Proof of Intent (36 page)

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said. “That makes such good sense that I'm going to sit down and let Mr. Olesky try to prove you wrong.”

Stash Olesky stood, looking angry. He knew Helen Raynes's reputation as well as I did. “Doctor, shattered bones are pretty sharp, aren't they?”

“I suppose they can be.”

“Is bone harder than wood?”

“Ebony is a very hard wood.”

“That's not what I asked. Is bone harder than wood?”

Helen Raynes looked a little sour. “Generally, yes. I suppose.”

“Thank you for that bold admission. Now, was Mrs. Dane's skull fractured?”

“Yes.”

“So, given that by your own admission bone is harder than wood, what's to stop a fragment of bone from shearing off this splinter just as cleanly as a knife?”

Helen Raynes smiled derisively. “It might seem that way to a layman. But when you've studied these things as long as I have, you realize it wouldn't work that way. It couldn't.”

“Why not?”

“The three marks that I pointed out earlier? The direction of the grooves demonstrates that they were made by twisting, not by a lateral shearing force.”

Stash squinted at the large blowup of the gouge in the bokken. “You can tell all of that from this blurry little streak?” He pointed at a vague ridge in the wood.

“Yes, I can.”

Stash raised his eyebrows, then gave the significant look to the jury. “Earlier I believe you testified that the ridges were here, here, and here. The one I just pointed at?” He shrugged. “It's just a random squiggle.”

I breathed out slowly. Why had I put this woman on the stand?

Dr. Raynes cleared her throat and stared at the chart for a moment. “I'm sorry I wasn't really paying attention where you were pointing.” She squinted at the huge poster. “You're right, I was mistaken.”

“You were mistaken. What else were you mistaken about?”

“Nothing,” she said firmly.

“Ah. Then perhaps you did it intentionally?”

“Did what?”

“Fudged the facts—as you so nicely put it just minutes ago.”

“I would
never
tamper with evidence.”

“Notwithstanding all the money you're being paid to help the defense, you'd never fudge the facts.”

“Absolutely not.”

“You've never fudged the facts on anything in your life?”

Dr. Raynes blinked. It wasn't much, but it scared me a little.

“I know, I know!” Stash moved along breezily. “You've got your reputation to think of. But what exactly
is
your reputation?”

The courtroom was silent.

“You were a tenured professor at the University of Montana, were you not?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“For what reasons can a tenured professor be forced from her position?”

“A variety, I suppose.”

“Do you suppose that fudging the facts in your research might be one of those reasons?”

No answer. I knew something bad was coming, and I was powerless to stop it.

“Doctor? Hm? If a researcher falsifies data in their research in order to come to a predetermined conclusion, would that be grounds for dismissing a tenured faculty member?”

“Objection,” I said. “This is totally irrelevant and speculative.”

“Denied,” Evola said. “I'll bet fifty cents Mr. Olesky is going somewhere with this.”

“And you'll win that bet, Your Honor,” the prosecuting attorney said. “Doctor, I'll ask you again: Is the falsification of research data considered to be sufficient grounds for the removal of a tenured professor at most universities?”

“Yes.”

“And were you fired from U of M because you falsified data in your research?”

“I was not fired.”

“Oh?”

“A jealous colleague made a variety of spurious accusations. They were never proven.”

“Come on. That's a lie, isn't it? Wasn't a report submitted to the faculty senate recommending your dismissal as a result of your dishonesty?”

There was a long pause during which Helen Raynes's face went slowly pale. “Who told you that?”

“I'm asking the questions here.” Stash's voice cracked like a whip. “Was or was not a report made to the faculty senate recommending your dismissal?”

“It was a sealed report. A preliminary report, nonbinding.” Her voice had gone shrill. “The final recommendation of the committee was never made. I would most certainly have prevailed if . . . had all the . . . if the facts had been fully examined.”

“But instead you resigned, didn't you?”

“My business was just taking off, so I decided it wasn't worth the agony of fighting the thing for another year.”

“What about your precious reputation?”

“Excuse me?”

“In your earlier testimony you claimed that your reputation was the
one
thing that ensures your truthfulness on the stand.”

Stony silence.

“If your reputation is so important to you, Doctor, then why didn't you stick around and beat the charges?”

Helen Raynes made an obvious effort to regain her composure, but her voice was still high and weak, and her skin was pale as death. Her career, her reputation, and her livelihood were going down the tubes right there on national TV. “As I said, my business was just taking off. I had just received a large contract. It seemed an opportune time to go.”

“I bet it did.” Stash shook his head in disgust and sat down.

“Son of a
bitch
!” Lisa said, slapping the table. “That pompous, bogus, boobs-hanging-out woman knew there was a time bomb in her past, and she never told us.”

“Let it go,” Miles said.

We were on recess waiting for my final expert witness.

“Let it go,” Miles said again. “We've got to focus on what's coming next.” He paused briefly, smiled glumly at me. “What
is
coming next, by the way? I'm waiting for the part of this trial where ace attorney Charley Sloan goes on a honking big tear and saves my ass.”

“Can I go strangle that woman, Dad?” Lisa said.

Anywhere but here
, I was thinking. I turned around and looked around the courtroom, looking for inspiration. The first face I saw was that of Roger van Blaricum, Diana's brother. He was no more than eight feet away, half of his face looking back at me with the careworn, injured expression of a grieving brother.

And the other half of his face was smirking at me.

“The defense calls JoEllen Flynn.”

JoEllen Flynn had no great reputation, no publications, wasn't an unusually forceful witness, and her experience in the field of crime scene investigation was unremarkable. But she was honest and diligent. And drop-dead gorgeous. Don't bother calling me a chauvinist: Sex sells in the courtroom just as well as it does on the breath-freshener commercials.

JoEllen Flynn was in her midthirties, black Irish—raven-haired, pale-skinned, high-cheekboned, tall. She'd been a crime scene investigator for the state police post in Lansing for a few years, then had quit her job to raise children. From what she told me, she testifies in a few cases a year to make gas money and pay for the annual family trip to Disney World.

“Ms. Flynn,” I began, “have you had an opportunity to review the evidence in this case?”

“Yes sir. I reviewed the entire police file, including the autopsy report, toxicology, the witness statements, and the crime scene reports, plus state police Agent Orvell Pierce's blood spatter analysis report.”

I began by using her to point out that the fingerprints found on the bokken were latent prints rather than impressions left in the blood. She made the point that the fingerprint evidence provided no clear evidence that Miles Dane had used the bokken as a murder weapon. I then moved on to the main reason I'd brought her to the stand.

“I'm going to show you what has been marked as State's Exhibit 60, Ms. Flynn,” I said. “Can you identify this document?”

JoEllen Flynn examined the paper I handed her. “Yes sir. That's Agent Pierce's blood spatter analysis report.”

“Let me direct your attention to page one of that report. There where it says ‘Methodology.' Could you read that portion silently and then tell us whether you have any comments as to the soundness of his methods?”

JoEllen Flynn looked at the paper for a while, chewing her lower lip. She looked a little nervous. “Yes sir. Well, it all looks about right. These are standard and accepted methods in the field of blood spatter analysis.”

“Good.” I handed her more papers. These were covered with spatters of a dried red-brown liquid, the pig's blood Agent Pierce had used to re-create the blood spatter from the crime scene. “Can you identify these items?”

“Yes sir. These are the papers on which Agent Pierce spattered blood. In other words, those are his verification tests.”

“And these? State's Exhibits 15 through 27?”

“These are photographs of the actual blood spatter from the room where Diana Dane was killed.”

“Now, I know Agent Pierce has already testified on this subject, but could you just briefly recap the logical connection between the test sheets and the actual photographs?”

“Sure. Basically the way this process works is you measure the size and shape of the blood spatter. Using a standard formula that you can punch into any scientific calculator, you can predict roughly where the drops came from and how fast they were moving. Working back from that, you can reconstruct the location and direction of motion of the object from which the blood was spattered. So the point of these”—she held up one of the spattered pieces of paper—“is just to verify that the calculations worked, that they correctly predicted what would happen in actuality.”

“So have you had an opportunity to compare Agent Pierce's blood spatter to those in photographs of the actual crime scene?”

“Yes sir.”

“And what did your comparison reveal?”

“Basically, that the test spatters are slightly shorter than the actual ones in the room. Here, see, in the crime scene photograph you have a blood drop that's an inch and a quarter long, and here in the test, same size of drop, but it's an inch and an eighth. I compared twenty-nine tested spatters against similar test spatters and I found that twenty-three of the twenty-nine were slightly shorter.”

“What does this indicate to you, Ms. Flynn?”

“Look, I can't question Agent Pierce's basic conclusion. There is a margin of error in these calculations. So when Agent Pierce here in conclusion number four on page one of his report states that the object used was approximately one and a half to three feet in length, I think he's got it about right.”

“Now the bokken, state's exhibit one, it's forty-one inches, is it not?” I said triumphantly.

“That's right. But as Agent Pierce pointed out, I think he was naturally referring to the amount of the weapon extending beyond the hand. Not the total length of the weapon. That's the standard way of calculating this.”

Thank you for that entirely unhelpful clarification, darling. Now would you like to shoot me in the head? Beautiful, she was. But not the most helpful witness I've ever had.

I tried to smile. “Okay, Ms. Flynn. Fair enough. But even assuming he was talking about the length extending beyond his hand—and I'm not sure he was—were his conclusions accurate?”

“Again, these are approximations. He estimated the weapon was one and a half to three feet in length. Hold the bokken with one hand, you've got more than three feet of weapon extending from the hand. Hold it like a baseball bat, you're looking at right around three feet. Which is at the extreme end of his approximation. In my experience, when you do a series of tests and the tests show that the midpoint of an approximate range is shorter than the object you're comparing with, there's a good chance you're dealing with the wrong object.”

“Let me get this straight . . .”

“I'll try to say this in a simpler way, Mr. Sloan. If he'd done one test, and the spatters had been in the right range, but slightly low—hey, no problem. But if you do twenty-nine comparisons, and the tests consistently indicate something that's slightly shorter, yeah, you're probably looking at a shorter weapon.”

I held up the black bokken in its plastic sleeve. “Simple English. You think she was hit by something shorter than this.”

“Yes sir. If I were to guess, it was probably something just under two feet long. Highly unlikely it was three.”

“Thank you. Mr. Olesky, she's all yours.”

Stash stood up. “Hi, Ms. Flynn, good to see you again.”

“Hello, Mr. Olesky.”

“You ever played softball, Ms. Flynn?”

JoEllen Flynn smiled shyly. “Yes sir. My team was state champs in high school.”

“If I may say so, you look as fit as a high school girl,” Stash said. The soft soap was making me nervous. Usually Stash likes to stampede right for the jugular.

JoEllen Flynn blushed. “Thank you.”

“You ever heard the expression ‘choking up on the bat'?”

“Sure.”

“What does it mean?”

“Well, some hitters grip their bats farther up on the handle than others. That's called choking up.”

Stash handed the bokken to her. “Show me.”

She took the bokken and held it in a batter's grip. “Normally, you'd hold it right down here on the end. But if you wanted to choke up, you'd just move your hands a few inches higher. Like this.”

Stash pulled a neon green tape measure out of his coat pocket, extended it from the tip of the bokken to JoEllen's thumb. “Could you read that off for me, Ms. Flynn?”

“Twenty-nine inches.”

“That's just a hair over two feet, isn't it?”