The Accused and the Damned: Book Three, the Eddie McCloskey Series (The Unearthed 3) (21 page)

“More likely, but in no way definitive and that’s why I left it out of my report. I didn’t feel comfortable making that determination.”

“And do you know Anson’s dexterity?”

Han shot a look toward the back of the courtroom. Ross stood by the double doors and leaned against the wall.

“I actually do.”

“And how do you know Anson’s dexterity?”

“We played in a softball league last summer. He bats and throws right-handed.”

“And based upon that, you can say it is more likely that Anson is right-handed, correct?”

“There are some people who switch hands depending upon the activity. It’s not uncommon.”

“I understand that, Dr. Han, but that wasn’t the question I asked.”

“Yes, it’s more likely Anson is right-handed.”

“And if you were naturally right-handed, Dr. Han, would you use your left hand as the twister and your right as the stabilizer in this extremely complicated maneuver?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled. I want to hear the answer. Go ahead, Dr. Han.”

“It’s possible,” Han said.

“Anything’s possible, Dr. Han. The world could end tomorrow. But is there any evidence to suggest that the killer used their right hand to perform the primary twisting motion?”

“Like I said, the evidence is inconclusive.”

“But what makes it inconclusive? From what you’re telling me, there’s evidence to suggest the killer used their left hand to twist but there’s no evidence to the contrary.”

“There are a variety of injuries to Mrs. Ketcher that make that kind of specific analysis difficult. If I felt confident in making that call, I would have put it into my report.”

The last time Eddie had experienced this sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach was in high school when he had to give an oral presentation. He’d pissed about ten times in the last hour. Show time was creeping up on him.

He was coming back to the courtroom from a recess and spotted Gracie Barbitok in front of the double doors. She was miked and one of her goons had a video camera trained on her.

“It has been a very interesting case,” she said. “I’ll be testifying shortly and I’m confident we’ll have a positive outcome. The scant evidence that could be construed as paranormal supports that Mr. Ketcher was guilty. I hope I can convince the jury of the truth.”

She paused a moment then made a swiping motion across her neck. The cameraman lowered the video camera. Gracie spotted Eddie over the man’s shoulder.

“Here’s your chance, Eddie. Would you like to add anything for the show?”

“Just one thing.”

He paused dramatically and winked at the camera.

“No comment.”

Eddie pushed through the double doors.

A few minutes later, Gracie took the stand and smiled prettily at the jury. The DA started by having her explain her background. Her resume was impressive. His would pale in comparison. It took Gracie fifteen minutes to tell her story and the jury seemed to lap it up.

“Mrs. Barbitok, based on your twenty-year experience, do ghosts exist?” the DA asked.

Gracie did the same thing that Green had instructed Eddie to do. She faced the jury when she answered.

“At best, all I can say is it’s possible. But as any honest ghost hunter will tell you, close to ninety-nine percent of purported hauntings are easily debunked with rational, reality-based explanations. So it’s fair to say that hauntings, if they do happen, are extremely, extremely rare occurrences.”

She was good on the stand. A natural communicator. On TV she came across a bit theatrical, flashy and argumentative, but in this courtroom she was more reserved, helpful, enlightening.

Her present testimony, however, differed wildly from the thought she’d shared with Eddie on their short-lived jog together. When they’d stopped for a breather in the woods, she had said there was no such thing as ghosts. Following the developments at the Ketcher house last week, she’d been forced to soften her testimony.

“How many paranormal investigations have you been on?” Spencer asked.

“Personally, I have performed over two thousand investigations over the last twenty years. Senior members on my staff, combined, have conducted over a thousand as well. All told, that puts the number for me and my staff at over three thousand.”

“And in how many were you or your staff able to verify the presence of a ghost at one of the sites?”

“None.”

“Excuse me?”

“Not at a single one.”

“But I don’t understand, Mrs. Barbitok. You just testified that, in your experience, there were probably ghosts. How can you say that if you yourself, and no one on your team, has seen any first-hand?”

“In a handful of cases, we were not able to explain the phenomena witnessed. The findings from those cases are therefore open to interpretation, and it’s possible that supernatural forces were involved.”

“But you can’t say definitively?”

“No. Many people believe it’s literally impossible to prove the existence of a ghost.”

The lights in the courtroom flickered like the power was about to go out. The DA paused and Gracie smiled and there was nervous laughter from the jury. Judge Metnick told the DA to proceed.

“Ms. Barbitok, you testified that this was the case in only a handful of investigations. What did you mean by a handful?”

“Five.”

The DA moved next to the jury. “Only five?”

“And that is a liberal estimate. If you do the math, five represents about a tenth of a percent out of the three thousand claims.”

Eddie couldn’t argue with her results. Almost all the claims he’d ever investigated had been debunked, most of them easily, many of them within a few minutes.

The DA continued. “On those five cases, did you ever encounter any evidence that a ghost had physically harmed a human being?”

“No. Not a single one.”

“Let’s take it a step farther. Do you know how many times someone claimed to be physically harmed by a ghost?”

“Out of the three thousand claims, maybe a dozen. None of those were ever verified.”

“What do you mean by verified?”

“We were unable to reproduce the phenomena described. In several of them, the evidence presented by the claimant was specious at best.”

Spencer smiled. “How was it specious?”

Gracie smiled back. “In this day and age, everybody has a cell phone that can take pictures. And yet, none of the claimants in question had any photographs of bruising, scratching, or other marks indicative of trauma. The claims of physical harm were literally just that: claims.”

“According to the paranormal literature, have you ever read of any instances where a ghost physically harmed a human being?”

“Not in any modern texts, no. We have accounts from the nineteenth century and earlier of physical harm visited upon humans by supernatural entities, but that literature is not scientific or reliable and the phenomena described in the texts have never been reproduced.”

“Have you had a chance to review Mr. Ketcher’s statement to the police?”

“I have.”

“And have you had a chance to examine the Ketcher residence?”

“I have.”

“And based upon your review of Mr. Ketcher’s statement and of the house itself, do you have an opinion as to whether the Ketcher residence was haunted?”

“I do.”

“And what is that opinion?”

“It is my opinion the Ketcher residence was probably not haunted. At best, the evidence is equivocal.”

“Can you explain why you came to that conclusion?”

“When investigating, we attempt to reproduce the phenomena described by the claimants. The Ketchers, collectively, described a set of subjective components that we were not able to reproduce upon investigation. In addition, we used objective testing as well and that testing returned no positive findings.”

“Can you explain what you found at the Ketcher residence when you investigated?”

“I will start by explaining what we did not find. None of my team reported any of the same symptoms that Mr. Ketcher described to police. There were no fuzzy feelings, or nausea, or lightheadedness. No one on my team felt any static electricity. We could not reproduce any of the subjective components of the haunting.

“Nor could we reproduce any of the more objective findings typically associated with a positive space. We captured no electronic voice phenomenon, there were no fluctuations in temperature. One weak variance in the electromagnetic fields was recorded, but it was so weak I wouldn’t consider it solid evidence of anything. There were no cold spots. Nothing was caught on the cameras we installed.”

“Could you explain to the jury what you mean by all those findings in laymen’s terms?”

Gracie took a few minutes. Several members of the jury scribbled notes while she spoke.

“Thank you, Ms. Barbitok. We’ve heard about what you did not find. Now please explain what, if anything, you did find at the Ketcher residence.”

“Mr. McCloskey—” Gracie pointed him out for the jury. “—is the defense’s expert witness and was leading the investigation that day. He used his K-II meter to read any changes in electromagnetic frequency. He started by asking questions. Many ghost hunters do this to see if they can elicit a paranormal response. In the living room, Mr. McCloskey addressed the ghost as if it was present and asked if it had killed Alice.”

“And did Mr. McCloskey get a response in the living room?”

“No.”

“Then what happened?”

“We eventually moved into the studio where Alice was killed. Mr. McCloskey attempted to elicit a response again, but before he could finish his first question writing on the wall suddenly appeared.”

“What do you mean writing on the wall appeared?”

“Letters formed on the wall as if some invisible person were writing them.”

“You saw the writing yourself?”

“I did. I watched as it appeared on the wall. I was no more than a yard away. Several other eyewitnesses saw it. It was also captured on tape.”

“What did the writing say?”

“The letters ran together.” Gracie spelled them out. “I took that to mean,
It wasn’t me
.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Nothing, actually.”

“Nothing! But you just said you saw letters appear on a wall that weren’t being written by anyone. Surely that must be something?”

“In my career, I’ve seen many hoaxes perpetrated similar to this. All you need to do is write the letters on the wall with some invisible chemicals that are later activated by a catalyst. It’s not as simple as invisible ink but it’s along the same lines. So it’s very easy to fake something like that. They do it in the movies all the time, often without any camera tricks.”

“Could you explain how that would work to the jury?”

Gracie did. She had an easy command of the material. She explained the chemical process to the jury in simple terms. No big words, and not a word wasted. She referenced the famous case of the Faces of Belmez, where this was thought to have occurred.

“Did you check the writing to see if any of these chemicals were present?”

“We never got the opportunity. If it were up to me, I would have tested the writing right away, but the defense expert was leading the investigation. He chose not to. He chose to continue with what he was doing.”

Eddie kept his face neutral but he wanted to burst out of his seat and explain how Gracie was full of shit. She was having her cake and eating it too.

Gracie was still testifying. “We didn’t have the right equipment with us. I sent some of my team members out to find what we needed while we continued our investigation of the premises. I planned to run some tests that day, but we couldn’t return to the premises until the defense expert did. By then, the house had been destroyed by the fire.”

“And now you have no way of verifying whether the writing was a hoax or not?”

“That’s right.”

“And the writing was the only potential paranormal evidence, for lack of a better word, that you encountered while on-site?”

“That’s correct. And Mr. Ketcher never described or reported activity like this, so this was new activity if it was paranormal at all. And that makes it even less likely that it was paranormal. Like I said, we could not reproduce any of the subjective components Mr. Ketcher told police about and none of the usual objective tests returned any positive findings. The writing on the wall is all we had, that can be easily faked, and we were unable to run any chemical analysis to determine its authenticity.”

Eddie had figured the DA would take this approach. If the DA convinced the jury no ghost was in the house, Anson’s only defense would evaporate. Better that than rely on the ghost’s self-serving denial of guilt because that was opening the door to the possibility of the paranormal. But even if the jury bought into the haunting, the paranormal evidence tended to inculpate Anson.

The DA finished with his questions, and all eyes in the courtroom turned to Green.

“Ms. Barbitok, there are different kinds of hauntings, aren’t there?”

“There are differences of opinion, but the general consensus in the paranormal community is that the three main types are residual, intelligent, and poltergeist. I have never seen intelligent or poltergeist hauntings. My five questionable claims were what would be described as residual.”

“And what is that?”

“Recordings, more or less. The ghost continues to engage in some behavior that leaves a tangible mark on the real world. We’re getting into wild theory here, but the idea is that the ghost is not even trying to haunt the premises. It’s just an imprint leftover.”

“Based upon your expertise, are residual hauntings the most common form?”

“The most common, yes, but remember hauntings are extremely rare.”

“Thank you, Ms. Barbitok. I do remember that from your earlier testimony.” Green stood up. “Now then, you say it’s possible that the writing you and others observed on the wall was paranormal in nature, is that correct?”

“Yes. With an emphasis on the word possible.”

“So then we can say it’s likely this writing was just a recording, because in your own words, most hauntings are just residual in nature. Isn’t that correct?”

Gracie shifted in her seat. “As I testified earlier, I don’t have an opinion on the writing because I was not able to properly test it.”

“But based upon the principles you just described, it’s more likely the writing was just a recording, isn’t it?”

The DA shot out of his chair. “Objection. The witness has testified that she was not able to test the writing so all of this is conjecture based upon conjecture and will not assist the trier of fact in any way. All we’re doing is discussing hypotheticals at this point.”