An Absence of Principal (22 page)

He began to shake. He looked away.

“I’ll be right back. Need to get a bottle of water out in the car,” he mumbled.

Angela and Stein looked at each other.

“I’m worried about him, Angela,” their old friend said. “I’m afraid he’s not strong enough right now to bounce back from this. He doesn’t need to be alone. He’s too fragile.”

She agreed with Stein. The two jumped up and headed to the door at the sound of spinning tires. Ben was gone. And neither of them knew where he was headed or if he would be back.

Midkiff sat back down at the prosecution table and scribbled on a yellow legal pad, taking so much time that he paused to ask for the court’s indulgence while he caught up on a few of his thoughts.

“Now, Mr. Nail, it’s interesting that your gun would turn up stolen before Mr. Walker’s murder,” he finally said. “And it’s interesting that you have suddenly become comfortable without the presence of a gun because of your faith in God, which is admirable, don’t get me wrong,” Midkiff began.

“Mr. Nail, were you aware that ballistics reports have shown the bullet that killed Mr. Walker was fired from a Remington .44-caliber handgun just like yours?”

Nail looked at Trask.

“I did know that, yes.”

“And did you know that the gun also contains fingerprints on it that belong to you?”

“I did know that, yes.”

“So, you want us to believe that the gun was stolen and subsequently used by someone unknown to you to kill a man that you knew?” Midkiff asked. “And of course you want us to believe that the fingerprints that are on the gun were there prior to it being stolen? And, of course, you maintain you had nothing to do with the murder of Junior Walker simply because you say your gun was stolen?”

“Objection, your honor. Mr. Midkiff is insinuating that my client has been untruthful and seems to be calling him a murderer,” Trask said. “It has been established by the police department that the gun used to kill Mr. Walker was in fact stolen. Can the court please ask Mr. Midkiff to allow my client to answer some of these questions instead of wasting our time by making us sit here and listen to Mr. Midkiff both ask and answer his questions?”

“And you did say that was an objection, Mr. Trask?” Judge Halfmann asked. “I’m sorry, I forgot. It was a ways back in your rather lengthy statement.”

“Objection to Mr. Midkiff’s line of questioning, yes, your honor,” Trask said.

“Mr. Midkiff, let’s move on, shall we? It’s been established that MPD reported the gun stolen. I’m good with that. Jury is asked to disregard the prosecutor’s last remarks.”

Nail sat patiently while the lawyers argued back and forth, and the judge ruled. His air of confidence was apparent and the jury could not help but notice, if they even bothered to look at him.

“I’m done with this witness,” Midkiff said.

“May I redirect?” Trask asked Judge Halfmann.

“Tony, you said earlier that you had shot a gun numerous times in your lifetime and felt comfortable doing so, is that correct?”

“Yes, sir,” Nail said.

“Is it possible for you to say how many times you have fired a handgun, Tony?”

“Probably not,” he said, smiling faintly. “After my mother’s attack, my daddy would take me and my brother and sister to the firing range every weekend. He did that for about a year, until he was confident that we were all well-versed in how a gun worked, and that we knew how to use it to the best of our ability and with a complete absence of error in our handling of the weapon.”

“That’s some pretty exact language there, Tony,” Trask noted.

“If you heard your dad repeat the same thing every week for a year, how he used to say, ‘We’re going to do this until I am confident that you are well-versed in how guns work and, until I am confident you can use them to the best of your ability and with a complete absence of errors, you’d probably remember it, too, Mr. Trask.”

“I suppose I would, yes,” he said.

“Let me ask you one or two more questions, Tony. How many practice rounds would you get off every weekend at the firing range during that year?” Trask asked.

“Sometimes fifty. Sometimes a hundred. Depended on the kind of time and money Daddy had that week,” Nail said.

“So based on a minimum of fifty rounds every week for fifty-two weeks, at minimum you fired off twenty-five hundred to three-thousand rounds?”

“Easy,” Nail said.

“You remember what your mean score was in terms of hitting the target?”

“Sure, I’ll never forget that,” Nail said. “After I became comfortable with how a gun worked and how it felt, about two months into the practice sessions we had, I scored 90 percent at or inside the inner target ring.”

“The inner ring being the white ring that surrounds the red bullseye?”

“Yes, sir,” Nail said.

“Pretty steady hand, sounds like,” Trask said.

“My instructor said he had never seen that percentage from a newcomer before,” Nail said.

“No, I suppose he hadn’t. Very good, Tony, thank you.”

Trask paused and looked at his notes as Nail made his way back to the defense table. Trask leaned over and whispered something in Nail’s ear. Nail showed a hint of a smile and it was clear Trask was happy with the way his questioning had gone.

“Your honor, I’d like to call Robert Simms to the stand, please,” Trask said.

Simms was Texas’ most renowned ballistics expert, and Trask no doubt spent the highest dollar to bring him to Midland to help his friend. After twenty years in law enforcement, Simms was able to now make his living simply by flying throughout Texas and the Southwest testifying at high-profile and occasionally not-so-high-profile trials.

“Mr. Simms, can you tell the court what you do for a living?” Trask asked him.

“I’m an independent ballistics consultant, based in Dallas,” Simms said.

“What exactly does an independent ballistics consultant do, Mr. Simms?”

“Basically what I’m doing here today,” Simms said. He was in his 50s and had seen more than most cops, having worked the barrios in East Dallas for his entire career. He spent 19 of his 25 years in a patrol car dealing with the toughest gangs and baddest dudes Dallas had to offer. Simms came from a mixed marriage; his mother was an immigrant from Mexico and so when he rolled up on the scene of the crime, he might have been a cop, but he also didn’t look out of place in East Dallas. He spoke fluent Spanish, and when he went undercover after 19 years, he grew his hair long and didn’t shave for six months, inked an Eastside barrio tattoo on his neck, changed out of his patrol uniform into a pair of ratty blue jeans and a wife beater pullover, and he fit right in. After three years of living and working in the East Dallas streets as “one of them,” Simms was able to parlay his information into one of the most historic drug arrests in Dallas history.

When his undercover work was done, Simms slipped back into respectability mode in a sort of mini witness protection program. The suits at Dallas PD transferred him into ballistics, a subject about which he knew quite little at the time. But Simms’ sharp intellect and his uncanny knack to retain everything he ever read quickly moved him to the top of the department. For the last five years of his DPD career, he improved the department at lightning speed and transformed it into the top performing ballistics unit in the region. When Simms decided he was tired of working for the man, as he liked to call it, he went out on his own, becoming a sort of witness for hire. He was paid handsomely and testifying at even just one trial a month or every two months was all he needed to maintain his upscale lifestyle in a stylish North Dallas home.

“You testify on matters pertaining to bullets, their caliber, the kinds of gun used, things like that, correct?” Trask asked.

“That is correct, sir,” Simms said.

“And you have studied the evidence in the case against my client?” Trask asked.

“I have,” he said.

“What conclusions have you drawn about the entry wound that ultimately proved fatal to Junior Walker?” Trask asked. He looked at Midkiff and found him chomping on the end of his pen nervously, fairly certain of what was about to go down.

“The shot that killed Junior Walker came at close range. It tore through his heart at an angle from the lower left quadrant to the upper right quadrant, and it appeared to have a trajectory that was unsteady.”

“Unsteady?”

“Yes. A magnetic resonance image of the mortally wounded organ showed the bullet’s path was inconsistent, almost jerky or unsteady.”

“And, putting that in layman’s terms, it would then mean what?”

“The gun was likely fired by someone with an unsteady hand.”

“How are you able to determine that?”

“Many things lead us to that sort of conclusion, first of all the path of the bullet being not straight on. As I mentioned, it was a sort of diagonal, entering low left and exiting upper right. That’s the first indication.”

“What does such a trajectory and unsteady path indicate to you about the shooter?” Trask asked.

“The first thing we are told by the ballistics report is that whoever the shooter was likely had a poor grip on the gun.”

“What kind of a poor grip?” Trask asked.

“The shooter likely did not have a firm grasp on the weapon,” Simms said.

“And, Mr. Simms, what kind of person, in your experience, are you likely to find that demonstrates such a poor grip on a weapon like the one in Junior Walker’s murder?”

“Nine times out of ten, Mr. Trask, such a messy wound and sloppy bullet trajectory comes from a bullet fired from a gun held by a person who has rarely, if ever, fired a weapon.”

Midkiff appeared unmoved at Simms’ expert opinion. He had his head buried in paperwork, as if to suggest to the jury that what was transpiring here was really not important. But Midkiff was listening. He was listening very well.

Trask looked at Midkiff and saw the poker face he knew so well. Juries were rarely able to get a read on the lawyer who had been an assistant D.A. in Midland for 17 years, a lifetime to be in one US Attorney’s office.

Trask passed the witness, and Midkiff was quick to pick up on the opportunity to run a few expert questions by Robert Simms.

“Nine times out of ten. Pretty good odds,” Midkiff noted. “Let’s play devil’s advocate. Say your numbers are accurate. That one time out of ten, what are the reasons that one person out of ten is unable to grasp a gun firmly during a kill shot?”

“Any number of reasons, sir. Mostly impaired judgment. Sometimes lack of motor skills, even emotional instability,” Simms said.

“Do your reports show you which one of the maladies Junior Walker’s shooter was suffering from?”

“No, sir, but as I say, — “

“Thank you, Mr. Simms, that’ll be all.”

Trask rose quickly and recalled Tony Nail to the stand. He had been writing notes furiously during Simms’ cross. Trask, who often wore his emotions on his sleeve during his trials, was looking fairly confident as he approached his client.

“Tony, have you ever had an emotional breakdown?” Trask asked.

“No, sir.”

“Ever have a problem with your motor skills? Any sort of loss of control over your arm or finger or hand movements?” Trask asked.

“No, sir.”

“When is the last time a substance, legal or illegal, ever served to impair your judgment because of abuse?”

“I had a run with cocaine about 10 years ago. Only time I’ve ever used drugs or alcohol,” Nail said.

“And tell the court one more time how many times you guesstimate that you shot a gun during that year your father trained you and your brother and sister at the firing range following your mother’s attack?”

“By your estimation, thousands,” Nail said.

“As many as two-thousand or three thousand practice rounds, as I think we discussed,” Trask noted.

“Easily that amount, yes, sir,” Nail confirmed.

“Nothing further, your honor,” Trask said.

Eight hours after Ben bolted out of Fredericksburg, there was a knock on the front door of Velma Doggett’s in Tulsa. It was five in the morning and Velma was up brewing her first pot of coffee of the day, a fifty-three year routine in which she had been thoroughly entrenched since Ben’s father, Gavin, had had the habit of rolling out of bed before the sun came up.