Defensive Wounds Read online

  “Especially that prosecutor.”

  A spark of hope glimmered in Theresa’s soul. She knew the guy, and no way would he have been swayed by Marie Corrigan’s breasts. So if his heart still wasn’t in it, maybe he thought William really was innocent.

  Don went on. “She said he was drugged, not drunk. The defendant. I guess they found no alcohol and one tiny Rohypnol metabolite in his system.”

  “In his blood? Not hers?”

  “Yeah, but because Mommy and Daddy lawyered up so fast the sample wasn’t drawn for nearly forty hours, so any alcohol and almost certainly any other metabolites would have cleared his system by then. But she made a big deal about it, got an expert to say that his symptoms—which we had only his word for—were consistent with a date-rape drug. He got off. With double jeopardy attached.”

  “So he could never be tried again. How did the defendant look?”

  Another blank expression. A witness’s time on the stand is dominated by the prosecutor, the defense attorney, and sometimes the judge. In between those interactions, eye contact needed to be made with the members of the jury. Theresa often left a courtroom with no recollection of the defendant whatsoever.

  Don said, “I don’t remember. I’m afraid I was too distracted by Miss Corrigan’s tight little skirt.”

  “Don.”

  He held up his hands to fend off her irritation. “Say what you like about her as a person—but she was hot.”

  “So’s pepper spray,” Theresa snapped, and went back to work.

  CHAPTER 20

  *

  Frank and Angela returned to the police station, sans any incriminating evidence against Dennis Britton, not that they’d really expected the city’s best defense attorney to have a bloodstained passkey to the Ritz hanging out of his toolbox. But that didn’t make Frank feel any better.

  He had begun to write up his report when Angela appeared at her desk, which faced his, with Neil Kelly in tow. Kelly carried two file boxes, one stacked atop the other, both heavy, judging from the thump they made when he deposited them on the corner of Frank’s desk.

  “He followed me back,” Angela stated, apparently in her own defense.

  “From the ladies’ room?”

  “Need some help, mate,” Neil said. “This is Bruce Raffel’s career in Cleveland. His law firm courteously slaughtered a few forests to make us copies of at least the public-record stuff. We could get it ourselves from the clerk of courts, but they had an intern who needed something to do. I got the feeling they don’t like that intern much. Or us. I think my hernia came back just moving this stuff from the car.”

  Even with desperate effort, Frank couldn’t think of a good excuse. “What are we looking for?”

  “That’s the fun part.” Neil stole a chair from behind the desk of some detective lucky enough to have gone home for the day. “We have no flippin’ idea.”

  “Terrific.”

  They read in silence for a while, tales of murder and robbery and assault, each one banal and yet unique at the same time.

  “This guy might have a reason to kill Raffel,” Angela said, her nose in a crisp manila file. “He got fifteen years for armed robbery—nah, he’s still in the can. Kind of makes me think Bruce wasn’t quite up to Marie’s level of ability.”

  Neil said, “I had to testify in front of him a few times. The personality of a pit bull with none of Marie’s flash. But he could pull stuff out of his ass that you wouldn’t see coming.”

  “He got this chick a hung jury,” Frank said.

  “What’d she do?”

  “Shot her husband, then tried to make it look like a burglary gone bad while she collected the insurance money.” He read on. “Hell, she’s one of the Ashworths.”

  “The mob?” Angela asked.

  “The closest thing Cleveland has to a mob, yeah.”

  “I remember that case,” Neil said, massaging his jaw. “About two years ago. She had married this street thug who couldn’t handle the rigors of the family business. To make it worse, he had a roving eye, so either she got tired of that or her brothers got tired of losing money through some lousy in-law, and no one was too upset when the guy bled to death in his living room. The defendant had family and money, and the victim had neither, so the not-guilty verdict came as no surprise.”

  Frank closed the file. “Then no one would be looking to avenge that particular murder.”

  Neil leaned back to stretch, groaning loudly enough to rattle the grimy windows as he worked out a crick in his spine. “The trial was nothing. All the drama happened before the trial began. The defendant—Marissa—was a newly widowed babe with a lot of money. Every defense lawyer in town begged to take her case. Instead she ignores big brother’s advice to use the family attorney and entrusts her future to up-and-comer Dennis Britton.”

  “But—” Frank checked the name on the manila folder.

  “Yes, but. She retained Britton, and all the other disappointed suitors went away. All but one. Two months later she fired Britton and opened her arms—and everything else—to Raffel.”

  “I’ll bet Britton didn’t care for that.”

  “Furious. Fur-i-ous. Not ‘fire off an e-mail’ furious, but ‘get into a shouting match at the Barristers Club’ furious.”

  “And you just thought of this now?”

  “It was two years ago. Water under the bridge in lawyer time. Raffel got her off—harped on the missing murder weapon until the jury got dizzy—and I guess Britton let the humiliation spur him on to new heights. Now he’s top of the heap, and Raffel left town. He who laughs last has no motive to murder.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure,” Frank said. “Britton had the hottest case, and Raffel stole it. Now he has the hottest babe. If he saw Raffel trying to steal that—”

  “Maybe,” Angela said. “But we have no real reason to think Bruce and Marie reconnected at the conference. We checked her cell-phone records—no calls between them. You said no one at her office has heard her mention his name since he left town. It’s kind of a stretch that Britton, who has a booming practice and a wealthy marriage to protect, would risk all that to get revenge for a professional slight.”

  “There’s nothing professional about one’s … um, manhood,” Neil said. “He swallowed his pride once and moved on, but if he saw history repeating itself … He wouldn’t be the first guy to throw away everything just to prove he’s got the biggest … um …”

  “Manhood,” Angela finished. “It’s a possibility. It’s also possible that he killed Marie during an argument but went back and killed Bruce for more practical reasons. Bruce would suspect him immediately in the murder, for one thing.”

  “So did we,” Frank pointed out.

  “Or maybe Marie told Bruce something. Something she knew about Britton that she would only share with an old lover.”

  “So Raffel tries to put the squeeze on Britton. Raffel is lower on the totem pole now, not doing so great, and Britton has married well.”

  “Maybe.” Now Angela stretched, but without the groan and leaning forward instead of back. “All we’ve got is maybes.”

  Frank put the file aside. They all resumed reading.

  “So,” Neil said to him. “Your cousin.”

  “Mmm?”

  “She seeing anyone?”

  Frank got this question a lot. He usually lied and said yes. But Neil Kelly had spent some time with Theresa in the past two days and might already know the answer, so he hedged. “I think so.”

  “Really? A cop?”

  “No.” This wasn’t technically a lie. Theresa saw her co-workers at the lab every day, and some were men who weren’t cops. And no matter what she said, she’d be on Don Delgado like frosting on cake if it weren’t for the eleven-year age difference. Women got all hung up on age.

  “Who?” Neil persisted.

  “None of your damn business.”

  Across from him Angela gave a little shake as if suppressing a chuckle.

 
Frank tried to change the subject. “Didn’t you find a phone number with an initial in his room?”

  Neil nodded. “Our mysterious M is a client outside Atlanta who wanted a return phone call. DUI case. What, you don’t let her date cops?”

  “The last cop she dated wound up dead.”

  “Did you shoot the guy?”

  The guy had been Frank’s former partner, and he would not banter about the man’s death with a goofball like Neil Kelly. “Besides, cops’ track records? How many times you been divorced?”

  Neil declined to answer, which meant it had to be at least twice. Of course Frank didn’t want his cousin to date cops—why the hell would he? Britton had been right on the mark with his “incestuous” comment. Frank reached for another file.

  “I just think she’s nice,” Neil said, with the patent innocence of a six-year-old asking about the contents of a gum machine instead of flat-out requesting a quarter. “But you’re right. I should speak to her.”

  “You should leave her alone,” Frank said. “Here’s that robbery-murder at the ATM.”

  Angela said, “I remember that one. Disgusting.”

  “That the guy only got ten years?”

  “That murder in the commission of a robbery is somehow not murder.”

  Frank skimmed the file. “Raffel moved to Atlanta only three months after the trial ended. Maybe he felt guilty.”

  Angela snorted.

  “But this is the interesting part. The guy had a partner, who gave him the gun and waited on the street corner to keep an eye out for cops and witnesses. The partner pled to conspiracy, got a slap on the wrist because, of course, they’d only intended to rob a young mother and her children at gunpoint—the whole killing thing was just an oops. Said partner’s counsel was none other than our Miss Corrigan.”

  “Get out!” Neil exclaimed.

  “It’s right here on the docket. Wonder why they didn’t sever the trials.”

  “Because Marie and Brucie got along so well?”

  “Isn’t that a conflict of interest?” Angela asked.

  Frank said, “I don’t think so. There’s nothing that says counsels can’t be friends—very good friends. And both defendants did pretty well, so they’ve got nothing to complain about.”

  “But the victim does,” his partner pointed out. “Did she have a husband? Family?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Look at the penalty phase,” she suggested. “The prosecution would have called them.”

  Frank scanned a few more pages. Witnesses called for the trial phase had to have something specific and relevant to say about the crime. During the sentencing phase, witnesses could be called merely to tug at heartstrings. “Here. I—Uh …” This was one of those cats that, once out of the bag, would never go back in without severe scratching and blood loss. “Penalty-phase witness list for the prosecution. Third from the top.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Marcus Dean. Brother of the victim.”

  A silence ensued, until Neil Kelly leaped into it. “No, no, no,” he said. “Don’t even think it.”

  “You knew,” Frank said. Another reason not to let his cousin date this guy.

  “Of course. Didn’t you?” If Neil wasn’t genuinely surprised at Frank’s ignorance of this fact, then he deserved an Academy Award.

  “I remember the victim’s brother being a cop,” Angela said. “I didn’t realize it was him.”

  Frank mentally nodded. He had never met Dean then, so the name hadn’t stuck. But surely his ex-partner would have followed the case more closely, known who the lawyers were. “It didn’t occur to you that the two lawyers in your ex-partner’s sister’s murder case dying on two consecutive days might not be coincidence?”

  “I didn’t attend the trial, so I didn’t know about Corrigan.”

  “And when Raffel turns up dead on Dean’s own job site, that didn’t strike you as, oh, suspicious?”

  “He’s a cop,” Neil hissed.

  “Cops can kill. I don’t like the idea any more than you do, but—”

  Neil leaned over the table, gaze furious but voice tight and controlled. “I said he’s a cop, meaning that if he was going to come back on someone, he’d have the guy shanked in jail, not bash in the head of the guy’s attorney. And even if he would do that, it’s been over a year. He waits all that time and then kills them in the one spot in the city immediately connected to him? Come on. He’d have to be a raging lunatic.”

  Frank did not move. “It might not be the most sensible plan, but people aren’t always sensible. I can’t believe you knew of a connection between both victims and the friggin’ head of Ritz-Carlton security.”

  “I can’t believe you didn’t,” Neil shot back.

  CHAPTER 21

  *

  Theresa spent the afternoon engaging in the somewhat-less-than-boisterous process of putting two glass slides on the side-by-side stages of the comparison microscope to check the colors, sizes, cross-sectional shapes, pigmentation, and other characteristics of the hairs and fibers found on and around the two victims. This process always wound up taking longer than expected and, in this situation, still could not positively establish that the two lawyers had been killed by the same person.

  Marie had one foreign hair found with her body, caught in the knot binding her wrists: a four-inch-long auburn strand with no root and a coating of product. Analysis of this product with the FTIR gave her a myriad of strange peaks corresponding to the inorganic chemistry of the product, the only recognizable ones being ethoxydiglycol and hydrogen peroxide. A touch of ethanolamine made her think of hair coloring, something like the shampoo-in hair color marketed to men to cover gray. This particular hair had not been gray, but perhaps too many surrounding ones had.

  Bruce also had two foreign hairs, one about the same length as the auburn hair and a similar color, but minus the dying product. Visually it appeared slightly different, with more pigmentation and a less distinct medulla, so that it might be a different hair from the same head or a different hair from a different person entirely. The other was short, with an undulating shaft and heavily pigmented with dark brown color—a black hair. There were only two colors of hair pigmentation, brown and yellow, plus the form of yellow that produced red.

  Microscopy alone could not tell her more than that. She turned the hairs from Bruce Raffel’s body over to Don for DNA analysis. He could do nothing with the auburn one from Marie’s knot, since it had no root and therefore no adhering follicular skin cells, which would contain DNA. The shaft of a hair is composed of proteins called keratins, essentially dead cells. If Theresa wanted any further information from this section of hair, she’d have to ship it to the FBI with a detailed and articulate request for mitochondrial-DNA analysis.

  One of these hairs could belong to the killer or none of them could, artifacts left over from other guests, other lives. She considered the fibers.

  Most of the fibers had come from the carpet each victim had lain upon, no surprise there. A pink acrylic fiber had been found on Marie’s body, a brown acetate one on Bruce’s. Blue cotton on Marie, a pink cotton on Bruce similar in hue to the pink acrylic. The microscopic globules attached to the fine spandex thread found on Marie’s skirt turned out to be a number of esters, or fatty acids, and some fatty alcohols. In short, wax, probably used on cars, shoes, or furniture. Either the spandex had the wax or Marie had leaned against her car, picking up the wax on her skirt, which in turn gave the spandex fiber something to cling to. Theresa shut down the FTIR, wondering what Marie Corrigan would drive—a restored Jaguar or an Escalade? A black Viper might be appropriate. She found no wax or spandex on Bruce.

  The two victims had only one item in common: cat hair. Someone had a gray-colored Persian mix, but was it the killer, or the maid, or some other staff member? Or even a guest whose room had been vacuumed by the same machine used in the victim’s rooms? Hotel murders were murder, no pun intended.

  The stray hair from Dennis B
ritton’s lapel came from a cat, but not a gray Persian.

  Maybe Marie had a cat, or Bruce. They might have encountered each other, given a hug for old times’ sake. Maybe more than a hug. Maybe they only sat next to each other at one of the seminars, transferring the cat hair. Maybe anything. And why had Marie Corrigan’s shirt been removed after she’d been struck and was bleeding, but Bruce Raffel’s clothing had been neatly put aside? Who would Bruce Raffel have taken off his clothes for? Besides Marie Corrigan? It was maddening.

  Neither attorney had been under the influence of drugs or alcohol. The pills in Bruce Raffel’s bottle were simply vitamins and the water in his glass simply water.

  Theresa then needed to process the chair—an ungainly piece of evidence if ever there was one. It wouldn’t fit in the superglue chamber designed for guns and tools, so she constructed one out of two cardboard boxes in which paper towels had been delivered to the laboratory. Packaging tape connected them and sealed up the edges, and she used a box cutter to slice a small flap in one bottom corner. With the chair enclosed inside, she slid in an electric mug warmer and then placed a foil tray carrying a dime-size puddle of superglue on top of it. Careful not to spill it, she trailed the cord out of the flap and then closed and sealed that opening. She stood back to survey this disposable structure. Not high-tech, but sometimes high-tech wasn’t needed.

  She left it on the floor of the amphitheater after writing “Don’t touch” in Sharpie marker on its sides. Provided no one stumbled into it, upset the superglue, or somehow moved the mug warmer against the cardboard to start a fire and incinerate her evidence, all would be well. She grabbed a much-needed cup of coffee and checked her e-mail before returning to find the box apparently unmolested.

  Holding her breath to keep from breathing in the fumes, she opened the box.

  The dark wooden chair now had various swirls and marks permanently marring its finish. The two pieces of wood supporting the backrest, which the killer must have gripped in order to swing the object with enough force to shatter a skull, had a heavy concentration of marks and smudges but not a single usable ridge. Several—in the straight, wide pattern of fingers—had a roughened, almost bubbly appearance. Latex gloves. Who wore latex gloves? Doctors. Cops. Paramedics, maids, food-service workers—anyone about to commit a crime who had a single brain cell in his or her head; they were sold by the box at Home Depot.