Perish

by Lisa Black

  She gave the pattest answer she had. “When they have a sufficient amount of information in common and I would not expect to see that amount of correspondence in prints from two different sources.”

  “What information are we talking about?” The attorney, a rather nice-looking middle-aged man with a tiny coffee stain on his power tie, spoke from the podium. This particular judge didn’t hold with attorneys “prancing all over the courtroom like Lipizzaner stallions.”

  “As I explained last week, information in the ridges themselves, what patterns they make, where they end and divide, other things like scars, incipient ridges, and pores. We take notes of all these characteristics and their spatial relationship to each other and compare them to the corresponding characteristics in the questioned print.”

  A fancy way of saying “We look at them and see if they match.”

  “And where are these notes?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Graham continued to stare, now licking his lips at her. His attorney’s cochair, a bear of a man, neatly blocked him from the jury’s view so they could not witness this behavior. But right now Graham could play all the mind games he wanted. The fear of looking like an idiot in front of the jury kept her focused on the attorney asking the questions.

  “Your report is a few mere sentences. You compared these prints, found them to be the same. Where are the contemporaneous notes, the checklists, the descriptions of each print?”

  “You have our worksheet. I believe it’s exhibit number—”

  “The worksheet doesn’t have much more than the report. Columns with the numbers of the latents and a single space with some symbols about the quality of the print. My client’s freedom may depend upon the quality of this print, this single little partial print that you say matches his. And you try to hang him with a single sentence?”

  She had heard this before, too. “A detailed written description of both prints could be pages long but still wouldn’t tell you whether or not I am correct in saying that the prints match.”

  “So a long report would be pointless, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes.”

  This brief answer temporarily stopped him, and she went on. Graham had gotten bored with trying to freak her and now paged through a notebook on the table in front of him.

  Maggie said, “You have blown-up photographs of his fingerprint and the print from the gun. If you like we can put that back on the projector and—”

  “But your conclusion is subjective, correct?” the attorney interrupted. He might be able to convince the jury that she had erred if they didn’t spend too much time looking at the fingerprint themselves. “It’s only your opinion that these prints match?”

  “An opinion based on the evidence and confirmed by a second examiner.”

  “But comparing fingerprints isn’t really a science, is it? It’s just you looking at pictures of things and deciding that they ‘match.’” While his attorney made contemptuous air quotes around the word, Graham pulled a pink envelope from his notebook and seemed to smell it, peeking at Maggie over its top edge.

  “Fingerprint conclusions are repeatable and reproducible and have been so for about two hundred years. The national database contains fingerprint sets from over one hundred million people and latent prints are searched against it all day, every day. Errors by human beings, when divided into these numbers, average in the one-hundredths of one percent. If that’s not science,” she added boldly, “I’d like to know what is.”

  She wondered when he would get around to his hired expert and assert that his expert had declared the latent print from the gun a nonmatch to Graham. Perhaps, she thought hopefully, the expert had refused to act as a hired whore and was not challenging her identification. The thought buoyed her.

  Graham slipped a finger into the pink envelope and ripped the top open.

  The attorney switched tracks again. “Let’s get back to how this print got on the gun. Even assuming that the print does match my client, it doesn’t prove that he shot the victim, does it?”

  “No,” Maggie agreed. Again this short answer seemed to surprise the attorney.

  “So it’s completely possible that someone else stole the gun from my client, shot the victim”—he didn’t name the dead woman, keeping the image of her as a human being as far from the jury’s mind as possible—“and then put the gun under my client’s bed.” He had to stick with this scenario since Graham had stupidly told the police more than once that he hadn’t touched the gun in weeks. He should have said that he discovered it in his room before they arrived with the search warrant—then the print would, or at least could, have been meaningless.

  As Graham began to read his pink letter, after sniffing it again, Maggie summed up: “So you’re asking if your client could have touched the gun, then someone took it, shot the victim without disturbing your client’s fingerprint that was already on the gun, and then brought it back to his apartment and left it under his bed.”

  The attorney paused. It did sound pretty ridiculous when she put it like that. Everyone knew what a gun looked like and how it was held in order to shoot—using it without touching the front of the grip would be pretty damn impossible. But he had no other avenues. “Yes.”

  His client smirked at Maggie from between two pink sheets of paper as if even he found the mental picture hilarious, of the “real shooter” holding the gun with a fairy-light touch in order to preserve a fingerprint he couldn’t have known was there and still managing to pull the trigger accurately enough to kill.

  “I have no idea,” Maggie said.

  “So it’s perfectly possible,” the attorney insisted.

  “I have no idea.”

  Graham began to cough, and wheeze in between the coughs.

  “You can’t say that didn’t happen, because fingerprints can’t be dated, can they? You can’t tell us when my client’s print was deposited on that gun, can you?”

  “No,” Maggie said. Fingerprints could last for years if left undisturbed in cool, not too dry conditions—though she doubted that applied to the underside of Graham’s bed.

  “Now, as you are surely aware, Ohio requires the Daubert standard for allowing testimony in court.”

  “The testimony of my fingerprint match has already been entered into the court, but go ahead,” she couldn’t resist saying. Not a good idea. I am a forensic scientist, not a lawyer, she told herself. Don’t try to out–lawyer-talk him. You will not win.

  “Then tell us about why there is no error rate associated with—” The attorney finally gave up trying to talk over his client’s coughing and apparently decided to use the moment to perhaps garner a shred of empathy from the jury. He moved behind Graham and put a fatherly hand on his client’s shoulder, despite the fact that his client was several years older than himself.

  But Graham kept coughing, nearly doubling over. He tried to shove his chair back with such force that the table nearly overturned and the large cocounsel had to grab it. Graham’s face had turned red and now faded to gray pallor as the coughing subsided to a strangled gasping. The attorney, who had jumped out of the way as if his client might have the plague, called for a doctor, a medic—anyone. “My client is having a medical episode. We need help!”

  Maggie stayed right where she was. Neither a doctor nor a medic, she knew it would not help the situation—or the security in the courtroom—for everyone to crowd the defense table. She would do the bailiffs a favor and stay out of the way. The prosecutors did the same.

  The spectators in the pews, however, did not feel so compelled. The entire audience rose as one and strained for a better look. The jury fidgeted, dying to do the same as long as it would not violate the dignity of the jury box.

  The judge told one of the bailiffs to get the jail doctor on duty up from the building next door. He did not seem overly concerned, no doubt having seen a number of “medical episodes” inside his courtroom. He did order the jury removed. As they were lea
ving, the defense attorney had a thought.

  “The EpiPen!” he cried to his cocounsel over Graham’s twitching form. “This must be anaphylactic shock!”

  “It’s probably a heart attack,” the prosecutor said.

  “He’s choking on something!” someone in the galley shouted.

  “Let him die,” a man intoned. Maggie had seen him before and felt fairly certain he was the father of the victim, grandfather to the orphaned five-year-old. Two print reporters immediately leaned in from a back pew and asked him for a statement.

  The defense attorney’s voice cut through the hubbub. “Where’s the EpiPen?” he screeched with such desperation that Maggie felt sorry for him, a man she would have happily speared only a minute before. His palpable fear spurred everyone else in the courtroom to higher levels of adrenaline and a tremor ran through the room as staff conveyed a message to the hallway outside; the call for the EpiPen went out. The cocounsel, meanwhile, began CPR, a chancy idea since he outweighed his client by at least a hundred pounds and could probably have broken all of Graham’s ribs with one compression.

  The court reporter had stood up for a better look, but stayed next to her seat, hovering in front of the witness box. As loathe as she felt to intervene on behalf of the habitual killer, Maggie suggested to her, “Wouldn’t he have the EpiPen on him? Like in a pocket or something?”

  The woman shook her head. “They won’t let him carry it because he could use it as a weapon. The deputy assigned to his guard duty keeps it with him. Besides, if it is a heart attack wouldn’t an EpiPen make him worse?”

  “Quite possibly,” Maggie agreed. “Where is the deputy?”

  The court reporter looked around. “I don’t know. Once Graham’s in the courtroom he can take a break, because the bailiffs are here to handle security. So he pops out now and then.”

  She shouted these last words for Maggie to hear as the room devolved into full-tilt chaos. The judge, sensing that this would be a lengthy interruption, ordered the bailiffs to clear the court. The spectators didn’t want to leave the biggest spectacle since the trial began, so while wise enough not to refuse they certainly weren’t in any hurry. And if the deputy on EpiPen duty had been strolling in the hallway, they now blocked his path in. But more likely he would be in the side entrances, the doors flush with the wall that entered the room directly from the walkways hidden behind the court’s walls, where judges, juries, and police personnel could arrive from separate and more secure entrances. Yet no epinephrine appeared.

  The large cocounsel kept up chest compressions. His more excitable partner seemed on the verge of tears, his voice cutting through the noisy hubbub. “He’s going to die! He’s dying! What can we do?! Somebody’s got to do something!”

  His panic infected the room. Every person in it, including Maggie, hummed with agitation. Unfortunately, all the wanting to do something didn’t translate into what, exactly, should be done.

  The man at the source of all this consternation had grown quiet. Maggie no longer heard his wheezing breaths, and from what she could glimpse of his face and one arm, both lay still and flaccid.

  A uniformed deputy cut through the crowd from the rear as if slogging through waist-deep snow, adroitly diverting one of the reporters who had stepped into his path. Maggie saw her calling a question to him, but the words were lost in the babble. When the man pushed open the railing gate into the well it seemed as if a dike had collapsed and the gallery members went after him like a following sea. Or a tsunami.

  The deputy rushed to the fallen man. Maggie finally stood; from her elevated position in the witness box she could see even over the heads of the spectators. There seemed to be frantic discussion among the two attorneys and the deputy about where and how to inject the EpiPen, and this made sense: Medic duty was not part of the deputy’s job. He had merely been supposed to hang on to the thing and pass it to the prisoner to inject himself, should it become necessary. But the prisoner now lay completely still and uncaring. The deputy stabbed the pen into unprotesting flesh.

  “Ms. Gardiner.”

  Maggie turned. The judge, who seemed to have sprouted a few more gray hairs in only the last few minutes, spoke to her.

  “You may be excused from the stand now.”

  Chapter 26

  “But what happened?” Carol asked. Quitting time had come and gone, but she had taken one look at Maggie’s face and brewed some hot, sweet decaf for her younger coworker. Maggie didn’t know why. She was not upset and certainly not traumatized. She felt more confused than anything, and said as much.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Carol said, blowing on her own cup. “It’s a human reaction when someone drops dead right in front of you. Instinct. Nothing raises one’s survival instincts like seeing a member of the herd roll over and give a death rattle.”

  “I’d really like to think that me and Gerry Graham weren’t members of the same herd.”

  “You’d like to, yes,” Carol said.

  “That’s supremely unreassuring.”

  “So he had a heart attack or an allergy attack?”

  “No idea yet. I’m sure it will be in the paper tomorrow, and frankly I can wait.”

  “Did he clutch his heart or his throat?”

  Maggie thought. “Throat.”

  “Allergy. Was he eating something right beforehand? He’s not allowed to eat in the courtroom, right?”

  Maggie pulled her knees up to her chin, balancing precariously on the seat of her chair, and pictured the scene. “No, he was reading a letter. Pink. I figured it had to be from one of his mail-order sweethearts. I’m guessing it was even …”

  Carol waited, then prompted. “What?”

  “What would happen if you had someone with severe peanut allergy and you ground up peanuts to dust and then coated a piece of paper in them? Wrote a long, appealing note so they’d keep holding it. Scented it with perfume so they’d take a good whiff as well—”

  “Death,” Carol said. “That’s what would happen.”

  “Murder by mail. Not tough to find out the jail’s address. High-profile case, he probably gets a lot of correspondence. All you have to do is disguise your handwriting.”

  “There’s no shortage of suspects. Any family member of the people he’s killed, maybe even his ex-wife, his kid, people who wanted him to stay in jail. The defense has been making such a show in the news, maybe those he terrorized were afraid he’d get out.”

  “It’s iffy, though. He might have opened the letter in jail, where the guard with his EpiPen would be right there.”

  “Depends on how often they do rounds.”

  “He’s in some sort of isolation because of the peanut allergy. The guard probably wouldn’t be too far away. It’s coincidence that he opened it in a courtroom when his epinephrine was in the pocket of a guy down in the cafeteria. And when the deputy did arrive, he used the pen right through the shirt into the arm. I think he’d seen too many old Star Trek episodes where they go right through the shirt. The thigh is the most effective spot.”

  “Yes,” Carol said. “Thigh. So bad luck contributed to his death—aww, what a pity. Now we have an untraceable murder weapon and lots of suspects. How hard should we even look? The whole city wanted the guy dead.”

  Including, Maggie thought, Jack.

  And me.

  “I’m depressing you,” Carol said, patting the younger woman’s knee. “And you look worn out. Go home and go to bed, right now.”

  “I’m okay. I’m only wondering if it’s terrible that my foremost thought is for how I don’t have to go back into that courtroom and explain error rates.”

  “I wouldn’t beat yourself up over that,” Carol advised.

  *

  Maggie had indeed gone home and gotten into bed, pausing only long enough to send a good-night text to her brother and strip off her clothes before collapsing onto the sheets. It had been a very busy couple of days and she felt besieged. Tomorrow, she had thought, my brain will sort out all t
he facts it has accumulated and the murders of the two women will make sense. Yes. Of course they will. The apparent murder of Graham might not, but she decided not to worry about that or to spend much time picturing Jack’s face when he spoke of the prolific killer. Graham might not even have had an allergy, using the story as a way to get himself a private cell. She would shelve that question for when she had more reliable information. Or maybe just shelve that question for good.

  Yet she found herself lost in a dream in which she entered the courtroom to find Jack disemboweling the still-alive Graham when the phone rang. A third woman had been murdered. In her home, with her torso flayed open. Maggie hadn’t wanted to ask any more, the nightmare still bright in her mind, and she arrived, bleary eyed, at an apartment building on East 12th Street twenty minutes later. The ground floor of the building contained darkened businesses, a small lobby leading to the upper apartments, and sat catty-corner to a small park. Not quite midnight but the streets were already deserted and she had no trouble parking the city vehicle in front of the curb. She could have gotten there quicker if she had walked from the police department, but schlepping all the equipment up several alleyways in the middle of the night with a looming thunderstorm didn’t appeal to her.

  A few raindrops gave her head some light pats, as if the sky released only what it must, holding the rest for a greater, coming battle. Jack and Riley loitered on the sidewalk with their own vehicle, finishing up some radio communication and appearing equally bleary eyed.

  “He’s getting bolder,” Maggie said by way of greeting. “First an isolated house, then a house in a close-knit community, and now an apartment? There isn’t a doorman, security cameras, nosy neighbors?”

  “No, maybe, and not that we’ve found,” Jack summarized. “There’s a camera on the front door only and the superintendent is trying to figure out how it works.”

  “Oh joy. And the victim is from Sterling? Who?”