Denton - 03 - Way Past Dead (14 page)

“What’s going on?” Ray asked.

“Slim’s downstairs in a holding cell. They’ve gone to get him.”

The noise level rose in the courtroom as Roger Vaden moved behind the defense table and people picked up
on what was happening. People jockeyed for position while others skipped out for smoke or bathroom breaks. Some even took the opportunity to do a little schmoozing and backslapping.

Since no judge in the entire history of jurisprudence has ever kept a five-minute recess to five minutes, we stood there another quarter hour. Finally, as my thighs were about to go completely numb, the judge entered the courtroom and gaveled everything to order. A couple of minutes of preliminary tap dancing went on, and then the marshals escorted Slim into the courtroom.

My psyche took a header right into the toilet. Jeez, I felt miserable for the guy. The orange jumpsuit was about two sizes too large, which gave him the appearance of having shrunk since I’d last seen him. His cheeks were hollow, and great purplish bags hung under his eyes. I doubted he’d slept much; anyone who’s ever been on the inside of a jail knows they’re not conducive to a good night’s sleep. I imagine the chow didn’t set too well with him either. But mostly he had that thousand-yard stare that most people get when they encounter the criminal justice system for the first time. There’s nothing that can prepare a person for the experience of incarceration. No other human experience is like it, at least not the first time.

I’d never experienced it directly, but I’d met enough people who did. And I knew enough about prison to know it was no place for a sensitive-songwriter type, especially when he was good-looking and well built.

Slim and Roger stood before the judge as the charges were read one last time.

“I want you to understand, sir, that this is not a trial,” the judge intoned for the television reporters. He hadn’t done this for the other prisoners, but for this case, he was—well, I think the word is
posturing
.

“This is only a preliminary hearing. We are not trying this case right now. The purpose of this hearing is to determine whether there is enough evidence to bind this
case over to the grand jury for indictment. The prosecution will not even make a complete case against you, and you are in no way required to defend yourself unless you so choose. Now, are you the attorney of record, Mr. Vaden?”

“No, Your Honor, I’m not,” Roger said, with just a tremor of fear in his voice. “I am here as attorney solely for these proceedings, with the court’s permission. Mr. Gibson has not had time to engage criminal counsel.”

“Any objections from the state?”

“None, Your Honor,” the woman assistant DA stood and said.

“Very well, then, let’s get on with it. Call your first witness.”

“The state calls E. D. Fouch of the Metro Nashville Police Department,” she said.

Fouch entered the courtroom from the far right while a court officer held the door for him. I’d run into Fouch quite a few times over the years; he had about twenty-two in and was eligible for retirement. Like a lot of people these days, though, he and his wife were raising their own grandkids and couldn’t afford to quit working. He was a steady, plodding kind of cop. Not brilliant, but a guy who’d stay on your ass until hell froze over if he thought you were guilty. Knowing Fouch had been assigned the case made me even less inclined to envy Slim.

He rolled himself into the witness chair and brushed his thinning silver hair back across his scalp. My guess is he needed to lose about forty pounds and give up smoking. And even from where Ray and I stood in the back of the courtroom, the veins in his nose gave him away as one who looks forward to the sun being over the yardarm.

The court officer swore Fouch in and the woman DA approached.

“State your name and occupation, please,” she instructed.

“Sergeant E. D. Fouch, Metro Nashville Police Department,” he grunted back. He shifted in the seat and tugged at his pants. A thin sheen of sweat formed on his forehead. He’d been down the court testimony path plenty of times in his career, but Fouch always looked like he couldn’t get used to it.

“Sergeant Fouch, you’re presently assigned to the Homicide Division as an investigator, correct?”

“That’s right, ma’am. I’ve been on homicide nearly nine years.”

“And on last Sunday night—early Monday morning, really—were you called to the scene of an incident that occurred at 530 Brooksfield Terrace in Nashville?”

“That’s right. I was.”

“Can you relate to us the details of that call?”

Fouch shifted once again in his chair, trying to get comfortable. “I was awakened at approximately five
A.M
. and instructed to proceed to 530 Brooksfield Terrace, where the on-scene police officers had reported a deceased woman and circumstances indicated foul play might be involved.”

“Would it be normal procedure for you to be awakened at that hour?”

“No, ma’am, it would not. But because of some other things going on right now, we’ve been shorthanded.”

Yeah, I thought, everybody’s waiting for World War III at the morgue.

“Okay. Go on, Sergeant Fouch.”

“I drove to the scene and there found an apparently deceased, approximately early-thirties Caucasian woman. There was evidence of a terrific struggle in the bedroom of the house. Quite a lot of damage, actually. An investigator from the medical examiner’s office arrived about five minutes after I did and pronounced the woman dead.”

“Were you able to establish the woman’s identity?”

“Yes, we established the victim as being Rebecca Provost Gibson, who lived at the address.”

“What did you do then?”

“We initiated an investigation of the scene. I called in a homicide team, two other investigators, the on-scene crime lab, our fingerprint expert. We began canvassing the neighborhood.”

“Were you able to find anyone who had witnessed any part of the incident?”

“Yes, we found several witnesses who’d been awakened by loud screaming and sounds of a violent struggle. The address in question is a condominium and the units are quite close to each other. We found four witnesses who said they saw a white, early-Seventies, Chevy sedan leaving the scene very quickly. Burning rubber, in fact. Two wrote down the license number.”

“Were you able to establish ownership of the vehicle through the Department of Motor Vehicles?”

“We were.”

“And who was the owner of the car?”

Fouch pointed at the table. “The defendant.”

“Let the record reflect that Sergeant Fouch has identified defendant Randall J. Gibson as owner of the car seen speeding away from the house at 530 Brooksfield Terrace.”

“So ordered,” Judge Rosenthal said.

“Was there any other physical evidence at the scene which might establish the defendant’s presence at the house that night?”

“There was.”

“Describe it for me, please, sir.”

“We lifted several sets of the defendant’s fingerprints off items in the house: a chrome-and-glass coffee table, a doorknob, and on the bloodstained debris of a shattered lamp.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered to Ray. “She was beaten to death with a
lamp?”

“There was also mud tracked through the house which was later identified as being similar to that found
on a pair of the defendant’s boots. Blood was found on the boots as well.”

“How did you obtain these boots?”

“Under a search warrant executed after the defendant’s arrest.”

“Was there any other evidence obtained under the search warrant?”

“Yes, there was. A bloodstained, khaki-colored, bush-type shirt.”

“Where were these items found, Sergeant?”

“The boots and the shirt were found taped up in a cardboard box and buried in a closet under a pile of clothes.”

“As if they’d been hidden, correct?”

“Objection, Your Honor!” Vaden jumped to his feet. “Calls for a conclusion.”

“Relax, counselor,” the judge ordered. “This is a preliminary hearing, not a jury trial. Objection overruled.”

Vaden sat back down, deflated.

“Were you able to establish the source of the blood on the defendant’s boots and shirt?”

“Yes, we were. We ran the standard battery of preliminary lab tests. The blood type on the boots and the shirts was an identical match to the victim’s blood. The full battery of analysis and DNA tests, of course, will take several weeks.”

“Now, Sergeant Fouch,” the assistant DA continued, “we’ll have other witnesses to establish the exact cause of death later, but in your opinion as an experienced homicide investigator, was this a particularly brutal crime, say on a scale of one to ten?”

I saw Roger Vaden jerk like he was going to his feet again. Then he paused and settled back down. What was the point? I thought. No way was the judge not going to bind this one over.

“I’ve seen hundreds of bodies in my years as a police officer,” Fouch said. “And investigated dozens, maybe hundreds, as a homicide investigator. And this woman
was beaten to death about as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen. She was way past dead by the time we got there.”

I shook my head from side to side, suddenly overwhelmed with weariness. Like the woman’s love in the song she’d written, Rebecca Gibson was way past dead.

And something told me Slim Gibson was way past screwed.

Dr. Henry Krohlmeyer, Marsha’s boss and the chief medical examiner for Metropolitan Nashville and Davidson County, was the next witness. Dr. Henry, as he was called by virtually everyone, described in his usual gory detail the procedures by which he’d determined the cause of death in the case of Rebecca Gibson. He also explained that he’d had to perform the autopsy at the Vanderbilt Medical Center hospital, what with his own morgue presently indisposed.

As a journalist, I’d seen a couple of autopsies before. Truth is, they’re not as awful as one might think, as long as you have a decent idea of what to expect and the body hasn’t been left out for so long it’s turned fragrant. You detach yourself from it all. Dead bodies—to me, anyway—don’t really look like people anymore. One of my first really bad car-wreck assignments as a young reporter was when a carload of drunks in a convertible took a curve at eighty miles an hour, then flipped. I got there just after the cops had set up the yellow tape and got past with my press pass. Five adults, two teenagers, thrown all over hell’s half acre, killed instantly, splayed out in the most damnably bizarre angles I’d ever seen a human body assume.

But they didn’t look like people anymore. They were like store mannequins that fell off the back of a runaway semi. I never blinked an eye. Completely professional, all the way.

This was different. I’d seen Rebecca Gibson when
she was alive, had heard her sing, heard her laugh, felt her spark. I don’t mean to go on about it. After all, I didn’t know her. But I was attracted to her despite myself. So was everyone else in the room that last night of her life. Listening to Dr. Henry talk about the results of her autopsy, and imagining her on a stainless-steel table with the awful Y-cut from her shoulders to the middle of her breasts, then down to her crotch; hell, I don’t know. It made me cold everywhere. My feet felt like blocks of ice and I realized I was covered in a thin, frigid sweat.

“You okay?” Ray whispered, jabbing me in the left arm with his right elbow. “You look pale as death.”

Interesting simile. “I’m okay,” I whispered back.

Dr. Henry finished his testimony. Rebecca Gibson had suffered over a dozen fractures to her cheekbones, skull, one arm, a collarbone, three ribs, with the accompanying cuts, bruises, abrasions. She’d suffered acute abdominal trauma; her gut was full of blood and fluid that shouldn’t have been there. One eye had been crushed in its socket, her nose shattered. Cause of death was a toss-up: accumulated acute head trauma from a multitude of severe blows led to extensive damage to the lining of the brain, subdural hematoma, and fatal swelling of the brain. However, her throat had been ripped open as well—presumably by one of the shards from the shattered lamp—tearing the carotid artery and leading to a Class-IV hemorrhage.

I squirmed against the wall. Someone had beaten Rebecca Gibson to a textbook bloody pulp, and had done it with great zest as well. It was not simply a case of passion overriding one’s best judgment and things getting out of hand. Someone with great physical strength had given themselves quite a workout. I stared at Slim as he sat at the defense table in his orange jumpsuit. The one-piece jumpsuit was short-sleeved, and Slim’s thick arms were the only thing stretching the oversized garment. Slim was young. He was well built, kept himself
in shape, looked, in fact, like an iron-pumper. He didn’t smoke, had good wind.

I remembered one other thing Ray told me Slim had: a bad temper, accompanied by a history of domestic-disturbance calls.

I suddenly needed some air.

The sun on the plaza in front of the Criminal Justice Center brought me back to some level of stability. I sat on a concrete bench, the pedestrians passing by in a swirl of movement and color. The traffic stopped-and-started down the James Robertson Parkway in the long shadows cast by the courthouse across the street.