Evidence of Guilt (5 page)

Apparently a neighbor had seen Lisa watering her yard at about six. The condition of the kitchen indicated that Lisa and Amy had eaten dinner, although Lisa had not yet done the dishes. Her answering machine logged two calls during the evening, one at eight-thirty, the other around ten. Both were apparently hang-ups since the machine had recorded static but no message. In the background of the first call there'd been muffled music and conversation reminiscent of a social gathering.

Lisa never retrieved Saturday morning's newspaper or mail, and she hadn't shown up for her Saturday afternoon shift at the restaurant. Velma had assumed Lisa was suffering from one of her headaches and had decided not to bother her by calling.

Lisa and Amy had both died of wounds to the throat, although in Lisa's case there were multiple stab wounds in the chest area as well. There was a full paragraph describing the length and depth of the cuts, and the mus-

cles and tendons severed, but I skipped over it, knowing that if those details became important to the case, I'd go back and wade through it There was also a gash on Lisa's left hand that was relatively fresh but appeared to have been sustained sometime before her attack.

Both bodies were found face up, and both were partially disrobed. Lisa's blouse had been ripped open, her denim skirt pushed up around her middle. Amy's shorts were lying in the dirt near her head. There was no sign that either of them had been raped, but both were naked from the waist down. Neither pair of undergarments had been found in the barn or on the surrounding property.

I put the report aside for a moment and took a couple of deep breaths. The images were vivid and unsettling, as was the picture taking shape in my mind. This was an assailant who not only killed in cold blood but seemed to take a certain perverse pleasure in demeaning his victims.

After a moment I shoved emotion aside and thought about the implications for our case. If the attack was an act of deviant behavior rather than clear-cut motive, did that help or hurt our position? It was hard to say at that point, but I thought it probably cut against us. Wes was, after all, a man with a less than upstanding reputation. Whether or not the reputation was deserved, it would be there in the minds of the jurors. I made some notes for myself, then went back to the file.

I read about the rabbit's foot that had been found near Amy's body, the motorcycle tire tracks in the drive, the dirt samples from Wes's cycle that were consistent with the soil on Lisa's property. Again, I skipped the technical analysis. There'd be time for that later.

Wes had been arrested on Tuesday, pursuant to a warrant that allowed the police to search his house. They

hadn't found the murder weapon, but they had found an extensive collection of knives. They'd also found a long, blond hair on one of Wes's shirts, and a pair of blood-spotted jeans in the clothes hamper.

Witness accounts of Wes's activities Friday evening were fairly consistent. He'd spent the early part of the evening with some buddies at a local bar, drinking, dancing and carousing with the other Friday night regulars. He was apparently in a foul mood, however, and left about nine o'clock after a nasty exchange with one of the women on the dance floor. Wes claimed to have driven home and gone to bed, but a neighbor heard what he thought was a motorcycle sometime about midnight.

I sipped my coffee, scribbled more notes, and with a growing sense of misgiving, wondered what I'd gotten myself into.

The photos didn't help.

Because of my association with Tom, who is the publisher and editor-in-chief of
The Mountain Journal,
I'd seen photos of the crime scene, including those judged too gruesome to print. But they'd been journalist's photos. The police photographs were far worse. Large, full-color glossies shot under the cold, harsh light of a strobe. Some were taken from a distance, showing the position of bodies relative to the barn's layout, but most were close-ups. Swollen, greenish-red flesh, gaping wounds, exposed torsos. Human life violated.

Sickened, I shoved them back into the folder. At this point they weren't going to tell me anything useful. I switched from coffee to wine and pulled out Sam's case notes. Other than copies of motions filed, some correspondence with the prosecutor and a few pages of what looked to be hieroglyphics, there wasn't much. I'd just

begun trying to make sense of Sam's cryptic scrawlings when my efforts were cut short by the peal of the doorbell.

Daryl Benson greeted me with his usual hesitant smile. "Got the message you called," he said, jingling the spare change in his pocket. "You were gone by the time I tried your office, so I thought I'd stop by in person."

Daryl Benson had been a family friend when I was growing up. He'd been a uniformed officer then; he was chief of police now. And counting the months to retirement.

Before my mother's suicide when I was fourteen, Benson had been a regular fixture at our holiday meals and summer barbecues, a sort of honorary uncle whose visits were always eagerly anticipated. I'd seen very little of him after my mother died and my father started drinking heavily, and nothing at all of him in the years I was away at college and then attempting to make my mark on the legal world of San Francisco. But since my return to Silver Creek we'd forged a new bond of sorts. What we shared was not friendship exactly, but a camaraderie born of having once loved the same people and having shared a piece of the past. Sometimes I wasn't even sure I liked Daryl Benson all that much, but he was my only link to parents I'd recently come closer to understanding.

"You want a glass of wine?" I asked, leading the way to the kitchen.

"You got any cold beer?"

I opened the refrigerator, handed him a bottle of Anchor Steam, and poured myself more wine. "Let's go into the other room where it's comfortable."

Benson followed me to the living room, where he eased his bulky frame into the forest green armchair that had been my father's favorite. "Looks like you're making

progress," he said with an approving glance at the fresh coat of paint on the walls. "It's a big job. You're smart to tackle it a room at a time."

Smart had nothing to do with it. I was tackling it the only way I could. Renovation didn't come cheaply.

The house had suffered from neglect since my mother's death. At first my father had wanted to leave everything just the way it was, although he had, begrudgingly, agreed to a new roof when the old one leaked so badly the upstairs rooms became unusable. Then, as he lost himself increasingly in his drinking, he'd ceased to care.

I'd intended originally to sell the place, as is. Sabrina concurred, and our brother John, who'd been living in Italy for the past five years, didn't care what we did so long as it didn't involve him. But when my one-week trip home to settle the estate had grown to a month, and then two months, I had reconsidered.

My coveted, on-the-brink-of-partnership position in San Francisco had turned to dust, as had my relationship with the firm's star litigator. There wasn't a lot to go back to but a mortgage I could no longer afford. I'd leased my house in Berkeley, furnished, and taken refuge in the family home I'd been so eager to leave fourteen years earlier.

The white was a good choice," Benson observed. "It lightens the room considerably. Sticking to something basic like that probably makes things less complicated as well."

I smiled. The color was royal ivory, not white, and it had taken me ten tries to get it right.

"I wanted to talk to you about Lisa Cornell's death," I said, getting back to the purpose of my earlier call.

Benson raised his beer and took a swallow. His bald

head shone like polished stone. "I thought it might be something like that." He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "What's your interest in this anyway?"

"Co-counsel with Sam Morrison. That is, assuming it's okay with our client."

"Hell, Wes won't care. He seems to have taken the ostrich approach to this whole business, like it doesn't really concern him. You'd think a man facing a possible death sentence would show a little interest in the outcome."

"How strong is the case against him?"

Benson gave a hollow laugh. "That's a question better put to the prosecutor. But you want my opinion, it's strong enough that I wouldn't want to be standing in your shoes."

Not a heartening appraisal, but then Daryl Benson wasn't a neutral party.

"I was looking through the case file before you arrived," I said, trying to keep my tone friendly rather than lawyer-like. "From what I've been able to gather the evidence is all circumstantial. And there's no motive, no murder weapon, no witnesses."

He brushed the air with his hand. "Don't need them."

"Did your investigation turn up other possible suspects?"

His eyes met mine, kindly. "The evidence may be circumstantial, Kali, but it all points to Wes Harding."

I opened my mouth to argue, but Benson held up his hand. "First off, we've got that rabbit's foot. A guy at the auto shop where Wes works remembers seeing him with it Thursday afternoon. When we questioned Wes on Tuesday he couldn't produce it. 'Might have lost it,' he says. You ask me, it's mighty peculiar he happened to lose it right when he did."

"A rabbit's foot is hardly a one-of-a-kind item."

"This one's pretty close. It's black rather than the stan-

dard white, and it's attached to a braided leather strand. But that's not the only thing that points to Wes. Tread marks in the dirt at the end of Lisa Cornell's driveway match Harding's motorcycle, at least as far as we can tell. It's not a perfect print, but the soil was damp so it's more than we might have gotten otherwise. And we found a long blond hair on clothing in Harding's hamper."

"With enough root structure for DNA testing?"

He shook his head. "But the color, length and texture are the same as Lisa's. She used some kind of dye that also showed up on the strand we found with Harding's clothes. May not be exact science, but I'm willing to bet a jury would find it pretty convincing."

I began mentally ticking off the points we'd raise on cross-examination. In a case like this, you try to cast doubt on the state's contention that the evidence points conclusively to the defendant. It's almost always possible to introduce a degree of uncertainty, but it wasn't clear we'd be able to cast enough doubt to sway the jury.

"There were also the blood spots on Wes's jeans," I said. The police apparently seized them as evidence, but the lab results weren't in the file."

Benson gave a half-shrug. "That's in the DA's hands now. Bottom line is, he thinks there's enough evidence against Harding that he's willing to take it to trial."

"That doesn't mean he'll get a conviction."

A sigh. "You defense lawyers are all alike. You try to muddy the waters with a lot of 'what ifs' and far-fetched speculation. In theory, it's possible to shoot holes in any case, even if you've got a goddamn video of the crime in progress. But I'm telling you, ninety-nine percent of the time, your most obvious suspect is the guilty party."

"In that case, maybe we should just streamline the whole

process," I observed dryly. "You know, have the cops powwow over coffee and donuts, and once they've come up with an obvious suspect, simply cart the guy off to prison. It's bound to save time and money."

Benson laughed. "There are times I think that's not such a bad idea." He drained his beer.

"You want another?"

"I could be persuaded."

I got him a second bottle and refilled my own wineglass. "Tell me about Lisa Cornell," I said.

"There's not a lot to tell. Twenty-two years old, worked as a waitress. Didn't seem to have many close friends, but then, between her work, her daughter and her fiance, she probably didn't have a lot of time for socializing."

"Fiance?"

"Philip Stockman. Owns the Big Bob Hardware chain, or rather his family does. Phil's kind of the chief honcho, though. I'm not even sure the old man is involved at all at this point."

"Had they been engaged long?"

Benson gave a shrug.

"Funny that she never mentioned him." It was dawning on me that I hadn't really known Lisa at all. "What about her family?" I asked.

"Her parents live in southern California. I've talked to them by phone but never met them. They had the bodies flown down there when we'd finished with them. Stockman was kind of p.o'd about that, as I understand it. Wanted Lisa and Amy buried here in his family's plot."

"Her parents didn't come to Silver Creek themselves?"

"Once, to go through her things and all. But I didn't meet them while they were here."