“When you turned into the block between Fifth and Madison Avenues, did you observe any unusual activity?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Did you see any pedestrians?”
“Yes, ma’am. Mostly kids. A few adults, all women.”
“Did you see anyone running from the location?”
“No, I did not.”
The rookie cop wasn’t much less nervous than Kate Meade.
“Were you able to enter the Quillian residence?”
“Not right away. The door was locked. My partner rang the bell while I tried the service door to see if it was open,” Denton said. I was accounting for more critical minutes that had elapsed while Amanda Quillian lay inside on the living room floor. “Then I climbed up on the railing of the stoop to check if I could force open a window, but they had bars over the glass, so there wasn’t any use.”
“What did you do next?”
“I’d already radioed once for a backup unit. I called again and asked for ESU.”
“Would you please tell the jury what those initials stand for?”
“Sorry. Yeah. It’s the Emergency Services Unit. They do all the rescues and stuff. People stuck in elevators or jumpers on bridges. Called for them ’cause they have the battering rams to open doors.”
“Who was the next person to arrive at the Quillian house?”
Denton looked at his memo pad and repeated the name he had written there. “It was maybe ten minutes later. This young woman came-with a set of keys. Said she worked for Mrs. Meade, the lady who called 911. She was the babysitter.”
“Did you enter the town house?”
“Yeah, me and my partner. He opened the front door with the keys. We made the girl wait outside and we went in.”
“Can you tell us what you found?”
Denton ran the back of his hand over the top of his buzz cut and down his neck. He swallowed hard. “My partner-Bobby Jamison-he was ahead of me. We went in the entryway. Something must have caught his eye-”
“Objection.”
Judge Gertz admonished the young cop, “Just tell us what you observed and what you did.”
“Yes, sir.” Denton turned back to the jurors. “He stepped off to the left, into-well, like a parlor, I guess. I walked straight ahead. Then, I-um-I heard this kind of noise. Sort of a gagging noise. I doubled back.”
“What did you see?”
“That’s when I saw the body-the lady on the floor.”
“She was making a gagging noise?” Gertz asked, incredulous, because he thought he was familiar with the facts of the case.
“The sound you heard,” I interrupted to ask Denton, trying to keep control of the witness in the face of jurors who had already seen me sabotaged by a character in my own case. “What was the source of that?”
“Was she?” Gertz said again.
Denton’s head moved back and forth between me and the judge. “No, sir. The corpse was already dead.” Yogi Berra couldn’t have said it any better. Denton sheepishly looked to the jurors for some sign of understanding, then answered me. “That was my partner, Officer Jamison, making the noise. Throwing up. It was his first DOA.”
Despite my many hours of prepping Denton for his court appearance, he had always seemed more focused on Jamison’s reaction than Amanda Quillian’s condition.
I walked him through the events that followed, trying to leave as little room as possible for Lem Howell to paint the pair of rookies as Keystone Kops. Bobby Jamison’s physical response to encountering the murder victim had obviously contaminated an area of the crime scene. No, neither man had worn rubber gloves or booties in the house; yes, Denton had moved the body a bit to keep clear of the problem his partner had created; and, no, they hadn’t called to report the homicide until after they had cleaned up Jamison’s mess.
“Were there any signs of forced entry?”
“No, ma’am.”
Howell would argue that the killer was a street person who had pushed in after his victim unlocked the door. It was Chapman’s view-with Brendan Quillian conveniently out of town and the housekeeper on her regular day off-that the defendant had given the killer access to the home, so that he could lie in wait for Amanda as she entered alone after her luncheon date.
Howell’s cross-examination was a well-organized punch list of activities that the most casual of television viewers had come to expect of crime-scene responders. Tim Denton had been oblivious to just about every rule as he tended his unsteady partner on that fall afternoon, and the volley of No’s he gave in response to the questions seemed endless.
“I have no redirect of Officer Denton,” I said when Howell ceded the witness back to me and nodded at me with a smile.
The entryway of the town house and the area surrounding Amanda Quillian’s lifeless body had been hopelessly compromised by the first two cops on the scene. If the killer had left any trace evidence near her, he couldn’t have asked for more than the timely arrival of Jamison and Denton.
“You want a recess before you call your next witness?”
“May I have ten minutes?” I didn’t need the time, but I counted on it to let the jurors stretch their legs and come back fresh to a more compelling witness.
“Sure,” Gertz said. “Why don’t we give the jurors a short break.”
Max signaled me from her third-row seat that Jerry Genco had arrived and was waiting in the witness room. Artie Tramm let me slip out of the courtroom to the small cubicle off the locked hallway, and I confirmed with the pathologist the points that would be covered in his testimony.
“Dr. Genco,” I asked as the trial resumed, after he had completed the details of his medical education and training as a forensic pathologist and been qualified in his area of expertise, “for how long have you been employed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York?”
“Three years.”
“I’d like to direct your attention to a date last fall, the late afternoon of October third. Do you recall that day?”
“Yes, I do.”
“What was your assignment at that time?”
“I was catching cases,” he said, speaking to the jurors in the manner of a professional witness who had testified many times before, and explaining the steps that he was obligated to perform at a crime scene. “I was on call to respond to any homicides reported between eight a.m. and six p.m.”
Jerry Genco, expecting a day in the morgue’s lab, was casually dressed in a sports jacket and chinos. He was in sore need of a haircut and a small screw to replace the Band-Aid that held one earpiece of his glasses to the edge of the frame, but his smart, studied answers were in sharp contrast to the nervous manner of Kate Meade.
“Would you tell us, please, what time it was and who was present when you arrived at the Quillian town house?”
“It was four thirty, and I was admitted to the home by Detective Michael Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide Squad. There were two uniformed officers from the Nineteenth Precinct there, three other homicide detectives, and Hal Sherman, from the Crime Scene Unit.”
“Any civilians?”
“There was a woman identified to me as the housekeeper, but we never spoke. Someone had called her and she was brought in just as I arrived.”
“What happened when you entered?”
“Chapman led me through the vestibule into an adjacent room, like a small sitting area with several armchairs and a sofa. In the middle of the floor, on the carpet, was the body of Amanda Quillian.”
“Would you describe for us what you observed?”
Genco faced the jury box and gave a clinical description of the scene. “I saw the body of a Caucasian woman who appeared to be in her midthirties, fully clothed, lying on her back, apparently dead.”
He was more artful than Tim Denton in talking about the grotesque bruising on the slim neck of the victim, the protruding tongue hanging to the side of her mouth, and the pinpoint hemorrhages that dotted her still-open eyes.