Key Witness (63 page)

“My friends who were there told me you were very good. My stomach was churning as I talked to them
—
I have such strong emotions about the boy you’re defending and thinking that my friend was murdered and the police are so sure he did it. I want whoever did it to pay but I don’t want you to get hurt. It’s hard. If you did get hurt, I’m sure I’d feel bad, too. I hope it’s proved he’s guilty or not guilty conclusively, one way or the other.

“I know I shouldn’t have called you
—
I said that, didn’t I
—
but I guess I couldn’t help myself. You take care of yourself. Maybe when this is all over …”
There was a long pause, as if she was going to say more; then the phone went dead.

He lay on top of the covers in his clothes, nursing a Scotch and watching CNN. There was a brief blip about the opening of the trial, less than thirty seconds. A quick shot of him entering the courthouse after lunch, a longer one of Helena Abramowitz. Nothing of Marvin or the family.

As much as he could he wanted to shield the family from this. They had no media savvy—they could come across as bumpkins, victims, cheap fodder. Their lives had already been devastated; anything he could do to protect what shreds of privacy and pride they had left, he was going to.

That was all background for what he was thinking about. Violet had called. He’d felt his breath stop, listening to her voice. He would have loved to have heard it in person, spoken to her, but at the same time it would have been a load to handle.

He stripped down, brushed the whiskey off his teeth, had a good piss. He fondled his cock, thinking of her, thinking of their night together. When he got hard he stopped playing with himself.

He had to put her out of his mind. An impossibility; but he had to try. He had a life to defend, a family to worry about.

Sleep came hard. His family, the trial, Violet—they all swirled around in his head. His last physical sensation before he fell into a troubled sleep, so strong that it could have been happening in the very moment, was remembering how Violet’s body fit so naturally and effortlessly with his.

“Y
OU’RE ONE OF THE
lead detectives on what have been referred to in the press as the Alley Slasher murders?”

“I am.”

“How long have you been a detective on the force?”

“Nineteen years.”

“You’re one of the senior detectives on the force?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You have been cited numerous times for being one of the best detectives in the city, haven’t you?”

“I don’t know about that,” the man answered modestly. “There’s plenty of good detectives on the force. They don’t assign you to the homicide division unless they think you can do the job.”

“Have you been assigned to these cases from the beginning?”

“Yes, although it wasn’t until the fourth body turned up that we realized we had a definite pattern—a serial-type series of killing, almost definitely by one perpetrator. I had investigated the first one, and then that fourth one, and when we realized there was a pattern, like I said, then I backtracked and checked out the second and third ones, and they matched the MO of the ones I’d been working on, numbers one and four, so from then on I was one of the lead detectives. And still am,” he added.

Abramowitz was questioning her first witness, Detective Dudley Marlow from the police department’s homicide division. Homicide detectives weren’t limited to any particular precinct or area; they covered the entire city. Like most large-city homicide units, they were considered the elite detective division in the force, as Abramowitz was making sure the jury understood and appreciated. They had one of the highest percentages of solved murders of any police force in the country, a fact they were proud of. And over ninety-five percent of the murder cases they brought to the district attorney’s office for prosecution resulted in convictions. In general, if they arrested someone for murder, he or she was guilty. At least found guilty in a trial.

Wyatt listened. He had Marlow’s police reports from the seven murders opened in front of him on the table. Some of the reports were computer printouts, others were copies of reports that were handwritten. From the way the reports were entered it looked to him like the detective had taken notes by hand at the scene and later on, when he was in his office and had the time, had typed them up and entered them into the computer, which was sent to the Department of Records, the agency he had visited when he was trying to find out if Lieutenant Blake had accessed the files.

All the detectives who had worked on the murders had done their reports in this fashion—making notes at the crime scene while it was still fresh, then typing up their reports later.

The typed, computer-stored reports were the public record as such. They were similar to the handwritten ones, but the syntax, grammar, and accounts of the event had been cleaned up and made more readable and coherent; also, some of the material in the handwritten reports didn’t get into the computer. Either the detective didn’t think it was important, or he was too busy (or lazy) to put in every detail.

Wyatt had subpoenaed all the reports, computer and handwritten, and had gone over them carefully. They corresponded in great detail to the information Dwayne Thompson had given the grand jury. Which to him meant that unless Marvin had sold him a bill of goods, which he didn’t accept—not because Marvin wasn’t capable of lying, but that he wasn’t good at it; he could never have carried off a deception this elaborate for this long—then someone in a position to get his hands on this stuff had given it to Dwayne.

The problem with that theory was that Doris Blake was the obvious candidate, and she hadn’t done that. He hadn’t figured out where to go from there.

Abramowitz’s voice brought him back to the present. “Would you describe for the jury, Detective Marlow, the way in which the victims were murdered? Not only murdered, but everything that was done to them physically.” She walked to the prosecution table and picked up a packet of photographs that been blown up to eight-by-eleven. “The state would like to introduce these into evidence.”

Wyatt had seen the pictures. They were full-color photographs taken of Paula Briggs, the latest victim. Ugly, gut-wrenching pictures.

“So ordered,” Grant said.

During the pretrial hearing Wyatt had tried to exclude the photographs as being prejudicial, but Grant had denied his motion. He knew he’d be shot down again, but he had to go on the record.

“Objection,” Wyatt called out.

“Overruled,” Grant answered immediately.

The clerk assigned them a number—exhibit #1—and Abramowitz carried them to the witness stand. One of the courtroom deputies set up an easel next to the stand, angled so that both Detective Marlow and the jury could see what was on it. Abramowitz set the stacked pictures on the easel. “Can you identify the body in this photograph, Detective Marlow?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “That is the body of Paula Briggs.”

It was a particularly grisly picture. She was lying on the ground, the scant remains of her mangled clothes twisted around her body. Her private parts were exposed. There were several wounds that looked like knife wounds, particularly around her neck and upper torso. One of her breasts had been sliced open, and lay askew against her rib cage.

The effect on the jury was powerful. There were gasps, hands to mouths. One of the women covered her eyes almost immediately, then looked down at the floor.

Abramowitz turned to them. “I’m sorry to have to subject you to this,” she apologized, “but it’s important that you understand the viciousness of these murders and their similarities. The killer didn’t merely kill his victims—he tortured and mutilated them.”

She turned back to Marlow. “Please describe to us what you saw when you arrived on the crime scene.” She handed Marlow a pointer. “You may use this to point out certain details if you want to.”

Marlow took the pointer from her and turned to the easel. “We went there as soon as the call came in. We knew—my partner and I—there was a good possibility this was another one like the ones we’d been tracking. She was still in the truck then—the garbage guys hadn’t moved her.”

Abramowitz moved the first picture to the side of the easel, revealing a shot of Paula in the garbage truck, as the garbage collectors had found her. “This is how you found her?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know how she got into that truck? The body?”

“She had been stuffed into a garbage can. When they emptied it into the truck, that’s when they discovered her.”

“So there was some attempt at concealment. So that the body wouldn’t be found immediately after it—excuse me, she—was murdered.”

“That would be the logical assumption, yes.”

“All right. Go ahead.”

“We took the body out of the truck as carefully as we could—we were wearing latex gloves, of course—and laid her on the ground, like you see in this first picture.”

“Let me interrupt you for a second, Detective. Who took these pictures?”

“A police photographer. Jack Russett. He was called when we were—he met us at the scene. We didn’t move the body until he took that picture and some others of the victim where she was found.”

“Okay. Continue, please.”

“We looked her over. We didn’t want to disturb the body too much, we wanted it to be as close to the way it was found as it could be for the coroner to look at. We checked it over enough to satisfy ourselves that it was done by the … whoever had done the other ones.”

“And what was your conclusion?”

“That it was.”

“That the victim had been murdered by the same man who had done the previous six that resembled it.”

“Yes.”

“Would you describe what you saw for the jury, please.” She took a third photo from the stack and set it next to the other two. It was a tighter shot of Paula, waist to head.

Marlow nodded. He touched the photo with his pointer. “As you can see, her clothes had been ripped off her, almost completely. Which had happened, to different degrees, with the other six. Since she had been in the garbage truck we couldn’t tell for sure if the killer had done it or the truck had done it—torn the clothes off her. To my eye it looked like the killer had done most of it and the action of the truck mechanism had taken what was ripped and made it worse; but I wouldn’t swear to that.”

Abramowitz nodded. She looked over at the jury to make sure they were all watching—they were. “All right. Continue, please.”

“There were several knife wounds to her head, neck, and chest areas.” He touched the photo with the pointer at some of the visible wounds. “I knew right away that’s what killed her, which the coroner later confirmed. Probably this one.” He pointed to a large knife wound at the right side of her neck.

“What about some of these other wounds?” Abramowitz asked. She took the pointer from him and pointed to the dismembered breast. “What about this one?”

“My guess is that happened before the ones to the neck.”

“So not only was she raped, but she was tortured before she was killed. Murdered.” That to the jury. She turned to Marlow again. “In your capacity as a detective, not a medical examiner, you could tell the following: the victim had been murdered.”

“Yes.”

“By knife wound.”

“Yes.”

“That she had been mutilated.” She touched the pointer to the area on the tight photo of the butchered breast.

“Yes.”

“Could you tell whether or not she was raped?”

“No. That’s the coroner’s job. We could see that her underpants had been ripped off and there was blood between her legs. There was a knife wound down there, too.”

“She had been cut with a knife in the region of her vagina?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

Wyatt looked at the jury. They were completely caught up in the Abramowitz-Marlow colloquy. This was awful, what had been done to these women. Separating the revulsion over the crimes from an attachment to Marvin was going to be one of the most important parts of his defense.

Abramowitz put a fourth picture on the easel. It was a close-up of the abdominal and vaginal areas of Paula’s body. “Is this what you saw?” she asked. She pointed to a dark gash alongside the vagina, the pubic hair clotted with blood. “This is the wound?”

“Yes.”

She stepped back from the easel. “Question: You were called to the murder scene where you found a body in a dump truck.”

“Yes.”

“It had been discovered by two workers from the trash company who had dumped it in from a trash can in the alley.”

“Yes.”

“The victim’s clothing had been torn, her body mutilated, possibly before she was murdered, and the cause of death, as you could best ascertain it, having the experience of thirteen years as a detective on the police force, was by knife. And that since the other victims had been raped it was logical for you to assume that this one had been, too.”

“Yes. I thought it would turn out she’d been raped, and she was. Also sodomized,” he added.

“Was sodomy a feature of the other killings?”

“Some of them. Four of the other six.”

There was no point in Wyatt’s objecting to any of this. The coroner would establish it later; to raise the issue further would more deeply embed it in the jury’s minds—the last thing he wanted to do.

“Okay,” she said. She took him through the similarities with the other murders, a long, painstaking procedure.

“Given all that information,” she said in finishing, “which you could see with the naked eye, and knowing what you knew about the previous murders that were similar to this one—was there any doubt in your mind that this was another one of those murders?”

He shook his head firmly. “None whatsoever. The man who murdered this woman murdered the other six. There’s no question about it, as far as I’m concerned.”

Wyatt stood at the lawyer’s lectern looking at the witness, Detective Marlow. He had Marlow’s official reports for all seven of the murders in a folder on top of the lectern. “Who called you to the murder scene, Detective Marlow?”

“The homicide division dispatcher.”