The Ophelia Cut

by John Lescroart

  “Did he believe you?”

  Hunt smiled. “I think he came to understand my position. In exchange for us not bringing up the Army Business, if Lo denies it, he will testify that Lo told him he thought Jessup had beat up his girls. So Lo will have a motive in play if we need it. Oh, and do you want to bet a buck that if I massage things just right, I can get Lo to roll over on Goodman about the blackmail if we choose to go in that direction?”

  Hardy broke a tight smile. “There you go. Nice work.”

  “Thank you, but there’s more.” Hunt straightened up so that he was sitting naturally in the chair. “Just to be thorough, I asked Goodman if he knew what he’d been doing on the day Jessup was killed, and after his usual stab at complete ignorance—he laughed and asked if I was kidding—he got out his calendar. It was Palm Sunday. He had political stuff going on all day. There’s no way.”

  “If he didn’t hire somebody.”

  Hunt shrugged. “Not so easy and not so common as you might think. Plus, Goodman’s a slimeball and a hypocrite, but he’s not, for example, Jon Lo, who probably has serious muscle on the payroll here in the city. But even muscle . . . I don’t know, Diz. A button guy is a whole different can of worms. In the Tongs, they fly some guy in, he does the hit and then disappears forever back to China the next day. I think Koreans, it’s the same. Somebody like Goodman, forget it. I just can’t see it.”

  Hardy had placed his coffee cup on the desk next to him. His arms were crossed, and he was staring at the wall behind Hunt’s head.

  “It’s neat,” Hunt said, “when you can actually see the gears turning. What just hit you?”

  Hardy hesitated. “You just described the same scenario for paid assassins that Brittany told me about, that she in turn got from our friend Tony Solaia, the protected witness I asked you to look into a couple of months ago.”

  “Sure. I remember. Not my finest hour.”

  “Don’t worry about it. The point is that I decided to take another run at him from a different direction. I asked Glitsky if he would try to go through an FBI contact and maybe hook up with Tony’s keeper in the marshal’s service that way.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “Better.”

  After Hunt heard about Solaia being a killer for hire, he was sitting at the front of his chair.

  Hardy was going on, “So then this guy goes out of his way to tell my niece how these Asian assassins work. Why? Because he knows she’s going to tell me, get me thinking in that direction in the likely event that I’m going to implicate Jon Lo as somebody else with a motive to kill Jessup. This is the same guy—remember, Brittany’s boyfriend—who contradicted her testimony and led the pile-on in court that locked in our client’s motive.”

  “I’m not seeing what you’re getting at.”

  “Two excellent suspects, neither of them him.”

  “You mean Tony? As Jessup’s killer?”

  Hardy nodded. “I started liking him last night when I realized he was the first one to know about the rape and had his own motive. I’m liking him a little better today.”

  “So Mose has gotten all the way here and he actually didn’t do it?”

  “Maybe.” Hardy showed off his craggy grin. “Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

  HUNT HAD LEFT an hour ago.

  Now, dusk settling outside the window, Hardy sat at his desk in the quiet office, a legal pad in front of him. It wasn’t too soon to put in some time on the outline of his closing argument, which would center prominently on his “some other dude” scenarios—people with legitimate motives to want Rick Jessup dead; not only Goodman and Lo but any of the individual girls abused by Jessup in Lo’s places, or perhaps their boyfriends, if they had boyfriends.

  He wondered if he was getting ahead of himself with his enthusiasm for Tony Solaia as another plausible suspect. Probably, he thought. From the beginning, he had been all but certain of Mose’s factual guilt, and all the evidence still convicted him. So it didn’t really matter if he got a little enthused over Tony’s possible involvement in the crime, even though he had nothing approaching evidence and no way to go about trying to collect any. If, indeed, any existed. But, he reminded himself, he didn’t need proof. All he needed was to create reasonable doubt in the mind of one juror. And if Tony’s presence in the narrative, however tangential, gave even Hardy a moment of almost reasonable doubt, it had an excellent chance of affecting a juror in a similar way. That could only be a good thing for Mose’s defense.

  The other side of his affirmative defense would be an attack on the Ramey warrant and Vi Lapeer’s takeover of the case, which she clearly had done for political reasons. Once again, Liam Goodman was to figure prominently.

  All this was to the good, he supposed.

  He stopped writing, laid his pen down next to the pad, asked himself the big one: if he were on the jury, what would he think?

  On trial was a man with a demonstrated propensity for violence who, upon learning that his daughter had just been raped—now firmly established—had taken a handy weapon, driven to the home of the assailant, and beaten him to death.

  Did Hardy believe that? Did the evidence support it? Was there any real alternative scenario that answered to these facts for which there was any shred of evidence?

  Nights like this one were when he had always come to the solutions that characterized his past successes. In the majority of those cases—in every one that he could recall—those solutions had come with an understanding of what had happened, of what was the actual, literal truth.

  What was he missing tonight? What was he overlooking, ignoring, fooling himself about?

  He was getting up to go around his desk and throw a few rounds of darts to clear his mind when his cell phone rang. He pushed the button to pick up and said, “I’m on my way, just walking out the door.”

  “I’m not calling about that,” Frannie said. “I just got off the phone with Susan. Brittany’s with her.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Not great, no.”

  “Did Tony hurt her?”

  “No. But it’s Tony, all right.”

  “What?”

  “He appears to have dropped off the face of the earth.”

  THE LAST CALL of the night was a late one.

  Hardy had told Glitsky to call him back at any time and it was eleven-fifteen when the phone rang in the kitchen. “What up?”

  “I just got off the phone with Schuyler. Tony’s gone.”

  “We know he’s gone. What happened to him?”

  “No one knows.”

  “His marshal doesn’t know?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t think Schuyler does, but that’s what he told me. You saw the picture this morning?”

  “Who didn’t?”

  “Evidently, nobody didn’t. Schuyler says the cover’s blown, which I’d agree with. He’s either out of the program, or they’re pretending he is.”

  “So how are we going to find him?”

  “I’d say, offhand, we’re not.”

  “He just up and left?”

  “That’s how they do it, Diz. No good-byes. Just poof, you’re disappeared.”

  37

  A PROSECUTOR IN a murder trial is unwise if he fails to establish that someone is, in fact, dead.

  To this end, Stier called San Francisco’s seventy-seven-year-old medical examiner, John Strout, who, despite his years, was still a very sharp tack indeed. Quite often, Strout’s was uncontested testimony, presented pro forma to a jury without objection. With the shock of Tony’s disappearance roiling through his guts, Hardy was just as happy to sit through this part of the trial, where, for better or worse, he didn’t have much to say anyway.

  Thin almost to the point of emaciation, with wispy white hair and wearing a coat two sizes too large, Strout spoke in a deep Southern drawl as he laid out the results of his forensic examination of the body.

 
“. . . no question as to the cause of death,” he was saying in response to Stier’s question, “which was blunt-force trauma to the head. The only real question was which of the blows did him in, or whether it was some combination.”

  “Doctor, can you say with certainty how many times Mr. Jessup was hit?”

  “Not ’xactly. From those that left impressions on the skull, I estimate about eight.”

  “Do you have a professional opinion about what he was hit with?”

  “Not with real specificity. I can only say that it was a hard, blunt object. Whatever it was had some distinctive protrusions, and the surface of it also may have been smooth-textured rather than rough.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “If it was somethin’ rough, it would have abraded the skin at the edge of the blows. There wasn’t any sign of that, or very little.”

  “Were any of the blows strong enough to leave an impression on the victim’s skull?”

  “Yes. Three of them broke the cranium, and five left an impression. There were two other contusions on the scalp, one on the upper-left forehead and another just above the left ear.”

  “Were there any other bruises on the victim’s body that you found significant?”

  “Yes. There was a recent heavy bruise and a small fracture on the victim’s left forearm, probably from defending himself against the attack. At least consistent with that, anyway.”

  “Doctor, you mentioned that the smooth texture of the blunt object caused little abrasion on the skin. Does that mean these injuries did not bleed?”

  “No, not at all. Head injuries don’t need to have a lot of broken skin to get a lot of blood.”

  Next to Hardy, Moses seemed to grow more tense as the testimony went on. Hardy noticed Amy surreptitiously putting a hand gently over Mose’s hand, then withdrawing it. Mose seemed to be taking controlled, shallow breaths, almost reliving the moment of the attack. Or at least that was how Hardy read it, and he was afraid the jury might as well. Leaning over, he whispered, “Relax. Think about something else. Find a juror and make eye contact. Chill out.”

  Over the next hour, Strout’s dry recitation of injury was punctuated by Stier’s presentation of a series of genuinely horrible color photographs of Jessup both at the scene and on the autopsy table at the morgue. Of the fifty available photos, Gomez had permitted Stier to use ten. They were plenty.

  Finally, it was Hardy’s turn.

  Hardy knew Strout well. In his earlier life, when Hardy worked as a prosecutor in this very building, he’d had many dealings with the medical examiner, none of them rancorous. Strout was a character whose office was a minimuseum filled with instruments of death, from a rumored-to-be-live hand grenade that he used as a paperweight to a variety of actual murder weapons and assorted medieval instruments of torture.

  Hardy had nothing serious for him now, but he did have a little tiny something; his core belief was that you never let anything pass; you were a duck, bent on nibbling the prosecution to death. Good defense work involved getting the maximum out of the smallest prosecutorial flaw, misstatement, oversight, or lack of specificity.

  Standing up, Hardy gave Moses a quick buck-up squeeze on the arm—a bit of spontaneous camaraderie for the jury to witness, good guy to good guy—and then came around and stood in front of the witness chair.

  “Dr. Strout. Good afternoon.” Hardy, familiar and easygoing, a friend to the court, even to prosecution witnesses. “You have no way of knowing exactly when Mr. Jessup died, do you?”

  “There is no medical way to determine that, no, sir.”

  “What about the possibility of taking the corpse’s temperature? Can’t that lead you to fix the time of death?”

  “Not really. There are too many variables—temperature in a room can change. This here room had an open window, I understand. Bodies can cool at different rates, depending on the amount of fat in the body. In this case, it appeared the man had been dead at least several hours, so the body was approaching ambient temperature. There’s lots of formulas and rules of thumb out there. Practically every pathology book has got a couple, but you can’t use ’em in any particular case, ’cause it’s entirely possible you’d be just plain wrong.”

  “So to repeat, in this particular case, there’s no way of knowing?”

  “Not medically. Of course, he had to die between the time somebody saw him alive and the time somebody found him dead. Maybe you could narrow that down by other evidence at the scene, but I can’t help with that except to say what’s possible.”

  “Doctor, can you say with any certainty how long it would have taken Mr. Jessup to die of his injuries?”

  “Not really, no. But they were very serious.”

  “But he might have sustained them—that is, the attack on him could have taken place—sometime before five o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much time, would you say? What would be the maximum?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Would an hour be possible? Could Mr. Jessup have lived for an hour with these injuries?”

  “He could in theory, I suppose, yes.”

  “Can you, in fact, Doctor, put any limit on the amount of time that passed between the attack on the victim and his death?”

  “Well, as I said, the last time we knew he was alive, I suppose. After that.”

  “But it could have been shortly after that, could it not? A few minutes to an hour or two, right?”

  “I can’t rule that out.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. No further questions.”

  NEXT UP WAS the sergeant in charge of crime scene investigations, Lennard Faro. Like Strout, Faro had been at his job for a long time and was good at it. Pretty much the sharpest dresser on the police force, Faro sported a soul patch under his lip, and his hair was carefully groomed. Today he was dressed all in black—slacks, shirt, tie, coat—although it was impossible to say whether in deference to the victim or simply as a matter of personal style.

  Faro’s testimony was also Stier’s opportunity to introduce to the jury more color photographs taken at the crime scene. Usually, for a violent murder, they tended to be graphic and powerful enough to lend an atmosphere of true drama to the proceedings. By now, no one on the jury was dealing with an abstract event. You can talk all you want about concepts such as reasonable doubt and burden of proof, but their meanings differ in the context of a horrible and brutal crime that took the life of a handsome young man.

  Moses was again having trouble controlling his visceral reaction. His eyes were glassy and focused on the courtroom’s floor in front of the defense table, and he kept his hands clasped tightly in front of him. Hardy wished he could get his client to tamp down his reactions, but in truth, he realized that the photos could literally make a person sick, and the fact that Moses took them so seriously might help to humanize him to the jury.

  Finally, with the photos now marked as prosecution exhibits, Stier came back to the witness. As he’d done with Strout, he walked Faro through the details of the crime scene. As the jury could see, there was a lot of blood on the hardwood floor and under the head. There was no other sign of struggle in Jessup’s apartment; he’d fallen a few steps inside the door, and that was where he’d died. When they’d arrived, the front door had been unlocked, because the cleaning lady had opened it that morning upon discovering the body and calling 911. The door did not appear to have been forced open. Stier thanked the witness and gave him to Hardy for cross.

  This was precious little for Hardy to work with, but again—nibble, nibble—he thought he had a couple of crumbs.

  “Sergeant Faro, you’ve testified that the door showed no sign of forcible entry, is that right?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Was there a peephole in the door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you happen to notice whether it was working? Whether it was obstructed by anything?”

  “No. It worked fine. I looked through it to
make sure.”

  “So Mr. Jessup, inside, could have looked through that peephole and been able to identify the person standing outside his door?”

  “If he looked, yes, he could.”

  “And the door opened inward, did it not?”

  “Yes.”

  Hardy longed to make an argument here. If Jessup, knowing that he’d raped Brittany the night before, and remembering his beating at the hands of McGuire two months ago, saw him standing outside his door, how could he possibly be so foolish as to open the door to him? But Hardy couldn’t make that or any argument. At least not now.

  Besides, he had one other small but decent point. “Sergeant, the photographs show a great deal of blood on the floor, do they not?”

  “Quite a bit, yes.”

  “And isn’t it your standard procedure for your crime scene investigators to make every effort to keep from disturbing the crime scene?”

  “Yes.”

  “And was there any disturbing of the crime scene, particularly the blood, that you identified or noticed?”

  “No.”

  “Were there any identifiable footprints in the blood? That is to say, footprints that could be compared to a pair of shoes?”

  “No.”

  Hardy needed to pound this point home. “How about unidentifiable footprints—that is, a pattern that came from a shoe—even if there was not enough detail later to compare to a shoe. Did you find any of those?”

  “No.”

  “How about a disturbance in the blood that might have been a footprint? Did you see any of that?”

  “No.”

  “How about any sign that anyone had touched or interfered or come into contact with that blood in any way?”

  “No.”

  “If you’d seen anything like that, we’d have close-up photos to show it, wouldn’t we?”

  “Yes.”

  “And as an experienced crime scene investigator, you’re very aware that it would be important to see and document that kind of evidence?”