Devil in the Dock (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery) (20 page)

Melissa studied my face a moment. She nodded, and I left, the subpoena I’d brought with me still in the pocket of my jacket.

Usually, I open my eyes in the morning and I’m awake, but the next morning my customary alertness and energy just weren’t there. I shrugged into a robe and took my bottle of water into the backyard so Deeks could take care of his business without a lot of effort on my part.

I dropped into one of the patio chairs as Deeks, having paused for a quick piddle, scampered to the chain-link fence that ran along the alley, going from one corner of the backyard to the other as he checked the alley for possible activity. Not seeing anything of interest, he ran back to me, pausing on the way to snatch up a tennis ball he had long since stripped of its felt. He dropped the ball between my feet and backed up alertly. I bent for the ball and flipped it over his head. He jumped, twisting in the air, and almost caught it, then scrambled for it in the dew-soaked grass.

He brought the ball back, and I tossed it maybe a dozen more times. “You don’t ask for much—do you, buddy?” I asked him. When I stepped toward the door, he ran back toward the far corner of the yard to poop. I waited for him.

“Good boy,” I told him when he came back.

His tail wagged, and he grinned at me. Probably he was just panting, his tongue lolling, but it affected me like a grin. When I went in to shower, I felt ready to face the day.

I was meeting Sarah Fleckman for coffee before court, so I got off the Downtown Expressway at the west end of Carytown. About a block before I got to the Coffee Grounds, I saw a parking spot against the curb and snagged it, then grabbed my purse and walked the rest of the way.

Inside was the noise of conversation and the smell of coffee. I took my place at the end of a line that reached nearly to the door. Brian Marshall and Whitney Foster were working the counter. I didn’t see Sarah, though my watch said five after eight. She was later than I was, if she was coming.

She still hadn’t shown up when I got to the register.

“Robin!” Brian said as his eyes focused on me. “How are you?” Whitney, glancing over, gave me a smile and a nod.

“Pretty well. I’m in court this morning, just dropping by for a cuppa joe to get me started.”

“Still drink vanilla latte?”

“I’ll take two of them this morning. Someone may join me.”

He charged me for the lattes, and put an apple fritter on a paper plate for me. My mouth started to water. “Fuel for the day’s battle,” he said, giving me a wink. “Gratis.”

It wasn’t easy to manage the paper plate with its glazed ambrosia and the two coffees and still scout for a table. A couple of women started strapping on their purses and satchels, one of which looked like a diaper bag, although there was no evidence of the baby who went with it. I moved over, hovering a bit to make sure no one beat me to the table, then slid onto the bench that ran along the wall as the woman with the diaper bag was sliding out.

My first victory of the morning, one that put me on my fanny while a half-dozen other people were still standing about with their mugs and their pastries. I tried to savor it while refraining from savoring the apple fritter reflecting light from its thick glaze of sugar. The temptation was inhuman. I broke off a bit of the apple fritter and popped it in my mouth.
Oh, wow.
I broke off another bit.

What with wrestling with temptation and indulging my taste buds in an orgy of sensation, I didn’t see Sarah Fleckman until she pulled out the chair across from me and sat down.

“Robin Starling,” she said.

“Sarah. Thanks for meeting me.” I wiped my fingers with one of the rather inadequate napkins and held out my hand.

She took it with a small moue of distaste, and her handshake was limp.

“I got you coffee,” I said, nodding at the cup. “It’s a vanilla latte.”

She eyed it a moment before picking it up, then sipped it as if suspecting I might have laced it with battery acid.

“When we talked on the phone, you seemed to know a lot about me,” I said. “Try a bit of the apple fritter. It’s still warm.”

“Let’s just get to it, shall we?”

The fritter did look like a rat had been chewing its way into it. “Okay.” I took a breath. “You need to let Mike go.”

She eyed me. “Did he ask you to talk to me, or are you taking this on yourself? Why didn’t he call me if he had something to say?”

“Naked women make men nervous.”

“He told you about that.”

“He did.”

She shook her head.

“I know it hurts,” I said. “I know it feels unbearable. How can you put someone you’ve loved, someone who’s been so much a part of your life, aside and go on? Believe me—I’ve been there. But you’ve got to do it. He can’t be there for you anymore. You’ve got to accept it. He’s gone.”

She was fast. A balloon of hot coffee hit me in the face before I even had time to flinch. She was on her feet, her chair overturned on the floor behind her.

“You don’t know me,” she said into the sudden, ringing silence. “You don’t know anything about me.”

Actually, I couldn’t tell if the coffeehouse had gone quiet, or if I’d gone deaf. The coffee dripping from my eyelashes blurred everything around me. “The next step is a restraining order,” I said. “You choose.”

“You’re a meddling, interfering, nosy . . .”

I stood as the small table in front of me flipped toward me, and I managed to catch it with my free hand, holding my oversize mug high in the other. Sarah’s mug bounced on the tile near my feet, not breaking, but splattering my feet with what was left of her coffee. Sarah was gone. I heard the door jangle as I righted the table and set down my mug.

Whitney appeared as I was wiping the coffee and vanilla syrup from my eyes with my fingers, looking about me for another of the tiny napkins. Fortunately, Sarah’s vanilla latte had cooled somewhat before her psychotic episode. The coffee was hot, but not scalding, although it was going to leave brown, sticky splotches all over my clothing. I didn’t see how I was going to get cleaned up before court.

Whitney touched my arm. “We’ve got a sink in the back. We should be able to get most of it off.”

I nodded. “Thanks.” I worked my way through the crowded coffee shop behind her.

In the courtroom Ian Maxwell caught my eye and gave me a quizzical glance that reminded me the cleanup had been less than complete, but I only smiled at him. They brought Shorter in, and I pushed aside the folder of photographs I’d been perusing.

“What happened to you?” he said.

I still had coffee stains that covered most of one shoulder and spotted the front of my dress, and my face was pink in places, evidently from the heat of the coffee. What little makeup I’d put on that morning was gone.

“I was interviewing a witness,” I told Shorter. “It didn’t go well.” I didn’t meet his eyes. Having seen Melissa’s video showing what he had done to the shepherd mix, I couldn’t look at his coarse, orangey skin and his yellowed teeth without feeling sick.

“What witness? What are you looking at there?” He nodded at the folder lying open on the table in front of me. “Photographs of the crime scene?”

“Photographs of your closet.”

“What about my closet?”

I shook my head. “You know your problem, Shorter? You don’t believe in anything.”

“I believe in myself.”

“Look where that’s got you.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you know why that Biggs fellow hates you so much? He knows you’ll do whatever you need to do to win—break the rules, violate people’s rights, do whatever you need to. You acknowledge no constraints whatsoever.”

“He might hate me because I got him in bad with the judge. I made it look like he was suborning perjury.”

“Sure. Whatever you need to do,” Shorter said.

“It’s not about winning.”

“No?”

“I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it’s for or against.”

His lip curled. “What’s that, your motto?”

“It seems to be. I’ve found myself saying it a lot lately.”

The bailiff opened the door, and the jury began filing in. “I need to concentrate,” I said. I pulled the folder of police photographs toward me again. As I flipped through them, I had an uneasy feeling of something out of place, but I couldn’t bring it into focus. The door behind the judge’s bench opened, finally, and we stood as the bailiff proclaimed, “Oyez, Oyez.”

We sat, and Maxwell called his first witness of the day.

Police Detective Ray Hernandez came to the stand wearing a houndstooth sports jacket and a shirt with an open collar. In response to Maxwell’s preliminary questions, he told us his degree was in criminal justice. He had been a police officer for sixteen years and had been a detective in the homicide division for eleven. He had been involved in between 100 and 150 homicide investigations.

After establishing Hernandez’s bona fides as a police detective, Maxwell went over the crime scene with him, going into more detail than he had with Officer Warren. Hernandez had been present when photographs of Bill Hill’s living room were taken. The photographs showed Hill’s body lying facedown on the floor, only partially on an area rug. They showed the position of the body in relation to the chair he had evidently been sitting in when he was stabbed. They showed the position of the murder weapon in relation to the body. Most damningly from my client’s point of view, they showed the single word scrawled in blood on the worn wood floor:
Shorter.
Each eight-by-ten photograph was identified individually as fairly and accurately representing the crime scene when Hernandez first saw it. Each was marked as a prosecution exhibit, was introduced into evidence, and was passed to the jury. It took a long time.

Maxwell next used Hernandez to introduce the murder weapon and the incriminating fingerprints found on its handle, something he’d also done in the preliminary.

“This is some kind of paring knife?” Maxwell said, holding it up.

“Yes.”

“Part of a set?”

“We think so. We seized a number of similar kitchen knives when we searched the defendant’s house.”

“Are these the knives?”

They all had the same handles as the murder weapon. Maxwell had them marked and introduced into evidence.

“I don’t notice a paring knife among these you took from the defendant’s house,” Maxwell said.

“We couldn’t find one.”

“Going back to the paring knife you found by the victim’s body. You said there was blood on it?”

“There was. We assumed it was the victim’s blood, but of course we turned the knife over to the office of the chief medical examiner for DNA profiling.”

Eventually, the testimony moved to the search of Shorter’s house, centering on the shirt and the pair of pants bunched up against the wall where Shorter’s hanging clothes mostly obscured them. Maxwell moved to have the shirt and pants admitted into evidence.

“Any objection?” Judge Cooley asked me.

“I’d like to ask a few questions on voir dire.” A voir dire examination was to determine the admissibility of evidence. I wasn’t going to be able to get the clothes excluded, I knew, but I was getting antsy sitting beside Shorter doing nothing while the evidence poured down on us like a dump truck’s load of dirt.

Judge Cooley looked at Maxwell, shrugged. “Very well.”

As I replaced Maxwell at the lectern, the judge gave me a second, sharp look over the rims of his glasses.

“Are you all right?” he asked me.

“Quite all right, Your Honor.”

His mouth worked, either in amusement or in an attempt to get his dentures back into place. “You look like you decided to wear your coffee this morning.”

I smiled sourly. “Fortunately, the woman I was interviewing didn’t have a gun.”

In the jury box, Andrew Hartman let out a bray of laughter. I was beginning to find his sense of humor a lot less amusing. I turned to Hernandez. “What did you do to determine whether the clothes you found on the floor were actually the defendant’s?” I asked.

“They were the same sizes as the other shirts and pants in the closet.”

“You evidently spent some time talking to the neighbors. Did you ask any of them whether he or she had ever seen the defendant wearing those clothes?”

“No.”

“So conceivably, these clothes could have belonged to someone else who was about the same height and weight as Bob Shorter.”

“They were in the defendant’s closet,” Hernandez said.

“And no one else had access to the house?”

“Not as far as we know, no.”

“No spare key in the toolshed?”

“Not that we found.”

“Any nails in the toolshed that might have held a key before somebody took it?”

“Objection,” Maxwell said, standing. “Calls for speculation.”

“Sustained.”

I said, “Your Honor, could I have a moment? I want to ask the witness a question about a photograph of the closet where these clothes were found.”

“Your Honor,” Maxwell said, “there can be no doubt as to the admissibility of these clothes.”

I waited for the judge’s ruling, and he cleared his throat. “By all means,” he said. “Take a moment.”

I shuffled through the photographs in the folder on my table until I found the one I wanted. It wasn’t one the prosecution had introduced. I hadn’t planned on introducing it, either, so I had only the one copy.

“Could I approach the witness to show him this photograph?” I asked the judge, holding it up. He made a circling gesture with his hand, so I took my photograph to the witness stand and handed it to Hernandez.

“Can you identify this photograph?” I asked him.

“It’s a photograph of the defendant’s closet.”

“It’s a police photograph, isn’t it, made at the time you searched his house and found these clothes that you’ve just identified?”

“Yes.”

“Does it fairly and accurately depict the closet as it was on the day you made your search?”

It did. The closet’s sliding doors were pushed to the right, and two rows of hanging clothes were visible above three pairs of shoes and a pair of slippers that looked like a couple of Chihuahuas had been at them. I had the photograph marked for identification.