Rabid (64 page)

“Would you even touch it?”

“No.”

“So, according to your testimony and your forensic data, Conroy Sloan and only Conroy Sloan must have been holding the knife when it went into his chest, since his fingerprints were the uppermost, and since he wouldn’t have touched it after it was in there.”

“Objection!” Boy Georgie was at it again. “Objection! Conjecture!”

Heath bent over the rail of the witness stand at Bhupadi. “Might Conroy Sloan have been holding the knife when it stabbed him?”

“The witness may answer,” Judge Washington said.

Bhupadi’s jaw popped. “Yes.”

Heath smiled. “One more thing, doctor. In other murder cases where a knife was the murder weapon, on a murder victim’s body, have you ever seen only one stab wound?”

“Objection!” Georgie Boy yelled again. “Irrelevant!”

Judge Washington said, “The witness can answer about cases with which he is familiar.”

“Dr. Bhupadi?” Heath asked. “Have you ever seen only one stab wound on a murder victim’s body?”

Bhupadi shifted in his seat. “No.”

Heath smiled some more for the jury. Juries like people who smile. “Usually more stab wounds than that?”

Bhupadi smiled back at the blonde bamboozler because the prosecution attorneys had told him to. “Yes.”

Heath smiled at Bhupadi. “Thank you, doctor.”
FMG asshole.

Bhupadi smiled at Heath Sheldon. “You’re welcome.”
Whathah rundi.

~~~~~

At the defense table in the courtroom, Bev stared at the blank, yellow notepad.

She didn’t want to hear about the knife.

She didn’t want to hear about the blood.

She couldn’t deny what all those experts said because she couldn’t remember anything. Blank spaces like empty picture frames interrupted the hallway of her memory.

Dante leaned over the railing and touched her shoulder. Bev leaned back and laid her hand on his.

Lydia, sitting beside the priest, patted Bev’s other shoulder.

Their concern made her feel worse because she should be able to remember, if she really wanted to. Her eyes burned.

Bev wouldn’t cry. She
wouldn’t
. They were trying to help, and she wouldn’t make them feel bad by blubbering.

Heath returned to the table while the next witness, a police department forensic technician who had analyzed the blood in the kitchen, was sworn in.

The forensic technician, Mercedes Gonzalez, said that she had been working for the forensic lab for a year since she graduated from college. Her huge, brown eyes glanced around the courtroom, and she kept staring at Bev.

Georgina Pire, the ADA, asked the girl, “And what did you analyze in this case?”

“Blood splatters,” the girl said, and she drummed her tiny fingers on the rail around the witness stand. “Blood splatters and smears.”

Bev’s heart clenched around its own supply of blood.

“Please describe the patterns of blood in the apartment, using this diagram of the kitchen to explain.” The line-drawing kitchen diagram was two feet high by three feet long, and it looked like the designers’ perspective illustrations when Bev had had the kitchen remodeled two years ago.

She wished for that fifteen thousand dollars back. That was a year and a half’s tuition at OLPH for the girls.

The technician cleared her slim throat and glanced at Bev again. The girl was wearing blue glitter mascara. The tech ducked her head and said, “The small blood pool in the center of the kitchen floor where the deceased’s body was found, measuring twenty centimeters in diameter, was the source for the majority of the blood swipes, wipes, and splashes in the kitchen.” The girl clicked a laser pointer, and a glowing red dot whirled in the center of the schematic.

A blood pool,
Bev hated the idea that Conroy had been laying in a pool of his own blood.

He had gasped, while he was lying on the white linoleum floor, trying to say something, while the knife in his chest quivered with his heartbeat.

Was she remembering that or illustrating the girl’s comments in her mind?

Bev wasn’t sure. She stared at the yellow notepad, willing her mind to reach back.

A tear fell out of Bev’s eye and splashed on the yellow paper.

“Please continue.” Georgina crossed her arms and pointed her sharp nose at the diagram.

“This blood pool was predominantly composed of blood from the victim. A splatter of the victim’s blood on the upper kitchen cabinets suggests a small spray of blood, perhaps from the initial blade entrance, occurred while he was standing, before he fell.” The red dot from her pointer swung over to the upper cabinets and jiggled.

“How can you tell that he was standing when this spray occurred?”

“The blood was a fine spray, perhaps even an aspiration, about six feet above the ground and tightly grouped. Like with a water pistol, if you’re standing close to a water pistol, the droplets are close together.”

A fine red mist hung in the air and flew past her left eye,
and Bev’s fingernails scratched the courthouse table. Her left arm was paler than her right and sore in the joints.

Mercedes continued, “A struggle flings blood everywhere, on the walls, on the ceiling, sometimes a hundred feet away. There was no indication of that. Other than the one spray on the countertops, the rest of Conroy Sloan’s blood was transferred, probably originating from the pool.”

“Transferred?” Georgina looked interested.

“Blood can be picked up by other people, on their hands, shoes, or clothing, and moved to a new place.” The Mercedes girl sounded like the smartest kid in class.

“And can you tell that blood was transferred?”

“Yes. Instead of drops, droplets, or sprays, transferred blood is a blot, a swipe, a wipe, a smear, or a print.”

Georgina cocked her head to the side. “And were there any of those in the apartment?”

“Lots,” the girl said. “One of the paramedics walked through the blood pool and tracked it through the living room and out the front door. The sole of his running shoe matched the print.”

Bev smeared the tears on her cheeks and wiped them on her black skirt. That was
Conroy’s
blood they were talking about. The paramedic had stepped in
Conroy’s
blood and tracked it across the living room carpet, leaving umber footprints burned into the beige carpet.

Was that another memory?

“Ah. That’s interesting,” Georgina said. “Could you tell if Beverly Sloan transferred blood anywhere in the apartment?”

The red dot scribbled on the wall telephone in the kitchen perspective drawing. “A bloody palm print on the telephone matched Beverly Sloan’s right palm. The fingerprint technician made the palm print identification. Beverly Sloan had blood on her right hand when she picked up the phone receiver.”

But the kitchen phone hadn’t been hooked up yet. Bev had called the paramedics on her cell phone. The stupid buttons had been so tiny, and her left hand was useless and so heavy that it felt like she was holding a gallon of milk.

“Did Beverly Sloan leave other bloody fingerprints or palm prints in the kitchen?”

“Yes. Here,” the laser scratched the black and white kitchen drawing, “on the counter in several places, and on the floor beside where the victim lay.”

When Bev had crouched on the floor beside Conroy, blood leaked down his side from the protruding knife and stained his shirt. Her hand squished on the floor.

Memory or imagination?

“Were there other bloody fingerprints or palm prints in the kitchen?”

“We found handprints and fingerprints matching Beverly Sloan, both the paramedics, Leila Faris, and Father Dante Petrocchi-Bianchi.”

“What does that tell you?”

“That all of them were in the kitchen some time after the victim was stabbed, and they all touched him while he was bleeding or they touched the blood on the floor.”

“Did you find blood anywhere else in the apartment?”

“More blood was found on the doorknob. Partials matched everyone in the apartment.”

“Was anyone else’s blood found in the apartment?”

“Drops and droplets of Beverly Sloan’s blood were found on the kitchen counters, near the spray on the cabinets,” the laser pointer touched the diagram again, “and a smear of Beverly Sloan’s blood was found on the deceased’s hand.”

“Is that amount of blood consistent with the wounds that her doctor testified that she had sustained on her right wrist and hand?”

“Yes.”

In the kitchen of the apartment, under the glare of the fluorescent bulbs, greasy drops of her blood slid off her wrist and dripped on the green veneer counter. She had been sitting on the counter, something poking her back. Her left hand held a knife.

She had cut cold, superficial slices into the accordion folds of her right wrist and palm.

Georgina the prosecutor prompted Mercedes Gonzalez through all the blood evidence. From the way she described it, blood had washed over the apartment in a huge crimson tsunami.

Heath stood and adjusted his suit. He reviewed his notes, flipping the pages on the yellow pad. He began his cross-examination with, “When did you sample the blood in the apartment?”

“Sunday, February fourteenth.”

“Was that the day you Luminoled the apartment?”

“No, we took samples of visible blood on Sunday, and then we used the Luminol on Monday the fifteenth.”

In his cross examination, Heath led the girl back through her testimony, paying particular attention to blood sprays, splatters, droplets, and drops. “You said, Ms. Gonzalez, that the blood on the counter you attribute to Mrs. Sloan was,” he consulted his notes, “drops and droplets.”

“Yes.”

“Did you find Beverly Sloan’s blood anywhere else?”

“On Conroy Sloan’s hand and on the knife.”

“Well,” Heath strutted around the courtroom. “How did her blood get on his hand?”

“He must have been nearby when she sustained the wound.” The girl enunciated every consonant in the last three words.

Heath asked, “And how did Mrs. Sloan’s blood get on the knife?”

“The wounds on Beverly Sloan’s right wrist are consistent with the type of knife analyzed.” Again, Mercedes’s statement was very carefully worded.

“The knife in Conroy Sloan’s chest.”

“Yes.”

“So he cut her hand?”

“That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing.”

“Was her hand cut with that knife, the one that ended up in his chest?”

“That conjecture is beyond the scope of the forensic testing,” she repeated.  

“Did any of the other knives in the block have blood on them? Anyone’s blood?”

“We tested all the knives remaining in the block. All were negative for blood.”