. “Your witness,” he said.

  I stood. “Dr. Murray, I see you’ve been using some papers to refresh your memory. Are these notes you made at the time you made the observations recorded in those notes?’

  He nodded. “It is contemporaneous documentation.”

  “May I see the notes?”

  The doctor looked at Judge Cheatham, then looked at me. “I suppose so,” he said.

  The judge motioned in my direction with his head, and his clerk got up, retrieved the folder, and brought it to me at the podium.

  I glanced through the notes. Though Dr. Murray had written all his numerals clearly, the rest of his handwriting was a messy scrawl. I’d gotten the actual autopsy report at the arraignment. If there was anything new here, I couldn’t make it out. I closed the folder and held it up. “I’m done with it.”

  The judge jerked his head at me, and I took it back to Dr. Murray.

  “When you say the DNA was a match, what do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean that the VNTR loci were the same.”

  “Do tell.”

  Dr. Murray chuckled, but it turned into a cough that sounded richly productive. He pulled out a wadded handkerchief and held it to his mouth.

  “What does VNTR stand for?” I asked when he had recovered himself.

  “Variable number tandem repeats.”

  It just got better and better. “Tell me about variable number tandem repeats,” I said.

  “They are highly variable DNA sequences that are unlikely to be the same between unrelated persons.”

  “So if Chris Woodruff had a brother, they might be the same?”

  “They might be very similar. If he had a monozygotic twin, they would be the same.”

  “Monozygotic. Would that be an identical twin?”

  “It would.”

  I’d been into the weeds on DNA profiling before. Though I didn’t think it would get me anywhere, I spent the next forty-five minutes or so going into them again, and I was right. It didn’t get me anywhere. With RLFP analysis—don’t ask—the theoretical chance of a coincidental match was perhaps as little as one in 100 billion.

  “Bu
t,” I said. “You said that twins would have matching DNA profiles, and identical twins make up roughly point-two percent of the population.”

  The doctor nodded benevolently.

  “Isn’t that right, doctor?”

  He cleared his throat. “That is correct.”

  We talked a bit about the number of available markers and eventually got the probability of a coincidental match up to one in a thousand, which was still not high enough to do me any good, even before a jury. “Are you familiar with a literature survey by William Thompson published in the Journal of Forensic Medicine?” I asked.

  “I can’t say that I am.”

  “So you’re not aware that proficiency tests conducted by various forensic laboratories have found the occurrence of false positives to be as high as one in a hundred, or even two in one hundred?” A false positive was the finding of a match when in fact the samples came from two different people.

  He shook his head. “I wouldn’t put too much weight on those proficiency tests.”

  “So it doesn’t matter to you that, in addition to coincidental matches that may occur one time in a thousand, laboratories mishandle samples and misinterpret results?”

  “Objection, your honor,” Biggs said. “That’s an entirely improper question.”

  “It goes to bias, your honor.”

  “Ms. Starling,” Judge Cheatham said.

  He seemed to be waiting for a response. “Yes, your honor?”

  “Do you really think there is any possibility that the bullet found on the scene was not the fatal bullet?”

  I shrugged. “I have no way of knowing. We have an expert witness on the stand, and I’m using him to explore the evidence.”

  “Well, let’s not spend any more time on it here. This is a preliminary hearing. I don’t know what your theory of the case is, but even if you get the chance of a false positive up to one in fifty, I’m going to bind the defendant over for trial. You may have greater success with this line of argument in front of a jury.”

  I took a breath and blew it out through puffed cheeks. “Very well, your honor.” I flipped back through my yellow pad of notes, then looked up at Dr. Murray.