Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Are you all right?” a voice said from somewhere behind me.

  I nodded, kept nodding. I heard footsteps, the squeak of a hinge as someone pushed through the bar.

  “I just ask because you’re sitting there with your head down and your mouth open.”

  I knew that voice. I looked up. “Hi, Dad,” I whispered.

  “What is it?”

  I took a breath, sighed it out. I shook my head.

  “You should still be in the hospital.”

  I hadn’t seen him since Christmas. Mom must have told him what had happened to me.

  He gathered my stuff together and put it in my briefcase. I felt his arm around me and his breath on my cheek.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you up.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, leaning hard on the table.

  “Yes, you look fine.”

  He carried my briefcase and supported me with his other arm as we pushed back through the bar and made our way to the elevators. Outside the courthouse, he left me sitting on a low brick wall while he went to get his car, a ten-year-old Audi with faded paint. He got out, came around the car, helped me get in.

  He drove around the courthouse to the parking lot, which was now mostly empty. “Is that your Beetle? I think it will be all right there, don’t you?” He sounded doubtful. I was, too, but I didn’t know what we could do about it.

  “I guess it will have to be,” I said.

  “You need to get the trial delayed until you’ve got your strength back. Can you?”

  “I’ll be okay in the morning. I just need to rest.”

  He looked at me a long moment. “You do need that.” He put the car into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. As he drove, I relapsed into the stupor that had come over me in the courtroom once the pressure was off.

  When we got to my house, there was a Camry parked against the curb in front of it. My father pulled his car to the curb behind it.

  “It’s your friend Paul,” Dad said as Paul got out. I’d forgotten they’d met.

  Dad opened his car door.

  Paul asked, “What happened?”

  “She’s tired. She finished a long cross-examination, and when court recessed all the energy went out of her.”

  “How’d she do?” My door was open, and Paul's hands were on my legs, turning me in my seat and getting my feet out the door. He pulled me toward him, then he was on one side of me, and Dad was on the other.

  “Not good?” Paul said.

  “She was very good. Don’t know what she has left for tomorrow, but today she was brilliant.”

  “She’s always brilliant.” Paul got my door open while Dad supported me. When they got me into the bedroom and I’d sunk down on the bed, I said, “I’m going to have to do this part myself.”

  “This is no time for modesty,” Dad said.

  “This is the precise time for modesty.”

  Dad and Paul exchanged glances. “Now that sounded like Robin,” Paul said.

  They left me. I got into some gym shorts and a T-shirt, but didn’t bother with hanging up my clothes. I opened the door, held onto the knob for a moment, then steadied. I walked carefully out into the living room, and both men got to their feet looking ready to spring toward me should my knees buckle.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You can relax.”

  They did, but only fractionally. Both sets of eyes remained on me.

  “You look as good in gym clothes as most girls look in a teddy,” Paul said. He glanced at my father. “Not that I’m familiar with how a lot of girls look in teddies. At least not flesh-and-blood girls. Just photographs, really.”

  I sank into the recliner. “Let it go. You’re not helping yourself.”

  Paul and Dad sat, one on the sofa, one on the other chair, but both sat forward on the edges of their seats.

  “I’m tired,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I’m about to fall out on the floor.”

  They sat back, but didn’t relax. I closed my eyes.

  “She was almost normal at lunch,” Paul said. “But this afternoon I had to work. Is she winning?”

  Dad recounted the trial from the perspective of a man who had been watching his daughter rather than paying attention to the over-all course of the trial. When he got to my cross-examination of Dr. Birdsong, his account became almost excruciatingly detailed. I wasn’t ready to relive it.

  “Do you think I did a good enough job with Dr. Birdsong that I don’t need to bring in an expert of my own?” I said, interrupting.

  “What would your expert say?”

  “That death could have occurred before eleven o’clock.”

  “Do you have an expert who would say that?”

  “For twenty-five hundred dollars plus expenses. I’ve talked to him on the phone, but he’s in Texas. I’m not sure how good a witness he would make.”

  Paul said, “Will he testify the death couldn’t have occurred after eleven?”

  “No. The best we’ve got is that death could have occurred anytime that evening.”

  “Then I don’t see the point. If he can testify that it couldn’t have happened after eleven, then Natalie has an alibi. If he can’t, you right where you are now. The murder could have occurred when Natalie was at the party, but it could also have occurred after. If the rest of the evidence points to Natalie, then the jury’s going to conclude it occurred after.”

  I felt myself drifting off. “Good to know I’ve been wasting my time,” I said.

  “I don’t think you’ve been wasting your time,” Dad said. “You’ve widened the time window, partially discredited a witness, strengthened your own credibility with the jury…”

  He may have said more about the wonders of me, but I went to sleep in the middle of it. When I woke up some time in the night, the room was dark, and one or the other of them was lying on the sofa.

  I got up quietly without sitting the recliner up, went into the kitchen, and got myself a drink of water. I was drinking it when something pressed against my leg, and I spilled most of the water I hadn’t drunk. It was my dog. I bent over him and rubbed his back.

  “Hey, there, Deeks,” I whispered. “When did you get here?”

  He licked my hand and wagged his tail, which, while not especially informative, was all the answer I needed. He trailed me back through the living room, where I paused to lean over the figure on the couch. It was Paul.

  I went to the front window and looked out through the sidelight. My father’s car was gone, which meant he had left a man alone in the house with his unconscious daughter. Paul must have impressed him strongly as either fairly virtuous or completely harmless.

  “Maybe both,” I said.

  Deeks and I went back to the bedroom. I picked him up to put him in his crate, then set him on my bed instead. I crawled in, and he snuggled next to me. I slept.

  Chapter 25

  Paul drove me to the courthouse the next morning. We drove by the parking lot where my car was—windows all intact, no slashed tires—then Paul swung around and dropped me in front of the courthouse.

  I expected Aubrey Biggs to recall Dr. Birdsong to the stand to try to rehabilitate his testimony on redirect. He didn’t. Maybe I had damaged his testimony beyond rehabilitation. I feared, though, that he had reached the same conclusion Paul had, that it didn’t really matter.

  Tom McClane came to the stand to tell about arriving on the scene in front of Kim Beecher’s house and about how his attempts to identify the body had been thwarted by the absence of any form of identification on the body and by mutilation of the face.

  “How was that done, in your opinion?”

  “Well, the skull was cracked in multiple places—that’s in the autopsy report—and you can see from the pictures that the shape of the head is distorted. I’d say somebody ran over it with a car a few times, maybe spun the tires against the face.”

  Out of the corner of my eyes I could see some of the jurors wincing and glancing in Natalie’s direct
ion.

  “The fingerprints didn’t tell you anything?”

  “They’re not on file anywhere. The murder victim is not in the national database, and he’s never held a job that required him to be fingerprinted. He’s not a securities dealer or a lawyer for instance.”

  “He wouldn’t have been fingerprinted when he applied for a driver’s license?”

  “Not in Virginia.”

  “Concealed-carry gun permit?”

  “Again, not in Virginia.”

  “Could he have a passport?”

  “Yes. You don’t get fingerprinted when you get a passport.”

  “So this isn’t necessarily a homeless person, despite the lack of identification.”

  “Not at all. This could be anybody.”

  “You haven’t been able to connect him with any place other than the piece of pavement on Everglades Drive where the body was found?”

  “We were able to connect him to a motel room.”

  I did a mental eye-roll.

  “Ah, tell us about the motel room.”

  So McClane told us about going to the Best Western, making inquiries at the desk, going up to room 238.

  “Was there anything unusual about that motel room?” Biggs asked him.

  “There was a hole in the wall and a stain on the carpet about a foot across.”

  Biggs handed him the small manila envelope with the bullet that had been admitted into evidence as Exhibit Number 7. “Do you recognize this envelope?”

  “Yes. I’ve written my initials over the seal along with those of Dr. Reginald Birdsong.”

  “What’s inside the envelope?”

  McClane dumped the bullet into his palm. “The bullet the crime technicians removed from the motel-room wall in my presence and under my direction.”

  “Thank you, detective.” Biggs retrieved the bullet and envelope and returned it to the court clerk. When he returned to the lectern, he asked McClane, “Did you ever have occasion to search the residence in Wyndam, where the defendant Natalie Stevens lives with her father and stepmother?”

  “Yes, on December ninth. I entered the house pursuant to a warrant and searched the house.”

  “What did you find?”

  “I found a compact pistol underneath the mattress of the bed in the bedroom belonging to the defendant. A Glock 32.”

  “Is this the pistol?”

  McClane took it from Biggs and peered closely at the barrel and the tag hanging from the trigger guard. “Yes, it is.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “This tag on the trigger guard has the serial number recorded in my handwriting and initialed by me, and the serial number I wrote down matches the serial number stamped on the barrel of the gun.”

  “What did you do with this gun?”

  “I took it back to police headquarters and turned it over to Danny Golden, one of our lab techs.”

  Biggs looked at the judge. “Your honor, I’m not through with this witness, but I’d like to dismiss him from the stand to take Mr. Golden’s testimony at this time.

  The judge looked at me. “Any objections?”

  “I’d like to cross-examine this witness on his testimony so far.”

  “Your honor, we’re not concluded with this witness,” Biggs repeated.

  “You’ve concluded with this phase of his testimony,” I said.

  “The defense may cross-examine,” the judge said.

  At the lectern Biggs, clearly peeved, shuffled his papers together with rough, jerky movements.

  “I really only have one question at this time,” I said when I had replaced him at the lectern. “How did you come to go the Best Western on Chippenham Parkway in the first place?”

  “We had a tip.”

  I waited, but he didn’t elaborate. “From whom?”

  “Anonymous phone call.”

  “Did you make an effort to trace it?”

  “Couldn’t. It was a burner phone.”

  “Would that be a cell phone purchased for cash with minutes already on it?”

  “Yes. That would be a burner phone.”

  “Was the caller male or female?”

  “Male. I think. Let me check my notes.” He opened the binder he had taken with him to the witness stand and started flapping pages. “Here it is. Male.”

  “Thank you, Detective McClane.”

  I sat down, and Biggs called Danny Golden, a big, square-headed man in his late twenties who had the thick neck and massive shoulders of a linebacker. In my previous encounter with him, he’d struck me as competent and too unimaginative to be misleading or deceitful. Biggs ran him through his credentials to qualify him as an expert, then led him through a brief tutorial in ballistics for the benefit of us nonexperts. In manufacturing a rifle or a handgun, a spiral is cut out of the barrel to spin any bullet fired through it, the spin being necessary to give the bullet stability in flight and accuracy beyond a few feet. The spiral, the lands and grooves, left striations on a fired bullet that were distinctive to the model of the gun. In addition, the barrel of a gun became marked from repeated firings. These imperfections left their own striations on the bullet that allowed an expert to tell whether two bullets had been fired from the same gun.

  “Did you examine the class characteristics of the bullet that Detective McClane gave you?”

  “I did. It was a .32 caliber bullet fired by a Glock 32.”

  Biggs introduced an enlarged photograph of the bullet and had him point out the striations left by the lands and grooves of the gun.

  “There are certain distinctive elements of these striations that can tell you which Glock 32, out of all the Glock 32s that have been manufactured, fired this particular bullet?”

  “Yes, there are. For those purposes, you need the gun. You fire a test bullet into a slab of ballistics gel, and then you compare that bullet with your original using a comparison microscope.” A comparison microscope is actually two microscopes connected by an optical bridge that brings the two images together

  Biggs introduced more photographs.

  “We’re looking at the sides of both bullets in this one,” Golden testified. “You can see how the striations in the one bullet continue unbroken into the striations of the other one. In this next picture, the bullets are turned about ninety degrees. You can see the striations still line up.”

  When he was done, everyone in the courtroom felt like a ballistics expert. Everyone was also convinced that the bullet first introduced by Dr. Birdsong, the bullet recovered from the wall of the motel room, had been fired by the Glock found under the mattress of Natalie Stevens.

  Chapter 26

  After lunch a gun dealer was called to the stand to authenticate Form 4473, a firearms transaction record that showed Mark Edward Stevens had purchased a Glock 32 about five years previously. The form was admitted into evidence. Then McClane came back to the stand.

  “Have you compared the serial number on the Glock 32 found under the defendant’s mattress with the serial number listed on the firearms transaction record admitted into evidence as People’s Exhibit 12?” Biggs asked him.

  “I have. It’s the same.”

  Biggs asked him, “Mark Edward Stevens purchased this handgun. Who is this Mark Stevens in relation to the defendant? Do you know?”

  “He is her father.”

  “Have you made any attempts to contact him?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t been able to speak with him. He’s in China.”

  “And you haven’t been able to reach him by phone?”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Let’s go back to the night of the murder. Kim Beecher testified to seeing a young woman with the body of the decedent on the street in front of his house on Everglades. Did you go to that location?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what did you do about locating the young woman he had seen?”

  “He had a license plate number. I checked it with the Department of Motor Vehicles, found it was re
gistered to one Mark Stevens, and went to that address early the next afternoon. My partner Matt Tarrant and I did.”

  Biggs went through the rigamarole of introducing the car registration document into evidence. It was not as big a rigamarole as it could be, since certified copies of public documents are self-authenticating: there was no need to dismiss McClane and call a clerk from the DMV to the stand. He presented me with a copy and I left in on the table between Natalie and me.

  “What happened at that address?” Biggs asked.

  “In an open garage we found the white Lexus Mr. Beecher had described. We saw that it had a broken headlight and something that looked like blood on the bumper.”

  “Did you subsequently test that substance to see what it was?”

  “I turned it over to the state medical examiner’s office.”

  I had a copy of the report. The substance was blood, and DNA testing showed that it had come from the decedent. To introduce that into evidence, they would have to recall Dr. Birdsong or, possibly put on the lab tech who had assisted with the test. From McClane’s mouth it would be hearsay, inadmissible in court.

  “What did you do next on the morning after the murder?”

  “We rang the doorbell at the Stevens residence and knocked on the door. Eventually, the door was answered by the defendant Natalie Stevens.”

  “Did you ask her any questions?”

  “I asked if that was her Lexus in the garage.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said it was.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “My partner read her her rights, and we arrested her.”

  “Thank you, Detective. That will be all.”

  I went to the lectern. Aubrey Biggs hadn’t asked about subsequent questions McClane had asked that had not been answered, nor about Natalie invoking her right to remain silent. That would have been to invite the jury to speculate that her silence was evidence of guilt, an inference that was impermissible under the Constitution.