By Blood Written (38 page)

Collier gazed at the jury for a few last moments. “Thank you,” he said quietly, then turned and sat down at the prosecutor’s table.

“Mr. Talmadge, are you prepared to deliver your opening statement at this time?” Forsythe asked.

Talmadge stood. “Your Honor, we’re going to defer our opening statement until the state has concluded its case.”

“Very well,” Forsythe intoned. “General Collier, call your first witness.”

CHAPTER 31
?

Monday afternoon, Nashville

Of all the things that had amazed her over the past year—

from falling in love with Michael to seeing him become a major literary celebrity to watching the world explode around them as these insane charges went on and on—perhaps the most astonishing of all was the clinical detachment with which the morning had gone by.

For three hours nonstop, from the district attorney’s opening statement until the judge declared a lunch break at twelve-thirty, witness after witness took the stand and related a series of events that should have horrified and repulsed everyone beyond description. Instead, the professional voices spoke quietly; the lawyers intoned with leaden heaviness; the jury watched attentively throughout most of the morning, with only a few eyes glazing over.

It was all Taylor could do to keep still. She wanted to scream, to jump up and yell: “Have you all lost your minds?
Look at him! He’s normal, like you and me! You
and me …”

Her eyes burned from lack of sleep. She felt frustrated, desperate. Her skin crawled with invisible insects under her clothes, in her hair. She fought to keep still.

And the voices went on and on. The first police officer on the scene described the grisly scene in the detached, un-emotional way he’d been taught in his report-writing classes at the academy. The first investigators on scene described how they cordoned everything off and began following accepted standard procedure—always accepted standard procedure—in their evidence collection, the samples, the bags, the labels, the sign-offs from one person to the next. The forensic examiner described the procedures for making a preliminary determination of cause of death, the estimates of time of death.

Explanations of algor mortis, rigor mortis, livor mortis …

the singsong litany of death’s sweet terms and verses. The clinical analysis and deconstruction of life gone from a mass of rotting tissue, the light gone, energy dissipated into the universe.

Taylor wanted to scream.

The hardest parts were the photographs. Somehow, detachment was easier to maintain when it was all just words.

But the pictures, the blowups of the mutilated bodies, paraded in front of the jury—then and then alone did Taylor see a visceral reaction from the jury. Heads turned away, faces screwed up in winces …

A woman sobbed.

They took lunch at the City Club on Fourth Avenue, an exclusive, members-only club where Talmadge had a standing reservation five days a week. The two younger attorneys had rushed back to the office to research a couple of issues and to report back to the consultants who would soon be testifying for the defense. If they were lucky, they would grab a quick sandwich and a soda somewhere as Talmadge, his daughter Carey, Michael, and Taylor sat around a corner table with a gorgeous view of the city from twenty floors up.

White-coated waiters brought them tall glasses of iced tea and expensive gourmet food Taylor couldn’t bear to touch.

They talked little, the silence between them awkward, heavy. Talmadge described a little of the history of Nashville, of its incredible growth over the last twenty-five years from what had even in the seventies still felt like a small town to the churning, multicultural megalopolis it had become. Nashville had become a mini-Atlanta, Talmadge complained, as his daughter grinned at him, patronizing the old man.

Taylor stared at Michael, who seemed to be taking this all in stoically. Taylor estimated he’d said barely ten words all day. As they left the courthouse, through a gauntlet of television cameras, he’d not even taken her hand. He seemed off in his own world, shut down and removed from anyone or anything else.

Finally, Taylor couldn’t take it any longer. “Wes,” she said, interrupting a monologue about his long involvement in the movement to bring professional football to Nashville.

“Where are we?”

“What?” Talmadge asked, confused.

“I mean,” Taylor said, leaning forward over her plate,

“where are we in this whole process? How did this morning go? I’m not an attorney. I’ve never done this before. How is it going? How bad does this all look?”

Michael turned to her, his face a blank mask.

Talmadge cleared his throat, then settled back in his chair.

“Okay, this is how I read it. The initial part of a trial like this is always difficult. You see the crime scene, how awful it is. The evidence is gruesome, the pictures even more so.

But this is the time when you have to keep your emotions in check. Yes, we’re human. Yes, we can’t help but react to this kind of horror. But we also have to keep our wits about us, our intellect intact. And looking at this from a legal point of view, an intellectual point of view, all they’ve done so far is prove that a crime was committed. They have presented no evidence that can tie Michael directly to any of this.”

Taylor felt the tightness in her chest loosen just a bit, and she let out a long breath. “Okay, then it’s not as bad as it looks.”

“Of course not,” Talmadge replied. Carey reached out and took Taylor’s hand in hers.

“It’s going to be fine,” she said. “You’re doing great. Just hang in there.”

Taylor squeezed Carey’s hand back, grateful for the touch, then turned to Michael. “You’re so quiet,” she said. “Isn’t there anything you want to say?”

Michael’s eyelids seemed heavy as he stared at her. “What can I say?” he asked after a moment. “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. There’s nothing we can do about it now except endure it.”

He looked back down at his plate, staring at it as if it were some object from another planet that had landed on the table in front of him.

“Michael, are you okay?” Taylor asked quietly. “Do we need to get you something?”

“Like what?” he answered, not taking his eyes off his plate.

“Like I’ve been on antidepressants for six months. Maybe it’s time you thought about it.”

He jerked his head up and glared at her. “No,” he said firmly. “Never.”

Taylor shrugged, looked away.

Talmadge and his daughter looked on, uncomfortable.

A hotel desk clerk testified that Michael had checked into a Hampton Inn the afternoon of his book signing. Around five, he left the hotel and returned by nine, then had gone back out around ten-thirty. No one saw him return.

A clerk at the airport branch of a rental car agency testified Michael rented a car on Friday afternoon and returned it by eleven-thirty A.M. Saturday. He’d put forty-three miles on the odometer.

The manager from the Davis-Kidd bookstore established that Michael had indeed been in Nashville that Friday night in February and had signed books before a large and enthu-siastic crowd.

Two more witnesses followed, all establishing facts of the case that were essentially self-evident. By three-thirty that afternoon, Taylor was struggling to keep her eyes open. She looked over and scanned the jury. Their eyes were beginning to wander as well. One man was scribbling something on a notepad. Another woman’s head bobbed up and down on her shoulders as she fought to stay awake.

“You have to understand,” Talmadge had said to them weeks earlier when they were in town for a conference, “a criminal trial is basically an eye-glazer. It’s like being a life-guard; long stretches of tedium and boredom punctuated by moments of complete terror.”

This
, Taylor thought, as the afternoon wore on,
this is the
tedious, boring part
.
Enjoy it.

Hank Powell sat in the back of the courtroom as the testimony droned on all afternoon. Trying a homicide case was anything, he knew, but drama. It was tedious, dreary work, almost as dreary and tedious as investigating a homicide case.

But Hank wasn’t bored. He was worried. He was worried because he knew the case against Michael Schiftmann was essentially circumstantial and weak. The DNA tests had come back from the lab inconclusive. Michael’s DNA matched none of the samples left behind at the crime scene or on the bloodied clothes, or even in the trunk of the rental car.

The case was made even weaker by the fact that the jury would never hear the truth about Michael Schiftmann, the truth that the two girls murdered in Nashville were only the latest in a long string of murders that had taken place over the last five years. Collier had fought like hell to get the testimony of the old lady, the retired schoolteacher who’d figured all this out in the first place, admitted. But of course, he hadn’t. Then when Collier tried to get the judge to allow Maria Chavez on the stand to testify how she’d tied all this together, Schiftmann’s lawyers had thrown a conniption.

It had been a long shot, Powell knew. No judge would let a homicide investigator or anyone else on the stand offer as proof to one crime a supposition that others similar to it had been committed by the same person. He’d have to be convicted of the other crimes before that could be brought in, and even then, only in the sentencing phase.

But without that supposition, the evidence against Schiftmann—what there was of it—somehow looked weaker.

Not that it was hopeless, Hank thought. When the jury saw the chain of evidence that conclusively and inextricably linked Michael Schiftmann’s rental car to the Exotica Tans murder scene, then the defense would have to do some serious shucking and jiving to get out of that.

Hank was relieved when Judge Forsythe called a halt to the trial at five-thirty that afternoon, with the prosecution’s case probably half complete. The trial moved more quickly than anyone expected because the defense offered, in most cases, only a perfunctory cross-examination. Since nothing that detrimental to the defense had been presented yet, there seemed little point.

Hank had taken a room in the Doubletree Hotel on Fourth Avenue, just a few blocks from the courthouse. He’d decided that morning to leave his rental car and walk rather than struggle for parking. As he walked out of the courtroom, through the crowd of spectators and news crews, he felt like he was walking through a madhouse. The January sun had almost completely set, throwing a sulfurous orange glow over the western horizon that melded into the lowlying scud that filled the rest of the sky.

The air was cold, with a bite to it. Powell ducked his head, pulled his overcoat tightly around him, and worked his way through the crowd toward the sidewalk, grateful that no one would ever recognize him.

Back at the hotel, he loosened his tie, threw his jacket across the back of the sofa, and went down the hall to the ice machine. He came back and turned on the local news as he scooped up a glassful of ice. The NBC affiliate station was doing a live remote from the steps of the courthouse, with the young woman reporter with the long black hair and the fashionable red glasses speaking directly into the camera. Hank remembered her sitting in the courtroom a few rows up from him. He raised the volume on the television, then opened the hotel minibar, and pulled out a tiny bottle of vodka.

“The prosecution opened today,” the young woman began, “with a series of witnesses who described in graphic and often hard-to-watch detail the murder scene at Exotica Tans on Church Street last February.”

The station cut to the news film of that night as the reporter continued in voice-over. “Nineteen-year-old Sarah Denise Burnham and twenty-two-year old Allison May Matthews were working that Friday night …”

Hank found himself not wanting to hear it all again. He muted the television, then opened the three-inch-high mini-bottle and poured the vodka over a tumbler of ice. He sat down in an overstuffed chair, took a long sip of the drink, and glanced at his watch—six-fifteen in Nashville, an hour later in upstate Vermont. Dinner should be over by now at the Butler School.

He picked up the phone, dialed a 1-800 number, then his calling card number, then a series of ten more numbers.

God
, he thought,
how do I remember all of it?

Then his daughter, Jackie, answered, and he knew how he could keep all those numbers in his head. They were the numbers that got him to this voice.

“Hello?”

“Hi, baby.”

“Daddy!” she said, excited. “How are you?”

“Fine, I’m in Nashville. Got in last night.”

“Oh,” she said, her voice becoming more serious, “you’re at that trial. That murder trial. We saw a report today on CNN.”

“Yeah, it’s kind of a zoo.”

“So how is it?”

“It’s interesting. Sort of getting off to a slow start, but I think it’ll speed up.”

“Dads,” Jackie said, “I thought you weren’t going to go. I thought the guys in the front office didn’t want you to.”

“What gave you that idea?” Hank caught his image in the mirror across the room. He looked tired, he thought. And he missed Jackie. She’d only been back in school a week after Christmas vacation, and already he missed the hell out of her. It was going to be a long semester.

“I heard you talking in your office that day. You were talking to somebody on the phone. You sounded upset, like the guys upstairs were really giving you a hard time on this.”

“Okay, pumpkin,” he said after a moment. “You caught me. They didn’t want me to go. I’m not testifying. I’m not an active investigator in this case. I’ve just acted in an advisory capacity on this, so my supervisor didn’t think there was any point in my being here.”

“So how’d you get there?” Jackie demanded.

“I took some personal time, vacation. I had it coming.

And I’m footing the bill myself, although the hotel did give me the government discount.”

“Daddy!” she said, exasperated. “I worry about you. Over the holidays, you looked exhausted the whole time.”