“And the A scan did find traces of cocaine and alcohol in Mr. Hollis’ system, is that it?”
Strout frowned. Making it simple for the jury wasn’t his job. He was already on the record as having missed the true cause of death in this case, and he wanted to keep it precise. “There was a potentially lethal level of cocaethylene, which gets a little technical, but basically it is the by-product when cocaine and alcohol mix in the blood.”
“And when you determined the presence of this cocaethylene, you stopped the autopsy?”
“Well, no. But we stopped looking so hard for a cause of death. A man’s got a knife sticking out of his head, we don’t necessarily go looking for a coincidental heart attack.” A brush of low laughter. “But we didn’t complete the autopsy with that finding. In fact, the lab tests and the physical examination are related but separate procedures.”
Strout explained about blood samples being sent off to the lab while the autopsy proper concerned itself with the body and its organs. “When we get back the lab results, we check to see if anything we’ve discovered in the physical examination might throw some new light on the lab’s finding or vice versa.”
“And in this case?”
“Well, we found the coca-ethylene. There weren’t any appreciable amounts or physical indications of the presence of barbiturates or alkaloids. So we had a probable cause of death at the A level and stopped there.”
Powell nodded to Strout, then turned first to the jury, then back to the defense table, making eye contact with Jennifer again. Hardy glanced at her out of the side of his eye. Was she smiling at her prosecutor? He touched her arm, and she stiffened, her face now a mask.
The direct examination continued without any surprises. Both prosecution and defense counsel might have stipulated to all of this forensic detail—the facts were largely undisputed—but neither Powell nor Freeman had shown any inclination to do so. They had their reasons. Powell wanted to make the long-ago death of Jennifer’s first husband real to the jury. He might have been dead a long time now, but when he died he’d been a healthy twenty-six-year-old man. Powell wanted the jury to know that, to get a sense of a young life snuffed out, to watch his accused killer react to it all. When he’d finished outlining the C scan and discovery of the concentration of atropine in Ned’s left thigh, Powell led Strout into an area that did not strictly concern his findings in the lab or at autopsy.
“Now, Dr. Strout, atropine is a prescription drug, is it not? It’s not available over the counter?”
Strout agreed.
“And what is its principal use?”
“It’s used in anesthesia and to inhibit the flow of saliva.” Strout was good at including everybody. He smiled all around, smooth and comfortable.
“Were you surprised when you found it in the scan you’ve described?”
“Objection.” Freeman was up like a shot, and almost as quickly, without discussion, Villars sustained him. Powell remained impassive.
“Dr. Strout, to your knowledge, does atropine get much use as a recreational drug?”
Hardy could see Freeman getting poised to object again, but he sat back, seemingly content to let Powell continue with this line of questioning.
“If it is, it’s not a common one.”
“It doesn’t produce a so-called high, or anything like that?”
Again, Hardy glanced over at Freeman. Powell was leading the witness all over the place, and Freeman was sitting back in his chair, lips pursed, listening.
“No.”
“In combination with other drugs, does it have some hallucinatory or euphoric effects?”
“No.”
“So if a person were an habitual drug user, and looking to get high, he or she would not—”
Here, finally, Freeman raised a hand, keeping his voice low. “Your Honor? Speculation.”
Again he was sustained. Powell smiled, palms out, apologized in his gentlemanly way and nodded to both the judge and the doctor. “That’s all, then. Thank you, Dr. Strout. Your witness, Mr. Freeman.”
The rumpled defense attorney, no less genial than Powell had been, although—Hardy thought—more believable in this guise, walked to where Powell had been standing, then moved three steps closer to the witness box, lifting one hand in a casual unspoken greeting to Strout, telling the jury by gesture that he and Strout, too, were professional colleagues. Just because he was with the defense, it didn’t mean he was with the bad guys, or was one of them.
“This exhumation business . . . I don’t suppose it’s much fun, is it, Doctor?”
Strout was still relaxed. There had been trials where he had testified for the better part of a week. He looked on his witness time as a break from his work in the morgue. He spread his hands. “It’s part of the job. Sometimes it gets pretty interesting.”
“Was this, the Ned Hollis exhumation, one of the particularly interesting ones?”
Strout thought for a moment, then added, “I’d have to say it was.”
“And can you tell the jury why that was?”
Strout liked this, the opportunity to sit back and chat. “Well, in any autopsy the search for a cause of death is a bit of a puzzle. As I’ve explained earlier, we run laboratory scans for various substances and examine the body, hoping we can point at something when we’re finished. In a case where someone has died a long time ago, the puzzle can get complicated. I guess that’s what I mean by ‘interesting.’ ”
Freeman, apparently fascinated, had now wandered closer to the jury box. “What kind of complications, Doctor?”
“Well, the body decays, for one. Certain substances break down—chemically, I mean—or turn into something else, or disappear entirely. Evaporate. Over time, of course, eventually you can lose almost everything.”
“And had that happened with Mr. Hollis?”
“Well, to some degree, yes.”
“And yet this was a particularly interesting . . . puzzle, I believe you called it.”
The medical examiner nodded. “That’s because we believed we had another poison and we had to find it—not just the substance itself, but how it had gotten into the body.” Strout, the ideal witness, was forward in his chair again, addressing the jury directly. “During the first autopsy,” he explained, “we had, of course, examined stomach contents and so on, but now we were looking to see if we missed anything the first time, so we tried again. But there wasn’t much there. Although the scan found the initial trace of atropine, we couldn’t get any concentration approaching a lethal dose.”
“And your next step?”
Hardy glanced at the jury. This was gruesome stuff, no one was sleeping. Strout continued, showing enthusiasm for his work. “Now here’s where the puzzle gets interesting. If there’s been a recent death, you might find some needle marks, bruises and so on, but here we took samples from various locations, hoping to find a concentration, and we got lucky.”
“How was that?”
Strout got technical on some muscle names and so on, but Freeman brought him back, making it clear that the injection had gone in two-thirds up the front of the left thigh.
“You’re sure it was the front of the thigh? It could not have seeped through, so to speak, from the back?”
Strout was certain. “There’s no chance of that. The muscles aren’t connected.” More medical detail, but gradually the picture came out—the lethal injection had been administered to the upper thigh.
To Hardy, it seemed like a long journey to get to something they already knew. Until Freeman asked, “This location on the thigh, could someone self-administer an injection there?”
Unflappable and friendly, Strout said of course.
“Was there anything about your examination that indicated that the injection had not been self-administered?”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a scratch where he might have tried to fight off the injection. Anything at all?”
Strout thought. “After all this time, n
o, nothing.”
Freeman went back to the exhibit table and lifted People’s Exhibit 5, the original autopsy report. “Did you notice anything nine years ago, Doctor, that would have argued against Mr. Hollis giving himself the shot?”
Perusing the page, Strout handed it back. “No. But, of course, there were tracks—needle marks.”
“There were needle marks? And where were these, Doctor?”
“On his inner arms.”
“Consistent with where a drug user might inject himself?”
“Yes.”
“Did you notice any needle marks on his thighs?”
Again, Strout glanced down at People’s Exhibit 5, his early autopsy diagram. “No, not that I noted here.”
Across the room, Hardy saw Powell sitting, his hands folded in front of him, his head down. He was getting killed and he knew it. Freeman, with half a losing point—the needle marks on the thigh—wasn’t even ready to concede that. He’d come back nearly to the edge of the witness box during the rapid-fire questions, and now he moved back to the center of the room. “But it’s possible, is it not, Doctor, that you might have missed even a recent needle mark?”
Nodding amiably, the doctor, relentlessly honest, went him one better. “Not only could I, Mr. Freeman—it seems likely I did. The injection went in his thigh. It’s the only way the atropine could have concentrated itself there. Needle marks are notoriously difficult to locate and catalogue. Autopsies miss them.” Strout spread his hands one last time. “It happens,” he said.
30
Dropped off on the seventh floor by the bailiff, then escorted by her two female guards, Jennifer Witt undressed in the open room, hanging her good clothes carefully on the wooden hangers, watching as the guards made space for them in the changing locker. She turned and faced the wall as she removed the feminine underthings that Freeman had bought for her. She slipped a runner’s bra over her head, turned back around, took the proffered plastic bag from Milner—a sweet-faced, overweight redhead with a gappy smile and freckles—and dropped the articles, one at a time, into the bag.
The other guard, Montanez, sullenly held out the red jumpsuit. From out in the pods, through the building, they heard the sound of bars clanging, strident voices rising and fading. It was near to dinnertime, getting darker a little earlier, a few weeks before the end of daylight saving time.
“How’s it going down there?” Milner asked.
Jennifer shrugged. “Bunch of men talking a lot.”
“Ain’t it, though?” Montanez started moving them together toward the door to the changing room.
“The judge is a woman, though. Her name is Villars. There are a few on the jury, too.”
But these considerations didn’t much concern either Milner or Montanez. The two guards flanked her in the dim and ringing hallway, their belts and hardware creaking as they walked. From behind them, the lockup guard called out, “Is that Witt? She’s got a visitor.”
Dr. Ken Lightner had been in the courtroom for at least some period of time during each of the four days of the trial so far. Not being a lawyer, he had not been allowed into the tiny room next to the guards’ station but, like Frannie, had to content himself with the more public arrangement—hard wooden chairs and telephone lines on either side of the Plexiglas.
He was already sitting there, waiting. His head was cradled wearily against the heel of his hand. When Jennifer sat down he stared at her for a long minute. Finally he reached for the telephone. “How are you holding up?”
“Nobody’s hitting me anymore. Maybe they think I’m going to win.” She allowed her face to crack into a brittle smile. “I’m starting to have a little faith in Mr. Freeman.”
Lightner nodded. “What does he say?”
“He won’t ever commit to anything. He says it’s a long haul. But I hear him talking to Mr. Hardy, I see the response he’s getting from the jury. He seems confident.”
“And how about you?”
“I miss you, Ken. I miss talking to you. Everything. The people here . . . ” There was nothing to say about them. They lived on a different plane. She stopped herself, swallowed. “It’s so different. I don’t know . . . ”
The phone nearly fell from her hand.
“What, Jen?”
She swallowed again, giving the impression of pulling back, even through the Plexiglas. “About going on.”
“What about going on, Jen? You’ve got to go on.”
Shaking her head, she became silent.
Lightner leaned forward, his face an inch from the glass. “Jennifer, listen to me. You’ve got to go on. You can’t give up now. You’re winning now, the worst may well be over.”
“No, the worst isn’t over. Mr. Freeman says the worst hasn’t started yet . . . ”
“He’s a big help.”
“He’s trying. He is, Ken. I’m at least sure of that. It’s not even the trial, you know, not mostly. It’s everything else being so different. All these people here”—she gestured around her—“this whole place. I think sometimes I’ll never get back to anything I recognize, anything I want.” A tear broke from her eye and rolled down her cheek. This time she didn’t wipe it away. It didn’t matter if she looked weak, if she broke down in front of Ken, that’s what he was for. And she was weak—they’d proved that. She didn’t care about the old things anymore. “I’m so confused, Ken. I’m so confused . . . ”
Lightner watched her, waiting for something, he couldn’t say exactly what. Jennifer seemed inside herself, suffering, and he wanted to get her past this, but he didn’t want to push. You let people find their own way out if they could.
“I’m still here,” he said finally.
She allowed that brittle smile again. “I sometimes think you’re the only reason I’m alive.” A half-sob, half-laugh. “It’s funny, you know. Remember when I thought if we could just get away from Larry, everything would work, everything would be better? It’d be a whole new world.”
“I remember. It could still be there, Jen. We’ve talked about this over and over, working through the changes.”
She shook herself, almost began rocking. Her head moved back and forth, a heavy weight held by a thread. “But that’s just it, that’s the problem. I don’t believe it anymore. I don’t know if I believe it anymore. The thing with Matt . . . ” The flow of words stopped, her eyes suddenly dead, without any energy. “It would be better if it were just all over with. That’d be the end of it.”
Maybe it was a test. Jennifer searched through the glass for something in his eyes, some answer. She scratched at the counter in front of her, reached her hand toward the Plexiglas, then withdrew it. “It’s not going to get better, no matter what happens. I’m just the kind of person that everything beats up on . . . men, things, situations. I’m a loser, that’s all.”
Lightner was sitting forward now, his hand pushing against the glass. “You’re not a loser, Jen. You’ve been victimized. We’ve talked about this. It’s natural to feel the way you do, with what you’ve been through. But you’re not a loser. I wouldn’t stick with you if you were a loser, if I thought there wasn’t some end to this, some time when things are going to be better.”
“Tell me when.”
“Come on, Jen. No one knows that exactly. But—”
“I think you’d stick with me anyway, Ken, even though I am a loser. And you know why. I’ve figured this out. Because I’m a challenge to you, some classic case study.”
“Jesus, Jennifer, how can you say that after all—”
“Because it’s true, isn’t it? You don’t really care, do you? I mean about me. Who could ever love somebody as messed up as I am? As soon as I do get turned around, the minute it happens, if it ever does, the challenge or puzzle or whatever I am would be over. You’d be gone, too, wouldn’t you? And then where would I be? I’ll tell you where—where I am now, which is nowhere. Nowhere, nothing, never coming back, oh, goddamn it all . . . ”
She threw the phone down, pushing the
chair backward, knocking it over, standing, looking around, tears falling freely now. The guard was moving up, hand on her stick.
Lightner stood, his own hand on the Plexiglas, watching. Jennifer said something to the guard, slumping. She didn’t turn back to look. They moved toward the door back to the cells, and Lightner sat again in the hard chair, trying to control his own feelings.
Suddenly she was back at the glass, hands splayed against it. Crying for real now, her body half-falling, half-leaning, her weight against the partition. Shaking her head, her face set, reaching for her stick as if she might really need it, the guard was coming up behind Jennifer—who was forcing words out between the sobs.
Even if he couldn’t hear clearly he knew what she was saying. It was what she always said when she hit her own bedrock, when she felt it was all on her and she had to accept it.
“I’m sorry,” she was crying, over and over, trying to reach him through the glass as though he were in another dimension. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, don’t be mad at me . . . ”
And then the guard’s hand was on her shoulder, pulling her backward, turning her around and back to the door.
Lightner stood there breathing deeply and thinking that Jennifer might be right. She might be hopeless, an incurable loser.
And after all he’d done for her. It hit him like an electric shock, forcing him back down into the chair—the realization that she might never, ever get herself straight. He realized he was shaking, trying to get it under control, but what he wanted was to wake her up, knock some sense into that confused, lovely head of hers.
Frannie could not believe that Hardy had made all these arrangements—calling Erin, Rebecca’s grandmother, to see if she would mind taking the kids overnight, sending a cab to pick everybody up and drop them where they should be, making reservations at this luxurious bed-and-breakfast.
Hardy was modest. “I’m a virtual treasure trove of surprises.”
“What made you think of this? What about the trial?”
The 13th Juror Page 26
