Antonelli - 03 - The Judgment

by D. W. Buffa

“Is this the bag?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is that the tag you mentioned?”

  He held it up and examined it closely. “Yes, that’s my mark.”

  “What did you do with it then?”

  “I placed it in the evidence room at police headquarters and then had it sent to the police crime lab.”

  “And what was the reason it was sent to the crime lab?”

  “To examine it for fingerprints and to have it examined for DNA evidence.”

  “We’ll have testimony later about the fingerprints that were found on the weapon as well as the results of the DNA testing,”

  Loescher remarked as she returned to her place next to the jury box. “But let me ask you, Detective Crowley, what further steps were taken in the investigation after you learned whose fingerprints were on the handle and whose blood was on the blade?”

  He glanced at the plastic bag and the knife inside it. “We closed the investigation,” he said, looking up.

  Loescher cast a meaningful glance at the jury, and then, turning back to the witness, said, “Thank you, Detective Crowley. No further questions.”

  “When you began the investigation,” I asked as I rose from my chair at the start of cross-examination, “were you not struck by the similarities between the murder of Quincy Griswald and the murder of Calvin Jeffries?”

  “I wasn’t involved in the Jeffries investigation.”

  I stared hard at him. “That wasn’t my question, detective. And, by the way,” I added almost as an aside, “if you weren’t involved in that investigation, you were the only police officer in the state who wasn’t. Let me repeat: When you began this investigation weren’t you struck by the similarities between the two murders?”

  “There were some similarities,” he allowed. He sat forward, spread his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. As I began to pace back and forth in front of the counsel table, he followed me with his eyes.

  “They were both circuit court judges, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were both killed near their cars in the structure where they both parked?”

  “Yes.”

  “They were both stabbed to death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me, Detective Crowley, as the lead investigator in this case, what investigation did the police make into the possible connection between the two murders? Let me be even more specific.” I stopped pacing and raised my head. “What effort was made to determine whether there was anyone—perhaps someone they had both sentenced to prison—who might have had a motive to want both of them dead?”

  “The Jeffries case had already been solved. There was no connection. There could not have been.”

  “In other words,” I asked impatiently, “you couldn’t conduct an investigation into that possibility because you assumed it didn’t exist?”

  “Objection,” Loescher interjected before he could answer.

  “That’s an assertion, not a question.”

  Bingham considered it. “Perhaps you could rephrase the question, Mr. Antonelli.”

  “You testified a moment ago that you weren’t involved in the Jeffries investigation, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “So your knowledge of it—your knowledge of what really happened—is at best secondhand, correct?”

  “I suppose,” he replied, watching me with sullen eyes.

  I turned until I was facing the jury and the witness was on my right. “There’s another similarity, isn’t there? In both cases the police were told where to find the person who supposedly committed the crime. Isn’t that true, Detective Crowley?”

  “We were given information from an outside source—yes.”

  I kept looking at the jury. A thin smile flashed across my mouth.

  ” ‘An outside source.’ You mean an anonymous phone call, don’t you, Detective Crowley?”

  “Yes, we received a call.”

  “An anonymous call,” I said as I turned to face him. “An anonymous call in which the caller in both instances sought to disguise his voice, isn’t that true?”

  He tried to turn it back on me. “The caller wanted to remain anonymous.”

  I ignored it. “And don’t you think it a little strange that both times—in these two cases in which you assume there was no connection between the murders—the police were told they could find the killer in the very same place, a homeless camp under the Morrison Street Bridge?”

  He jumped at it. “You forget: The killer in the first case confessed and then killed himself. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the second case, could he?”

  With a bored expression, I shook my head and dismissed it with a cursory wave of my hand. “Move to strike, your honor.

  The answer is nonresponsive. Besides that,” I added with a glance at Loescher, “it’s nothing but hearsay.”

  Bingham instructed the jury to pretend they had never heard what they were not very likely to forget. With no more questions to ask, I sat down and waited for Loescher to call the next witness for the prosecution.

  With a drooping gray mustache and disheveled gray hair, Rudolph Blensley looked more like an aging professor of mathematics than he did a police detective. Loescher first established his credentials as a fingerprint expert and then asked him whose fingerprints he had found on the knife that had been taken from the defendant.

  “The only fingerprints found on the weapon,” he replied,

  “matched the fingerprints of the defendant, John Smith.”

  Blensley was suffering from a cold, and his words came out muffled and garbled. When Loescher sat down, he removed a large white handkerchief from his side coat pocket and blew his nose. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and with the back of his hand tried to wipe his red, runny eyes.

  “Would you like some water?” I asked. We had been in court together before, and he had always answered my questions in the same straightforward manner he answered those asked by the prosecution. “Summer colds are the worst,” I remarked while he took a drink.

  When he was finished, he settled back in the witness chair and waited.

  “The fingerprints you found belong to the defendant, known as John Smith, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know, by the way, whether there were any fingerprints on file for John Smith, or were you given them by the police after they had taken him into custody?”

  He saw where I was going. “You mean, did we take prints from the knife and then run them to find out who they belonged to, or did we compare them to the ones we had for the defendant?

  We compared them to the set we were given—the ones that belong to the defendant.”

  “I see. In other words, this was not an investigation in which you used the fingerprints taken from a weapon to find out who among all the millions of people out there who have their fingerprints on file might have held the knife in their hand and used it as a murder weapon?”

  “That’s correct,” he said, reaching for his handkerchief.

  I waited while he blew his nose and when he finished asked him if he wanted more water.

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “If you had not been given a set of his fingerprints,” I asked, pointing at the defendant, “would you have been able to iden-tify him as the person whose prints were on the knife?”

  He coughed into his hand. “No,” he said finally. “There are no prints of his on file.”

  “Isn’t it true, Detective Blensley, that everyone arrested for a crime—even a misdemeanor—has their fingerprints taken?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “And those fingerprints are kept on file?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what you’re saying is that the defendant in this case has never before—not once—been arrested for a crime, any crime, isn’t that right?”

  He lifted his arms and turned up his palms. “All I can say is what I said before: H
is fingerprints weren’t on file.”

  I went back to the counsel table and stood next to my chair.

  “Your honor, may the witness please be shown state’s exhibit number 106?”

  The clerk handed the detective the clear plastic bag containing the knife.

  “I won’t ask you to take it out and test it, but just looking at it, does the blade seem to have been filed sharp? In other words, does it have an edge on it?”

  “No, it doesn’t have an edge.”

  “In fact, wouldn’t you say it appears rather dull?”

  He nodded, and waited.

  “Of course even a dull knife can be used to stab someone, can’t it?”

  He nodded again, and I had to remind him to answer out loud.

  “Yes.”

  “Now, if you would, look at the handle. Does it look to you—

  the way it looked to me—worn, faded, a knife that has been used a lot?”

  “Yes, I’d say so.”

  “In other words, from everything you observe, you would have to say, wouldn’t you, that this is a rather old knife—certainly not a new one?”

  “I would agree with that,” he said, sniffing into his handkerchief.

  “Probably used by lots of different people from the time it was first sold, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Yes, I would imagine.”

  “And yet, if I heard you right, the only fingerprints you found on the knife belonged to the defendant. All those people—dozens, perhaps hundreds—used this knife and you only found one person’s prints. Doesn’t that suggest something to you, Detective Blensley?”

  He hesitated, not certain what I meant. I drew myself up, and with a sense of urgency in my voice, asked, “Doesn’t it suggest to you that whoever had that knife before it came into the possession of the defendant must have wiped it clean?”

  He started to answer, but I cut him off. “Doesn’t it suggest to you that whoever had the knife before didn’t want anyone to know? And why do you think whoever that was wouldn’t want anyone to know that he had held that knife—that knife that the prosecution tells us was used to murder Quincy Griswald—unless it was because he was the one who murdered him?”

  Loescher was on her feet, shouting her objection. “Nothing further, your honor,” I said as I started to sit down.

  I was back on my feet before I had touched the chair. “There is one more thing, your honor.”

  Loescher looked at me, her mouth still open. Bingham looked at me, his mouth still shut.

  “Detective Blensley, the fingerprints you found—the fingerprints that belong to the defendant—can you tell us if they were put there before Quincy Griswald was murdered?”

  He shook his head. “No, there is no way to know that.”

  “In other words, they could just as easily have been put there sometime after Quincy Griswald was murdered, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  Twenty-six

  _______

  The prosecution began the third day of testimony with Dr.

  Friedrich Zoeller, head of the laboratory that had conducted the DNA testing on the blood residue found on the knife. Tall and thin, with prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, he slouched on the witness chair, one leg dangling over the other, one arm sticking straight out to the side. With astonishing rapidity he rattled off facts and figures and did it with such confidence that it was almost impossible to think he might be wrong. From nine-thirty in the morning until the court recessed for lunch a few minutes after twelve, Dr. Zoeller lectured the jury on the nature of DNA and the absolute certainty that the blood from the knife belonged to Quincy Griswald and to no one else.

  Cassandra Loescher treated him with a deference she had not shown anyone else. Zoeller was not just an expert witness, he was a scientist, and science, she seemed to say with every respectful question she asked, was the one thing no one could question. The testimony of the state’s witness that the knife found on the defendant, the knife that had only his fingerprints on it, had been used to murder Quincy Griswald was something only a fool could doubt.

  Standing in front of the charts and graphs that had been carefully arranged on two large easels between the jury box and the witness stand, I studied for a moment the brightly colored, neatly labeled exhibits. With my hands clasped behind my back I moved to the far end of the jury box.

  “I’m afraid I’m just a lawyer, Dr. Zoeller,” I said, watching the faces of the jury. “Earlier we heard testimony from someone about fingerprints. If I followed what you were saying, DNA is the same kind of thing. Is that right?”

  He seldom moved from the languid position he had assumed when he first took the stand. His head rolled onto his shoulders and he looked at me down his nose.

  “In a manner of speaking,” he replied with an indulgent smile.

  “The difference is that fingerprints are just what the word suggests: the surface skin of the tips of the fingers. DNA, on the other hand—

  as I tried to explain—can be taken from virtually any part of the body: skin, blood, hair, bodily fluids—the saliva inside the mouth, for example.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said, flapping my hands in the air. “I understand that. What I want to be clear about is this: DNA, like fingerprints, is unique to every individual—no two people have the same fingerprints or the same DNA. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” he said, flashing that same patronizing smile.

  “With the exception of identical twins.”

  I smiled back. “Tell me, Dr. Zoeller, do identical twins have the same fingerprints?”

  He blinked. The smile disappeared, and the hand that had been dangling in the air gripped the arm of the chair as he started to sit up.

  “I don’t think so,” he replied cautiously.

  “You don’t think so?” I asked, still smiling. “You don’t know?”

  “No, I don’t believe they would be the same,” he said, becoming a shade more pale.

  I dismissed it as a matter of no great consequence. “Fingerprints aren’t your specialty. You’re an expert on DNA.”

  He seemed relieved. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Then tell me this. You gave us an extraordinarily clear account of the way this works. The genetic code you described, made up of billions of very specific directions—is it all right to put it like that?”

  He was sitting straight up, following every word. “Yes, that’s a fair way of putting it.”

  “It’s like a vast, enormously complicated computer program, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s a good analogy.”

  I stopped and looked at the jury. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I suppose one could say—”

  “A miracle that science has now proven the existence of God?”

  “No, I don’t think you can say—”

  “But you said it, didn’t you? You said it was like a computer program. Every program has a programmer, someone who designed it, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Do you know of any computer program more intricate and complex than the genetic code?”

  “No, but—”

  “You’re a scientist, Dr. Zoeller. Would it be reasonable—would it be rational—to assume that less complex systems can only come into being by design, but more complex systems come into being by chance?”

  He sat back, a condescending smile on his mouth. “Or millions of years of evolution.”

  “Which is chance plus duration,” I said with a dismissive glance.

  “Now, Dr. Zoeller, however the genetic code was first written, you were able to establish that the blood on the knife was the blood of the victim in this case because the DNA in one sample matched the DNA in the other, correct?”

  “Yes.” He gestured toward one of the charts left on the easel.

  “I see that. You showed how the pattern of horizontal marks which represents the DNA taken from the body of the victim
matches the marks which represent the DNA taken from the blood left on the knife. And because each of the marks in these two samples match each other, we can be confident that they belong to the same person, correct?”

  “Yes, that’s absolutely correct.”

  “We can be confident, in other words, that they have a common origin?”

  He seemed amused at the way I was struggling to understand something which to his well-trained mind was self-evident. “Yes, they have a common origin; they belong to the same person. As I said, they’re identical.”

  “So we can all be confident—with scientific certainty—that if two things are in all important respects the same, they’re identical and have the same origin?”

  “Yes, yes of course,” he replied, relaxed and self-assured.

  “Even two murders?” I asked innocently as I turned toward the jury on my way back to the counsel table.

  Loescher shot an angry glance at me as she got to her feet and, eager to show everyone just how wrong I was, almost shouted out the name of the prosecution’s next witness. “The state calls Detective Jack Stewart.”

  Though long since abandoned by even the most senior members of the department, Stewart still adhered to a formal dress code. Perhaps he remembered the time when he made his first appearance in a courtroom, a uniformed patrol officer, testifying in front of a jury in which every woman wore a dress and every man wore a tie; perhaps, living alone and close to retirement, he just needed an excuse to put on a suit.

  Cassandra Loescher was wearing one as well, a dark-striped tailored suit that fit her perfectly. It was new and it was expensive, and more than the way she looked, it changed the way she felt.

  She held her chin just a little higher and her shoulders just a little straighter than she had before. When she turned on her heel, there was a bit more confidence in her step and a kind of hard sparkle in her eye. While Stewart took the oath, she stood with one hand on her arm, stroking her sleeve.

  After a few quick questions established Stewart’s rank and experience, Loescher moved directly to the only issue left, the utterly absurd suggestion that the defendant could not have killed Quincy Griswald because whoever killed him had killed Calvin Jeffries as well. Her hand still on her sleeve, she tapped her fingers, impatient of the necessity of having to prove what everyone already knew.