“Thirsty.”
He nodded, stepped back into the hall. When he came back, I said, “Am I tied down?”
“You’ve been agitated. It was the only way they could keep the IVs in you.”
The woman in scrubs came in carrying a cup with a flexible straw. With a whir, the head of my bed rose. I sipped some water.
The clock above the sink said one-thirty-five. It didn’t say a.m. or p.m., but there was no light coming through the window. “Is that right?” I asked, meaning the clock.
“Is what right, sweetie?” Dr. McDermott said. He laid a hand against my face, and I closed my eyes.
When I came to again, I was alone, or I thought I was. I tried to lift my hand to my nose, which itched, but a bracelet of white cloth still held my wrist against the frame of the bed. “Well, crap,” I muttered. Dr. McDermott’s head rose into my field of vision. A sadness came over me at how old he looked. He wouldn’t be around forever.
“You’re back with us,” he said.
“I’m back. Can you untie my wrists?”
He glanced at the door. “Sure.”
The clock above the sink showed that it was five minutes to seven. Dr. McDermott untied one wrist and moved around to the other side of the bed. I said, “I’m starving. Do you think there’s breakfast?”
He smiled. “We’ll have to talk to the doctor, but I think we can manage it.”
“Where are we?”
“ICU. You were shot in the head, but fortunately it wasn’t a penetrating wound. You do have a concussion, and you lost a lot of blood, not quite enough that they’ve given you a transfusion.”
I lifted my head enough to see the chair he’d been sitting in, which was half-reclined. “Have you been here all night? Do they allow that in ICU?”
He held the cup with its flexible straw to my lips, and I sucked greedily. “I used to have hospital privileges here. Not everyone I know is retired or dead.”
A few people in street clothes walked past in the hall. Paul and Brooke appeared at the door. I raised a hand, feeling almost exultant at the freedom of movement. They came in. There were tears on Brooke’s face, and Paul’s eyes were bloodshot.
“Are you all right?” I asked them.
“Are you?” Paul said.
“I feel pretty good, actually. Hungry as all get out, but nothing hurts.”
Paul looked at Dr. McDermott. “Can she eat?”
“We’ll have to clear it with the doctor, but she should be able to.”
Paul said, “You’re a doctor. Would a protein bar hurt her any?”
“That’s not the kind of food…”
I interrupted. “You’ve got a protein bar?”
He moved his head. “Two of them, actually.”
“Gimme.”
He glanced at Dr. McDermott as he fished one out of his pocket. Dr. McDermott moved between us and the door, looking out.
“Incorrigible kids,” he muttered.
I tore open the protein bar. It was a bit melted from Paul’s body heat, but I took a bite and chewed. “Messy, but delicious,” I said with my mouth full.
“Do you always carry protein bars?” Brooke asked Paul.
“One of the benefits of having a fat boyfriend,” I said, chewing.
“Ouch,” Brooke said. “She called you fat.”
“She called me her boyfriend.”
“So she did.” They both looked at me.
“He’s a boy, and he’s my friend,” I said defensively.
“He may have saved your life,” Brooke said. “Though there’s not much glass left in your French doors, what with the gunfire and the brass bookend Paul threw at the shooter.”
“Hit him, too…I think I did,” Paul said.
Dr. McDermott was suddenly beside me, one hand closing over the inside-out wrapper in my hands, the other lifting the remaining protein bar from my sheets.
“I don’t guess we can do anything about the chocolate on your face,” he said.
The door behind him opened, and the woman in scrubs came in. When she saw I was awake and coherent, she told me I’d had a Class II or Class III hemorrhage secondary to ballistic trauma and had required volume resuscitation—lots of saline or something like it—but not a blood transfusion. My heart rate had been in the nineties when they brought me in, but was almost back to normal. My oxygen saturation was fine, but my blood pressure was still just ninety over fifty-five. She pointed to each of the displays in turn.
“That’s pretty much my normal blood pressure,” I said.
“You can talk to the doctor about it when he comes around this morning.”
“When will that be? I’ve got to be in court at nine-thirty.”
She gave me a pitying smile.
“I’m not kidding. I’m in the middle of a murder trial.”
“Who’s the judge?” Dr. McDermott asked. “I’ll call him and explain what’s going on.”
“The jury was just empanelled yesterday.” I looked around at them. “It was yesterday, wasn’t it? This is Wednesday?”
Paul was nodding. “This is Wednesday.”
I felt a wash of relief that left me feeling suddenly very tired. “The judge is Eric Cheatham,” I said. “Maybe I’ll close my eyes for just a bit.”
Chapter 22
The case of the Commonwealth versus Natalie Stevens was postponed until the following Monday. I was discharged from the hospital late Thursday morning, the day after I’d woken up in ICU, and, though my mind was a little fuzzy, I really didn’t feel that bad. Still, I was glad for the long weekend, because I looked like crap. The hair clipped from the side of my head had been cut with no regard for cosmetic considerations. The scalp wound had been closed with Dermabond, which wasn’t supposed to get wet for five days, which meant that my oily hair would remain that way until Sunday. On top of that, there was a deep bruise on my temple and some discoloration of the skin around my eyes. Paul tried out “Raccoon-face” as a possible term of endearment, but I glared at him, and he didn’t try it again.
When court reconvened on Monday morning, I still had the bruise and possibly the worst bad-hair day I’d ever had. Though I had a persistent low-grade mental lethargy, I thought I was sharp enough and that anyway mental acuity was overrated. If we can rely on Woody Allen for tactical advice, eighty percent of the battle is just showing up.
Judge Cheatham, bless him, referred neither to my appearance, nor to my having been shot, but the incident had made the papers, and some of the jurors were staring at me openly.
“Mr. Biggs,” the judge said after the bailiff had called court back into session. “You may call your first witness.”
Kim Beecher, the accountant who lived in the cracker-box house on the Southside, took the stand. As he told about standing at his picture window having milk and cookies when he couldn’t sleep, a couple of men in the jury exchanged glances.
“This car you saw, can you describe it?” Biggs asked him.
“It was white or at least pale. Smallish. And it was an actual car, not an SUV or anything.”
“Two-door or four-door?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I got the license number.”
“But you can’t say whether it was a two-door or a four-door.”
“I can’t. Can’t tell you the model either, or even the manufacturer. I don’t know cars.”
“But you did get the license number. What was it?”
“I don’t know.”
A ripple of involuntary laughter swept the courtroom, and the judge eyed Beecher disapprovingly.
“I told it to the dispatcher. I have the transcript here.” He pulled a folded paper from the inner pocket of his suit coat. “Here it is. ‘GBX 1-1-6, could be 1-1-8. GBX 1-1-something.’” He looked up.
“When you first saw the car, the driver’s door was standing open?”
“I think so.”
Biggs head slumped forward, then he brought it up again. “You don’t know? Did you used to know?”
There was more muted laughter. I stood. “Your honor…”
Cheatham held up a hand. “Sustained. Try to refrain from making fun of your own witness, Mr. Biggs.”
More laughter, less muted.
“Yes, your honor.” Biggs smoothed his jacket against his sides. “Mr. Beecher. You saw a woman standing behind the car, did you not?”
“I did.”
Biggs looked relieved at the affirmation. “What was she doing?”
“She took a couple of steps and squatted down next to what I thought at the time was a bundle of clothes lying in the road. I glanced at the trunk, thinking maybe the lid had come open or something and stuff had fallen out, but it looked to be shut tight. I remember now about the car door. She left it standing open.”
“Did you get a good look at this woman? Is she here in this courtroom?”
“Pretty good. She was wearing slacks and a short fur, and she moved like she was wearing heels, though I didn’t notice her feet particularly.”
“Do you see her here in this courtroom?”
“I don’t know. This woman was medium height, medium build, dark hair, somewhere between twenty and forty. Actually, of all the people I’ve seen since, she looks the most like Ms. Starling’s girlfriend who came by to talk to me. Except that she has red hair.”
“Ms. Starling’s girlfriend came by to talk to you? Ms. Starling, the attorney for the defense?” All heads turned toward me. I held up a hand and flashed a smile.
“I don’t see her friend in the courtroom today though,” Beecher said.
“Her girlfriend,” Biggs said.
I stood. “For the record,” I said, “I like men.”
There was laughter in the jury box and here and there among the spectators. The judge smacked his gavel on the bench.
Kim Beecher said, “I didn’t mean to imply…It was just a manner of speaking. This person was a young woman, and she seemed to be Ms. Starling’s—”
“Friend,” Biggs finished for him. “Yes, we got that. Why was she coming by to see you?”
Judge Cheatham said, “Since this young friend of Ms. Starling’s has not been charged and is not in the courtroom, this seems like a pointless line of inquiry.”
“I agree, your honor,” Biggs said.
Cheatham held out his hands. “Can we move on then?”
Biggs started turning red, but he took a breath and went on, going over the woman’s bending over the body, Beecher’s movement out onto the porch, the woman returning to her car and driving off as Beecher moved out into the street and called 9-1-1. When it was my turn, I went to the podium.
“You don’t know that you’ve ever seen this woman again,” I said.
“No, I don’t.”
“You said this woman was between twenty and forty. If Natalie Stevens is nineteen—” She was nineteen, but that fact was not yet in evidence.
“That puts her outside the range,” Beecher said. “I know. This woman could have been nineteen, but she seemed older.”
“How old would you say?”
“I would have said about thirty. It was after midnight, though, and there was just the one streetlight. A lot of what I saw were shadows.”
“But for your identification of the license number, all except the last digit, you wouldn’t know the car if you ever saw it again.”
“That’s right.”
“When you first saw this car and this woman, the car was stopped, the door was open, and the woman was on the street. You didn’t see the car hit this man or run over him.”
“No. Once I realized the bundle of rags was a human being, I just assumed—”
I had my hand up, and he trailed off. “I appreciate your efforts to be open and honest about what you saw and what you remember,” I said. “But what you assumed isn’t evidence.”
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
“When the car pulled away, it went forward, away from the body.”
“Yes. I went out into the street. The car took a left turn toward Midlothian Turnpike and was gone.”
“Did the woman see you?”
“Not that I could tell.”
“And she was alone in the car.”
“No one else got out. I’ll put it that way.”
“Your witness,” I said to Biggs.
Biggs, officious little toad that he was, got up with his usual amount of extraneous movement. “Mr. Beecher,” he said when he got to the podium. “Do you think you might have assumed this woman you saw was older than nineteen because of the way she was dressed, the heels and the fur and whatnot?”
“Possibly.”
“Was there anything about her appearance, anything at all, that would rule out the possibility of it having been the defendant in this case?”
“No.”
To the judge: “That’s all I have.”
I half-stood at my table. “No further questions.”
Next up was one of the officers who had responded to the 911 call. He and his partner had arrived at the scene at 1:50, just ahead of the fire truck. An ambulance had followed, then the crime techs, then the M.E. He described the scene, indicated they had talked to Beecher.
A police photographer followed to introduce a half-dozen gory photographs. Technically, the pictures were to show that the unknown decedent was dead and the nature of the injuries that had killed him. There were other ways to present that information, of course, but the prosecution valued the photographs for their inflammatory nature, a little something to get the jury in a hanging frame of mind. I’d objected to such photographs before, but never with any success. This time I sat next to my client and tried to ignore the looks of horror that several of the jurors shot at Natalie as they viewed each of the photographs.
Chapter 23
Neither Paul nor Brooke had been in court that morning, but we met for lunch at a little hole-in-the-wall a block off Shockoe Slip. I called Rodney Burns while we were waiting on our food. He was on my witness list and so couldn’t be in the courtroom with me. I had not yet subpoenaed him, though, because he had a living to make, and I couldn’t afford to pay him to sit in the witness room.
“This is Rodney Burns,” he said.
“Hi, Rodney. Robin. Listen, I had a thought.”
“Of course you do.” I wondered how many cups of coffee he had had. “It’s why you always call me.”
“You said you checked airlines and trains and whatnot for evidence that Mark Stevens had left Hong Kong for mainland China.”
“Yes, and couldn’t find anything. He didn’t take a flight back to the U.S. either.”
“Did you check for other flights out of Hong Kong? To Singapore, maybe, or Bangkok, or Kuala Lumpur?”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Perhaps not as thoroughly as I should have,” he said.
“I’m thinking he’s back in the United States, that maybe he circled back somehow. When I suggested in opening statements I was going to implicate him in this murder, he shot me in the head.”
“Well, he hasn’t flown back out of Hong Kong, at least not as of a week ago.”
“Check to see if he might have flown back via Singapore or some place, will you?”
“I certainly will. How are you holding up?”
“Other than a headache and a little dizziness, not too bad.”
I punched off and looked across the table at Brooke.
“You’ve got a headache?” she said.
Paul said, “You didn’t tell us that.” He sounded accusing.
“You didn’t ask. I’m surprised Rodney did. He’s not usually one to get personal on you.”
After lunch a pathologist from the medical examiner’s office came to the stand. Aubrey Biggs ran him through a moderately impressive list of credentials that included medical school at St. George’s University in Grenada. Though I assumed Reginald Birdsong went to a med school in the Caribbean because he couldn’t get into one in the U.S., I really didn’t know how or whether to exploit that assumption in the cour
troom. He had done his residency at the Orlando Regional Medical Center in Florida, which might well cancel out any shortcomings implied by his medical school.
“Dr. Birdsong, could you tell us how the decedent in this case met his death?” Biggs asked him.
Birdsong cleared his throat. “He had a gunshot wound to the head. The bullet entered beneath the chin and exited just beneath the occipital protuberance.”
“The occipital…”
“The bony bump on the back of the head.”
“Ah.” Biggs was feeling of the back of his own head. “It was just the one gunshot? How long after the shooting did death occur?”
“In my opinion, death would have occurred in less than a minute.” That was the point of going through all his credentials as a pathologist: Qualifying him as an expert made his opinions within his area of expertise admissible into evidence.
“When you say the bullet entered beneath the chin…” Biggs used his index finger to push up his own chin. “Are you suggesting that the wound may have been self-inflicted?”
“It could not have been self-inflicted. There was no bruising beneath the skin, no tattooing from gun powder on the skin, and the entrance wound wasn’t split. The origin of the shot had to be at least three feet from the entrance wound, further away than the length of a man’s arm.”
“Thank you, doctor.” Biggs handed him an envelope. “Is that your signature on this envelope?”
“Yes. My signature and that of Officer Thomas McClane.”
“Is the envelope sealed?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Could you open the envelope, doctor?”
Dr. Birdsong tore off the end of the envelope and dumped a small metal object into the palm of his hand.
“What are we looking at?” Biggs asked.
“This is the bullet that was delivered to me by Officer McClane. I examined it in his presence, then we sealed it in this envelope and signed our names across the flap.”
“What did you find when you examined the bullet?”
Dr. Birdsong was turning it over in his hands. He looked up, appearing almost startled. “I found traces of blood on it.”
“Did that blood match the blood of the decedent?”
Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) Page 17
