Proof of Intent (27 page)

I handed her the record from the Detroit police files. “So this record of accusation I'm showing you, documented by the Detroit Police Department, it's complete fiction.”

“Correct.”

“Manufactured.”

“Correct.”

“You were accused . . . yet not guilty!”

“Correct.”

“Sort of like Mr. Dane, wouldn't you say?” I wheeled, walked back to the table, and slapped the piece of paper down with a loud bang. “I'm done with this woman.”

I ran into Stash in the hallway at lunch. He was carrying a bag of food from Edna's Café over on Farm Credit Street. “That was a pretty nice cross,” he said. He had a deep-fried chicken finger trailing out of his mouth like a cigar. “I'm curious how it feels trying to make a decent cop look like an asshole?”

“That's my job,” I said. “I don't mind doing it when my client's innocent.”

Stash snorted, the chicken finger bobbing up and down from the corner of his mouth.

“Anyway, Stash, just because she's a good cop doesn't mean she isn't an asshole.”

“True. But this isn't Detroit, Charley. I'm not sure a Kerry County jury will go for all that police conspiracy baloney.”

“You knit the scarf from one side while I unravel it from the other,” I said. “As long as I pull off enough yarn by the time we get to Miles's witnesses, then you're sunk.”

He pretended surprise. “Oh, you have witnesses?”

“Ha ha.”

Stash pulled the chicken finger out of his mouth and waggled it between his fingers like Groucho Marx. “Wanna buy a duck?” he said.

“Laugh all you want,” I said. “Reasonable doubt. That's all it takes.”

I walked away with a confident smile on my face. But Stash knew as well as I did that every jury had its own definition of reasonable. And you never knew what it was until the foreman read the verdict. With Blair Dane on the stand, I felt confident I could get there. But without him? Well, we'd just have to see.

“The state calls Dr. Ernesto Rey.”

The medical examiner of the county, Dr. Rey, was a very small, almost delicate man, whose dapper dress was tempered by a slightly gloomy air, as though every one of those dead people he'd cut up had left a smudge on his karma.

Dr. Rey eyed me warily as he walked to the witness stand. The last time we'd been in the same courtroom together, I'd made him look quite foolish. As far as I know, he's a reasonably competent medical examiner, but I'd caught him with his pants down in court one time, and I'm sure he's never forgotten it.

“I don't know if I can take this,” Miles whispered to me.

I put my hand on his arm. “Do your best,” I said. We both knew this was where the “graphic testimony” was going to happen. I couldn't even imagine how awful it would be to sit there in his seat as they showed pictures of his murdered wife.

As Stash Olesky stood and prepared to wade through Dr. Rey's tedious list of qualifications, I stood, and said, “Your Honor, the defense is prepared to stipulate to Dr. Rey's qualifications. Dr. Rey is well-known to me for his breadth of knowledge and his impressive résumé, as well as his many years of excellent service to this community.” I smiled and sat down. Dr. Rey blinked. He'd probably been awake nights for a week, expecting to get a world-class smack-down of a cross-examination from me. And here I was giving him a free pass. He couldn't believe it.

Even Stash Olesky looked a little surprised.

“I thank you for that uncharacteristic generosity, Mr. Sloan,” the prosecuting attorney said. “Now, Dr. Rey, I'm going to show you a document which I'm identifying as State's Exhibit Number 53. Could you identify that, sir?”

Dr. Rey examined the small stack of stapled pages Stash had handed him. “This is the Report of Examination I prepared after performing an autopsy on Diana van Blaricum Dane.”

“Very good, Doctor. See that paper clip there? On page seven of Exhibit 53? Right. Could you read the paragraph that begins with the heading ‘Conclusions'?”

“Yes. ‘Based upon this examination, I find the cause of death for Diana van Blaricum Dane to be blunt force trauma with attendant exsanguination and shock.”

“Could you put that in laymen's terms?”

“Simple. Diana Dane was beaten to death. Maybe more accurately, she was beaten so badly that she bled to death and her heart finally stopped.”

Olesky nodded sadly. “Doctor, let's turn to page three of your report. Could you just take your time and work through that page, telling us what you did and what you found?”

“Sure. Basically this section outlines the results of a careful examination of the wounds on Diana Dane's body.”

I looked over at Miles. His skin was pale, his face taut, but essentially expressionless. He stared straight at Dr. Rey. It's a peculiarly distasteful thing to be forced to mix professional judgment with normal human emotion: At that moment I believed that Miles was doing his best to maintain his composure in the face of a nearly indescribable horror. But the lawyer in me was thinking it would sure look better to the jury if he wept or groaned a little. Anything to show he actually felt some emotion.

Stash Olesky cut in. “Dr. Rey. I've got a large blowup of a chart you made in your report. If it would help your testimony, I'd be happy to put that on the easel next to you.”

“That would be very helpful, thank you.”

Stash's paralegal, a very attractive young lady wearing a skirt that was just this side of immodest, put up the easel. There seemed to be a pleasantly unnecessary amount of bending over involved in the process. Stash used that distraction to accomplish the dull work of admitting the chart into evidence and marking it as State's Exhibit 54.

“Please, Doctor, continue.”

The doctor took out the biggest red magic marker I'd ever seen, with a point about an inch wide. I took a deep breath. Here we go.

“As I said earlier, Diana Dane's person presented in the form of someone who had obviously suffered severe trauma. ‘Trauma' is a medical term that essentially refers to what happens to the human body when it's struck by objects with sufficient force to damage tissues and/or bones. I examined the body carefully. With the court's permission, I'm going use this chart to lay out my findings.”

Dr. Rey stood next to the chart. On the chart were line drawings of two female figures, front and rear, and two side views of female heads. The chart was full of small black marks that had obviously been drawn on the preprinted chart with a pen of some kind. “When you write a medical report, you're supposed to use very precise medical terminology. Anterior, posterior, so on so forth. That's all there on pages three through five of the report, but for the sake of clarity, I'm going to spell out what I found in plain old everyday language.”

Dr. Rey took his red pen and held it over the chart. “Based on the pattern of the wound, it is my belief that the first blow Diana Dane received was right here on the right temple. WHAM!” Rey slashed the red pen over a black mark across the temple.

“There's a depression fracture, bruising, and massive damage to the brain tissue and blood vessels underneath. Based on the long, shallow depression, I would judge this blow to have been made by a long, thin item. Such as a stick.”

Olesky said, “You went WHAM when you drew the line. What are you suggesting about how hard this blow was?”

“Extremely hard. The cranium, the skull, is a very very tough structure. To break a hole in it with a stick requires a blow of great strength.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Stash said. “Back up here. I can see Mr. Sloan over there chafing at the bit to object that we don't know if this was a stick or a poker or a steel I-beam.”

“Well, yes and no. If you'll flip back to page two, you'll see that I recovered what I characterize in the report as a ‘glossy black fragment' from Diana Dane's head. At the very location where this blow was made. I recovered several similar fragments from other locations on the body. At the time I was puzzled. To my eye, they looked like plastic. But if you'll turn to page fourteen, the appendix consisting of a supplemental report from the state crime lab? You'll see that all three of those objects were identified as being splinters of wood. Gabon ebony.”

Stash held up three plastic bags, each with a tiny dark splinter in it, took them over to the clerk, and had them marked as evidence. “I'll call your attention, Dr. Rey, to what's just been marked as State's 55, 56, and 57. Are you familiar with these items?”

The doctor pretended to examine them with great skepticism. Finally, he looked up, and said, “Why, yes. Those are the three fragments I recovered from Mrs. Dane's body.” He reached over and made some more red slashes on the body. “They were found here, here, here.”

“And did you find the presence of these fragments of ebony to be meaningful in any way?”

“Yes I did. As I noted in the addendum to the reports, page eight, signed and dated by me on November 1 of last year, the pattern of the wounds and the presence of the ebony fragments strongly indicate that Diana Dane was beaten with some sort of stick made from ebony.”

“Very good. Please continue.”

“Generally speaking, Diana Dane's body was heavily bruised, and many of her bones were fractured. I've been a forensic pathologist for twenty-three years if you include my residency at the University of South Dakota, and—outside of a few car accidents—I can't recall seeing a body more heavily bruised than hers. Which makes re-creating the exact order and location of the blows a bit difficult.

“But basically here's what I think happened. The first blow, as I said, struck her here. On the temple. Based on the particularly lethal location of this first wound, and based on the lack of defensive wounds, fingernail scrapings, etc., I don't believe Diana Dane defended herself. In fact, I suspect she was sleeping.

“Whether or not she was not sleeping to begin with, the first blow would likely have rendered her unconscious. It very likely would have proved to be a fatal wound over time even if she had not been struck again—though the fact that the killer then continued to strike Mrs. Dane renders the point moot. First he hit her several more times in the head and face.” More dramatic red slashes across the face of the line drawing. “Here, here, here, here, here, here, possibly here, possibly here. Broken jaw, broken nose, broken left orbit, crushed eyeball, left upper incisor and bicuspids knocked out, more potentially fatal trauma to the brain, here and here.” Suddenly Dr. Rey looked angry. “This was a savage, unnecessary beating. It just went on and on and on.”

Miles Dane stared at the chart, jaw clenched, face pale. But no expression. No expression. If I could have punched him to make him cry, I swear I would have done it. But, no, he looked cold as yesterday's fish.

“Here! Here! There! Here! Again, again, again.” Dr. Rey's face had gone slightly red. “Now the attacker began beating her in the torso. Broken ribs, punctured lung, ruptured spleen, bruised liver. Ah! Now . . . torn femoral artery!” He slashed red on the groin of the figure. “I'd like to make particular note of this wound to the femoral artery, the artery which runs from the torso down the groin into the leg. Why? Two reasons. First, it just requires a huge amount of force to tear that artery. And more important, because there is no hematoma accompanying that rupture.”

“Is that significant?” Olesky serving up another soft lob.

Rey's eyebrows shot up. “Yes, it is. Very. Normally when an artery is torn inside the body, the heart drives blood out through the tear into the surrounding tissue. But in this case, it didn't. What that means is that by the time this blow was administered, Diana Dane's heart had stopped. She was already dead, and the attacker was still hitting her.”

“How long, Doctor, would it have taken her to die?”

“Hard to say. I would think a minimum of ten minutes. Maybe as much as half an hour.”

Olesky stood there staring at the doctor. He blinked once, then said, incredulously, “You're saying that whoever killed Diana Dane, stayed in that room for at least ten minutes and maybe as long as half an hour . . . and continued hitting her all that time?”

“Not continuously, no. But, intermittently, yes, she was struck over a period of at least ten minutes. Probably a good deal longer. The killer stayed there and kept pummeling a dead body.”

“My God,” Stash Olesky said softly.

Next to me, Miles Dane didn't even blink.

“How many blows, would you estimate?”

“Difficult to say with such extensive tissue damage. Probably between thirty and forty.”

Stash Olesky gathered up his notes and began walking back to his chair.

“Oh, one last thing,” Stash said. “I almost forgot . . . Were you able to make any estimate of the time of Mrs. Dane's death?”

“Yes, I was. Our technician arrived at the scene to process the remains at four-fifty. He took a core temperature at that time, which was recorded as eighty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. He also recorded the temperature on the thermostat of Mr. Dane's home at sixty-eight degrees. Using standard TOD—time-of-death—calculations for core body temperature decline versus ambient temperature, I concluded that Diana Dane had been dead for three to five hours at that time.” He paused significantly. “Meaning she was killed somewhere between midnight and 2:00
A.M.
”

“Let me direct you to Mr. Dane's witness statement, which has been marked as State's 23. Could you read . . . yes, right there, the underlined portion.”

“It says, ‘Mr. Dane indicated that he had called Mr. Sloan within ten minutes of discovering his wife had been murdered, i.e. at approximately 3:30
A.M.
' ”

“And, Doctor, how does that jibe with your medical findings?”