Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “And did you complete a DNA comparison with each of these items?”

  “Yes, I did. The reference sample and the unknown samples from the shirt and pants were all a match. The blood on the clothes was William Hill’s.”

  Maxwell went through the same questions with respect to the murder weapon. Unsurprisingly, the blood on the knife was also William Hill’s.

  “This baggie containing two small hairs has been entered into evidence as Prosecution Exhibit 28. What can you tell me about it?”

  “It, too, was given to me to make a DNA comparison between them and a reference sample.”

  “Was this reference sample also blood drawn from William Hill’s body?”

  “It was not. This time the reference sample was blood drawn from the body of the defendant in this case, Robert Shorter.”

  “And what was the result of the comparison?”

  “The two small hairs came from the body of Robert Shorter.”

  Maxwell finished with his direct examination of Dr. Pavlicek at two minutes before five. With a glance at the clock, Judge Cooley tapped his gavel and stood. “Courts adjourned until nine o’clock tomorrow.”

  So I left the courthouse with Paul and Mike and Brooke. Nobody said anything until we had cleared the doors and were out in a strong April breeze that whipped at my clothing. Then Mike said, “So. Brooke tells me you talked to Sarah.”

  “I did. That’s how I came to be wearing a vanilla latte perfume.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Me, too. On the other hand, maybe that was the final cathartic moment when she found she was able to give you up.”

  “You think so?”

  “We can hope. I think I’ve done all I can do, unless you want to hire me to get a restraining order.”

  “I guess I could do that myself.”

  “But you won’t,” Brooke said.

  “I will if it’s necessary,” Mike said.

  “If she comes back, I’ll hire you, Robin,” Brooke said.

  Mike took a breath as if he might say something, but he let it out again without speaking.

  “Where shall we eat?” Paul said. “Mike’s buying.”

  “I am?”

  “Robin’s wearing that vanilla latte perfume.”

  “Good point,” Mike said.

  “I’d really like to take a shower before dinner,” I said.

  “Great,” Paul said. “We can pick a place out near you. How about Italian?”

  We were at my car, and I beeped it open. “Mario’s?” I said as I got in. “Paul likes the house Chianti. Seven o’clock?”

  “Uh, Robin,” Brooke said as I reached for my seat belt.

  I glanced down and saw what she meant. I gave the hem of my dress a tug in the direction of my knees, but my dress had gotten bunched beneath me. I pushed my feet against the floorboard to get my butt off the seat and tried again. “Oh, give it up, all of you,” I said. “Don’t pretend you’ve never seen a woman’s panties before.”

  With that inauspicious exit line, I pulled my door shut and headed for home.

  It was ten o’clock before Deeks and I headed out for our run. I was jogging at a medium pace, and Deeks, off leash, was checking out the shrubbery on my side of the road and roughly keeping pace. When I turned a corner, a trail of sparks arched toward me, and a report like a gunshot sounded just in front of my right knee. I jumped sideways, twisting, turning in a full circle to keep from falling. Not a gunshot, I thought. A firecracker or something like it. I crouched in the road, trying to discern shapes in the darkness around me.

  “Stahling,” called a voice somewhere off to my right. “Stahhhling.” The house on that side of me was a shadow half-hidden in the larger shadow of an overgrown magnolia. I started as something cold touched my neck above the collar of my sweatshirt, but it was Deeks, who had come back to me out of the darkness.

  “Bitch,” came a hoarse whisper. I turned, but there was nothing behind me. The word was repeated, this time somewhere ahead of me and to my left. The situation was every bit as creepy as it sounds. Maybe it was dangerous. I didn’t know.

  “Stay close, buddy,” I murmured, and Deacon replied with a soft whine.

  The limbs of the magnolia tree rattled.

  “Easy,” I said.

  Something fizzed behind me as I sensed movement on my left.

  “Go,” I said. I sprinted forward as the exploding firework sounded just behind my head. Within a few steps, I was running full-out, Deeks at my heel. A shadow loomed out of the darkness on my left, then we were by it, and the road was clear ahead.

  At the next corner, I stuttered a step in order to turn right without tripping over my dog. “Deeks!”

  He made the turn with me.

  I turned into the next alley and bent over by a trash container, breathing hard, my hands braced on my knees. Deeks licked my face. I curled my fingers into his collar. The alley, except for us, was empty.

  I waited, my eyes on the spot where the alley intersected the street, but no one appeared. The wicked flee where none pursueth, I thought. It wasn’t Shakespeare. Holy writ, maybe. Even if no one was behind me now, though, I had been pursued. My ears still rang with the sound of that second firecracker.

  When I stood up, I winced at the stiffness in my legs. Deeks, evidently feeling that things had returned to normal, began checking out the trash containers and various fence posts as we continued down the alley. I stopped walking, and he came back to me, looked up into my face.

  “What do you think, buddy? Are we safe?”

  His tail wagged.

  “What do you know?”

  He extended his neck to reach his head forward and lick my knee. I laughed.

  “Good dog,” I told him. “Let’s go home.”

  When I got close, I changed my mind. I didn’t want to go home. People knew where I lived—if not everyone, at least everyone who knew how to use a phone book. Changing direction, I found the alley that ran behind Dr. McDermott’s house and let Deeks and me through the gate into his backyard.

  “Give a bark and let him know we’re out here,” I told Deeks.

  He didn’t react.

  “Speak!”

  I sensed him looking at me, but it might have been my imagination. It was really too dark to tell. “Speak,” I said again.

  He woofed.

  “He’s not going to hear that. Speak!”

  Deeks barked at me.

  “Good boy.”

  As we stepped up onto the back stoop, an exterior light came on, looking elegant and somehow homey in its fixture of copper and beveled glass. The door opened. It was Dr. McDermott, the hair at the back of his head standing up like the graying plumage of some exotic bird—one with chin wattles. I giggled.

  “Robin? What’s wrong?” He pushed open the storm door, Deeks rushing past him through the opening door. Dr. McDermott peered past me and to each side, then stepped back, motioning me in. Deeks was already coming back from the next room.

  “Everything all right in there, buddy?” I asked him.

  Dr. McDermott turned from locking the door. “Is one of you going to tell me what this is all about?”

  I looked at Deeks but knew it was going to have to be me. “Unwelcome company on our run,” I said. “Somebody threw a couple of firecrackers at us.”

  “Firecrackers! That could be dangerous.”

  “Where did you get those pants? They’re hilarious.” He was wearing a pair of plaid pants made from baggy flannel with elastic at the ankles.

  “What’s wrong with them? They’re my lounging britches.”

  “A name almost as funny as they are. How come I’ve never seen them?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll model my entire wardrobe for you someday. First, though, we need to decide what to do. Call the police? Or I can get my pistol, and we’ll go check out your house.”

  “Not the police,” I said, shaking my head. “I really think all this will go away once the trial’s ove
r.”

  “Would you and Deacon like to stay here tonight?”

  “I don’t know. Is your guest room available?”

  He smiled at me. “It is always available for you,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  I woke to the smell of coffee and frying bacon. When I’d eaten more than was good for me, Dr. McDermott got his pistol and crossed the street with Deeks and me and stood guard in the living room while I showered and got dressed for court. When I came out, he was pacing, his head swiveling and eyes alert, as if an army of commandos might come crashing through the windows at any moment.

  “I’ll see you out through the garage. Then I’ll lock up after myself,” he said.

  I shook my head at him, smiling. “You are a sweetie.”

  He wasn’t the only sweetie. The first person I saw when I got off the courthouse elevator was Melissa Stimmler, sitting on one of the benches on the second floor, her small hands clenched in her lap.

  I sat beside her. “You are a brave woman,” I said.

  “I’m not. I’m a terrified woman who’s ashamed of herself.”

  “That counts as bravery in my book.”

  Her smile seemed pale. “I’m not here for him, not even for you, really. I’m here for . . . for truth no matter who tells it and justice no matter who it’s for or against.”

  I really needed to figure out where that quote came from.

  “I would like that subpoena, though, to show Val and Jenn when they get after me.”

  I fished it out of my briefcase and filled it in for her. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll stick with my original observation. You’re a brave woman.”

  More people were getting off the elevator now, some going into Judge Cooley’s courtroom, some going into the clerk’s office, some going into the other courtroom. Others collected in small groups to talk in awe-muted voices. I put my arm around Melissa to give her a hug.

  “There’s a special room for witnesses to stay in until they’re called. It may be empty. At any rate, your neighbors have testified and gone. There shouldn’t be anyone there to give you problems.”

  “I brought some reading.” She opened her purse and pulled out a copy of Reader’s Digest.

  “I didn’t know they still published that.”

  “They still do.” She held it up, pointing at the date, which was the current month. “Actually, it’s my mother’s subscription. I never canceled it.” She lowered her voice as if about to impart a shameful secret. “What I like best are the jokes. I cut out my favorites and keep them.” She wet her lips, hesitating. “When all this is over, maybe you and Deeks could come over for tea again, and we could read some of them.”

  “We’d like that, very much.” I met her gaze, and she smiled at me.

  “It’s about to start. Let me show you to the witness room,” I said.

  Court reconvened, and Dr. Harold Pavlicek returned to the stand. Judge Cooley said, “Mr. Maxie, I believe you had just finished with your direct examination?”

  “Maxie is a woman’s name, your honor,” Maxwell said, looking pained. The laugh from the jury box came from a woman this time, although Andrew Hartman smirked.

  “So you have no further questions?” Judge Cooley said.

  Maxwell sighed. “No further questions.”

  Probably I’m slow on the uptake, but it occurred to me suddenly that Judge Cooley was doing the name thing on purpose. This was his way of amusing himself at the expense of the lawyers who appeared before him.

  “Ms. Startling, you may cross-examine.”

  I grinned at him.

  “Ms. Startling, you wish to address the court?”

  I shook my head. “No, Your Honor.” I went to the lectern, and Dr. Pavlicek blinked at me expectantly through his round lenses. He had a half smile on his face, and it occurred to me that he was enjoying himself, too. A weight in my chest lifted that I hadn’t known I was carrying. This was life, and it was a good life, so many of us working diligently to do the right thing.

  “Dr. Pavlicek, why is your estimation of the time of death so imprecise? Your testimony is that death occurred sometime between noon and midnight of the ninth. Really?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. When a body is discovered too long after death, body temperature is of no help to us. In this case, the body had already cooled to the temperature of the house, though the house was quite cool when I got there, right at sixty-two degrees. If the house had been at that temperature since death, and there’s no reason to think it hadn’t been, that means death occurred at least twenty-two hours prior to the time I took the temperature of the body, which was just before four o’clock on the afternoon of the eleventh.”

  “Because after twenty-two hours, the body temperature would have become constant,” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “What about rigor mortis?”

  “Rigor mortis sets in two to six hours after death and lasts for maybe thirty hours after that. None of this is exact, you understand, but in this case, rigor mortis had come and gone.”

  “So the absence of rigor mortis tells us that Mr. Hill had been dead more than thirty-six hours. Is that right?”

  Pavlicek was nodding. “Based on the body temperature and the absence of rigor mortis, I would say that Mr. Hill died before four a.m., the morning of the tenth.”

  “You said before midnight on the ninth.”

  “Yes. Other factors made me think it had been a somewhat longer than the minimum time indicated by body temperature and the departure of rigor mortis.”

  “The same factors that made you think he had died in the twelve hours before midnight? How do you know he hadn’t been dead a week?”

  “The processes of autolysis and putrefaction had begun but were not well advanced.”

  “Autolysis is . . .”

  “A process of self-digestion begun by the living enzymes contained within the body’s cells.”

  “And putrefaction?”

  “Putrefaction results from bacteria that escape from the body’s intestinal tract after death. After about thirty-six hours the skin of the trunk and head begins to develop a greenish tinge.”

  “And the deceased’s skin had developed this tinge?”

  “It had.”

  I hated to ask. “What’s the next step in autolysis and putrefaction?”

  “Bloating.”

  Of course it was.

  “The bacteria produce gas that accumulates most visibly in the face, making the eyes and tongue protrude as the gas inside pushes them forward.”

  It was enough to make a girl squeamish, and I didn’t see that it was getting me anywhere. I had no reason to think that Pavlicek’s estimate of the time of death was off. Melissa Stimmler’s testimony was going to cut his time window in half anyway, and Bob Shorter had no alibi for any relevant time period.

  “Had the body been moved after death?” I asked.

  “Not in my opinion, certainly not after livor mortis had begun.”

  I had him tell the jury what livor mortis was: the settling of the blood after the heart stopped beating, a process that darkened the body tissues closest to the floor.

  “Did your examination reveal evidence of a struggle? Skin under the fingernails, defensive wounds to the palms or forearms?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  “I noticed from the autopsy report that there was a cut on the front of the right thigh.”

  “Yes, but that wasn’t a defensive wound. It was a cut that had evidently occurred sometime earlier. There was a piece of tape across it, nipped in over the wound to create a makeshift butterfly bandage.”

  “The leg was taped so as to hold the wound closed?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Is the presence of the tape the only reason you say the cut was made sometime before the murder?”

  “Well, there was no cut or a tear in the pants leg.”

  “What does that tell us? That the cut was made while Mr. Hill wasn’t
wearing any pants?”

  “At least not those pants.”

  “Do you know anything about another pair of pants with a cut or tear in the pant leg?”

  “No, though I don’t think there’s any reason to look for one. The blood loss was insignificant, and the wound bore no relation to the cause of death.”

  “When you say the blood loss was insignificant—how do you know there was any blood loss at all?”

  “A small amount of blood had seeped into the fabric of the pants.”

  “On the inside?”

  “Yes, though there was enough blood to show through the outside of the pants, too.”

  “The pants the decedent was wearing at the time of his death, the ones with no cut or tear in the pant leg?”

  “Yes.”

  “So this was a recent cut, and fairly deep. Would you say this cut was made on the day of the decedent’s death?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “What could have caused it?”

  He tilted his head and raised his shoulders. “A household accident of some kind? Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Could it have been done with a blade like the paring knife that’s been identified as the murder weapon?”

  “Certainly.”

  I retrieved the aspirin tin from the court reporter and took it to Dr. Pavlicek. “Could you open that aspirin tin and take a look at what’s inside?”

  He opened the box. “Two pills,” he said.

  “Do you recognize them? Can you tell us what kind of drug this is?”

  “No.”

  I went back to the lectern to look at my notes, but there wasn’t a lot more I could do with Dr. Pavlicek. “No further questions,” I said, and returned to my seat.

  “Mr. Maxine?” the judge said. I didn’t know how he managed to keep a straight face.

  Ian Maxwell was flipping pages on his yellow pad. He looked up and said, “The prosecution rests, Your Honor.”

  The judge looked at the clock, which read 10:55 a.m. “I assume you’ll want to recess over the lunch hour before beginning your case,” he said to me.

  “Actually, Your Honor, I have one witness I’d like to call before lunch. Melissa Stimmler is in the witness room. I believe we can finish with her before noon.”