Final Exam: A Legal Thriller (52 page)

Ben grinned.
 
“And given the amount of carnage in this scene,” Ben said holding up the photograph again, “wouldn’t you have expected the killer to have blood on his shoes?”

“Perhaps.”

“His pants?”
 
Ben was moving forward now, his voice rising.
 

“Probably, yes.”

“His coat?”

“Perhaps.”

“His shirt?”

“Maybe.”

“And assuming he was wearing them, his gloves?”

“Yes.”

“Did you or your office have occasion to examine any of those kinds of items belonging to my client, Megan Rand
Cavallaro
?”

“Yes, we did.”

“Did you find any of the victim’s blood on any of those items?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“Did you find any skull tissue or brain matter on any of those items?”

He shook his head.
 
“No.”

“Just those two little drops of blood on that gray scarf?”

“Yes.”

48

Ben got home at about ten-fifteen only to discover Libby watching news coverage of the trial on television.
 
She seemed almost giddy.
 
“This is exciting,” she said.
 
“Everything was very positive.
 
All of the experts, including that Stan Goldman guy on Fox, thought you did a great job.
 
They had a lot of good things to say about her opening statement, Bridget Fahey’s I mean, but they said you gained a lot of ground with the cross-examination of the medical examiner.”
 

Ben dropped his briefcase and plopped down on the sofa beside her.
 
She looked at him excitedly.
 
“So, what did you think?”
 

He looked at the TV then at his wife and then back at the TV.
 
“Can’t we turn this off?”

“Don’t you want to watch it?
 
You’re a celebrity.”
 

He looked back at her, his head cocked, his eyes squinting.
 
“You forget, Lib, I was there.
 
I know what happened in the courtroom.”
 

She sighed.
 
“Okay okay,” she said.
 
“I’ve recorded most of it anyway.”
 

He rolled his eyes.
 
“Great.”

“Seriously though, how did you think it went?”

“About how I expected.
 
I figured her opening would be good and it was probably even better than I expected.
 
Professor Hyatt wasn’t much.
 
Somebody had to find the body and he was the guy who did.
 
The medical examiner went about as well as I could have hoped.
 
They’ve got the blood, sure, but where’s the rest of the bloody clothing?
 
There should be some somewhere.”
 
He got up.
 
“What did you have for dinner tonight?”

Ben took some grilled chicken out of the refrigerator and cut it up and put it on a salad.
 
Then he grabbed a root beer and sat down in front of the television to eat.
 
They tried to find something unrelated to the trial, much to Libby’s chagrin, and settled on a rerun of
Seinfeld
and an episode of
The Sopranos
which Libby didn’t particularly care for.
 
She fell asleep during the show and Ben jostled her awake when it was over.
 
She went upstairs at about ten minutes to twelve and Ben sat down on the couch for a while thinking about the case before joining her a half hour or so later.
 
He knew there was still something he was missing, something that would make everything click into place in his mind.
 
Try as he might, he just couldn’t find it.
 

Ben got a good night’s sleep, hopefully his mind was working overtime trying to piece the puzzle together, and got down to the Courthouse feeling refreshed and ready to go.
 
The sun of the previous day had given way to clouds and cooler temperatures and the shadows so evident in the courtroom the day before were now gone.
 
Mark hobbled in a few minutes later, apparently his knee was acting up, but happy with news coverage of yesterday’s events.
 
“A lot of good pub on TV last night,” he said.
 

Ben shook his head.
 
“Not you too.
 
Libby wanted to watch that stuff when we got home.
 
Isn’t it enough that we have to live through it all day without watching it all night?”
 

Mark shrugged.
 
“It’s still fun to see.”

“I guess.”

After the jury was brought in, Bridget Fahey called Charles Powell to the stand.
 
The tall, soft spoken, African American security guard for the law school ambled up to the witness stand wearing his best suit.
 
Bridget Fahey took him through his background and experience working at the law school.
 
He testified that he recalled seeing Meg at the law school on several occasions shortly before and around the time of the murder.
 
This was consistent with what he had told Ben earlier.
 
He also described the security system at the school, including the cameras.

On cross, Ben forced the witness to concede that he couldn’t pin down Megan’s visits to the law school to an exact date.
 
He also stated that fellow staff members and professors possessed the pass cards which would enable them to go from the hallway outside Greenfield’s office back into the library, a maneuver that might not be easily visible on the security cameras.
 
Finally, the witness conceded that certain female professors, including Angela Harper, had inquired into the security procedures at the law school.
 
Nevertheless, Charles Powell had identified Meg as having been at the law school around the date of the murder.
 
Combined with the blood and the other evidence, this was something for the State to work with.
 
Ben could only hope that he could create enough doubt to cause the jury to see things his way.

Bridget Fahey’s next witness was her blood expert, who testified consistently with the medical examiner, Dr.
Akhter
.
 
His primary conclusion was that the blood found on the scarf undoubtedly came from Greenfield and that it hadn’t degraded to such an extent that he would say that it had arrived on the scarf a long time before the tests.
 
Ben didn’t do much with him on cross-examination, even his own blood expert conceded that the blood on the scarf was Greenfield’s, so he let the man off the hook with a token cross-examination, rather than try and achieve something spectacular and fail in front of the jury.
 

The following day, Bridget Fahey led off with her expert on hair, a criminologist from the University of Chicago, who appeared overly devoted to his unusual niche in the field.
 
Professor Byron Marks, a quiet looking man in his mid-fifties with a flop of brown hair falling in his face, looked uncomfortable in his navy blue sport coat, tie, gray pants and brown walking shoes.
 
He described the science of hair evaluation and analysis, from root to stem, as though trying his best to bore everyone to tears.
 
After a seemingly endless recitation on the differences between types of hair, with a peculiar focus on Oriental hair and African-American hair, neither of which was present here, he testified that three hairs found in Professor Greenfield’s office were consistent with the samples received from the Defendant.
 
Everyone seemed happy when his direct-examination concluded, especially the jurors.
 

Mark handled the cross-examination and sought to undermine the notion that hair analysis was a science in the area of criminology.
 
His only real success came at the end of his cross-examination, when he asked, “Isn’t it true, Professor Marks, that one cannot match hairs in the same way he or she can match fingerprints or blood?”
 

The witness fidgeted somewhat in his chair, looking off into the middle distance as if searching for the answer on a cloud floating by the windows to the courtroom.
 
“Although the matching of hair,” he said, “is not quite the same as matching blood or fingerprints, we can nonetheless state that a given hair is consistent with a known sample to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty.”
 

The magic buzzwords, Ben thought.
 
Mark strove onward.
 
“Isn’t it true that you found other hairs in Professor Greenfield’s office that do not appear to you to have come from my client?”
 

“That’s true.
 
We found quite a few hairs that were consistent with hairs taken from Professor Greenfield himself.
 
We also located three other light brown hairs that seemed to come from the same subject and two darker brown hairs which came from an entirely different subject.
 
We also found one other blond hair that did not appear consistent with the Defendant’s hair.”
 

“So, in other words, you have at least three sets of other hairs that do not appear to have come, in your opinion anyway, from either the Defendant or Professor Greenfield?”
 

“That’s correct.”
 

All in all, a mixed bag, Ben thought.
 
The blond hairs probably placed Meg at the scene of the crime, even if there may have been others there as well.
 
Whether they thoroughly discredited the science or not, Ben couldn’t tell.
 

The State’s expert on blood splatters basically supported the testimony of Dr.
Akhter
, and established that Professor Greenfield was likely bending or leaning over next to his desk when he was struck with the first or the first couple of blows.
 
Ben didn’t really dispute this testimony and focused merely on the degree of splattering in his cross-examination.
 

“Given your testimony on splattering,” he asked the witness, “and the amount of blood, tissue and brain matter found at the scene, can you reasonably expect that a person committing this crime could have escaped this scene without getting a significant amount of this material on their person and clothing?”
 

The witness paused and then said, “I’m not quite sure what you mean by significant, but I would say that the killer would have likely received some splattering on his or her person.”
 

“A lot more than two drops on a scarf?”
 

“Yes, I would say so, but clothing could always be cleaned and, perhaps, disposed of somehow.”
 

Ben got what he needed.
 
He decided not to push it too far.

49

The toughest things about trial work are its relentlessness and its unpredictability.
 
From the moment you begin a trial, it never lets up.
 
Ben had lost ten pounds since the first of July on his slight frame and his regular suits started to feel loose on him.
 
In order to keep from losing too much weight, he forced himself to eat even when he wasn’t hungry, at times sucking down chocolate milkshakes rather than full meals he wouldn’t be in the mood to finish.
 
He slept fitfully, his mind working overtime, and after he showered, he pulled on an older suit that didn’t feel quite so loose.
 

When Detective Scott Nelson walked to the witness stand, Ben felt
an added
electricity in the room and knew he faced one of those moments in a trial where he didn’t quite know what was going to happen next.
 
Nelson wore a tweed sport coat, a light blue shirt, print tie and brown slacks, and looked as much like a college professor as Professor Hyatt had days earlier.
 
As always, he appeared soft spoken and earnest.
 

Bridget Fahey led the detective through an unremarkable description of the early stages of the investigation, from his first appearance on the scene through his conversation with the widow to his conclusion that Megan was a suspect in Greenfield’s murder.
 
Shortly before lunch, Fahey turned to the telephone records and asked, “Detective, from your review of these telephone records, did you find any telephone contact between the Defendant and Professor Greenfield?”
 

“Yes, we did.
 
We found thirteen possible telephone contacts between the two from October 30, 2001 to December 26, 2001, two days before Professor Greenfield’s death.”
 

Fahey nodded and said, “When you say possible contacts, what do you mean?”
 

“A couple of things.
 
First, we only know the telephone numbers attributable to both the Professor and the Defendant.
 
We do not know necessarily who made the calls or who, if anyone, received them on the other end.
 
Some of the calls are fairly short, only a minute or two, so perhaps the calls involved leaving messages, rather than speaking directly to the party on the other side.
 
Also, the phone calls made from the law school do not come directly from an individual’s phone line.
 
Rather, they are routed through a central phone system.
 
What that means is that phone calls to Professor Greenfield, for example, are recorded to his direct line number, while calls made by Professor Greenfield, show up on one of the outgoing lines available to the law school.”