We’re both beginning to wonder if Jack was not right. That perhaps we should maybe have some early conference with the DA before the tides of temper run high.
‘Then we have videotapes,’ he says.
‘More than one?’
He nods.
The most damaging, he tells me, is the security video from the porch of the house, the night of the murder. It has the time and date imposed at the bottom left corner.
‘I haven’t seen it,’ says Harry. ‘We’ll have a copy in a few days. But the description isn’t good,’ he says. He reads from a page prepared by one of the evidence techs. They have pictures but no sound, what is described as a lot of angry and threatening gestures by Laurel toward the victim followed by the destruction of the camera by Laurel after the door was slammed in her face. According to the report, at one point Melanie, in the doorway, threatened to call the police if Laurel didn’t leave.
‘How do they know that with no sound?’ I ask.
‘Lip-readers,’ says Harry. He’s talking about experts who can read lips with field glasses a mile away. These people can take the art of sounding out words from a tape to whole new levels.
‘Do they know what Laurel was saying?’
‘If they do, it’s not in the report,’ he says.
‘What time was the tape?’
‘Twenty-seventeen hours,’ he says. Seventeen minutes after eight, the evening of the murder.
‘Time of death?’ I’m making notes on a pad, the critical elements.
‘Ah.’ He’s looking. ‘Eleven-thirty.’ This is as close an estimate as the medical examiner can make.
A little over three hours between the two events. ‘You said there were two tapes?’
‘Yeah. The courthouse earlier that day,’ he says. ‘There was a security camera in the ceiling when Laurel went after her.’
‘All we needed,’ I say. It was bad enough that there were a dozen witnesses. On film this attack will take on a whole new meaning. A skillful prosecutor can splice these pictures together with forceful argument. The image for our case is not a pleasant one. A brooding Laurel languishing over thoughts of vengeance for hours before presumably carrying out the deed. Their case is beginning to take form, handed to them on a platter, a blood feud between the two women, with one of them now dead.
‘The toughest part of their case,’ he says, ‘are the special circumstances.’ Harry does not believe that the DA can produce hard evidence that the killer, whoever he or she was, actually lay in wait for the victim.
‘No lurking in the corners on this one,’ says Harry. ‘Whoever did her came straight at her,’ he says. ‘And they fought. The evidence in the bathroom shows a scuffle. They’re playing it down,’ he says. ‘But the evidence is there. There was a perfume bottle shattered on the floor, like maybe she tried to throw it at the killer. A lot of stuff was knocked off the vanity. The scene was more consistent with evidence of a rash act of violence than somebody lurking in the shadows to do the victim quietly,’ says Harry.
It would be our first break in what is an otherwise seamless case for the state. Perhaps I can tell Danny and Julie Vega that at very least their mother is not facing death if convicted.
Tonight we will be burning the oil, a first cut on a pretrial motion to attack the indictment, to scuttle the special circumstances. For the first time in a week some of the knots in my stomach begin to unwind.
‘What else have they got?’ I ask him.
‘Bits and pieces,’ he says. ‘Very little blood in the tub, where they found the body. What was there is typed to the victim.
‘Melanie was shot near the tub in the master bath. She appears to have been unclothed. Probably getting ready for a bath. The cops are thinking she fell in when she was shot or else the killer picked her up and put her in the tub afterward. They’re still choreographing,’ says Harry.
‘Any powder burns?’ This could give a clue.
‘Pathology,’ he says. ‘Not in yet.’ We have a new medical examiner in this county. He is notoriously slow.
‘They did find some semen.’
‘Where?’
‘The sheets on the bed,’ he tells me. ‘Dried. No biggy. Police lab checked it. A secretor,’ says Harry.
About sixty percent of the general population are what are known as secretors. These are people who carry in their bloodstream a specific substance that makes it possible to determine their blood group from other body fluids — tears, perspiration, saliva, and in this case semen.
‘Blood type matches the husband,’ says Harry. He’s talking about Jack Vega.
‘Still, I’d like to check it,’ I tell him.
It is a problem most often in cases of disputed parentage, fudging on blood in a serology report. It is one of the areas I always check. Move a decimal point a few digits in one direction and the probability that blood belongs to one person or another, to the exclusion of all others, can go from one in a thousand to one in ten million.
I have known some good-time Charlies, working stiffs with a roving eye for the ladies, who are now on an eighteen-year cycle of support payments — paternity cases involving promiscuous mothers with more lovers than a rock band and children who look like the random sampling of a gene pool. It is what can happen in a lab when the candidate is itinerant and Welfare gives a little nudge. They figure the law of probabilities. If he didn’t do this one, he surely did another.
Though rarely is it a problem in a murder case, still I ask Harry to check the blood and semen, an independent analysis. Harry has the name of a good lab. I want to know if Melanie was bedding another lover, maybe passion gone astray as a motive for murder.
‘You think she was bobbing for apples with somebody else?’
I give him a face, like who knows? Harry makes a note to take care of it.
‘Any prints?’
‘Nothing they’ve disclosed,’ he says.
Fingerprints in a case like this can be a blade that cuts both ways. The absence of any prints tying Laurel to the crime, on its face, might lead to the inexorable conclusion that she was not there. On the other hand, if they can show by independent means that Laurel was inside the Vega home on the night of the murder — hair or fibers, a witness, any faint moves on the Ouija board of identification that a jury might buy — then the failure to find her prints in the house might lead to quiet conjecture, the kind you can’t counter, that she wore gloves. It is only a short hop from there to thoughts of premeditation.
Harry fanning more pages in his pile of papers.
‘All we have left is ballistics,’ he says. ‘Single nine-millimeter slug,’ says Harry. ‘Thin copper jacket. Badly deformed from the head shot. One copper casing, nine-millimeter Luger, with multiple toolmarks.’
‘How do they account for that?’ I ask. I’m thinking dry fire. I have known shooters, mostly hobbyists, hunters, and marksmen, who will work the slide on a semiautomatic by hand with live rounds to ensure that the gun will not jam when fired. This would leave extra marks on the cartridges where the tiny metal teeth grip the rim for ejection.
‘They’re saying the casing had been previously fired. Expanded and resized,’ he says.
‘A reload?’
‘That’s what they seem to be indicating.’
‘Where the hell would Laurel buy reloaded ammunition?’ Their theory starts to have holes.
Harry gives me a look like take your best guess. ‘You can buy the stuff at some ranges. Gun shows,’ he says. Harry plugging the leaks in their case. It might float, but these — gun shows and firing ranges — are not places I would ever expect to see Laurel.
‘Anything on the gun itself?’
He shakes his head. ‘They’re still looking for it. Lands and grooves on the bullet are a right-hand twist. Could be any of a dozen models sold. But here’s the interesting stuff,’ he says. ‘Their lab found some striations not quite as deep as the grooves. Four of them at the edges of the bullet,’ he says. ‘Each one about the width of a piece of coarse thread.’
‘Do they hazard a guess?’ I ask.