Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “The amount of tattooing caused by a discharging firearm depends a great deal on the weapon, doesn’t it?” I asked. “The length of the barrel, the condition of the weapon—that sort of thing?”

  “Yes,” he said, nodding. “It depends a great deal on both factors.”

  “How does it depend?”

  He cleared his throat. “In general, the longer the barrel, the greater the distance at which tattooing will occur.”

  “So to tattoo the skin, a pistol would have to be closer than a rifle.”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “The prosecution hasn’t introduced its murder weapon yet, but did the police ever give you a handgun to test tattooing patterns at different ranges?”

  “No. That’s not the sort of testing I do.”

  “Who does do that sort of testing?”

  “I think some ballistics experts at various police departments might do it. I’ve never heard of anyone at the Richmond Police Department doing it.”

  “Doesn’t the condition of the weapon have something to do with the range at which tattooing would occur?”

  “The effect of the weapon’s condition would be more variable.”

  “But could still be significant?”

  “Of course.”

  I waited, then finally said, “So, given these factors, and in the absence of any testing of the murder weapon itself, the best you can give us is a firing range of one to three feet.”

  His eyes cut to his folder. He looked up. “That’s why I gave it to you.” He showed us a mouthful of mottled, yellow teeth.

  I took a breath. As far as I knew, none of this mattered at all to Willow’s case either. I’d pushed for an early preliminary to try to get a picture of what had happened, though, and of how tight the prosecution’s evidence was. I was trying to make the most of my opportunity.

  “You say Chris Woodruff had been dead between six and eight hours,” I said. “In other words, he died at 7:22, give or take an hour.”

  Dr. Murray opened his folder to fumble with his notes again. “Yes,” he said finally. “7:22 is about right.”

  “Give or take an hour.”

  “Always give or take.”

  “You mentioned the contents of the stomach as a determinant of the time of death. What were the contents of the stomach?”

  “There weren’t any.”

  “Telling you Mr. Woodruff had not yet eaten that morning?”

  “He had not eaten for at least twelve hours. There was no food in his stomach and no food in his small intestine.”

  “That doesn’t narrow the time of death much, does it? He could have been a late sleeper, or he could have gotten up early. He could have had an early supper or a late supper the night before, at least as far as you know of your own knowledge.” I glanced at Biggs, wondering if he had a witness to testify as to the time of Woodruff’s last meal.

  “Certainly.”

  “All you can tell us is that he hadn’t eaten that morning.”

  He blinked his deep set eyes. “I believe that’s exactly what I said.”

  “How about his bladder? Was it full?”

  “It was not.”

  “Had the bedding, was it. . .” I was conscious of Willow listening to this, but deliberately avoided glancing in her direction.

  “It had not been soiled, no.”

  “So he did get out of bed that morning, at least to use the bathroom.”

  “It seems probable that he had used the bathroom.”

  “And he’d gone back to bed.”

  “Well.” He glanced in Biggs’s direction.

  “Well? Had he gone back to bed or not?”

  “He wasn’t in the bed. He was just on it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, he was sideways on the bed and on top of the rumpled sheets and the comforter. He was wearing only the boxers and T-shirt he might have slept in.”

  The scenario that was shaping up wasn’t quite as I had pictured it. “Doctor. . .is it possible that Chris Woodruff was not lying in bed when he was shot, but that he was standing and fell back onto his bed?”

  “I would say it’s likely.”

  “On what do you base that opinion?”

  “The pattern of blood spatter.”

  Blood spatter. “Where exactly was the entrance wound?” I asked. “What part of the head?”

  “The left temple. The bullet punched through the sphenoid bone and exited behind the right ear, shattering parts of the parietal and occipital bones.”

  The names of the bones didn’t mean much to me, but I got the idea. “What was the trajectory of the bullet? Upward, downward. . .”

  “Slightly upward.”

  “If he was shot by someone the same height as he was, the gun might have been held at shoulder height?”

  “Might have been. Of course, we don’t know the angle of the decedent’s head. It could have been back or bent forward.”

  “How tall was the decedent?”

  “Five-ten.”

  “You mentioned several factors relevant to the time of death: Rigor mortis, livor mortis, and—”

  “Algor mortis. The three mortises.”

  I heard a sound from the prosecutor’s table, as if Biggs had dropped something or thrown something down, but Dr. Murray was smiling, showing his yellow teeth again, and his eyes had taken on a far-away look. “I wrote a poem about them once, back in med school.” In his dusty voice he recited, “‘Rigor mortis tells the time of death. Livor, if the body has been moved. Algor gives the time of death improved.’” His gaze focused. “I won’t bore you with the rest of it. Frankly, in this case I relied mostly on that last one.”

  I glanced at Aubrey Biggs, who was sitting with his ankles crossed and his eyes on the ceiling. “You relied mostly on algor mortis to estimate the time of death in this case,” I said.

  “Oh, absolutely.”

  I felt like I was chasing down a rabbit hole, but I said, “Algor mortis is. . .”

  “The cooling of the body after death.”

  “How fast does a body cool?”

  “It depends.”

  “Can we start with an average?”

  “One-point-five degrees per hour.”

  “Until?”

  “Until it matches the ambient temperature.”

  “The temperature of the surroundings.”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that depend in part on what the temperature of the surroundings is?”

  “Yes, yes it does. Of course it does.”

  “And the temperature of the surroundings in this case was. . .”

  “Seventy-four degrees.”

  “At 2:22 on the afternoon of April 11.”

  “That’s right. The temperature at that time matched the setting of the thermostat, so I assumed that the ambient temperature was constant over the relevant time period.”

  “The rate of cooling depends on other factors, too, doesn’t it? Clothing, baseline temperature, hydration, percentage of body fat. . .”

  “Oh, yes. It’s not precise. That’s why I gave you a two-hour range for time of death rather than try to pinpoint it exactly.”

  “Because you can’t pinpoint it exactly.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Can you even get it within two hours? There’s a temperature plateau, isn’t there? The body doesn’t begin to cool immediately.”

  “That’s right. The body continues to produce heat for a short time after death.”

  “And that plateau can last anywhere from two to six hours.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was the temperature of the body at 2:22?”

  For that he took another look at his notes. “Eighty-nine degrees.”

  “This was a core temperature?”

  “Yes. I made a small incision in the decedent’s abdomen and inserted the thermometer into his liver to take the reading.”

  “And you assumed that his baseline temperature was what?
”

  “Ninety-eight point six.”

  “That’s a guess, isn’t it? Doesn’t the temperature of healthy people vary by a degree or more? Mr. Woodruff’s normal temperature might have been as low as 97.6 and as high as 99.6.”

  “Yes, that’s possible.”

  “You’ve suggested that the rate of cooling is linear, but it isn’t, is it? There’s the temperature plateau, then the body begins to cool rapidly, then the rate of cooling slows down.”

  He blinked at me. “You’ve been reading,” he said.

  “It keeps me out of bars.”

  There was a light titter from somewhere in the gallery, but the judge didn’t react to it.

  “Well, you’re right of course,” Dr. Murray said. “The linear formulation is an approximation.”

  I continued asking about the reliability of body temperature in determining the time of death and thought I’d gone a long way to challenging the last line of his little ditty, that ‘Algor gives the time of death improved.’ After I’d finished with algor mortis, I questioned the doctor about rigor mortis and postmortem lividity. Neither did much to narrow the likely range for time of death.

  “I don’t think you’ve managed to establish a two-hour window for the time of death,” I said finally. “From what you’ve told us, it sounds like all we can say with any certainty is that Christopher Woodruff had been dead between three and twelve hours.”

  He shrugged. “What I’ve given you is my opinion.”

  I nodded abstractedly. Broadening the window didn’t help me anyway, at least not that I could see. If I could shift the window, if I could show that Chris Woodruff had died after Willow left for work, that would be nice. Of course, world peace would be nice, too.

  “Those are all my questions,” I said, and I left the podium.

  The prosecution’s next witness was Detective Tom McClane. He came forward wearing a white shirt, black pants and a black tie, his badge clipped to his belt. After being sworn in, he stepped into the witness box, adjusted the crease in his slacks, and sat forward on his chair.

  Biggs ran him through the preliminaries, his name and rank, educational background, years on the police force, number of homicide investigations, and so forth. “Did you have occasion to go to the residence at 4524 West Seminary Avenue on the afternoon of April 11?”

  He did have such an occasion. After being notified of a possible homicide by the dispatcher, he and his partner Matt Tarrant had gone to that address and had arrived shortly before two o’clock.

  “What did you find there?”

  Officer Dub Ahern had opened the door for them, and McClane had seen the defendant Willow Woodruff seated in the living room with Ahern’s partner Logan Fisher. When he’d gone back into the bedroom, he found the same thing Officer Dub Ahern and Dr. Murray had, a dead man sprawled on a full-sized bed.

  “Had Dr. Murray arrived from the Office of Chief Medical Examiner when you got there?”

  “No. He was fifteen or twenty minutes behind us.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called for a forensics team to examine the crime scene.”

  “Do you know of your own knowledge whether the forensics team recovered a bullet?”

  “Yes. There was a 95-grain bullet imbedded in the wall about six-and-a-half feet above the floor.”

  “Just the one bullet?”

  “Just the one. It had traces of blood on it. We sealed it in an envelope, and a couple of us wrote our names across the seal. Later I turned it over to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for DNA analysis.”

  “What caliber gun would have fired such a bullet?”

  “It was a .380.”

  “Was there such a gun at the scene?”

  “There was not.”

  “Did you subsequently recover such a gun?”

  “I did. We retrieved a .380 Smith and Wesson Bodyguard from a trashcan at a Valero gas station out on Parham Road.”

  “Tell us about that gun.”

  “It was registered to the defendant, Willow Woodruff, and ballistics tests showed it to have fired the bullet I’ve just been talking about.”

  “The bullet that was recovered at the scene of the murder?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Was this gun—we’ll call it the Willow gun—the first gun you tested as a possible murder weapon?”

  “No, it was the second. The first was a handgun given to me by Robin Starling, the defendant’s attorney.”

  Biggs turned his head to look at me, pursing his lips and looking thoughtful. He said to McClane, “Tell us about that gun.”

  “It was another Smith and Wesson Bodyguard that was identical to the murder weapon in every respect.”

  “Who was that gun registered to?”

  “The decedent in the case, Christopher Woodruff. Evidently, the two guns had been purchased at the same time about two years ago.”

  McClane produced the registration papers. Biggs got them admitted into evidence, then asked, “Did the defendant’s attorney make any statement about how this second gun, the Christopher gun, had come into her possession?”

  “She said it came in the mail.”

  “It came in the mail,” Biggs repeated.

  “Then when we went to pick it up, it had disappeared.”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Later it reappeared in her bedroom. At least, that’s what she told us when she finally turned it over to us.”

  “Reappeared in her bedroom.” Again Biggs turned his head to look at me. Judge Cheatham was looking at me, too, with apparent interest, which I took to be a bad sign. “Did she say how it came to disappear in the first place?” Biggs asked.

  “No. She opened an empty drawer in her office and said it was gone. She didn’t give any explanation.”

  “Did you ask her for one?”

  “I did.”

  “And then she said the gun had reappeared, and she gave you the Christopher gun, the one that was not involved in the murder.”

  “That’s right.”

  “When did you arrest the defendant in this case?”

  “When we found the Willow gun in the trashcan. We discovered that it had fired the fatal bullet and was registered to the defendant.”

  “Were there any restraints on the defendant’s movements during the time the gun was unaccounted for?”

  “No.”

  “Were you keeping her under surveillance?”

  “No.”

  “And certainly you weren’t keeping the defendant’s attorney under surveillance.”

  “Of course not.”

  “So during that time, based on the facts as you know them, it would have been possible for the defendant and her attorney to be passing the murder weapon back and forth between themselves before one or the other of them tried to dispose of the gun by throwing it into the trashcan at that Valero station.”

  I stood. “Objection. Leading and calls for speculation.”

  “It calls for a conclusion,” Biggs said, contradicting me. “We have qualified the witness as an expert.”

  “In interpreting crime scenes maybe,” I said. “He hasn’t been qualified as an expert in all the things Willow Woodruff and I might have done in our spare time over the last couple of weeks. Ask the witness if it would have been possible for us to have been picking up men in bars or playing on the train tracks or composing a symphony. He’d have to give exactly the same answer to any of those questions.”

  Judge Cheatham rolled his eyes toward Biggs. “She has a point,” he said.

  “Your honor, the facts speak for themselves.”

  “Then we’ll let them speak, why don’t we, and not ask the witness to speak for them.”

  “Very well.” Biggs closed the folder and opened another one on top of it. After flipping through some pages, he glanced at the clock. “Your honor, it’s nearly twelve. I think I’m going to be some time with this witness.”

  The judge looked at the clock, hesi
tated a moment, then nodded. “All right. We’ll recess until two o’clock.”

  I said a few words to Willow, and the deputy sheriff took her by the arm and led her out. A couple of attorneys who’d been waiting in the gallery came forward with a motion they wanted to put before the judge. Peyton Shilling pushed through the bar and approached Biggs, who was still organizing his papers and filing them in his briefcase.

  I remained seated at my table, watching.

  Peyton handed a document to Biggs that looked like the subpoena I’d prepared and given to Rodney to serve on her. Probably more trouble was brewing, but there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. I got up to push out through the bar, wondering if I’d made a mistake in forcing her to appear. She was a potential suspect. On the other hand, her affair with Willow’s husband gave Willow a textbook motive for murder.

  I’d have liked to talk it over with someone, and usually when I’m in trial I have friends around me. Paul or Brooke, even Mike McMillan, come to watch the trial, and we confer during breaks and go to lunch together. Today though, Paul was tied up at the bank, and Brooke had gone to Fredericksburg to look over a potential client’s computer systems. I didn’t know where Mike was. I was on my own—or so I thought until I got to the railing that separated the gallery, and Carter Fox stood, smiling, and moved toward the aisle.

  Chapter 10

  I wasn’t up for dealing with Carter Fox. I held up a finger, smiling, and turned back, letting the gate swing shut behind me. There were two other exits to the courtroom: one, a side exit through which the deputy sheriff had taken Willow; and two, the door behind the bench that the judge used, though others used it, too—the court reporters and judges’ clerks for example. I went that way, overtaking the court reporter in the doorway. He was a gaunt man in his twenties with thinning, pale brown hair and almost colorless eyes.

  “May I help you?” he said. The judge was still on the bench, conferring with the two lawyers and paying no attention to us.

  “Yes, I hope so. Could we?” With a motion of my head, I indicated the hall beyond the door.

  “Sure.” We moved through the doorway into a short hall with more doors opening off it into offices—judges’ chambers—and at one end an open door to a larger space that was the office of the district clerk. Though I’d visited judges in their chambers before, I did always have the feeling of having forgotten my hall pass.