Now we’re getting somewhere. Judge Long won’t hold any criminal defendant on the basis of motive alone, even a plausible motive. If Louisa Rawlings is telling the truth—and my gut says she is now, even if she didn’t come clean with the cops—then the Commonwealth won’t have any physical evidence implicating her. That won’t get us out of the woods permanently, of course; Geraldine’s just begun to sink her teeth into this one. But it will buy us some time.
Geraldine turns away from the bench and sends an index-finger signal to Clarence Wexler. My stomach somersaults. I know that look on her face. She’s got something. Or at least she thinks she does.
Clarence jumps to his feet and rushes forward as if summoned by God Himself. He’s holding an evidence bag, a large one. From here, I can’t make out what’s in it.
I start toward the bench so I can see, but I stop when the Kydd slides two sheets of paper across the table to me. One is a report from the crime lab. The other is Clarence’s summary of the lab report’s contents. I lean over to read and my eyes absorb the words as Geraldine speaks.
“What we’ve got,” she says, “is this. On it are skin fragments from the victim’s skull. And two of his hairs. And traces of his blood.”
Geraldine pauses for a moment and I look up. “Also on it,” she says, “are Louisa Coleman Rawlings’s fingerprints. No one else’s.”
Judge Long takes the evidence bag and holds it up to the light. “But what is it?” he asks.
“It’s a decorative plumbing fixture,” Geraldine replies. “A brass swan.”
CHAPTER 19
Judge Long called a thirty-minute recess to give the defense time to examine the Commonwealth’s surprise exhibit, time to digest the contents of the lab report, time to construct our own version of what it all means. Normally, the prosecutor is required to disclose all such evidence before presenting it in court. Trial by ambush went out with the Dark Ages.
The disclosure rule is always malleable at this stage of the game, though. The government’s version of probable cause came to light today, not yesterday. And since Geraldine’s office received the report from the Commonwealth’s crime lab just an hour or so before open session began, Judge Long ruled that the Common-wealth’s failure to disclose was harmless.
As a practical matter, of course, the judge is right. This judge usually is.
We’ll be given ample opportunity to have an independent lab examine the brass swan before this case gets to trial. We’ll hire our own forensic experts to analyze DNA, to determine blood type, and to identify fingerprints. But the answers I want right now can’t come from a lab or a physician or a scientist. They have to come from Louisa Rawlings. And so far at least, she doesn’t seem to have any.
She’s shivering, though it’s not the least bit cold in here. We’re in the jury deliberation room, across the hall from the main courtroom. Louisa and the Kydd are seated at a long, narrow table; I’m on my feet. The Commonwealth’s documents are spread out in front of the Kydd and he’s still wading through them. The bagged brass swan is in front of Louisa. She doesn’t touch it.
I take it from the table and hold it up to the fluorescent light. It’s the mother swan, not one of her two cygnets. Portions of the skin fragments Geraldine referred to would have been scraped off at the crime lab for analysis, but two remain affixed to the brass. Even through the plastic, the fragments are easy to see with the naked eye. And I’ll be damned if they were there twenty-four hours ago.
We’ll get to the swan in a minute. I have another issue on my mind. “Louisa,” I ask, “did you have brunch at the club last Sunday morning?”
She stares at me for a moment before she answers. “No,” she says. “I didn’t. Truth is, I found my companions rather dull. And I had a lot on my mind. I bought a coffee and drove to Lighthouse Beach with it.”
“But you told Mitch Walker you ate at the club.”
“No, I didn’t. I told him exactly what I told you—that I’d been invited to play nine holes and have brunch. He didn’t ask anything else about it.”
I shake my head at her.
“What was I supposed to do?” she asks. “Volunteer that I needed time alone to think about my impending divorce? Tell the cop I didn’t want to go home until I was pretty sure my husband had gone for the day?”
She can protest all she wants. Her eyes tell me she knows how stupid she was.
“Well, your clever little answer is what landed you here, Louisa. And this”—I hold the swan out toward her—“just might keep you in.”
I set the wrapped fixture back on the table, closer to Louisa than it was before, hoping she’ll shed some light on its current condition. She recoils from it, shaking her head. “I can’t explain this,” she says, her voice trembling along with the rest of her. “It makes no sense.”
“Hold on,” the Kydd says, pulling a page free from a stapled packet. I walk behind him, so I can look over his shoulder and read. He’s holding a sheet divided into three columns. It’s the inventory of items confiscated by the two guys from the state crime lab. The swan is near the bottom of the list.
The Kydd runs his finger horizontally across the page on the swan line. The middle column, the widest of the three, gives a brief description of the item identified in column one. The final entry, in the third column, tells where it was found. The brass swan, the state guys claim, was discovered in the Rawlings’s basement.
“What was it doing down in the basement?” the Kydd asks Louisa.
She looks blank. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I take the inventory sheet from him and put it in front of her, on top of the bagged exhibit, my index finger directing her attention to the swan line. “Did you remove it from the hot tub for some reason?” Surely Louisa would have noticed if the mother swan had migrated from the Queen’s Spa.
She’s silent. After a moment, she sits a little straighter, tapping the sheet. “Wait,” she says, “that must be the other swan.”
“The other swan?” I wonder how many brass swans one household can support.
“Yes,” she says, more animated now. “When the plumbing fixtures first arrived, just a week or so before we moved in, the plumber called us in Greenwich to say the largest master-bath faucet was defective, stripped threads or some such thing. Anyhow, there was no way he could create a proper seal. It was leaking from the base of the neck.”
“So you ordered a replacement?” I ask.
“Herb did,” she says. “He called the plumbing supply company—a place in Ohio, I think it was—and they agreed to ship a new one right away. We’d spent a buck or two on them, after all.”
“What happened to the first one?”
“The plumber left it on top of one of the bathroom sinks. I found it the day we moved in. Herb was out on the dock, fussing with the boat as usual, and I carried the swan out to the back deck to ask him what I should do with it.”
Hence her prints. “And what did he say?”
“He said to just leave it there, on the picnic table; he’d take care of it. He said he’d agreed to ship it back to the company. They thought it could be refurbished. He must have moved it into the basement and then…”
“And then he never got around to it,” I finish for her.
She nods, her spurt of animation visibly fading.
“Who had access to the basement, Louisa?”
Her eyes grow wider. “Anyone who wanted it, I suppose. Herb always went down through the bulkhead in the yard. He kept his tools and boating equipment down there.”
“Is that the only way to get there?”
She shakes her head. “No. There’s a stairway from the kitchen, but it’s steep. Herb never used it, as far as I know. He always used the bulkhead.”