"Bad blood" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fairstein Linda)

5

The cops in the patrol car who got the message from the 911 dispatcher to respond to the Quillian home were there within six minutes of the call. Although they were the closest unit to the location, they had been double-parked in front of a deli to buy sandwiches and lost more time while stuck behind school buses stacked to pick up students from trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Police officer Timothy Denton referred to his memo book, with the court’s permission, as he recited the times he had recorded in it.

“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.

Genco carefully described what he set about to do to pronounce the manner of Mrs. Quillian’s death, the legal classification that made it a homicide, rather than a natural event. The causation-the medical finding of the mechanism responsible for the death-was fairly obvious to anyone looking at the victim’s throat, but not able to be legally confirmed until autopsy.

This was not like the many cases in which the determination of the time of death played a critical role in the case, making measures of postmortem rigor, lividity, body temperature, and ocular changes significant. Here, instead, the parameters were tightly drawn by the hour and minute stamped on the digital photograph taken at the end of the ladies’ lunch, the phone records from Amanda Quillian’s cell as she was confronted by her killer, and the 911 call from Kate Meade.

So Dr. Genco moved his audience from the exquisitely appointed parlor in which he first saw the body of the deceased to the formaldehyde-scented room decorated only with a cold steel gurney in the basement of the morgue.

He described photographing his charge, undressing her, washing her body, and autopsying it. He didn’t need a receipt from the tony bistro where the friends had dined to assert that the victim’s last meal had been a Cobb salad with blue-cheese dressing. Stomach contents visible to the naked eye underscored that death had occurred within a short time after the ingestion of food. The two glasses of white wine she had sipped might have made it even more difficult for her to resist her attacker.

“Were you able to determine, Doctor, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, what caused the death of Amanda Quillian?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, I was.”

“Would you please tell the jury about your conclusions?”

“Mrs. Quillian died as a result of asphyxia, and in particular in this matter, by compression of the neck-or strangulation.”

“What is asphyxia, Dr. Genco?”

“It’s actually a broad term referring to conditions that result in the failure of cells to receive or to utilize oxygen, along with the inability to eliminate carbon dioxide. Body tissues simply cannot function without oxygen. Most especially the brain, since it uses twenty percent of the body’s total available oxygen.”

“Is there more than one category of asphyxia?”

“Yes, in general there are three. One would be chemical asphyxia-things like carbon monoxide or cyanide poisoning, which operate by excluding oxygen from the brain. A second would be suffocation or obstruction of the airways.”

“Let me stop you here for a moment, Dr. Genco, at these first two categories. In the case of both chemical asphyxia and suffocation, is it correct to say that the resulting death might occur homicidally?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper. You’re right-in some circumstances. But in both instances death might also be accidental. And in the case of suffocation, it’s frequently self-inflicted.” Genco went on to give examples of each to the jury. “One may have a choking fatality because of the unintentional inhalation of an object-a wine cork or the cap of a pen that someone puts in his or her mouth temporarily, but then it gets sucked in and occludes the airway. Same thing happens with a piece of food.”

Several jurors nodded their heads in understanding.

“Now, Doctor, what is the third form of asphyxial death?”

“Compression of the neck, Ms. Cooper-usually by strangulation.”

“Are there different methods of strangulation?”

“Yes, there are. Again, we usually break these down into three varieties. Those would be hanging, ligature strangulation, and manual strangulation.”

“Can you distinguish between accidental, intentional, and homicidal deaths in the case of asphyxia by strangulation?”

Genco spoke confidently to the jurors farthest from the stand. “Most of the time, of course. The overwhelming number of hangings are suicides-it’s not a method frequently used as a means of killing someone.”

The jury was following his analysis. “With ligature strangulation, although you do get a few accidents, virtually all the cases are homicides-probably the most common form of homicidal asphyxia.”

“And by ligature, tell us what you mean exactly.”

“Certainly, Ms. Cooper. I’m referring to a bond of some kind-electrical cord, rope, wire, necktie-an object used to encircle the neck horizontally, occluding blood and oxygen from reaching the brain.”

“That’s distinguished from manual strangulation, is it not?”

“Quite easily, in fact. Manual strangulation-death caused by using one’s hands to compress the neck of another-can never be anything but homicide.”

“Would you please tell the jury why, Dr. Genco?”

He straightened his glasses and looked earnestly at the people in the box. “It’s not possible to use your own hands to strangle yourself. Pressure on the neck is a very intentional, deliberate action. The first thing such excessive pressure causes is a loss of consciousness. So that if you were holding your own throat until the point at which you passed out, you couldn’t possibly continue to keep the grip on. You’d regain consciousness as soon as your hands dropped away.”

I wanted him to go through every second of Amanda Quillian’s final agony. I wanted them to understand that her last moments were spent face-to-face with her attacker, at less than arm’s length, while he purposefully squeezed the life out of her body.

“Can you estimate for us, with a reasonable degree of medical certainty, how long it was that Mrs. Quillian remained conscious while her neck was being compressed?”

Genco took his time with the answer, trying to explain the dynamic of this death mechanism without drawing an objection for any prejudicial statement. “Strangulation, you must understand, does not cause death as quickly, say, as a bullet to the brain or a stab wound to the heart. There is evidence here that despite her small stature and weight, the deceased put up a struggle-a fierce struggle-for her life.”

Several jurors began to wriggle in their seats as they followed his testimony. Genco paused, asking permission of Judge Gertz to step to the easel and refer to an enlargement of one of the autopsy photographs I had introduced through him half an hour earlier. I handed him a pointer and he got back to work.

“These marks on the neck of the deceased represent the force used by her assailant to subdue her, and then to cause her death.” He tapped at several large bruises on her throat as he spoke. “Repeated applications of force, actually, suggesting that she was struggling against him while he tried to fasten his grip more tightly. All of that fighting prolonged the process of the strangulation.”

The finger marks of the killer looked enormous to me, causing not only the external bruising but the hemorrhaging deep into the musculature that Genco’s dissection of the throat had revealed. I had studied the images for months, thinking constantly of someone with hands big enough, strong enough, to cause that damage. Someone with hands much larger than Brendan Quillian’s, which detectives had examined at the time of his arrest.

“Is there any other physical evidence to suggest that unconsciousness did not occur immediately after Mrs. Quillian was attacked?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper. All the medical hallmarks of manual strangulation are present.”

“Would you identify those to the jury?”

Genco pointed to the small, crescent-shaped marks that bordered the larger discolorations. “Can you see these small semicircles?” he asked the jurors, most of whom were nodding. “These abrasions weren’t made by the killer. They were left there by the fingernails of the deceased herself.”

Brendan Quillian had assumed a posture of faux anguish. His shoulders were slumped and he held his head in one hand, shaking it from time to time as though incredulous that someone could have done these things to his wife.

A few jurors seemed surprised, until Genco went on with his explanation. “Mrs. Quillian was struggling against her attacker to breathe, fighting for her very life. Like every victim of strangulation whose arms aren’t bound, she tried to free her airway of the hands that were restricting it. She didn’t mean to scratch herself, but each time her assailant increased the pressure on her neck, she fought to claw his hands off her-unsuccessfully despite a number of attempts.

“This is a very slow and deliberate way to kill someone,” Genco said. His glasses were cockeyed on his nose and he adjusted them again. He looked up. “Strangulation is an especially painful way to die.”

Howell knew better than to object. The damage had been done with the forensic pathologist’s assertion, and the defense position was simply to distance Brendan Quillian from the murderous act of whatever lone thug had committed the crime. Howell leaned over to stroke his client’s back, to suggest that he needed to be comforted during this graphic description of Amanda’s death.

I took Genco through each set of fingernail scratches, hoping jurors could imagine the fourth, fifth, and sixth times that Amanda Quillian scratched at the massive pair of hands to gasp for air. I looked for their reactions out of the corner of my eye as the doctor explained the abrasion on the tip of the young woman’s chin, which he said had been injured when she lowered it in the vain effort to protect her fragile neck.

“Back to the question I asked, Doctor, about whether you can estimate the length of time you believe Mrs. Quillian fought before losing consciousness?”

“Yes, Ms. Cooper, I can. Were there constant compression of the carotid arteries, for example, one might become unconscious in fifteen or twenty seconds. But that isn’t the case here.”

Genco repeated the rest of the autopsy findings: the congestion of Amanda’s face, which had become cyanotic-tinged with a blue cast-above the site of the compression; the pinpoint hemorrhaging in the whites of her eyes and densely spread throughout the eyelids themselves; and the fracture of the hyoid bone, a horseshoe-shaped structure at the base of the tongue, crushed by the deadly reapplications of force.

“I would say that the nature and number of injuries to Mrs. Quillian’s neck and face, as well as those she sustained internally, suggest that the struggle may have lasted for as long as two or three minutes. Perhaps even four,” Genco said, looking up at the clock above the doors at the rear of the courtroom.

In my closing argument, I would repeat the medical findings and stand silently in the well of the courtroom while the second hand swept slowly around the dial four times, reminding the jurors how very long that time took to elapse. The death throes of Amanda Quillian had been excruciating, and I would make that point at every possible opportunity.

I would also have the chance, then, to suggest to them our theory that as Brendan Quillian had ordered, the enormous sapphire ring was wrenched off Amanda’s finger, and the area around the still-warm body was ransacked to create the illusion of a botched burglary. The killer had the great good fortune to be out the door and away from the town house with barely two minutes to spare before the first cops came within half a block of the scene of the crime.

I was almost at the end of Jerry Genco’s direct exam, with just a few points to clean up. The jurors and indeed the spectators seemed sobered by his testimony, following the morning’s unexpected entertainment from Kate Meade. “Did you have an opportunity to meet Brendan Quillian?”

Genco lifted the damaged eyeglass frame and focused his attention on the defendant, who sat upright and returned the stare. “Yes, I did. He came to my office the following day, October fourth.”

I didn’t bother with questions about his demeanor. I would argue that it had been part of his plan to play the grieving widower. “Did he tell you where he had been on October third?”

“Yes, he mentioned that he was in Boston. That he took the shuttle back to New York late in the evening, after Detective Chapman had notified him of the death of his wife.”

“Did you examine any part of the defendant’s face or body?”

“Yes, actually I did.”

“What were you looking for?”

Quillian’s hands were folded in front of him, resting on the counsel’s table. His fingers were long and slender, unlikely weapons in this matter, which we’d known from the outset.

“Detective Chapman and I were convinced the killer would have been injured in this struggle as well. I expected if we found him early enough, there would be lacerations-probably numerous cuts and scratches-caused by the victim’s frenzied fight for her life, on his face and hands,” Genco said, looking squarely at the defendant. “Mr. Quillian had no such injuries.”

I was about ready to relinquish my witness to Lem Howell, running my eyes down the checklist of facts that I had planned to cover on direct before I asked the judge to issue the grim photographs to the jury.

The silence occasioned by Genco’s recounting of Amanda’s last minutes alive was broken by loud voices coming from the rear of the courtroom. As with all high-profile trials in Manhattan, every seat in the house was filled, and a line of onlookers queued in the hallway to fill the place of any departing spectator.

The lone court officer in charge of the flow was pushing and shoving a tall, pale-faced man in a blue seersucker suit who was trying to break past him.

I glanced over my shoulder again as Judge Gertz banged his gavel to restore order.

Preston Meade, the cuckolded husband of Kate, was shouting my name as he charged toward the railing that separated the benches from where I stood.