“We thought it possible there would be some on material covering the upper body.”
“Why did you think that?” Hardy now had Schiff firmly assuming the role she didn’t want and wasn’t qualified for, that of crime-scene reconstruction expert. But if Stier wasn’t objecting, she couldn’t very well refuse to answer the question.
“We thought… after the first blow… the assailant would have to lift the cleaver, which now had blood on it, and swing it hard down again. Some blood might have come off in the swinging or from the second impact.”
Now Hardy turned and faced the jury, impassive. Without looking at Schiff he asked, “Sergeant, did you in fact search for blood on the clothes you took from Maya’s home early in the morning after the murder of Mr. Preslee?”
“Yes, we did.”
“Isn’t it true, Sergeant, that you removed all the clothing from the house, including her husband’s and children’s? And removed for testing the contents of the hampers and laundry room? Everything, in fact, except for what they were wearing?”
“Yes.”
“And were there clothes in the washing machine or dryer or anywhere else in the house?”
“No.”
“So you got them all?”
“Yes.”
She hated this. She knew it was coming across to the jury as some form of police harassment. Even if she didn’t have the specific evidence. She knew that it wasn’t particularly difficult to be in a room or an apartment, even for a substantial period of time, and leave no physical sign of it, especially if you knew you were going in to commit a crime. She knew that Maya had been at Levon’s, and if not to kill him, then why? She didn’t know what the damned Townshend woman had done with her clothes and her shoes in the time she’d had to get rid of them. And if she hadn’t gotten rid of them, Schiff didn’t know how she’d avoided the blood spatter. But none of that made any difference to her core belief that this defendant was a crafty and dangerous killer. “We were just trying to be thorough.”
“Indeed,” Hardy said, “thoroughness is commendable. And you were careful when you seized this clothing to package it appropriately for later testing for blood by the crime lab, were you not?”
“Yes.”
“But with all their sophisticated testing, the crime lab found no evidence whatsoever of blood on anything you seized from Maya Townshend’s house, did they?”
Stier finally came alive. “Objection. Hearsay.”
“Sustained.”
“Okay, let me ask it this way, then, Inspector. I want you to assume that lab personnel will testify that they found no blood. That’s not consistent with your theory of how this crime was committed, is it?”
Now Stier compounded his error. He should have let Schiff say that maybe the defendant had gotten rid of her clothes, or maybe there just wasn’t enough blood to find, but instead he objected. “Speculation, Your Honor. Irrelevant. Inspector Schiff’s theories are not evidence.”
Hardy couldn’t believe his luck. “Well, gosh, Your Honor,” he said. “My point exactly. Since the prosecution concedes that Inspector Schiff’s theories aren’t evidence, and since the prosecution doesn’t seem to have anything besides her theories, I have no further questions.”
Braun banged her gavel and chastised Hardy for making speeches, but he didn’t care.
For the rest of the afternoon Hardy continued to hammer the same point through the other lab witnesses.
“You’re a fingerprint expert, right? Did you find fingerprints inside Mr. Preslee’s home?”
“Yes. Lots of them.”
“Were any of those Maya Townshend’s fingerprints?”
“No.”
“In fact, there are several fingerprints that belong to people whom you’ve never identified, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Fingerprints at the table where the victim was seated?”
“Yes.”
“Fingerprints at the sink where the cleaver was allegedly washed?”
“Yes.”
“Fingerprints on the interior door handle of the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“And none of these are Maya’s, and some of them are unidentified, right?”
“Correct.”
Hardy did the same with the DNA-some recovered, some unidentified, none belonging to Maya. When he was finally done with his last cross-examination at quarter to five, Hardy took a long beat and threw a look at Stier, wilting at his own table. The prosecutor had taken a beating today on the Preslee evidence, and he knew it.
But next up, he would be talking about motive. And motive evidence, Hardy knew, was going to be brutal.
27
The apartment door opened and Wyatt Hunt stood looking at his young associate. “What is this bullshit, Craig?”
“What bullshit?”
“ ‘What bullshit?’ he asks. Calling in sick when you look about as sick as I do, except for a little red around the eyes. Are you stoned?”
“Slightly.”
“And what do you hope to accomplish by that?”
“Nothing. I’m not trying to accomplish anything. Except figure out how I’m going to get back with Tam.”
“You think better when you’re loaded?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“And yet here you are.”
“I just thought I’d take a day off and think about things.”
“This is thinking about things?”
“No. I felt bad about Tam and was trying to cheer myself up about it.”
“Yeah, you’re just the picture of good cheer.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“There’s nothing you can say, Craig. You know the rules. You want a day off, call in and ask for a day off. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve done that before and it’s never been a problem. But you don’t call in sick when you’re not sick.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well…” Hunt hated this, hated Craig at this moment. “You want to get back with Tamara, it’s not rocket science. She wants you to stop with this dope shit.”
“She send you here?”
“Nope. I wanted to see how bad it was.”
Chiurco blew into the air between them. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”
“That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. Because to tell you the truth, it doesn’t look too good right now.”
“You going to fire me?”
“I’m thinking about it. I feel a little betrayed, if you want to know.”
“Not by me?”
“Yep, by you.”
“Wyatt, come on. This is the first time for anything like this in like-what?-five years. We’re not exactly in the busiest time we’ve ever had. I just made a bad decision.”
“Couple of ’em. Notice any connection between the dope and the bad decisions?”
“Maybe. A little.”
“Maybe a little, yeah. And in the meanwhile Dismas Hardy comes by my place last night and gives us a shitload of work and I’m thinking you and me are going to be humping round the clock on this Townshend case for at least the next few days, maybe a week. Except you call in sick when you’re not actually sick at all, and Tam’s all messed up back at the office, can barely answer the phone, and I’ve got no goddamn backup.”
“I didn’t know that. I couldn’t have known that.”
“No, I know. Which is why one of the rules is you show up at work when somebody’s paying you, so that if there’s work to do, you’re there to do it.”
Chiurco hung his head; his shoulders rose and fell. “Again, I’m sorry.”
Hunt waited until Craig’s head came back up, then looked him square in the eyes. “Shit,” he said. “This is no way to run an airline. Didn’t we already have a discussion about this once? How am I supposed to write a reference letter if this is going on? How about, if this is your chosen field, maybe you want to avoid things that threaten it?”
“I don’t usually smoke during the day.”
“You shouldn’t be usually smoking at all, Craig. You might lose your job over it-hell, your whole profession. Worse, you’re losing Tam, and you already know that.”