I’d never experienced it directly, but I’d met enough people who did. And I knew enough about prison to know it was no place for a sensitive-songwriter type, especially when he was good-looking and well built.
Slim and Roger stood before the judge as the charges were read one last time.
“I want you to understand, sir, that this is not a trial,” the judge intoned for the television reporters. He hadn’t done this for the other prisoners, but for this case, he was-well, I think the word is posturing.
“This is only a preliminary hearing. We are not trying this case right now. The purpose of this hearing is to determine whether there is enough evidence to bind this case over to the grand jury for indictment. The prosecution will not even make a complete case against you, and you are in no way required to defend yourself unless you so choose. Now, are you the attorney of record, Mr. Vaden?”
“No, Your Honor, I’m not,” Roger said, with just a tremor of fear in his voice. “I am here as attorney solely for these proceedings, with the court’s permission. Mr. Gibson has not had time to engage criminal counsel.”
“Any objections from the state?”
“None, Your Honor,” the woman assistant DA stood and said.
“Very well, then, let’s get on with it. Call your first witness.”
“The state calls E. D. Fouch of the Metro Nashville Police Department,” she said.
Fouch entered the courtroom from the far right while a court officer held the door for him. I’d run into Fouch quite a few times over the years; he had about twenty-two in and was eligible for retirement. Like a lot of people these days, though, he and his wife were raising their own grandkids and couldn’t afford to quit working. He was a steady, plodding kind of cop. Not brilliant, but a guy who’d stay on your ass until hell froze over if he thought you were guilty. Knowing Fouch had been assigned the case made me even less inclined to envy Slim.
He rolled himself into the witness chair and brushed his thinning silver hair back across his scalp. My guess is he needed to lose about forty pounds and give up smoking. And even from where Ray and I stood in the back of the courtroom, the veins in his nose gave him away as one who looks forward to the sun being over the yardarm.
The court officer swore Fouch in and the woman DA approached.
“State your name and occupation, please,” she instructed.
“Sergeant E. D. Fouch, Metro Nashville Police Department,” he grunted back. He shifted in the seat and tugged at his pants. A thin sheen of sweat formed on his forehead. He’d been down the court testimony path plenty of times in his career, but Fouch always looked like he couldn’t get used to it.
“Sergeant Fouch, you’re presently assigned to the Homicide Division as an investigator, correct?”
“That’s right, ma’am. I’ve been on homicide nearly nine years.”
“And on last Sunday night-early Monday morning, really-were you called to the scene of an incident that occurred at 530 Brooksfield Terrace in Nashville?”
“That’s right. I was.”
“Can you relate to us the details of that call?”
Fouch shifted once again in his chair, trying to get comfortable. “I was awakened at approximately five A.M. and instructed to proceed to 530 Brooksfield Terrace, where the on-scene police officers had reported a deceased woman and circumstances indicated foul play might be involved.”
“Would it be normal procedure for you to be awakened at that hour?”
“No, ma’am, it would not. But because of some other things going on right now, we’ve been shorthanded.”
Yeah, I thought, everybody’s waiting for World War III at the morgue.
“Okay. Go on, Sergeant Fouch.”
“I drove to the scene and there found an apparently deceased, approximately early-thirties Caucasian woman. There was evidence of a terrific struggle in the bedroom of the house. Quite a lot of damage, actually. An investigator from the medical examiner’s office arrived about five minutes after I did and pronounced the woman dead.”
“Were you able to establish the woman’s identity?”
“Yes, we established the victim as being Rebecca Provost Gibson, who lived at the address.”
“What did you do then?”
“We initiated an investigation of the scene. I called in a homicide team, two other investigators, the on-scene crime lab, our fingerprint expert. We began canvassing the neighborhood.”
“Were you able to find anyone who had witnessed any part of the incident?”
“Yes, we found several witnesses who’d been awakened by loud screaming and sounds of a violent struggle. The address in question is a condominium and the units are quite close to each other. We found four witnesses who said they saw a white, early-Seventies, Chevy sedan leaving the scene very quickly. Burning rubber, in fact. Two wrote down the license number.”
“Were you able to establish ownership of the vehicle through the Department of Motor Vehicles?”
“We were.”
“And who was the owner of the car?”
Fouch pointed at the table. “The defendant.”
“Let the record reflect that Sergeant Fouch has identified defendant Randall J. Gibson as owner of the car seen speeding away from the house at 530 Brooksfield Terrace.”
“So ordered,” Judge Rosenthal said.
“Was there any other physical evidence at the scene which might establish the defendant’s presence at the house that night?”
“There was.”
“Describe it for me, please, sir.”
“We lifted several sets of the defendant’s fingerprints off items in the house: a chrome-and-glass coffee table, a doorknob, and on the bloodstained debris of a shattered lamp.”
“Holy shit,” I whispered to Ray. “She was beaten to death with a lamp?”
“There was also mud tracked through the house which was later identified as being similar to that found on a pair of the defendant’s boots. Blood was found on the boots as well.”
“How did you obtain these boots?”
“Under a search warrant executed after the defendant’s arrest.”
“Was there any other evidence obtained under the search warrant?”
“Yes, there was. A bloodstained, khaki-colored, bush-type shirt.”
“Where were these items found, Sergeant?”
“The boots and the shirt were found taped up in a cardboard box and buried in a closet under a pile of clothes.”
“As if they’d been hidden, correct?”
“Objection, Your Honor!” Vaden jumped to his feet. “Calls for a conclusion.”
“Relax, counselor,” the judge ordered. “This is a preliminary hearing, not a jury trial. Objection overruled.”
Vaden sat back down, deflated.
“Were you able to establish the source of the blood on the defendant’s boots and shirt?”
“Yes, we were. We ran the standard battery of preliminary lab tests. The blood type on the boots and the shirts was an identical match to the victim’s blood. The full battery of analysis and DNA tests, of course, will take several weeks.”
“Now, Sergeant Fouch,” the assistant DA continued, “we’ll have other witnesses to establish the exact cause of death later, but in your opinion as an experienced homicide investigator, was this a particularly brutal crime, say on a scale of one to ten?”
I saw Roger Vaden jerk like he was going to his feet again. Then he paused and settled back down. What was the point? I thought. No way was the judge not going to bind this one over.
“I’ve seen hundreds of bodies in my years as a police officer,” Fouch said. “And investigated dozens, maybe hundreds, as a homicide investigator. And this woman was beaten to death about as bad as anyone I’ve ever seen. She was way past dead by the time we got there.”
I shook my head from side to side, suddenly overwhelmed with weariness. Like the woman’s love in the song she’d written, Rebecca Gibson was way past dead.
And something told me Slim Gibson was way past screwed.
