Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  That stung.

  “And Paul hasn’t asked you to marry him,” Brooke said. “He’s afraid to, actually. You know that, don’t you? He thinks if he rushes you, he’s going to spoil things. Well? Why can’t Mike be afraid of spoiling things? What gives him so much confidence in the woman department?”

  She paused, but her complaints and observations had been tossed out so indiscriminately that I didn’t know where to start.

  “You know I’m just following your lead,” Brooke said. “You’ve done the sex thing, and look where it’s got you.”

  “I’m not doing so badly. I’ve got friends. I’ve got Paul . . .”

  “The ongoing mystery! You don’t give him anything, and you promise him even less. Maybe if I was a six-foot goddess, I could get away with that with Mike.”

  I was only five eleven, if only is a word that belongs in front of five eleven, and Aphrodite I was not, but I let it pass. “You are getting away with it. The whole premise of this conversation is that you’re getting away with it.”

  “I promised to marry him.”

  “Well, yes, but you didn’t have to.”

  “Suppose he asked me, and I said no, and he left me? What then?” There were tears in her eyes.

  “Mike wouldn’t leave you,” I said.

  “He left Sarah, didn’t he?”

  “She spent the night with her old boyfriend.”

  “Well, at least he doesn’t have to worry about that with me, now does he?” Brooke spun out of her chair and left my office, slamming the door behind her.

  I sighed. Another abrupt departure. If she’d asked me, I would have told her to leave the door open.

  Chapter 6

  I didn’t see a compelling need to visit Bob Shorter in the Richmond city jail, so I didn’t. It might be fair to say I neglected him shamefully, even though I was working on his case. By the time the sheriff’s department brought him back to the courthouse for his preliminary hearing, I was feeling guilty about my failure to visit him, so I arranged to spend a few minutes with him before the start of his hearing. It was the least I could do—which is why I did it.

  “If it isn’t the Wizard of Oz,” Shorter said when he saw me. “I was beginning to think you were a myth. I trust you’ve been hard at work behind the curtain?”

  “Do you want his handcuffs off or on?” the deputy sheriff asked me.

  “Off,” I said.

  He nodded, and I waited while he unlocked them. When the deputy left the room and closed the door behind himself, Shorter took a seat at the scarred wood table. I remained standing.

  “Well?” he said.

  “Preliminary hearing today.”

  “Thanks for the news flash. You said this is when I get out of here.”

  I shook my head. “The judge will take another look at the question of bail. That’s all I can say.”

  “So what have you been doing?”

  “Filing discover motions and poring over what the prosecution gives me.”

  He made a disgusted noise, his breath puffing out through his lips. “Like that’s gonna do me any good.”

  “I talked to your neighbors. Some of them were rather insistent I spend time with them.”

  “Warped bunch of busybodies. What did they want?”

  “For you to fry in the electric chair. Life in prison might satisfy them. Whatever it takes for you never to return to their neighborhood.”

  His smile was without humor.

  “It would be an understatement to say that they hate you. Why is that, do you think?”

  “They like neighbors who play nice. It gives them power. A person who feels no obligation to play nice is a person they can’t control.”

  “I found your lawn decorations for Halloween. I assume the tombstones were for Halloween.”

  This time his grin held a touch of humor.

  “So you’re not above playing games of your own,” I said.

  “When they amuse me.”

  “What’s amusing about them?”

  “Oh, come on. You saw the tombstones. They’re hilarious. You’ve got to admit that.”

  “They’re witty,” I conceded. “You had to know they’d upset people.”

  “A little clean fun, all perfectly legal.”

  “Maybe.”

  “They pooled their money to hire a lawyer to go after me. He wrote me a couple of threatening letters. I ignored them. After that, nada.”

  “I might have had a go at proving libel. Maybe intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

  “Fortunately, they didn’t hire you. The lawyer they got didn’t have your cojones.”

  I ignored his dubious grasp of the female anatomy. “You don’t have a pleasant bone in your body, do you?”

  “I told you, niceness is an obligation the weak impose on the people around them in an effort to control them. Why should I play?”

  “Your natural disposition to benevolence?”

  “Evidently, I have no such disposition.”

  “And evidently, you don’t consider that a failing.”

  “I consider it a strength,” he said.

  “Suppose you’re wrong about that?”

  “Some may find it undesirable. Who’s to say it’s a failing?”

  “The great weight of public opinion?” I offered.

  “What, majority opinion determines what’s right and wrong? You see how ridiculous that is, don’t you? All I have to do is convert enough people to my way of thinking, and I’ll have right on my side.”

  “I can’t see you as that persuasive.” I stepped to the door and slapped my palm against it. The deputy sheriff had his hand on the butt of his gun as he pushed the door open.

  “We might as well go,” I told him. “We’re not accomplishing anything here.”

  “What?” Shorter asked from behind me. “We’re not going to go over my testimony?”

  I turned to look at him. “To put you on the stand in a preliminary hearing, I’d have to be as bad a lawyer as you think I am.”

  “I haven’t said you’re a bad lawyer. How would I know? So far I haven’t seen jack from you.”

  At the hearing, the prosecution introduced evidence as to cause of death—a stab wound to the chest—and the presence of bloody clothing in Shorter’s closet. The blood’s DNA profile matched the profile of Hill’s blood, just as Shorter had suspected from the moment he saw it. I did find out something about the murder weapon, a stainless steel knife with a three-and-a-quarter-inch blade. Detective Ray Hernandez was on the witness stand when it was marked as a commonwealth exhibit and entered into evidence.

  “Where was the knife found?” asked Ian Maxwell, the assistant district attorney currently in charge of the case.

  “Beside the body.”

  “Were there fingerprints on the knife?” Maxwell asked.

  “Yes, on the handle.”

  “But not on the blade?”

  “No, not on the blade.” Hernandez shook his head.

  “This was a wood handle?”

  “Yes. Beechwood, according to the manufacturer. It held the prints just fine.”

  “Whose fingerprints were they?”

  Hernandez looked toward Shorter and me at the defense table. “The defendant’s, Robert Shorter. They were the prints of the third, fourth, and fifth fingers of his right hand.”

  I leaned toward Shorter, who sat beside me at the defense table. “Any thoughts?” I said.

  “It could be my knife,” he said. “I told you I have a paring knife that looks like that.”

  When it was my turn to cross-examine, I asked Hernandez, “Were the fingerprints imprinted in the blood that was on the knife?”

  “They were not.”

  “They were just prints consisting of the natural residues any of us might have on our fingers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Any way to know how long they’d been on the knife?”

  “No.”

  When he seemed d
isinclined to say anything further, I said, “Please elaborate.”

  “There are three factors that might determine how long a latent fingerprint would stay on a surface: the matrix of the print, the substrate, and the environment.”

  I waited. “Okay,” I said finally. “Now you’re just playing with me.”

  He grinned.

  I said, “Since you seem disinclined to do it, let me elaborate, and you tell me where I’ve gone wrong. The matrix is the sweat or body oil that was on the fingers—”

  “Or it could be some kind of contaminant,” Hernandez said. “Blood, dust, wet fingernail polish . . .”

  “Was there fingernail polish on this knife? Or blood or dust?”

  “There was blood on the knife, but, like I said, it wasn’t what held the print.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So much for the matrix. The substrate would be the surface the print was found on, the beechwood handle.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And environment I think I understand without further explanation. Based on the three factors you mentioned, the matrix, the substrate, and the environment, these prints could have been on the knife how long?”

  Hernandez shook his head.

  “You can’t say?”

  “I’d say the prints were made after the last time the knife went through the washer.”

  “Or was washed in the sink with soap and water?”

  “Or after that. If you can tell me when that was, I can give you the earliest possible date for the prints.”

  “You’ve said that the defendant’s prints were on the knife. Were there anybody else’s?”

  He hesitated. “We’re not sure.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure?”

  “There was one smeared print.”

  “A print you couldn’t match to any of the defendant’s fingers?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you attempt to match it to anyone else’s?”

  “The decedent’s.”

  “And?”

  “There were a few points of identification between the print and the print on the decedent’s left middle finger.”

  “How many points?”

  “I think it was four or five. I’d have to look at my notes to be sure, but it wasn’t many. As I said, the print was mostly smeared.”

  “Do you have your notes with you?”

  He didn’t.

  “How many points of identification are required to establish a match?”

  “In the United States, there’s no set number. It depends on the clarity of the impression and the uniqueness of the formations.”

  “In the United States there’s no set number? Does that mean that other countries set some minimum number of points necessary to establish a match?”

  He shifted in his chair. “Yes. England, I think, requires sixteen points, Germany only twelve or so.”

  “Or so,” I said.

  “What other countries require in the way of fingerprint identification is not something that comes up very often,” he said.

  “Have you speculated as to how Bill Hill’s fingerprint may have gotten on the handle of that knife? Could he have been trying to pull it out of his chest?”

  “Well, maybe, but it wouldn’t explain the fingerprint—assuming the print was his, which we haven’t established.”

  “Quite a coincidence, isn’t it, if it’s not his? That the print would have four or five points of identification with one of the two people who might have handled the knife?”

  “I’m not a statistician. All I can tell you is we couldn’t establish a match.”

  “You said the decedent couldn’t have made the print pulling the knife out of his chest. It wasn’t still in the wound, was it? Didn’t you say the knife was on the floor?”

  “The decedent was wearing gloves.”

  “Wearing gloves.”

  “The blood did show an imprint of the fabric of one of the gloves on the underside of the knife handle,” Hernandez volunteered.

  We spent a little time working out which part of the knife handle was the underside. “Doesn’t it seem strange to you that the decedent was wearing gloves?” I asked.

  “No, not really. Hill didn’t have his heat on, and it was cold in that house. According to the thermostat, when we found him it was sixty-two degrees in the house, and the high on March 9, the day of the murder, was only fifty-seven.”

  “And there was blood on the gloves, I take it. Both gloves, or only one of them?”

  “Only the right. There was blood on the palm of the glove and especially the tip of the index finger. We think he used that finger to write Shorter’s name on the floor, that he dipped it in the blood running out of his chest.”

  Way to end on a high note. When I sat back down, Shorter leaned toward me. “Even I thought that was a waste of time, and I got nothing going on.”

  “I’ll try to be more entertaining.”

  He only grunted.

  “Ms. Starling?” the judge said. “Are you prepared to continue, or do you need a short recess?”

  I half stood. “Ready, Your Honor.”

  “Call your next witness,” the judge said to Maxwell.

  The preliminary hearing ended just before lunch the next day, and the judge bound Shorter over for trial in circuit court. I asked that the defendant be admitted to bail. As the magistrate had done before him, the judge declined. As the courtroom cleared, Shorter said, “You said I was going to see some action at the preliminary hearing.”

  “You did. We got an outline of the prosecution’s case against you, and we got to cross-examine the two key witnesses—the police detective and the medical examiner.”

  “And here I go back to jail.”

  “You were always going back to jail. Defendants never win at the preliminary hearing.”

  “That’s not what you said. When the magistrate denied bail, you said to wait until the preliminary hearing. I’ve been waiting.”

  “I was hoping something would come up.”

  “Besides, I know of at least one case you won at the preliminary hearing. I read about it in the paper.”

  “That was a fluke.”

  “Great.”

  “You seem to think I have an obligation to exercise skill and diligence to acquit you,” I said.

  “And you don’t? I believe we have a contract.”

  “And it’s your opinion that people ought to honor their contracts?”

  He studied me. “If they don’t want to face the consequences.”

  “But if I’m okay with the consequences, screwing you over would be a valid choice, wouldn’t you say?”

  His lips pulled back to expose the brownest teeth I’d ever seen. “Majority opinion is on my side on this one,” he said.

  “So for this we defer to majority opinion? The majority’s opinion is binding when it comes to the moral obligations of a contract, but not when it comes to being pleasant to our neighbors?”

  The deputy sheriff was standing by, the handcuffs cupped in one hand, but Shorter stayed in his seat.

  “You read books, don’t you?” he asked me.

  “Since early childhood.”

  “There may be more to you than meets the eye.”

  “Maybe. I like to think moral principles are real, like mass and color,” I said. “They don’t change as the public consensus changes, and we don’t get to make up our own.”

  “And these moral principles are grounded on what?”

  I hesitated.

  “You’re building castles in the air with this moral edifice of yours, but you are quick on the uptake, I’ll give you that.” He stood, finally, and the deputy sheriff cuffed his hands behind him. Shorter didn’t look upset, but his expression was calculating and not particularly pleasant. He’d given me two compliments in a row. I thought he might as readily drive a knife into me as give me a third.

  The deputy led him away. As I put my papers back into my briefcase, a cold
spot developed between my shoulder blades. The shiver started there and radiated outward. I do not like Bob Shorter, I said to myself.

  Surprisingly, there aren’t that many places to eat near the courthouse—a Subway up near the Coliseum, a couple of places down around the VCU Hospital. One of the best within a couple of blocks was the Richmond on Broad Café, occupying a space on East Broad Street that had once served as a drugstore. Even though it was a block out of my way, I decided to stop off for a bite to eat on my walk back to the office.

  As soon as I walked through the double glass doors, I regretted my decision. Mike McMillan and Sarah Fleckman were sitting across a table from each other, him with a sandwich in front of him, her with a quiche. His back was toward me. Her gaze flicked toward me and away.

  I took a breath and went to the counter to order a salad with spinach and roasted butternut squash. Brooke, I was sure, didn’t know Mike was having lunch with Sarah, and it put me in an awkward position. I paid for my salad and, after a moment’s hesitation, took it to a table by the front window, close enough to Mike and Sarah’s table for me to pick up at least some of their conversation but still out of Mike’s line of sight. I know what you’re thinking, but I was acting for his benefit. Mike was a friend. I owed it to him to learn enough to acquit him of the suspicions Brooke was going to have when she found out about this—to be honest, of the suspicions that I myself had at the sight of him and Sarah leaning across the table toward each other, talking earnestly.

  As soon as I sat down, though, they stopped talking and started working on the food in front of them. Sarah’s fork clinked against her plate. Mike drank his tea and ate his sandwich. I was halfway through my salad before Sarah said, “You’ve been ready a long time. I understand that.”

  She gave him time, but Mike didn’t say anything. He reached for his tea.

  “Like I said, I’m ready now, too,” she said.

  Mike drank. I couldn’t see his face, but his neck seemed flushed where it was visible above his collar.

  Sarah said, “I thought . . . I just wanted you to know. In case it mattered.”