Silenced Witness

by Larry A Winters

  “Can you think of anyone else we should be talking to?” Graham said. “Anyone else who might be able to provide helpful information?”

  “Not really. Sorry.”

  The three of them talked for a few more minutes, but Graham mentally checked out, sure they were not going to get anything useful from this man. She waited for a pause in the conversation, then rose from the couch. “Thank you for your time, Mr. Raney.”

  Outside, walking back to the car, Graham said, “He saw or heard something that night.”

  Novak nodded. “Good luck getting him to admit it. And even if you could, imagine him on the witness stand? Hunched over and squinting at the jury? The defense attorneys would make him look like a senile fool.”

  Graham nodded, conceding that this prediction was probably accurate. “He did tell us something interesting, though.”

  “The part about me being a spring chicken?”

  Graham smiled. “That, too. But I was specifically thinking about what he said about Edley being a ladies’ man.”

  “I’m not sure that’s helpful to us,” Novak said. “Sounds more like it helps the other side by providing a convenient list of potential alternate killers. All those angry husbands and boyfriends with just as much motive.”

  “Maxine told us that on the night her husband taunted her with the details of the murder, he told her that she meant nothing to Edley. That it had only been sex. It sounds like maybe that was true.”

  “This case just gets more cheerful every day,” Novak said.

  They were a few feet from the car when they heard Raney’s front door open. They turned. The old man came out of his row house. “I thought of something.”

  “We’d love to hear it,” Graham said.

  “You asked me if there was anyone else you should talk to. There’s a woman who lives across the street. Linnet Tiller.” Raney pointed to the row house directly across the street from Edley’s. “Nosy old lady, always watching the street. I wouldn’t be surprised if she saw something that night.”

  Graham looked at the house. The uniformed cops had visited Ms. Tiller during their neighborhood canvas and had learned nothing from her. Still, it couldn’t hurt to double-check. “Thank you, Mr. Raney.”

  The old man nodded. “Good luck.”

  Graham and Novak crossed the street and rang the doorbell. A plump, middle-aged woman opened the door.

  “Linnet Tiller?” Graham said.

  “No, I’m her caregiver. Angelica Witherell.”

  Graham showed her badge. “We’d like to speak to her.”

  Witherell led them into the house. “She’s in the kitchen. Follow me.” They found Linnet Tiller sitting at her kitchen table, cradling a cup of tea in her gnarled hands and blowing on the steam. Another senior citizen, even older-looking than Raney.

  “Linnet, these people are the police,” Witherell said. “They want to ask you some questions.”

  “Of course!” Tiller smiled at them. She wore dentures, which seemed overly large and bright in her mouth. “What would you like to know about?”

  Graham and Novak sat down at the table. “I assume you heard that your neighbor across the street was murdered,” Graham said. “Kent Edley.”

  “Oh yes. Just terrible, isn’t it? Just terrible.”

  “You live directly across the street. We’re wondering if you saw or heard anything that night.”

  “I’m sorry, Detective. I was already asleep when that poor man was killed.”

  Graham nodded with resignation. “So you didn’t see or hear anything.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Thank you for your time.” Graham started to get up.

  “Detectives, wait.” Angelica Witherell looked at them, seeming to hesitate. “I think I might have seen something.”

  Graham and Novak sat back down. “What did you see?” Graham asked.

  “I was at the sink, washing some dishes, and I saw something through the kitchen window. I guess the motion caught my eye. There was a man, kind of jogging to the front door of the house across the street. Normally, I wouldn’t think anything of it, but it seemed odd given the time.”

  “It was late at night?” Novak said.

  “Not that late. Maybe 9:15 PM. But Mr. Edley doesn’t usually get visitors at that hour. Not male ones anyway.” She looked away quickly as if embarrassed.

  “Did Mr. Edley receive a lot of female visitors?” Graham said.

  The caregiver smiled sheepishly. “I’m not gossipy or anything. I respect people’s privacy. But, you know, Linnet sleeps a lot. It gets kind of dull sometimes. So, I can’t help noticing things the neighbors do. One thing I noticed was Mr. Edley getting a lot of female attention.”

  “He was a ladies’ man,” Graham said.

  “Exactly. And no wonder. He’s one handsome devil. Or, I guess, he was.”

  “Did you ever see Mr. Edley with Maxine Hazenberg? The woman they’ve been showing on TV?”

  “You mean the wife of the man that killed him. Allegedly, as the newspapers say. Yeah, I saw her plenty of times.”

  “Let’s talk about the man you saw on the night of the murder,” Graham said. “You say he caught your attention because of the late hour. What was he doing exactly?”

  “He knocked on the door. Mr. Edley opened it. I could see Mr. Edley was surprised. Looked like he was going to shut the door in the man’s face. But the visitor kind of pushed his way inside. Then the door closed. That’s all I saw.”

  Graham and Novak exchanged a glance. “Do you remember approximately what time you saw this happen?”

  “9:15 PM. I remember glancing at the clock because Linnet was already in bed and I was getting ready to leave. I usually leave around 9:30.”

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Novak said. “Wasn’t it dark? How could you see Mr. Edley’s expression?”

  Witherell looked at Novak. “When Mr. Edley opened his door, light came out. He must have had a lot of lights on inside his house. Enough to light up his face and the other man’s too.”

  “So you saw the other man?” Graham said. She felt her heart start pounding. “Do you remember what he looked like? Can you describe him?”

  “I know what you’re going to ask me next,” Witherell said, “and the answer is yes. It was that man they’re showing on the news. Oscar Hazenberg.”

  17

  Smart, but stupid.

  Leary sat at his desk in the DA’s office and watched the video play on his monitor. The video had been captured by a security camera mounted under the eaves of a convenience store roof. The store was located on a corner that was just a brisk walk from Kent Edley’s row house. And there he was, walking into the frame and walking out of the frame. Oscar Hazenberg.

  After so many years in law enforcement, Leary should have been used to this type of thing. But it still amazed him.

  The man had been so careful not to leave evidence inside his victim’s house. He’d worn gloves. Probably some kind of covering over his shoes as well. Apparently, he’d taken a shower and changed his clothes. Yet he’d failed to consider that where he had parked his car—several blocks from his victim’s house—required him to walk past the convenience store, and to pass right through the field of view of the camera.

  Hazenberg had passed the camera once, on his way to Edley’s house, and later, after leaving, he’d passed it again, wearing different clothes. The two video timestamps matched up with the estimated time of the murder.

  A smart guy by all accounts, but also incredibly stupid.

  Hazenberg could have avoided the camera just by walking on the other side of the street.

  Leary shook his head. He watched the video again. Maybe Hazenberg had been relying on the darkness to mask him. But despite the fact that it was night, there was enough ambient light to create a clear view of the street. There he was, striding toward his destination with a determined, single-minded look on his face.

  Leary shouldn’t have been surprised.
There were so many factors involved in committing a crime that even the smartest criminals tended to slip up in some respect, minor or major. A fingerprint here, a hair follicle there. Wearing your favorite pair of designer sneakers even though the rest of you is masked and disguised. Solving crimes required solid police work, no doubt, but the truth was that a lot of criminals captured themselves by making mistakes and leaving clues that an observant investigator could pick up.

  In this age of video surveillance, getting inadvertently caught on camera was an increasingly common mistake.

  Sometimes, just showing a video to a jury so the jurors could see the defendant’s face could persuade them of his guilt. But just as often, a jury would disregard such evidence. Juries were hard to predict. And one problem with this video was that the convenience store was several blocks away from Kent Edley’s house. Jessie could ask the jury to infer that footage of Hazenberg passing the convenience store on his way to and from a location close to the crime scene suggested he had gone to the house and committed the crime, but that still required the jurors to make an inference. A good defense attorney would turn that into reasonable doubt.

  Leary knew Hal and Kristina Nolan would do their best to make this evidence seem irrelevant. Hazenberg took a walk, they would say. He’s in good shape and likes to exercise. And the convenience store wasn’t far from his own home. The video means nothing.

  He hoped Graham and Novak were digging up something more concrete, because the video alone was not going to convict Hazenberg. They needed evidence tying Hazenberg directly to the crime scene.

  Something like a bloody glove.

  He pushed the thought from his mind. What was done was done, and there was no sense fretting about it now. Novak’s screw-up could only be fixed by replacing the tainted evidence with other evidence just as good.

  Leary looked at the police report accompanying the video footage. The officers who had recovered the recording had also searched the area for other video sources—traffic cameras, home security systems, other stores. They had not found any. The convenience store video was all they had.

  Leary’s next stop was the crime lab. Gary Danziger, one of the CSU investigators working the case, met him at the lab’s entrance and shook his hand. Leary knew Danziger from back in the days when he’d been a homicide detective with the PPD. Danziger was a good investigator, thorough and inquisitive. He rarely missed a detail. He was also great on the witness stand and had helped the DA’s office convict many killers.

  “Mark Leary,” Danziger said. His mouth widened in a big smile. “How is the DA’s office treating you? Is it the dream job people say? The place good detectives go to enjoy the easy life?”

  “Sometimes,” Leary said. “But other times, it can get pretty stressful.”

  Danziger nodded. “I’m guessing now is one of those times.”

  “I’m hoping you can help with that,” Leary said.

  “Don’t get your hopes up too high.”

  Leary did not like the sound of that. “The results from your tests aren’t encouraging?”

  Danziger gestured for Leary to follow him deeper into the lab. “Well, you probably heard by now that the glove Novak found returned a positive on the victim’s DNA and your suspect’s. The blood matched Edley’s DNA and the hair found inside the glove was a match to Hazenberg. But from what I’m hearing, you won’t be able to use the glove at trial.”

  “We’re working on that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There were no other hairs?” Leary said. “Maybe on the victim’s body at the scene? If Hazenberg dropped one hair follicle, chances are he dropped several, right?”

  Danziger shook his head. “Hazenberg didn’t drop the hair. It was found inside the glove. My theory is that while he was perpetrating the act, his hand rubbed against the inside of the glove, and the material of the glove pulled one of the hairs on his hand out of the skin. We did not find any other hairs at the crime scene that matched Hazenberg’s DNA.”

  Something about the way Danziger emphasized Hazenberg’s name made him pause. “Are you saying you found other people’s hairs?”

  “Well, sure. There were hairs in the room. That’s not unusual. Hairs always collect in a house, even one that is cleaned frequently. We even found other hairs on the victim’s body. But they didn’t match your guy.”

  “You didn’t find anything else at the scene that might be helpful?”

  “I’m afraid not. Too bad about the glove. Novak’s usually so careful around evidence, too.” Danziger shook his head.

  Smart, but stupid. It applied to cops as well as criminals. Novak was a good detective. Hell, he’d been observant enough to find the glove in the first place. In a sewer grate several houses away from the crime scene, no less, and at night in the dark. But he had also been stupid enough to forget about the glove and fail to follow procedure. He had broken a link in the chain of custody that would likely compel the judge to exclude the glove from trial.

  Leary’s next stop was the morgue. He tried to ignore the sharp, chemical odors as he entered the chilly room. Omar Mandalia, an assistant ME working the case, crossed the tiled floor to meet him. They walked together to a stainless steel table.

  A sheet covered Kent Edley’s body. Mandalia seemed hesitatant to uncover it. “This is a bad one, Mark.”

  “Just do it.”

  “Your call.” Mandalia took hold of the sheet and yanked it back. Leary recoiled. Edley’s body was a ruin of slashes and stab wounds. And that was just from the waist up. The real ugliness was below that, where a jagged gash was all that remained after the violent removal of his genitals.

  Leary forced himself to look, then wheeled away when a column of vomit surged up his throat. He swallowed it down and wiped his mouth. “Shit.”

  “Told you,” Mandalia said. “I’ll cover him back up—”

  “No.” Leary forced himself to look again.

  “He was alive through the whole thing,” Mandalia said. “Screamed so hard he damaged his vocal cords.”

  Leary nodded. He had seen that in the autopsy report.

  “Eventually, he bled out,” Mandalia said. “That was the cause of death. You lose that much blood that fast….” His voice trailed off.

  “I need to make sure this killer goes to prison.”

  Mandalia nodded. “Obviously. This guy is as sick as they come.”

  “Then help me, Omar. Tell me something the DA can use at trial.”

  Mandalia gave Leary a dubious look. “There isn’t anything I didn’t include in the autopsy report. The attack was almost certainly committed by a man—a reasonably strong one. That might help a little. The manner of attack obviously suggests a crime of passion. You don’t usually hack off a man’s penis and testicles unless it’s personal. So, that ties into the wife cheating with the victim.”

  “None of that is going to win us the case.”

  Mandalia’s gaze shifted out of focus as he seemed to think. “The murder weapon was probably a large knife with a serrated blade. Like a knife a hunter would use to cut up a kill. Did you find anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. Always a harder case for the DA when you don’t have the murder weapon.”

  They had hoped to find the murder weapon in the sewer where Hazenberg had ditched the glove. But it wasn’t there. The second glove wasn’t there either. Their theory was that Hazenberg had disposed of each object in a separate place—the right glove in the sewer, the left glove somewhere else, the bloody clothing in a third location, the murder weapon in a fourth—and somewhere, of course, the missing body parts. Leary didn’t want to imagine that.

  “At this point, our hopes of locating anything Hazenberg got rid of are low. That’s why I’m here. Is there anything else you found examining this body that could possibly help us?”

  Mandalia sighed. “On this slab? No.”

  18

  Jessie sat up straighter in her chair and the muscles
in her back flared. How long had she been hunched forward at her desk, staring at her screen? She sighed and grabbed her cup of coffee. She could tell by the absence of warmth through the cardboard that it had gone room-temperature. Yuck. She could drink coffee hot or iced, but room-temperature coffee? She pushed it aside.

  On her computer screen were the results of her most recent Lexis search of legal decisions in Pennsylvania dealing with chain of custody evidentiary disputes in criminal cases. She’d always had a knack for legal research, starting in law school when she had found the process—while not exactly enjoyable—not entirely unpleasant, either. Her skills had served her well throughout her career, but were proving less useful today. It wasn’t that she hadn’t found a plethora of cases that were recent and on-point. She had. The problem was they all went against her.

  She could see the glove in her mind—a piece of physical evidence virtually guaranteed to persuade a jury of Hazenberg’s guilt. But she couldn’t find strong case law in support of an argument to bring the glove to trial.

  Take a break, she told herself. Sometimes it was when she let a problem go that the answer came to her. Think about something else for a while.

  She switched browser tabs and reviewed her research on spousal privilege. Unfortunately, this research had not gone much better. The fact was, while she could make reasonable arguments for the inclusion of the glove and the confession, the defense could make stronger ones. The law was on their side, not hers.

  A knock at her door roused her from her thoughts. “Come in.”

  Emily Graham stepped into her office. She held a white cardboard cup in each hand. Steam rose from the lids.

  “You’re a lifesaver.” Jessie reached for one of the cups.