Defensive Wounds (2 page)

“We think it's Marie Corrigan,” the detective explained—his name could be Nelson, but Theresa couldn't quite remember—stood next to the bed. Closer to her age than Powell's and taller than both of them, he had receding brown hair, dark lashes, and a smile that made you want to keep an eye on him. “No ID, but it looks an awful lot like her, and her office said she's supposed to be here.”

“It's her. I testified in front of her a few months ago.” Theresa shook her head, trying to reconcile the dead person with the live Cleveland defense attorney she'd known. “Why would she be staying at the Ritz?”

“She wasn't staying here. She was attending the convention.” At Theresa's raised eyebrows, he explained. “The hotel's full of lawyers. They're having a convention for criminal defense attorneys, can you believe that?”

“Everyone has conventions,” Theresa said. “Who rented—”

“That's just it. No one was registered to be in this room. I guess they can't make enough off their dirtbag clients to afford the Presidential Suite. Almost makes me feel a little better.”

“Almost,” Powell added, coming in behind her.

Theresa said nothing about their evident bigotry. She respected attorneys but often didn't like them, and she had no doubt they felt the same about her. It simply went with the territory of the adversarial system of law. Nothing personal. At least not usually.

“So she wasn't staying in this room.” It made sense, since there seemed to be nothing there save for the victim, her scattered clothing, and the hotel-provided magazines. Theresa could see into the thoroughly mirrored bathroom; it contained enough towels to stock a locker room, but no toiletries broke up the white-on-white accoutrements of the sink area.

“No, it was vacant. Except somebody got a key,” Nelson or maybe-Nelson said. “They decided to ditch the latest legal scoop for a little luxury-suite whoopee with no room tax. He and Corrigan get their kink on, but then lover boy gets out of hand.”

“Any suspects? A boyfriend?”

“Don't know yet, but suspects? A hotel full of them,” Powell said. “And I can't wait to question them. How are they going to lawyer up?”

“They'll all represent themselves and say nothing,” his partner guessed. “This is going to be oh so much fun.”

“Marie Corrigan,” she said, still trying to take it in.

“Yeah. The bitch finally got what was coming to her.”

“Finally,” Theresa breathed.

Many aspects of forensic science, Theresa knew, were not designed for the faint of heart. Among them: Zipping on a Tyvek suit that made her sweat in the dead of winter so she could move around an efficiency apartment with a four-week-old corpse oozing across the kitchen floor. Or asking a pedophile to open his mouth so she could rub two large Q-tips on the insides of his cheeks to collect his DNA. Or searching through a series of kitchen drawers looking for a murder weapon while cockroaches the size of ore carriers scuttled out from under every item touched.

But the worst, the absolute worst, was having to put on a conservative black skirt and a pair of sensible heels and take a seat in a hushed, paneled room. A hot seat.

The last time she'd seen Marie Corrigan alive, the seat had grown warm enough to sear flesh.

Can you tell us what's in that envelope, Ms. MacLean?

Three months previously: In the witness box, Theresa opened a manila envelope, the red seal already torn from the attorneys' examinations, and shook out a smaller envelope. From that she pulled a piece of glassine paper folded to about one inch square.

“These are the fibers I removed from the suspect's shirt.”

“Which you say came from the victim's sweater? This sweater?” Marie Corrigan held up an opened paper bag, helpfully giving the jury another peek at the bloodstained scarlet cardigan.

“They all have characteristics in common with that sweater,” Theresa corrected. “I can't say they positively came from that sweater. I have no idea how much of this thread has been produced or how many sweaters are in circulation.”

“You said they are”—Marie made a show of picking up Theresa's report from the defense table and quoting it directly—“ ‘alike in all discernible factors'?”

“Yes.”

“Can you show the jury those fibers?”

“They're very small,” Theresa warned. Even the closest jury members wouldn't be able to see them, and, if passed around, they would surely be lost. Static electricity, a sneeze, or clumsy fingers would see to that.

Marie said to do it anyway. As usual, the prosecutor did nothing, did not wish to be seen as coaching or protecting the state's witness. No sense handing the defense grounds for an appeal.

Theresa unfolded the paper, then held up three fibers of neon pink. The jury could see them, all right. The last row of spectators could see them, and a child could see that they bore no resemblance to the bloodlike color of the victim's sweater.

“These aren't the right fibers,” Theresa said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“These are not the fibers that were in this envelope,” Theresa said, unable to conceal the quaver in her voice. She'd never had her evidence stolen before, much less while in front of a jury.

“My chambers!” the judge snapped. “You, too.”

Theresa unhappily repeated her assertion in the cramped, white-walled office while the judge glared at her, the prosecutor, and Marie Corrigan. The fibers had been switched. Both offices had had access to the envelope, and both attorneys insisted they had no recollection of even looking at the fibers, just at the signatures and dates on both envelopes.

The prosecutor reluctantly accused Marie. “She's the only other person who could have—”

“Along with a dozen interns, paralegals, and bailiffs,” she countered. “And you.”

“And why would I torpedo my own case? The fibers are all we have, since your client strangled this poor girl with his bare hands. No blood, no murder weapon, her nails too short to get his DNA. The cellmate he confessed to is in the wind—no one can locate him.”

“Exactly. Fibers aren't conclusive. You knew you'd never get a jury to convict on them only. This stunt buys you time to find your mystery witness.”

The judge turned to Theresa. “Are you sure those fibers have been switched?”

“Positive.”

“Do you have any photographs of the original fibers?”

“Um,” Theresa had to say. “No.” Due to budget constraints in the suffering county, she still used an ancient Zeiss comparison scope. It had an inconvenient and balky camera attachment, which required more talent with 35-millimeter film than she possessed. She could have asked the photographers for help, but … “No. However, it's obvious I wouldn't have said that the colors were identical when these are so radically different, Your Honor.”

The judge pondered, seeming to tune out the protestations of the attorneys. Theresa pondered as well, wondering how this could adversely affect her career, how it could affect the trial, and what might resolve it. No solution presented itself.

Finally the judge declared a mistrial, and Theresa paused in the hallway to give her heartbeat a chance to return to normal.

The Justice Center in Cleveland loomed twenty-six stories into the sky, and Theresa pretty much despised each one. Not the court system—she had great respect for that—but the design of the building itself. Built to be chock-full of people who had committed crimes and yet shockingly unconcerned with security. Some stairwell doors locked, and others didn't. Hallways turned and twisted, taking one quickly out of the sight of others. Worst of all, courtrooms were clustered four to a floor, with offices and judges' chambers placed around the outside of the building. The hallway to the courtrooms ran from the elevator bank to the east wall, where wide windows opened onto a stunning view of the city and the lake—even more stunning on a summer's day when the window tint only deepened the blue in the sky. But mere mortals could not visit this calm oasis, because the judges' chambers opened onto the space. People waiting to appear in any one of the four courtrooms, people under stress, worried, upset, traumatized, with small, needing-to-be-entertained children—people who could have benefited from the panoramic scene outside the glass—had to stay corralled in the 1970s modular seating next to the elevator bank, under the weak fluorescent lights.

Theresa loathed the Justice Center.

Two weeks later, with no other evidence and the mystery witness still missing, the prosecutor dropped the charges. Marie Corrigan's client was free to kill again.

And he did.

Three weeks later another strangled girl turned up in the same alley. When the police went to pick up the suspect, they found nothing but ants and candy wrappers in his rented room. He had not been seen in Cleveland since, and nationwide BOLOs failed to locate him.

And now Theresa loathed nothing so much as Marie Corrigan.

Theresa gently shooed the two detectives out of the rooms, pulled off the keys hanging around her neck, and slipped them into a pocket, then switched on her twelve-megapixel digital camera. She began to photograph the two double doors leading into the hall and progressed inward, remembering to turn and shoot behind her. The second detective, maybe-Nelson, followed, either curious or just wanting to make sure she didn't move or discover any item he didn't already know about. Though he seemed to be most fascinated by the curve of her calves, he proved handy when she continued to ask questions as they occurred to her. “Who was the last person to occupy this room?”

“The CEO of some aluminum company, but he checked out five days ago. Didn't know there was that much money in aluminum.”

Far too long for Marie to have been here all that time. “And the last time someone saw her?”

“Yesterday's luncheon. Apparently she stuck in the conference coordinator's mind, and not in a good way. We haven't had a chance to talk to anyone else yet, and I'm not willing to turn them over to patrol. I want to do it myself.”

Theresa took a snapshot of the magazine on the end table, arrested in the process of sliding off after its compatriots. The lamp, however, stood perfectly within its faint circle of non-dust. “Are they going to call off the conference or cut it short?”

“No reason to. These people's firms ponied up big bucks so they can party at the Ritz and learn how to keep even more scumbags on the street. They're lunching at the Muse while John and I scarf down Mickey D's and pound out reports on ten-year-old computers. I am definitely on the wrong side of the law.”

Theresa stopped in the process of placing an L-shaped ABFO ruler on the floor next to a footprint-size smudge of blood to glance at him. He flushed, reluctantly, as if his fair skin couldn't help itself.

“I'll bet you think I'm a right bastard for thinking that.”

“No. I think I'm a right bastard for agreeing.”

He laughed. “Anyway, the organizers sure as hell don't want to hand out refunds, and we don't want anyone to leave. You might say we saw eye to eye on that. So the conference goes on as planned, and we'll look for the boyfriend among the attendees,” he added more briskly, with the tiniest hint of a lilt to his voice. Plenty of Irish had immigrated to Cleveland, but the accents had long since faded.

Theresa had moved into the bathroom. The sink and the bathtub were completely dry and without any visible water spots. No one had used them to clean up after the bloody attack—unless he (or she) had dried both his hands and the porcelain when he was done. She counted the apparently untouched bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths—five of each. Nothing missing.

“Who found the body?” she asked, without raising her voice. The rooms were so well insulated that she and the detective might as well have been in a cocoon.

“Well, okay. That takes us back to this damn conference.”

She waited. Was the water in the toilet less than crystal clear?

“A lawyer from Des Moines. Says he came here to meet a friend. Swears he doesn't know Marie Corrigan from the devil and has never been to Cleveland before this.”

Theresa turned, brushed past the detective and over the body of the victim to retrieve a bottle of Hemastix strips from her crime-scene kit. A quick dip in the toilet and the yellow pad on the end of the strip turned a medium blue color.

“What does that mean?” maybe-Nelson asked.

“It means the killer washed his hands in the toilet.”

He made a face.

“That way he didn't have to turn on any faucets, risk leaving fingerprints he might not wipe off. He didn't take a towel to dry them, though. Maybe he wiped them on his pants or used Marie's clothes. Why
not
just take a towel, though?”

Not to mention that she had just trodden all over any latent footprints. She tiptoed back to the door, walking on the periphery. She'd keep everyone off the ceramic tiles until she could get to them with a fingerprint brush.