VC04 - Jury Double (17 page)

Corey Lyle’s face whipped around to stare at his attorney. He shook his head two times, slowly.

“Your Honor, there is no such statement on any tape—nor has any such tape been introduced into evidence.”

“Objection sustained.” The judge glared at Elihu. “Mr. Elihu, this is cross-examination and you will question the witness accordingly. Now, I don’t want to have to remind you again.”

“Mr. Briar …” Dotson Elihu placed his hands on the railing of the witness box. “You testified that when you found your stepmother dead, you thought she was asleep. You say you shook her. How roughly did you shake her?”

“Why on earth would I shake an old woman roughly?”

“She’d cut you out of her will, hadn’t she?”

“I wouldn’t brutalize an elderly woman over a financial disagreement.”

“Do you remember the body’s original position before you shook it?”

Jack Briar was wary now. “Well, I—”

“Mr. Briar, will you please tell this court, under oath, exactly how Amalia Briar was positioned when you entered her bedroom?”

Jack Briar didn’t answer.

“Could she have been lying on her side?” Elihu’s tone was suddenly gentle, almost friendly. “With her face down?”

“I don’t recall exactly. I don’t think she was facedown.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Not a hundred percent, no.”

“Mr. Briar, is it not a fact that your father’s will left his entire estate to your stepmother?”

“Objection—relevance.”

Elihu wheeled. “Your Honor, I intend to show relevance.”

“Overruled. Witness may answer.”

“Yes, my father left his entire estate to his wife.”

“And is it not a fact that one week after your father’s death was discovered … you filed suit contesting his will?”

“That’s true, I contested his will.”

“On what grounds?”

“Objection.” Tess diAngeli sprang to her feet. “This line of questioning has no bearing whatsoever on any material raised in direct.”

“Overruled.”

“Mr. Briar …” Elihu returned to the defense table and picked up a sheaf of court papers. “Did you not depose under oath that your father’s marriage ceased being a marriage five years before his death, that Amalia Briar locked her bedroom door and refused him his conjugal rights?”

Tess diAngeli was on her feet again. “Your Honor, I—”

“Overruled.”

Jack Briar drew himself up. “Shortly after I introduced my father and stepmother to Corey Lyle, my father told me Amalia had decided to take a vow of celibacy. She told me the same thing.”

“Objection—hearsay!”

“Your honor.” Elihu turned, sighing. “The People cannot impeach their own witness’s sworn declaration to the New York probate court.”

“Objection overruled.”

Jack Briar continued. “The upshot was, my father and stepmother stopped having sexual relations. There was no secret about it. They told everyone.”

“Did your father say he intended to be celibate as well?”

“He never mentioned the subject to me.”

“Do you know if he was celibate after that point?”

“It was none of my business.”

“Is that a
no
?”

“Yes.” Jack Briar’s face colored. “That’s a
no
. I don’t know.”

“Then it’s conceivable that your father met with another woman—or other women?”

“Anything’s conceivable, I suppose, but he never mentioned such a relationship to me.”

At the prosecutor’s table, diAngeli scrawled on a sheet of scratch paper. Her assistant read the note and shook his head in the negative.

“To your knowledge, was your father in the habit of giving friends the key to his apartment?”

“Not to my knowledge. He certainly never gave one to me.”

Elihu gave the point a moment to register: conceivably, one or more unnamed persons had had access to the apartment. “Mr. Briar, I didn’t ask if your father gave
you
a key, I asked if he gave
friends
keys.”

Jack Briar’s face colored. “I don’t know. I honestly can’t conceive of it.”

“Ellie,” Cardozo said, “what are you working on?”

“Two homicides and a robbery.” Ellie Siegel’s fingers flew across the keyboard of her P.C. She didn’t look up.

“And twenty assorted lesser felonies. Why—what did you have in mind?”

“Would you have time to check out Roger Bailey’s movements Wednesday evening?”

“He was working the four to midnight shift.”

“I know that, but where? Who saw him?”

“I’ll bet his partner saw him.”

“Talk to his partner and make sure. Find out where he went after his shift. And another thing—Britta asked him for a divorce. He thinks she met somebody else but he doesn’t know who. Look into that, okay?”

“Think he killed her?”

“He’s hiding something.”

“Most men are hiding something.”

“Mmm. See if you can find out what.”

SIXTEEN

Friday, September 20

Third day of trial

7:50
A.M.

I
N THE DEPUTY ASSISTANT
medical examiner’s office under First Avenue, Cardozo turned a page of the preliminary autopsy report on Britta Bailey. “Before the killer suffocated her, he hit her on the side of the face with a straight-edged object?”

Dan Hippolito nodded. “Which is how she lost her upper left incisor.”

“What kind of straight-edged object?”

“Possibly the open door of an automobile glove compartment. Which would fit with the synthetic carpet fibers on her clothing and the synthetic leather fibers in her mouth and nostrils. Her face was pushed into the front seat of a car and held there till she stopped breathing.”

Cardozo tried not to visualize it. Easier said than done.

“Pontiac uses that fiber,” Dan said. “So do American-assembled Hondas. And NYPD cars don’t.”

Cardozo turned to the next page of the report. He scanned for a moment in silence. “Estimated time of death, somewhere between five and seven
P.M.
Wednesday?”

“That’s going by the cottage cheese and the hydrochloric acid in her stomach.”

Cardozo thought back. “The ground was wet under her body—but it didn’t rain till two
A.M.
Thursday. So she was left in the rail yard after two. But if she was killed early Wednesday evening …”

“What bothers you about that?”

“The idea of driving around for seven hours with a corpse in the car.”

“Who says he was driving around? He could have been parked. He could have been having dinner. Watching a movie.”

“Then he’s a sociopath.”

“From what I’ve seen, it’s a possibility.”

Cardozo’s mind kept trying out connections. “Funny. John Briar was suffocated by a sociopath and Britta was the first uniform on that scene. And two years later she turns up suffocated, possibly by a sociopath.”

“Relax, Vince, you’re reaching too hard.” Dan pushed up from the desk and ambled to the counter where he kept his Juicematic machine. “There are a lot of sociopaths in this world, and statistically, strangulation is the third most common form of homicide in the United States.”

“What do statistics say about killers changing their M.O.?”

“I’m making some fresh tangelo juice. Could I interest you in some?”

“No, thanks. Does an M.O. tend to stay constant over time, like handwriting?”

“Depends on the killer. Professionals tailor their M.O.’s to circumstances.”

“And professionals are sociopaths.”

“Have to be. But Britta and John Briar weren’t the work of professionals. They were heat-of-passion jobs. The killers went in without a weapon and they improvised with the material at hand: a glove compartment door, a leather seat, a pillow.”

That pillow nagged at Cardozo. “The prosecutor didn’t want Britta or me testifying about goose down in John Briar’s mouth and throat.”

“That figures.” Dan sliced citrus fruit and fed the slices one at a time into the screeching machine. “The presence of goose down implies that John Briar was murdered, but the
absence
of goose down implies that Amalia died a natural death.”

“Which was your finding.”

Dan nodded. “And since the charge is conspiracy to commit
two
murders, it’s not a finding the state’s going to let loose in court.” He brought over two cups of juice and placed one on the table beside his guest. “I could see preferring to skip the whole issue of goose down.”

Cardozo sipped. “This is good.”

“You should get one of these machines.”

“There’s no room in my office.”

“Throw out some files.”

“I wish.” Cardozo closed the report. “How did the D.A.’s office react to your findings on the Briars?”

“I never heard from the D.A.’s office.”

“They didn’t ask you to testify?”

Dan shook his head. “I never expected them to. Not when Lalwani’s findings suited them so much better than mine.”

Cardozo recalled that just last week Hank Lalwani, the controversial medical examiner for Queens County, had been accused by a television network of slanting his findings to suit prosecutors. “And what were Lalwani’s findings?”

“What you’d expect. He said they both were murdered.”

“At present,” the tall man with the high-cheekboned, closely shaved head said, “I’m in my eighth year as a crime scene technician with the NYPD.”

Judge Bernheim interrupted: “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Mr. Kelly is certified as an expert. That means he’s allowed to give us his opinion as a recognized professional in his field. It does not mean that his opinion necessarily has the weight of evidence. You yourselves are going to have to decide what weight you ultimately wish to attach to the opinion portion of his testimony.”

“Mr. Kelly,” Tess diAngeli said, “would you tell the jury a little about a crime scene technician’s duties at the scene of a murder?”

Alvin Kelly described how minute particles and sometimes not-so-minute quantities of blood and skin, hair and saliva were invariably deposited at a scene of violent death. “Some belong to the victim, some to the killer or killers, and sometimes some belong to third parties.” He told how he went about detecting the presence of such particles; how he collected them and preserved them.

“And would you explain to this jury exactly how you processed the scene of the Briar murders?”

As Alvin Kelly explained, diAngeli asked him to identify several dozen small plastic envelopes. Kelly considered each envelope in turn and stated that it contained a sample of tissue from John Briar or his wife, Amalia, that he had personally recovered this sample from the murder scene.

“Your Honor,” diAngeli said, “I ask that the jury be allowed to examine this evidence.”

For a moment the judge’s gaze met the prosecutor’s. A message passed. Annoyance. “Very well. If you insist.”

The bailiff distributed the envelopes to the jury, like party favors. The immaculately packaged bits passed from juror to juror: white and brown dust, gray hairs, shreds of cloth—the last molecules left behind by John Briar and his wife, Amalia.

Cardozo figured Roger Bailey’s captain would give him at least a week off; and eleven
A.M.
seemed a reasonable hour to phone a bereft husband who had nothing on his schedule but drink and sleep.

Bailey answered on the third ring. “Yeah?”

“Roger—Vince Cardozo. Did I wake you?”

“That’s okay.”

“How are you doing?”

“I don’t know.” He sounded ragged. “I went down yesterday to see her. They showed me a picture. To spare me the shock.”

“Everyone gets a picture nowadays. No one sees the body but the examiner.”

“She didn’t look dead. The whole thing feels unreal. The grief counselor says I should go through scrapbooks. Britta and I had a lot of memories. I’d forgot how many.”

“Roger, I have one fast question. Did Britta have any heart or lung problems? Did a doctor ever prescribe anything?”

“Funny you should ask—I was just looking at pictures of Britta and me white-water rafting on our honeymoon. She was stronger than me. Had a heart like an ox. Never had any trouble. Not even a skipped beat. About her lungs—I never heard anything.”

“Okay, Roger. I’ll let you get back to your scrapbooks.”

As Cardozo hung up the receiver he saw that Ellie Siegel had made herself at home in a chair. She arched an inquiring eyebrow. “How’s he doing?”

Cardozo shook his head. “Grief therapist.”

“Then they’re monitoring him for suicide.” The police chief had become alarmed about the suicide rate among cops: it was fourteen times the civilian rate and rising. “Widowers are in the second highest risk category. And Bailey’s partner says he’s been depressed for the last three months.”

“And does his partner say where he was Wednesday night?”

“He spent the whole shift in the squad car.”

“And afterward?”

“She drove him home.”

“His partner’s a she?”

“It happens, Vince. More and more. Her name’s Edie Vasquez.”

Cardozo tapped a pencil on the edge of the phone. “Any rumor of anything between them?”

Ellie sighed the sort of sigh that said all men, but especially Vince Cardozo, had a one-track mind. Cardozo had a problem with Ellie’s sighs.

“It happens, Ellie.”

“I suppose you want me to check?”

“Tactfully.”

Ellie stopped at the door and threw him a look. “By the way, if Britta had a love life, she wasn’t telling anyone at the precinct.”

“Keep digging.”

SEVENTEEN

9:35 A.M.

“D
R. LALWANI …” TESS DIANGELI
had a welcoming smile for the witness. “Would you tell the jury a little about your work?”

“I’m assistant chief medical examiner for Queens County.” Dr. Hank Lalwani appeared to have dressed for a state funeral. A tall, extremely thin, white-haired East Indian, he spoke in a melodious voice seasoned with a British accent. He detailed his curriculum vitae—degrees earned and honorary, previous employment, college lectureships, articles published in professional journals.

Judge Bernheim explained to the jury that the witness was an expert.