‘Is it the trial?’ Harris asked.
Terri nodded. ‘And Elena. In a way, they’re inseperable, aren’t they? They both have to do with Richie’s death.’
‘It may all come back to Richie, in a way.’ Pausing, Harris looked into her face. ‘On the evidence of your dreams, you somehow feel responsible for your father’s death – even though it was an accident – and, perhaps, for Ritchie’s death. Now, Elena’s nightmare seems to be different: it began while Ritchie was alive, although we don’t know what she dreams about. But what appears quite clear is that Elena feels responsible for her father’s death. Or at least did.’
Terri stared at her. ‘What you seem to be suggesting,’ she said finally, ‘is that Elena believed that I wished her father dead and blamed herself.’
Harris shrugged. ‘Does that seem so far-fetched? Given that, in their egocentricity, children tend to believe that everything relates to them.’
Chris had said much the same thing, Terri remembered, in Portofino. She got up from her chair, walked to one of Harris’s upstairs windows, and pushed it open from the bottom. Standing there, she gazed out into the sunlit street, feeling the cool air on her face. Three miles away, Chris was on trial for murder.
Still at the window, Terri said, ‘Elena seems to be past that now. Ever since she found out Chris was charged, she believes that he killed her father. Insists on it, really.’
Harris was quiet for a time. ‘Whatever else, Terri, we know that Elena didn’t do it.’
Terri leaned on the window frame. ‘No one killed my father,’ she said finally. ‘And for all we know, no one killed Richie. The rest of this, from my supposed sense of guilt to Elena’s, is Freudian guesswork.’
‘Which, to a child, can be something very real.’
Terri turned. ‘And how is she doing with you, Denise? In the presuambly real world.’
Harris smiled a little, and then her face grew serious. ‘I play with the doll figures,’ she answered, ‘while Elena watches. But I finally persuaded her to start drawing.’
‘What does she draw?’
Harris rose from her chair and went to a drawer beneath a shelf of children’s games. She took out a sheet of drawing paper, handing it to Terri.
Terri gazed at Elena’s drawing. As best she could tell, it was the stick figure of a little girl on the jagged edge of a mountain. The drawing seemed incomplete: one of the girl’s feet was on the tip of the mountain, while the other did not rest on anything.
‘Has she drawn other pictures?’ Terri asked.
Harris stood beside her, looking at the picture. ‘Uh-huh,’ she answered. ‘Several. But they’re all pretty much like that.’
‘Like what?’
‘A little girl in a position of danger, with no one else in the picture. My guess is that she’s a surrogate for Elena herself.’
Terri turned to her. ‘How do you mean “position of danger”?’
Harris pointed to the leg that rested on nothing. ‘Here, for example, the little girl is falling off the mountain.’
Terri gave her a skeptical look. ‘I’m no psychologist, Denise, but I’ve been to a bunch of parents’ nights. Based on your interpretation, I’ve seen lots of drawings of kids in danger – in grade school, they give them prizes.’
‘If you’re saying that kids don’t draw precisely, I agree.’ Harris still studied the picture. ‘But this was Elena’s interpretation, not mine.’
Terri felt a faint alarm. ‘What did she say?’
Harris frowned. ‘That the little girl had been bad and was falling off the mountain.’
‘Did you say anything?’
‘Yes. I suggested that she might want to draw someone else in the picture, to rescue her. As you can see, she wouldn’t.’
‘Do you know why?’
‘Only what Elena told me.’ Still Harris did not look at her.
‘What she said, Terri, was that no one could save her.’
Chapter 2
Chief Medical Examiner Elizabeth Shelton was a slender blonde in her late thirties, with a clear-eyed gaze, an air of composed attentiveness, and a well-tailored style that reflected taste and moderation. In his life as a lawyer, Paget had admired Liz Shelton: she was fair and professional, she spoke the truth as she saw it, and juries trusted her instinctively. There was no point in trying to break Shelton down, Caroline said, and the best thing one could try was to score some points and create a little doubt. Paget agreed; he had not looked forward to this moment.
Putting Shelton on the stand, Salinas appeared quite confident. He quickly established Shelton’s extensive credentials in both forensic medicine and criminology, and took her through a summary of her physical findings and the tests and procedures she had performed. Then Salinas began to lay the groundwork for murder. ‘When Mr Arias’s body was found,’ he asked, ‘did you go to his apartment?’
Shelton nodded. ‘Yes, with a team from the crime lab.’
Paget imagined several white-coated men and Shelton photographing Ricardo Arias’s body, wearing masks to stifle the stench of decomposition. ‘Could you describe the condition of the body?’ Salinas was asking
‘Of course.’ Shelton turned to the jury, her tone dispassionate. ‘Mr Arias was lying on the floor with a revolver near his hand. I found what appeared to be a bullet entry wound through his mouth. He was obviously dead, and had been for some time.’
Paget saw Luisa Marin look away. Salinas picked up a manila envelope and pulled out several photographs, which he passed to Shelton almost gingerly. ‘Dr Shelton, I hand you what have been premarked as People’s Exhibits 1 through 4. Can you tell me what these are?’
Shelton took out a pair of tortoiseshell reading glasses and inspected the photographs one at a time: the gesture seemed less for the sake of eyesight than for maintaining a certain professional distance. ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘These are crime scene photographs of the head and hands of Ricardo Arias.’
The jury seemed suddenly still. ‘Your Honor,’ Caroline interjected, ‘does Mr Salinas intend to show these photographs to the jury?’
Salinas turned to her. ‘That’s why I had them marked,’ he said with muted exasperation.
Caroline kept looking at Lerner. ‘To what end, I wonder, except to horrify our jurors? I think we can all agree that Mr Arias is deceased. The question is not whether he’s dead but whether it was a homicide. As to which these photographs prove nothing.’
That was right, Paget knew: Salina’s aim was to make the jury feel Richie’s death. ‘The prosecution is entitled,’ Salinas retorted crisply ‘to show the manner of death and condition of the body.’ Glancing at Caroline, he added in an accusatory tone, ‘And the defense is not entitled to sanitize this man’s death until it becomes a parlor game, like Clue or Let’s Give a Murder.’
Salinas, Paget realized, meant to try this case on moral outrage. Lerner looked unhappily from Salinas to Caroline and told her, ‘I’ll allow these.’
With a satisfied smile that the jury could not see, Salinas collected the photographs and tendered them to Caroline. She spread them on the table, and Christopher Paget looked into the face of Ricardo Arias.
Richie’s eyes were frozen in shock and terror: he did not look like a man who had resolved to shoot himself and then pulled the trigger. His face was waxen and puffy, and his curly hair seemed to rise from his head. There was dried blood coming from his mouth, and flecks of blood on his face and chin. His nose appeared swollen.
Paget made himself study each picture. It was hard to believe that this staring corpse had once been a threat to Carlo.
In the final picture, Richie’s hand was shriveled like a mummy’s.
All at once, Paget had seen enough. He pushed them back to Caroline. ‘Easy to grasp why Salinas wants these in.’
Nodding, she collected the photographs and gave them to Salinas. He handed them to the jury, his expression grave.
One by one, they inspected the photographs. Paget watched them.
Marian Celler, sitting back from the pictures, mouth compressed; Joseph Duarte, studying each photo impassively and taking notes. Only Luisa Marin refused to look. ‘What bothers me is his eyes,’ Paget murmured.
Caroline glanced over at him. ‘The terror?’ she asked. ‘Or the surprise?’
Salinas was walking back toward Shelton. ‘In the course of examing Mr Arias,’ he asked, ‘did you form an opinion as to how recently he had died?’
Shelton nodded. ‘From the body, it was clear that Mr Arias had been dead for some time.’
‘What made that apparent?’
‘Several factors. The air-conditioning was set at sixty-five and the apartment was quite cold, which retards bloating or decomposition. But as the pictures show, Mr Arias’s hands were mummified and his skin had a somewhat greenish tinge, both indicating the passage of several days.’
‘Were you able to establish a time of death?’
Shelton shook her head. ‘No. However, we were able to establish from extrinsic evidence a probable range of time within which Mr Arias died.’
‘And what was that evidence?’
‘His mail, to start. It appeared that Mr Arias had opened his mail for Friday, October sixteen – several bills were on his desk, bearing the postmark of October fourteen or fifteen. But there was a stack of unopened mail behind the mail slot of his apartment; the local mail bore postmarks from October sixteen until the day before we found him. Based on which we believe that Mr Arias died sometime between the delivery of his mail on Friday, October sixteen, and the next day’s delivery.’
Paget turned to Caroline. But she was already on her feet. ‘Your Honor, I move that the last sentence of Dr Shelton’s answer be stricken as speculation. Given the performance of our postal service, it is utterly plausible that Mr Arias picked up this mail on Saturday the seventeenth.’ Pausing, Caroline added with irony, ‘Or, for that matter, on the following Monday or Tuesday.’
Salinas gave a quick, edgy smile. ‘The post office is a convenient whipping boy, Your Honor. But Dr Shelton is stating one basis for her belief, not testifying to a fact. And we will be offering other evidence to establish the time frame of Mr Arias’s death.’
Lerner nodded. ‘Based on that representation, Mr Salinas, I will deny the motion. At least for now.’
Sitting, Caroline looked unsurprised but pensive; the prosecution needed to show that it was likely Richie had died while Paget was still in the country, and this was Salina’s first small victory.
‘What,’ Salinas asked Shelton, ‘were the other indicators of the range within which Mr Adias died?’
Shelton folded her hands. ‘In the kitchen, we found a full pot of coffee. We determined that Mr Arias had preset his automatic coffeemaker for seven-thirty a.m., suggesting that he died before the coffee was actually made.’
It was a potentially damaging point, possibly narrowing the range of Richie’s death to the hours between midevening and seven-thirty the next morning. ‘Objection,’ Caroline called out again. ‘Two of them, actually. First, it’s quite possible that, in a state of despair, Mr Arias lost all interest in his coffee. Second, we don’t even know what day the coffee was brewed – unless Mr Coffee has developed technologies beyond my imaginings.’
For the first time that day, Paget smiled. Salinas approached the bench, shaking his head. ‘Your Honor,’ he said with annoyance, ‘Dr Shelton is giving us the basis on which she determined a probable range of death. Ms Master’s recourse is to cross-examine, not to object to every question.’
‘Then ask one that isn’t objectionable,’ Caroline shot back.
Jared Lerner broke in. ‘Overruled,’ he said to Caroline. ‘Dr Shelton is stating the basis for her opinion. I’ll give you plenty of latitude to challenge that basis on cross.’
Frowning, Caroline turned to sit down. Before she had done so, Salinas asked quickly, ‘In your career, Dr Shelton, have you ever known anyone to preset their coffeemaker and then turn around and shoot themselves?’
Caroline spun on Salinas. ‘So now there are rules for suicide?’ she snapped. ‘Or are you offering Dr Shelton as a mind reader? For that matter, how do you even know that it was Mr Arias who set the coffeemaker –’
Lerner held up his hand. ‘If that’s an objection, Ms Masters, I’m sustaining it.’ He turned to Salinas, leaning forward with a stare of annoyance. ‘And I’ll admonish you, Counselor, not to try to prejudice the jury by asking questions you know very well to be improper.’
It was a necessary rebuke, Paget thought: Salinas seemed to take each success as an invitation to go farther. ‘I apologize, Your Honor,’ Salinas said quite calmly. Turning to Shelton, he asked, ‘Were there other factors on which you based a range of death?’
Shelton gave a small smile, as if bemused that there was any question. ‘Of course. We found the morning newspaper for October sixteen on the kitchen table, open to the business page. But the newspaper for the seventeenth was still outside the door.’
It was neatly done: with one added detail, the medical examiner made her guesstimate seem convincing and Caroline merely quarrelsome. As she appraised Shelton, Paget saw Caroline’s eyes narrow in something like a smile. ‘In addition,’ Shelton went on, ‘there were facts I learned from the police. According to Inspector Monk, several people spoke to Mr Arias on the afternoon and early evening of October sixteen, but the police found no one who claims to have seen or spoken to him after about nine o’clock that evening. All of which further suggested that Mr Arias was shot sometime between roughly nine o’clock on October sixteen and the early morning of October seventeen, when he failed to pick up his newspaper.’ Once more, she smiled briefly. ‘Or, quite possibly, to drink the coffee that was waiting for him.’
The seemingly casual remark, Paget thought, was artful: he doubted that anyone on the jury did not now assume that Ricardo Arias had died before Paget left for Italy.
Quietly, Salinas asked, ‘And were your physical findings, Dr Shelton, consistent with a self-inflicted gunshot wound?’
With this question, Paget knew, Salinas had reached a critical point: before proving Paget a murderer, he must establish that a murder had occurred. In the jury box, Joseph Duarte flipped a page of his notepad and waited to hear Shelton’s reasons. For the first time, Shelton turned to Paget, giving him a look that seemed to mix puzzlement and disappointment. ‘They were not,’ she answered. ‘I concluded that Mr Arias had died at the hands of another.’
Although she had not spoken his name, Paget felt accused. The jury was stiff, attentive. ‘What facts,’ Salinas asked, ‘led you to conclude that Mr Arias was not a suicide?’
Shelton gazed up at the ceiling, as if to reconstruct her thought process. ‘When I first arrived at the scene, I assumed this might well be suicide. The cause of death – a gunshot through the mouth – was consistent with that, and there were no signs of forced entry at the apartment itself. And Mr Arias apparently had left a note.’ Pausing, Shelton looked pensive, a woman reliving her own doubts. ‘But within moments, I found things that made suicide seem unlikely. By the time I left, it seemed apparent that this was a homicide dressed up to look like suicide.’ She glanced at Paget. ‘Not very well dressed, at that.’
As she watched, Caroline took out a pen and began scribbling on a legal pad. ‘On what basis,’ Salinas asked, ‘did
you determine that?’
‘The first thing I noticed was Mr Arias’s hands.’ Shelton turned to the jury. ‘As I mentioned, the bullet which killed Mr Arias did not exit his head. That causes something called blowback – blood splatter and tissue which, because of the pressure of the bullet, sprays forward through the path left by the gunshot. Which is why the pictures of Mr Arias show specks of blood and tissue on his face.
‘Similarly, the firearms examiner advised me that the gun which killed Mr Arias was old, a Smith and Wesson safety revolver manufactured in the early nineteen hundreds, and firing Winchester silver-tip bullets made roughly thirty years ago. A g
un like that leaves a considerable amount of gunshot residue – what we call GSR – a sootlike deposit of unburnt gunpowder and the chemicals found within. There was a significant amount of GSR on Mr Arias’s tongue, the roof of his mouth, and his face. In fact, we even found blood spatter and traces of powder on a coffee table three feet from Mr Arias’s body.’ Shelton paused, surveying the jury. ‘My point is this: if Mr Arias had placed the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, I would expect to find at least as much blood spatter and GSR on his hands and arms as on his face. But there was almost none.’
The jury had a rapt look, Paget saw. Marian Celler, whose empathy Paget hoped for, seemed very troubled. ‘If that had been the only thing,’ Shelton said, ‘I would have had extreme difficulty in accepting that Mr Arias shot himself. But there was additional evidence inconsistent with suicide.
‘Perhaps most troubling was the other violence done to Mr Arias. First, Mr Arias skull showed an abrasion – a gash on the back of his head – which was not caused by the gunshot wound. And in fact, we determined from traces of skin and hair that Mr Arias’s head had struck the corner of his coffee table.
‘Then there were contusions and swelling to Mr Arias’s nose. Again, the fatal bullet did not cause this. And the fact that his nose had been bleeding was consistent with a blow struck prior to his death.’
In an involuntary reflex, Paget thought of the suit he had taken to Goodwill, and then of Terri, glancing at his hand as she had concealed his injury from Monk. He was glad that she was not here.
‘Our autopsy,’ Shelton continued, ‘revealed another anomaly: a bruise on the front of Mr Arias’s right leg. Although we could not determine the cause, its position reflected the approximate height of the coffee table.’
Eyes of a Child Page 36
