by JF Freedman
“Motion for DNA analysis? What the hell is this?”
Ignoring her, Luke turned to Martindale. “The arraignment is tomorrow. My client is going to be indicted for first-degree murder. At the bail hearing, the prosecution said they might bring additional charges that could elevate this to a possible death-penalty case.” He brandished the motion in his hand. “There’s nothing to justify that except adding rape to the charge. And the only way they can make that stick is if the coroner can extract sperm from the victim’s body and match it to my client’s DNA.”
“Wait a minute,” Elise interjected angrily. “We haven’t brought rape into the picture. This is a murder case, your honor. I don’t know what the hell Luke’s driving at.”
“Bail, your honor,” Luke answered. “The prosecution does not want my client out on bail. They fought it at the bail hearing, and they’ve promised to bring the issue up again. If they can attach a rape charge to the murder, they can appeal for his bail to be revoked under the so-called ‘threat to the community’ clause.” He brandished his copy of the motion in Elise’s face. “My client didn’t kill Maria Estrada. He never laid eyes on her. Which means he couldn’t have raped her. He wants to be tested so we can take that charge off the table.”
The motion was only a few pages long. Martindale flipped through it quickly. “Did the coroner get any sperm from the victim?” he asked Elise.
“Yes, your honor,” she answered.
Hands laced behind his head, Martindale rocked back in his chair. “Were you going to bring it in?” he asked.
Elise was grim-faced. “We want the option,” she admitted.
“Then better sooner than later.” Martindale got to his feet. “Your motion is accepted,” he told Luke.
“Thank you, your honor. We would like to have it done as soon as possible. And we’d like the results before the arraignment.”
“So would I,” Martindale said. “Find out from the coroner how long it will take to match McCoy’s blood to their samples,” he instructed Elise. “If it’s only a few days, we’ll postpone the arraignment.” He turned to Luke. “You know the old saying, pal: be careful what you wish for.”
“I hear you, judge.”
Did he ever. Glancing at Elise, who was making notes on his motion, he thought to himself, she’s in the catbird seat. If, incredibly, Steven was lying about this, the prosecution could phone it in. And if there was no DNA match, Steven was still going on trial for murder, and she and Alex still had a great case.
18
REBECK AND WATSON PICKED Steven up the following morning and drove him to the lab at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara to have his blood drawn. Although it was hot out, Rebeck wore a pantsuit. She didn’t want Steven looking at her bare legs. When he was just a naughty boy flirting with her, it was acceptable to feel an illicit thrill from his attention. But that was before his arrest. He was a murderer now. She didn’t have to wait for the trial and verdict, she was sure of it. One of her cardinal rules was that you don’t play games with criminals. It does occur—cops are human—but the fallout is always terrible. She had heard stories of women officers (it was always women) who had fallen in love with convicts. Their careers, their entire lives had been ruined. She wouldn’t allow that to happen to her.
Steven barely glanced at the detectives as they placed him in the backseat of their Crown Victoria. They drove him over the pass and into the city. Watson went into the lab with Steven and stood guard while the blood samples were taken. Then they drove him back to the ranch.
The testing was completed in less than forty-eight hours. Judge Martindale had postponed the arraignment and convened a special hearing. The session was closed, so there was no one present except the necessary court officials, Luke, Alex Gordon, and Elise Hobson.
Dr. Atchison, the county pathologist, was on the stand. Judge Martindale would do the questioning. On both sides of the aisle, the lawyers were at attention. Luke was usually a cool customer, but he was sweating bullets now.
“When you did the autopsy you were able to extract semen from the victim’s body, is that right?” Martindale asked Dr. Atchison.
Atchison nodded. “Yes.”
“From her vaginal area?”
“Yes,” Atchison answered again. He looked up. “Her rectum had also been penetrated, although we didn’t get semen from it.”
Jesus, Luke thought. That would really inflame a jury.
“Did you compare it to the blood sample taken from the defendant?”
“We tried to.”
Luke perked up. Across the aisle, he saw Alex frown.
“Tried? Meaning what?” Martindale asked.
“The body was in an advanced state of decomposition,” Atchison explained. “It had been outside for several days during the hottest time of the year. So although we were able to get some sperm samples from it…excuse me, her…they were of poor quality.”
“Were you able to get a match?”
Atchison shook his head. “Not one I could testify to.”
Luke sagged back in his chair like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Next to him, Steven broke into a smile for the first time that he had been in a courtroom, while at the prosecution table, Alex was shaking his head, either in disagreement or frustration, Luke couldn’t tell. Probably both.
Martindale made a note to himself. “The charge of rape is excluded from this trial. Arraignment tomorrow morning, as scheduled.” He looked out at Luke and the prosecutors. “Unless there are questions from any of you, we’re finished for today.”
Alex got up. “No questions, your honor,” he said heavily. “We’ll be ready tomorrow morning.”
As he sat down, Luke rose. “I have a question.”
“What is it?” Martindale asked.
“You say you got DNA from sperm samples taken from the victim, but they weren’t good enough to match up with my client’s, is that right, Dr. Atchison?”
“That’s correct.”
“Well, let me ask you this. Could you tell if the samples came from more than one person?”
Atchison nodded. “Yes, we could tell that.”
“And did they?”
Again, the pathologist nodded. “They did.”
“Could you tell how many?”
“Not with absolute sureness,” Atchison answered. “But I would make an educated guess that there were at least three separate DNA strands.”
Luke made a show of taking that in. Then he asked, “Are you saying that at least three different men had sex with Maria Estrada shortly before she was killed, Dr. Atchison?”
Alex was on his feet. “Objection, your honor,” he called out, clearly disturbed by where this was going. “You have already eliminated rape from this trial, your honor. The victim’s sexual history is therefore irrelevant.”
Martindale thought for a moment. “Overruled,” he said. “We’re not at trial here. I’ll decide later if this information can be used. You can answer the question,” he told Atchison.
Atchison nodded. “Again, I wouldn’t swear under oath to how many partners she may have had,” he said. “But if you want my professional opinion, the answer is that she was sexually active with at least three men in the days leading up to her death.”
“Would it be a correct assumption to make that she and her sexual partners didn’t practice safe sex?” Luke continued. “You wouldn’t get DNA samples from semen if condoms had been used, would you?”
This time it was Elise who sprang up to her feet, but before she could yell out her objection, Atchison was already answering. “That’s correct. Proper use of a condom would not leave semen.”
Luke looked over at the prosecution table. Alex was writhing in anger. This was information he didn’t want to hear. Everyone knew Maria Estrada wasn’t Mother Teresa, but for an eighteen-year-old girl to have had multiple sexual partners, particularly without taking precautions against AIDS or other communicable diseases, was terrible news for them. Until this morning, th
eir case had been almost bulletproof. Now there was a crack in the wall. Juries didn’t think well of young girls who fucked around and had anal sex to boot, even if they had been murdered and abandoned.
“For the record, we object to this line of questioning,” Elise said.
“Objection is sustained this time,” Martindale said. “We’ve heard enough of this for now.”
Luke sat back. It didn’t matter—he had gotten what he needed.
Atchison detailed more unflattering information about Maria. Traces of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana, had been detected in her tissue. So she was probably high at the time of her death. He was still testing for other drugs.
Luke had his defense now, certainly an important part of it. He would put the victim on trial. It wasn’t a strategy he liked to use, because she wouldn’t be able to defend herself. She would be violated yet again; this time it would be her family and her reputation that would take the assault. But given the volume of evidence against Steven McCoy, he didn’t feel he had a choice. His job was to pry a Not Guilty verdict from twelve jurors. Questions of morality and ethics would have to be left to others.
PART III
19
NOBODY WHO HAD KNOWN Maria Estrada was willing to talk about her (so they told Kate, when she approached them), but most of them did, anyway. Gossip is so seductive, she thought wryly. Why else is People magazine so popular?
Everyone who did talk about Maria began by itemizing her many virtues—how sweet she was, what a generous friend, always there for someone in need, didn’t take no crap from no one, the usual laudatory bullshit that acclaims the deceased in far rosier terms than were ever used about them when they were alive. But then tendrils of schadenfreude would start to seep under the cracks, which reminded her of a quote that defined what being a detective was all about—No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues. So-called friends of Maria recalled the times Maria had stolen a boy from a girl who thought she and Maria were friends. Not because Maria really liked the boy, but because she could. Then, in a few weeks (sometimes it only took a couple of days), she would dump the chump, and blithely move on, leaving two broken kids in her wake. Or she would pit two boys, friends, against each other, doling out sexual favors to both (by almost all accounts, Kate discovered, sex for Maria Estrada was as easy and natural as brushing her teeth), telling each (in sworn secrecy) that he was the one, she was only seeing the other so as not to hurt his feelings. Or some equally lame lie. And then she’d drop them both, and two boys who might have been friends going all the way back to T-ball no longer even spoke to each other. Or they got into public fights, even while they knew they’d been used.
Sometimes there was money involved—not straight-out payments, she wasn’t a whore, but favors, gifts. Drugs, jewelry (like the earrings that had been bought for her the afternoon she was killed), clothing. If you had dope, she was there to party. Partying was what she did best. She could party longer and harder than anyone her age.
What seemed to drive Maria, more than anything, was the power that came from being the queen bee. But that had been waning. Girls who had been less mature in tenth and eleventh grade had caught up to her. They didn’t need to get warm in the fringes of her limelight—they found out they could create their own. She was still a force. But she wasn’t going anywhere, and everyone knew it. She was destined to be one of those kids who peaked in high school and never reached those glamorous heights again. The kind of fading star who, ten years later, people would look at and say, “What did we ever see in her?”; or even worse, “What a shame.”
Despite the cattiness, though, the consensus amongst the chatterers was that Steven McCoy, the guy the cops had in jail, was the killer. Everyone knew about Maria and the unknown boy who had bought her a pair of earrings at the mall; a boy who matched Steven’s description. The earrings had been found with the body, like totems from the tomb of an Egyptian princess. The foregone conclusion was that McCoy had bought her the earrings, and then had killed her.
Exactly why he had killed Maria, no one knew. Sex, drugs, or both. Maria commonly had drugs, or could get them easily, although she wasn’t a dealer, or even a mule. But her family had a history with drugs. Or maybe it was something else altogether.
“Everybody always assumes the worst,” one particularly blunt girl said to Kate, as they stood outside a video store. “Nobody’ll say it, but it’s like she got what she deserved, you know what I mean? Like what was she doing with this guy? It’s like that girl who accused Kobe Bryant of raping her. What was she doing sneaking into his room if she didn’t want to fuck him?”
The school was her next stop. The vice-principal was reluctant to help, until Kate mentioned that Maria’s teachers could talk to her informally or do so under the threat of subpoena. That got the administrator’s attention.
Maria’s teachers didn’t mind talking to Kate. But although most of them didn’t bother to conceal their antipathy toward their former student, even though she was dead, they couldn’t shed any light on who might have killed her, if it wasn’t the boy already in custody.
After she was finished with the teachers, Kate talked to more friends of Maria’s, kids she hadn’t questioned yet. Mostly it was the same old nothing; but just when she was about to give it up and move on, a nugget fell from the pan. A girl remembered seeing Maria at lunchtime on the day she disappeared. She was going into Chico’s, a taco stand on Milpas Street that was a block from the school. The girl told Kate that Maria and her girl-gang ate there regularly. Maybe someone there would remember if she was with anyone suspicious, other than Steven McCoy.
“How come you didn’t tell anyone about this before?” Kate asked.
The girl shrugged. “No one asked me.”
That made sense. The cops had their killer. They didn’t need—didn’t want—any information that might imply that they were wrong.
Kate gave the girl her card. “If you can think of anything else, give me a call,” she requested.
The girl glanced at the card. “Blanchard? Are you Sophia Blanchard’s mom?”
Kate had discussed the case a few times with Sophia. Sophia had demonstrated no inclination to pursue the discussion, so they had let it go. She didn’t want Sophia pulled into this, but she couldn’t escape the question.
“Yes,” she answered.
The girl smiled. “She’s a nice kid. Tell her hi for me.”
“Thanks,” Kate said to the girl. She felt a surge of gratitude from the offhanded remark. “I will.”
It was the middle of the afternoon, so there were only a few customers at Chico’s Mexican Restaurant and Take Out. The counterman, a short, stocky Latino with Mayan features, remembered Maria immediately.
“She was always trying to watch her weight, so she usually ordered a tostada and a Diet Coke. But sometimes she’d fall off the wagon,” he said with a gap-toothed smile, “and get an enchilada combo, or tamales. I thought her body was excellent,” he added. He wiped a spot of grease off the counter. “These young girls worry too much about their booties. A man doesn’t want a stick. You want some meat on those bones. Like J. Lo.”
“Do you remember if she was here the day she disappeared?” Kate asked him.
He nodded. “Yeah, she was. I remember hearing about her later and thinking I might have served her last meal to her. She ate light that day,” he recalled, “chicken tostada and iced tea.” He shook his head in regret. “Pretty damn sad.”
“It was,” Kate agreed. “Was she with anyone?”
“Not when she came, but later.”
A blip on the radar. “What happened later?”
“It was crowded, and Maria was at a table by herself. These two boys had their food and were looking around for a place to sit down. There weren’t any empty tables, so they asked if they could sit with her, and they did.”
“Did you know them?” Kate asked. “Did Maria?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t, a
nd I don’t think she did, either. I hadn’t seen them here before. I figured they were college kids, they looked older than high school.”
“Were they Anglo, Latino, Asian, what?”
He laughed. “They were definitely not hermanos. Blond surfer dudes.”
“Did you notice anything that went on between the boys and Maria? Did they talk to each other?”
He shook his head. “I wasn’t paying close attention. It was busy. We do a big lunch business.”
You paid closer attention than you’re willing to admit, that she knew. “After they finished eating, did you notice what they did, Maria and these boys? Did they leave together?”
He shook his head. “She left first. Then them.”
“How much after?”
“Not long. Maybe a couple minutes.”
Kate nodded. “Thanks for your help.” She started to leave; then, seemingly as an afterthought, she turned back to him. “If I showed you some pictures, do you think you could recognize them if they were the boys who were with Maria that day?” she asked.
He shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t know.”
She was already opening her bag. “It’ll only take a minute.”
He looked at her with suspicion. “I guess not,” he agreed reluctantly.
She took a pair of eight-by-ten photos of Steven and Tyler out of her purse and laid them on the counter. The counterman stared at them. After a moment’s hesitation, he tapped his finger on Steven’s picture.
“This could be one. Kind of looks like one of them.” He turned to the picture of Tyler. “This one, no. He doesn’t look like the other one.”
“Are you sure?”
The counterman was losing patience with this. “Hey, it was a busy time, and I only saw them for a couple minutes, like I said,” he told her. “But this one”—he pointed to Tyler’s picture again—“I don’t think so.”
