Hella said, “I think they have been collected. But specifically? If they were collected, it would be recently. Maybe as recently as yesterday.”
That Hella and I were on the same temporal page with our facts made my subterfuge less taxing. I hoped. I said, “My experience with this sort of thing is limited—I think you know my wife is a deputy district attorney—but my understanding is that it typically takes a significant amount of time to get DNA results back from a forensic laboratory.” Lauren frequently complained of how long it took to get routine forensic reports back from the Colorado Bureau of Investigation laboratory. “Lauren has explained that the CBI lab is always working off a backlog of cases and that it’s hard to get something new to rise to the top of the queue. It doesn’t seem possible that the—”
“I know. It’s not like it is on TV.” Hella smiled. “Nothing happens overnight. I checked online for all this information, Alan. Can I finish? Maybe save us some time. We don’t have much.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Late yesterday, the accused’s lawyer told my patient’s lawyer”—in my head I translated that Casey Sparrow had told Cozier Maitlin—“that the accused had voluntarily provided his own samples for DNA analysis, collected under the videotaped supervision of an ex-FBI agent, for submission to a qualified laboratory. This all happened early on—the day after the police first made the man aware of the accusations against him.”
My mouth hung open. I was that surprised. “Really?” I said.
“According to his attorney, the samples were collected and sent to a private laboratory for analysis. All at the accused’s expense.”
Wow, I thought. Mattin Snow did his own DNA tests. He anticipated the trajectory of the investigation, he knew what was coming, and he took evasive action. He basically punted on third down. A most inventive strategy.
Hella seemed to be waiting for me to say something intelligent about the news—not an unreasonable expectation in the circumstances. I said, “This is something new. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a potential criminal defendant doing his own anticipatory forensic laboratory work.”
My initial reflexive response to the news Hella had shared was an urge to pick up a phone and ask my wife, the prosecutor, or my friend Sam, the detective, a pertinent question, or maybe two: Is it permissible for a criminal suspect to do a forensic examination on himself before the police get around to it?
And would the results be admissible in any court?
I suspected Lauren and Sam’s response to the first question would be that suspects and their defense attorneys are free to do almost anything they want with their biological samples and their own money as long as they aren’t tampering either with evidence or with jury pools along the way.
To the second question, the one about admissibility in court, I felt certain that Lauren and Sam would reply in perfect two-part harmony. They would say, “Hell, no. No law enforcement agency or court in Colorado is going to care about the results of those independent tests.”
Which, of course, raised the question: If the cops and the courts wouldn’t recognize the outcome, why would Mattin Snow do it? If he knew the results would be irrelevant and inadmissible—and he and Casey Sparrow must have known that—why did he collect and then have analyzed his own biological material long before the sheriff’s investigator or the district attorney had asked him to volunteer samples, or a court had compelled him to provide samples, for use in the actual sexual assault investigation?
Casey was smart enough to see how it might be useful, if it worked. She was certainly clever enough to plan the necessary legal moves. But was she trustful enough of her client to be willing to risk whatever the results of the testing might show?
I had to assume that Mattin Snow had been adamant with Casey that the laboratory results would prove exculpatory. But Casey was not trustful by nature. She certainly would not take her client’s word about his own innocence or accept his assertion that the laboratory results would be exculpatory.
Clients undoubtedly lie to their attorneys as often as they lie to their therapists. In this instance, if it turned out that her client was lying to her, the impact of the anticipatory DNA tests would prove a thousand times more damaging for her client than would something like a failed lie-detector examination.
Why would Casey risk it? I wondered.
I suddenly had another question for Lauren: If the results of the independent test had turned out not to be exculpatory, would Mattin Snow and Casey Sparrow be required to share them with the prosecution?
The answer to that question, I thought, might change things.
The more I thought about Casey Sparrow and Mattin Snow, the more credence I was giving to the likelihood that the DNA/laboratory maneuver had been hers.
Over those beers the other night, Sam had preached to me that the primary legal lesson of the Kobe Bryant sexual assault case was that the earlier the attorneys could get everyone involved to shut the hell up, the better it would be for the future of the accused celebrity. And maybe even for the accuser.
Throwing exculpatory laboratory results—even nonadmissible exculpatory laboratory results—at the sheriff and the DA, not to mention at the accuser and her attorney, would certainly help shut them all up, at least temporarily. Once the prosecutors and the accuser were in possession of exculpatory laboratory data—even if the results would require replication before they could be used to further the investigation or be presented in court—it would be most reckless for either the sheriff or the DA to tarnish Mattin Snow’s reputation by identifying him publicly as a suspect in a rape.
The exculpatory results would give everyone pause. Which would be a major tactical victory for Casey Sparrow.
Mattin Snow was trying to get everyone—everyone associated with the accuser, everyone in the sheriff’s department, and everyone in the district attorney’s office—to shut the hell up about what they thought had happened in the hours after the end of the housewarming.
Huh. I definitely had some more thinking to do.
I looked at Hella. She was clearly ready for me to become verbal again. I said, “Give me another moment to try to make sense of this? I’m trying to be methodical as I walk through it in my head. This is a—”
“But I want—”
“Please? Another minute?”
My conclusion about the underlying motivation for the strategy was simple: Mattin Snow must have felt a tremendous degree of confidence that the independent DNA analysis would prove to be exculpatory. Specifically, he was betting his future—personal and professional—that his DNA would not be a match for any of the DNA identified in the rape kit samples collected from the accused the morning after the alleged assault. He was, in fact, so confident that the laboratory would find no biological relationship—none at all, zero, ziggy, zilch—between any rape kit samples on the alleged victim and any samples he had voluntarily provided for the independent forensic examination that he was willing, literally, to bet his freedom on it.
How could he be that certain? The simple answer, the obvious answer, the only answer I was smart enough to surmise, was that Mattin Snow knew the results would not prove incriminating because he knew that he had not been present—and thus couldn’t leave any stray DNA behind—when the alleged rape took place.
Which meant to me that Mattin Snow had not been part of any sexual assault on Hella’s patient.
The psychologist in me gave that kind of confidence credence. By testing his own DNA, Mattin Snow was displaying self-assurance, pathological denial, or some kind of thought disorder approaching psychosis.
Which was it? That was the question.
Mattin Snow’s sole motivation at this stage of the investigation was to prevent public disclosure of the fact that there was an investigation. It made sense, then, that neither Mattin Snow nor Casey Sparrow ever had any intention of sending a copy of the independent DNA testing to a Boulder County judge, or had any intention of arguing for its admissi
bility to a future court. The audience Mattin and Casey had in mind for the results of the DNA examination and comparison was extremely limited.
The data was intended to influence the very few people who held the power to decide if this investigation had merit, and the few people who would decide if the case ever saw the light of day.
Hella was still waiting for me to demonstrate that she had my attention.
“Ready yet?” she said. “You seemed to zone out on me there.”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess I did. I was considering the implications of all this. It’s a lot to digest. Legally. Strategically, it’s hard to make sense of it.”
“Yeah—I—I totally—I don’t even know what half this stuff means. I’m trying to be supportive of my patient as she deals with all this, but . . .” Hella closed her eyes. Her chin was quivering as she fought back tears.
That got my attention. “Tell me what’s on your mind,” I said. I realized I had not even given Hella a chance to do that.
“Okay, what my patient told me is that thus far only preliminary results are available from . . . from the independent DNA testing. I don’t know what that means, technically. ‘Preliminary.’ I don’t know if that refers to reliability or if it means that the results thus far are partial, that there are more to come. Do you know that?”
“I don’t,” I said. “I’ll see what I can find out.” I made a mental note to ask Sam or Lauren.
“I was afraid of that. Anyway, my patient said that these preliminary results were provided to the sheriff’s investigator, to the deputy district attorney who is assigned to the case, and to my patient’s lawyer. That’s it.
“What’s crazy for my patient’s situation right now is that the preliminary results of the official rape kit—the one from Community Hospital—are known only to the sheriff and to the DA. Since no charges have been filed in the case, the results of the rape kit haven’t been provided to either side’s attorneys.”
I said, “Which means—”
“It means my patient doesn’t know what the sheriff was able to learn from the rape kit.” I immediately saw where Hella was heading. She continued. “Which also means that the sheriff and the DA may know if the independent DNA results from the accused are, in fact, incriminating, or if they are exculpatory. But my patient doesn’t know. And the accused doesn’t know. Or he shouldn’t know. Not for sure, anyway.”
Wow.
“How crazy is that, Alan? That my patient, the woman who was raped, might be the last one to know what the science is saying about what happened that night?”
I asked, “So, what is her attorney telling her? Does he believe that the independent tests are incriminating? Or exculpatory?”
“Her attorney doesn’t know. He hasn’t been in this situation before, either. But he cautioned her that the other lawyer is good, and that she isn’t reckless. He told her to be prepared for the possibility that, when the results of the rape kit are known, the independently collected samples won’t match the rape kit samples.”
I summed that up. “Her attorney expects the results to be exculpatory.”
Hella sighed before she said, “Yes.”
33
I reminded myself I had a job to do. My real job. I glanced at the clock. Too little time remained.
I said, “How’s your patient, Hella? How is she taking all this? And how are you?”
Hella’s eyes filled with tears again. “She is not doing well. She sounded devastated at this news, and she’s started doubting everything. She’s started to think even her lawyer doesn’t believe her.”
I paused before I said, “Everything?”
“Everything. Her memories. What happened. Everything.”
Hella’s maturity for a therapist her age had always been a strength. I was seeing some cracks forming. I didn’t understand why. Nor did I have much time to learn why. “What would be most helpful right now?” I asked. “From me? We only have a few minutes.” The clock behind her indicated seven more minutes, to be precise.
Hella turned her face toward the backyard. I didn’t know what she saw out there. When I followed her eyes in that direction, I imagined a staging area for construction equipment and supplies. Haphazardly parked pickup trucks and vans. And a postage-stamp yard behind a huge new duplex.
Hella reached into her purse and removed her cell phone. I found it odd. I hadn’t heard the thing ring, or vibrate. She tapped a few buttons. Then she cradled the device in her lap using both hands. Ten seconds passed, maybe more.
Without looking up at me, she said, “Please know that I don’t want to show you this, Alan.” I heard a sudden, sharp inhale. “I don’t want . . . anyone . . . to see this,” Hella said. “It was never my intention that anyone . . .”
She had something on her phone that she wanted to show me. I guessed that she had received an e-mail from her patient. Something ill conceived, written in a moment of weakness, something about the case that Hella was desperately wishing was not forever etched in her electronic records.
“This was . . . is . . . private.” It was, I imagined, her patient’s reasonable expression of doubt about some important fact related to the assault. But it was also something that Hella realized wouldn’t look right in a defense attorney’s hands.
That’s what I was thinking I was about to see.
Hella said, “The whole thing is almost two minutes.”
Two minutes? What?
She touched a control on the phone. Sound suddenly began spilling from the speaker. The volume was intense; it overwhelmed the tiny device. Hella adjusted the volume down. I heard music. Drums. Yelling. Chanting. Chanting? The thick, dense murmur of a crowd that is completely alive. Auditory chaos.
Hella watched the screen on her phone for about fifteen seconds before she leaned across the space between us and handed the phone to me.
I looked down. “Five more seconds or so,” Hella said.
That’s all she said. During those five seconds, I tried to make sense of the tiny image. Right away, I knew I was seeing flames, at night. A dark sky seemingly full of fire. In the foreground, and in the background, the blurred motion of many people dancing. Other people, in the foreground, standing, watching.
It took me an additional second or two before I was able to begin to comprehend the sum of all the visual noise. It’s Burning Man. This is Burning Man.
The video was amateurish. The angle was low, from near waist level. The images were grainy, the light was inadequate, the focus inconsistent. I imagined a spectator with a camera phone mostly concealed in the front pocket of a pair of scruffy jeans.
The photographer was a guy. Not a nice guy. I recalled that Hella had spoken of an “expectation of anonymity” at Burning Man. No cameras. No photography.
So much for that. The five seconds Hella had alerted me about were ending. As if on cue, entering lithely from the left side of the screen, I saw Hella dancing, floating.
Her hair was up. She hadn’t told me that about the night at Burning Man. She’d told me so many personal, even intimate details about her experience that night, but she had not told me that her hair was up. For a few seconds, I fixated on the benign fact that her hair was up.
And then I couldn’t distract myself any longer. I watched Hella dance, almost nude, as she was lit by the hyperactive flames of a thousand fires.
She was wearing those familiar leather boots. And the wedding veil she’d described the day she’d first told me about Burning Man. The veil, I remembered from her description, was eighteen feet long. I could see the weaves of grosgrain ribbon that represented fire rising from below to the earth, and from the earth to above.
I could see the veil trailing behind Hella like a predatory snake, or given the circumstances, like a fuse. It taunted the fire that was everywhere around her.
Hella danced with simple beauty and with captivating grace. What was apparent, and what was remarkable to me considering the chaotic intensity of the scene, and despite t
he fact that she was dancing among dozens, and that hundreds of others—including whoever was hiding the damn prohibited video camera—were observing, was that Hella seemed completely alone in that sea of fire and ocean of people.
For a moment, I looked nearby for a topless woman in a miniskirt whose head appeared impaled by a three-wood. The reason I was looking for her is because I thought I was supposed to, that she was the point of this video.
I didn’t find her. My eyes returned to Hella.
Then, suddenly, I was done. I’d watched long enough to register the nature of the video. To be entranced by the dance and appalled by the intrusion. I did not want to watch this private, intimate moment for even a second longer.
In a vacuum, things would have been different. I knew that. Were she not my supervisee, and were she not naked from the tops of her boots to the edge of her brow, I knew I would hardly have been able to keep my eyes off the woman dancing.
The performance that night in the desert belonged to her. Everyone else on that little screen was in the chorus. Or in the audience.
I asked, “Have I seen enough?” Hella’s face was down. I was looking at the top of her head, the anything-but-straight line that marked the jagged part in her blond hair.
She thought about my question for longer than I thought it deserved before she said, “No. You need to watch until the end.”
“Hella.”
“Please.”
I tilted the phone back into position. I watched more.
“Now,” she said, “this part.”
“Okay.” I thought she must have recognized some transition in the music. That’s how she identified the part.
“From the left side of the screen. See the woman?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my patient,” Hella said.
She didn’t have to tell me that. I could see it. She was the one with the three-wood impaled in her head. The woman’s back was to the camera. The embroidered suns on the cheeks of her short jean skirt were stunning in their clarity. Her back was naked.
The Last Lie Page 27
