by Jodi Picoult
“No. We tried to run a DNA test, but the results were not conclusive. There were traces of bleach in the swabs, and bleach often compromises DNA tests.”
“Isn’t it true, Ms. Allston, that when sprayed on bleach, Luminol also gives a positive reading?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“So the traces of blood you found might be traces of bleach instead.”
“It’s possible,” she concedes.
“And the alleged blood in the bathroom might simply have been Jess cleaning the tile floor with Clorox?”
“Or,” Marcy says, “your client cleaning blood off the tile floor with Clorox, after he murdered her.”
I wince and immediately back off. “Ms. Allston, you can tell a lot about a body from the way that person is positioned at death, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Was there anything that struck you about Jess Ogilvy’s body when it was found?”
Marcy hesitates. “She wasn’t discarded. Someone had taken the time to sit her upright and to wrap her in a quilt, instead of dumping her.”
“Someone who cared for her?”
“Objection,” Helen interrupts, and like I expect, it’s sustained by the judge.
“Do you know my client, Ms. Allston?”
“Actually, I do.”
“How?”
“He’s a crime scene junkie. He’s been at a few I’ve been called to, and he starts giving us advice we don’t particularly want or need.”
“Have you ever let him help out at a crime scene?”
“Absolutely not. But it’s pretty clear he’s fascinated by all that stuff.” She shakes her head. “Only two kinds of people show up at crime scenes: the serial killers who are checking their handiwork, and the crazies who think police work is like the television shows and want to help solve the crime.”
Great. Now she’s got the jury wondering which of those two categories Jacob fits. I decide to cut my losses before I completely implode. “Nothing further,” I say, and Helen gets up to redirect.
“Ms. Allston, did Jacob Hunt show up at the culvert when you were processing the body?”
“No,” she says. “We didn’t see him at all.”
Helen shrugs. “I guess this time, there was nothing for him to solve.”
Jacob
If I do not become a crime scene investigator famous in my field, like Dr. Henry Lee, I am going to become a medical examiner. It is the same work, really, except that your canvas is smaller. Instead of processing an entire house or a stretch of woods to determine the story of the crime, you coax the story out of the dead person on your autopsy table.
There are many things that make dead bodies preferable to live ones:
1. They don’t have facial expressions, so there’s no worry about mistaking a smile for a smirk, or any of that nonsense.
2. They don’t get bored if you’re hogging the conversation.
3. They don’t care if you stand too close or too far away.
4. They don’t talk about you when you leave the room, or tell their friends how annoying you are.
You can tell, from a dead body, the sequence of events that occurred: if the abdominal gunshot wound caused the peritonitis and septicemia; if those complications were the cause of death, or if it was the respiratory distress syndrome they led to that was the final blow. You can tell if the person died in a field or was left in the trunk of a car. You can tell if a person’s been shot in the head before the body was set on fire or vice versa. (When the skull is removed, you can see the blood that has started seeping as a result of the brain being boiled, a thermal injury. If you don’t see that, it usually means that execution was the cause of death, not the fire. Admit it: you wanted to know.)
For all these reasons, I am very attentive when Dr. Wayne Nussbaum takes the stand to testify. I know him; I’ve seen him before at crime scenes. Once, I wrote him a letter and got his autograph.
He lists his credentials: Yale University Medical School followed by rotations in pathology and emergency medicine before becoming an assistant medical examiner for the State of New York and, finally, twenty years as chief medical examiner in Vermont. “Did you perform an autopsy on Jess Ogilvy?” asked Helen Sharp.
“I did. On the afternoon of January eighteenth,” he said. “The body was brought to my office in the morning but had to thaw.”
“What was the temperature outside when she was found?”
“Twelve degrees, which allowed for excellent preservation.”
“How was she dressed?”
“She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and a light jacket. She had on a bra, but her underwear was on backward. There was a tooth wrapped in toilet paper in a small front pocket of the sweatpants, and her cell phone was zipped into the pocket of her jacket.”
Usually on CrimeBusters, when a medical examiner takes the stand, it is a five-minute testimony, tops. Helen Sharp, however, walks Dr. Nussbaum through his findings three times: once verbally, a second time with a diagram of a body while Dr. Nussbaum draws his findings in red marker; and finally with photographs he’d taken during the autopsy. Me, I’m loving every minute. I don’t know about that lady on the jury, though, who looks like she is about to throw up.
“You said, Doctor, that you took samples of Jess Ogilvy’s urine, heart blood, and vitreous humor from her eyes for toxicology purposes?”
“That’s correct.”
“What’s the purpose of those exams?”
“They let us know what foreign substances are in the victim’s bloodstream. In the case of the heart blood and the vitreous humor, it’s at the time of death.”
“What were the results?”
“Jessica Ogilvy did not have any drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of death.”
“Did you take photographs of the body during the autopsy?”
“Yes,” he says. “It’s routine procedure.”
“Did you make any notations as to unusual marks or bruises on the body?”
“Yes. The victim had bruises on her throat consistent with choking and bruises on her arms consistent with being restrained. The bruises were reddish violet and had sharp edges, which suggested that they occurred within twenty-four hours of death. In addition, the skin on her lower back had been scraped postmortem, most likely as a result of being dragged. You can see the difference in the photograph, here, between the two sorts of bruises. The postmortem one is yellowish and leathery.” He pointed to another photograph, this one of Jess’s face. “The victim was badly beaten. She had suffered a basal skull fracture, bruises around the eyes, and a broken nose. She was missing a front tooth.”
“Were you able to tell if those injuries were pre- or postmortem?”
“The fact that bruising occurred indicates the injury was prior to death. The tooth; well, that I can’t say for sure, but it did seem to be the one tucked in her pocket.”
“Can you punch someone so hard in the face that they lose a tooth?”
“Yes, it’s possible,” Dr. Nussbaum says.
“Would someone who had been punched hard in the face present with the same sorts of injuries you found on the victim’s body?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor,” Helen Sharp asks, “after having done the autopsy and studied the results from the toxicology labs, did you form an opinion within a reasonable degree of medical certainty about the manner of death?”
“Yes, I ruled it a homicide.”
“What was the cause of Jess Ogilvy’s death?”
“Blunt head trauma, which led to subdural hematoma—bleeding inside the skull, consistent with a blow or a fall.”
“How long does it take to die from a subdural hematoma?”
“It can be immediate, or it can take hours. In the victim’s case, it was relatively soon after injury.”
“Did the bruises you found on Jess Ogilvy’s neck and arms contribute to her death?”
“No.”
“How about the tooth that
was knocked out?”
“No.”
“And there were no drugs or alcohol in her system?”
“No, there were not.”
“So, Dr. Nussbaum,” Helen Sharp says, “the sole cause of fatal injury to Jess Ogilvy that you found during the autopsy was a basal skull fracture that caused internal bleeding in the skull?”
“That’s correct.”
“Your witness,” the prosecutor says, and Oliver stands up.
“All those injuries you found on Jess Ogilvy’s body,” he says. “You have any idea who caused them?”
“No.”
“And you said that a subdural hematoma could be caused by either a blow or a fall.”
“Correct.”
“Isn’t it possible, Doctor,” Oliver asks, “that Jess Ogilvy tripped and fell and suffered a subdural hematoma?”
The medical examiner looks up and smiles a little.
It’s one of those smiles I hate, the kind that might mean You are so smart but might also mean You moron. “It’s possible Jess Ogilvy tripped and fell and suffered a subdural hematoma,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “But I highly doubt that she tried to strangle herself, or knocked out her own tooth, put on her underwear backward, dragged herself three hundred yards away, and wrapped herself in a quilt in a culvert.”
I laugh out loud—that’s such a great line it might have been scripted for CrimeBusters. My mother and Oliver both look at me, and that expression’s easy to read. They’re both one hundred percent pissed off.
“Perhaps now’s a good time for a serenity break?” the judge asks.
“Sensory!” Oliver snaps. “It’s a sensory break!”
Judge Cuttings clears his throat. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
* * *
In the sensory break room, I lie underneath the weighted blanket. My mother’s in the bathroom; Theo has his head on the vibrating pillow. He talks through his teeth and sounds like a robot. “Tickle me, Elmo,” he says.
“Jacob,” Oliver says after a minute and thirty-three seconds of silence. “Your behavior in this courtroom is making me very angry.”
“Well, your behavior in this courtroom is making me very angry,” I say. “You still haven’t told them the truth.”
“You know it’s not our turn yet. You’ve seen trials on television. The prosecution goes first, and then we get to undo the damage Helen Sharp’s done. But Jacob, Jesus. Every time you have an outburst or you laugh at something a witness says, that adds to the damage.” He looks at me. “Imagine you’re a juror, and you’ve got a daughter about Jess’s age, and then the defendant laughs out loud when the medical examiner talks about the gruesome way Jess died. What do you think that juror’s saying to himself?”
“I’m not a juror,” I say, “so I don’t really know.”
“What the medical examiner said at the end was pretty amusing,” Theo adds.
Oliver frowns at him. “Did I ask you for your opinion?”
“Did Jacob ask you for yours?” Theo says, and then he tosses me the pillow. “Don’t listen to him,” Theo tells me, and he slips out of the sensory break room.
I find Oliver staring at me. “Do you miss Jess?”
“Yes. She was my friend.”
“Then why don’t you show it?”
“Why should I?” I ask, sitting up. “If I know I feel it, that’s what counts. Don’t you ever look at someone who’s hysterical in public and wonder if it’s because they really feel miserable or because they want others to know they’re miserable? It kind of dilutes the emotion if you display it for the whole world to see. Makes it less pure.”
“Well, that’s not how the majority of people think. Most people, confronted with photographic evidence of the autopsy of someone they loved, would get upset. Maybe even cry.”
“Cry? Are you kidding?” I mimic a phrase I’ve heard kids say at school. “I would have killed to be at that autopsy.”
Oliver turns away. I’m pretty sure I hear him wrong.
Did you?
Rich
The running joke among those of us sequestered for the trial involves the sensory break room. If the defendant can get some special accommodation, why not the witnesses? Me, I want a Chinese food take-out room. I tell this to Helen Sharp when she comes to let me know that I’m testifying next.
“Dumplings,” I say, “have been scientifically proven to enhance witness focus. And General Tso’s chicken clogs the arteries just enough to increase blood flow to the brain—”
“And here all this time I thought your disability was your short—”
“Hey!”
“—attention span,” Helen says. She smiles at me. “You have five minutes.”
I’m only half kidding. I mean, if the court was willing to bend over backward for Jacob Hunt’s Asperger’s syndrome, how long will it be before this is used as a precedent by some career criminal who insists that going to jail will inflame his claustrophobia? I’m all for equality, but not when it erodes the system.
I decide to take a leak before court reconvenes and have just turned the corner toward the hallway where the restrooms are located when I smack directly into a woman who’s walking in the opposite direction. “Whoa,” I say, steadying her. “I’m sorry.”
Emma Hunt looks up at me with those incredible eyes of hers. “I bet,” she says.
In another lifetime—if I had another job, and she had a different kid—maybe we would have been talking over a bottle of wine, maybe she would be smiling at me, instead of looking like she’d just been confronted by her worst nightmare. “How are you holding up?”
“You have no right to ask me that.”
She tries to push past me, but I block her with an outstretched arm. “I was just doing my job, Emma.”
“I have to get back to Jacob—”
“Look, I’m sorry this happened to you, because you’ve already had to go through a lot. But the day Jess died, a mother lost her child.”
“And now,” she says, “you are going to make me lose mine.”
She pushes at my arm. This time, I let her go.
* * *
It takes ten minutes for Helen to walk me through my credentials—my rank as captain, my training as detective in Townsend, the fact that I’ve been doing this since before Jesus was born, yada yada, all the stuff a jury wants to hear to know they are in good hands. “How did you become involved in the investigation into Jess Ogilvy’s death?” Helen begins.
“Her boyfriend, Mark Maguire, came to the police station and reported her missing on January thirteenth. He hadn’t seen her since the morning of the twelfth and had been unable to make contact with her. She had no planned trips, and her friends and parents did not know where she was, either. Her purse and coat were at her house, but other personal items were missing.”
“Such as?”
“Her toothbrush, her cell phone.” I glance at Jacob, who raises his brows expectantly. “And some clothes in a backpack,” I finish, and he smiles and ducks his head, nodding.
“What did you do?”
“I went with Mr. Maguire to the house and listed the items that were missing. I also took a typed note found in the mailbox, asking for the mail to be held, and sent it to the lab for fingerprints. Then I told Mr. Maguire that we’d have to wait and see if Ms. Ogilvy returned.”
“Why did you send the note to the lab?” Helen asks.
“Because it seemed strange to type a note to your mailman.”
“Did you get results back from the laboratory?”
“Yes. They were inconclusive; no fingerprints were found on the paper. That led me to believe that it was possibly a note typed by someone smart enough to wear gloves when placing it. A red herring, to make us think Jess had run away on her own.”
“What happened next?”
“I received a call from Mr. Maguire a day later, saying that a rack of CDs had been knocked over and then alphabetized. It didn’t seem to be a clear sign of foul play—after all, this w
as something that Jess might have done, and in my experience, felons don’t tend to be neat freaks. However, we formally opened an investigation into Ms. Ogilvy’s disappearance. A CSI team was dispatched to her residence to gather evidence. I took her date book from her purse, which was found in the kitchen, and began to follow up on the meetings she had prior to her disappearance and was scheduled to have afterward.”
“Did you attempt to contact Jess Ogilvy during this investigation?”
“Numerous times. We called her cell phone, but it went right into voice mail, until even that was full. With the help of the FBI, we attempted to ping her cell phone.”
“What does that mean?”
“Using a GPS locator built into the device, the FBI has a software program which can find coordinates within a meter of actual physical location anywhere in the world, but in this case, the results were inconclusive. The phone has to be powered up in order for that software to work, and apparently, Jess Ogilvy’s was not,” I say. “We also screened the messages that came into her residence. One was from Mr. Maguire. One was from a vendor, one from the defendant’s mother, and three were missed calls that originated from Jess Ogilvy’s own cell phone number. Based on the time stamps of the answering machine, it suggested that Ms. Ogilvy was still alive somewhere at the time the calls were placed—or that we were being led to believe this by whoever had her cell phone.”
“Detective, when did you first meet the defendant?”
“On January fifteenth.”
“Had you seen him before?”
“Yes—at a crime scene a week earlier. He crashed an investigation.”
“Where did you meet Mr. Hunt on January fifteenth?”
“At his house.”
“Who else was present?”
“His mother.”
“Did you take the defendant into custody at that time?”
“No, he wasn’t a suspect. I asked him questions about his appointment with Jess. He said that he had gone to her house for the two thirty-five appointment but did not meet with her. He indicated that he walked home. He also revealed that Mark Maguire was not present when he arrived at Ms. Ogilvy’s place. When I asked him whether he had ever seen Jess fight with her boyfriend, he said, ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’”
