Degree of Guilt (17 page)

A brief triumphant expression crossed Sharpe’s face. ‘She wasn’t arriving,’ she answered. ‘No one came to the door. The woman let herself in.’

Sharpe had gained confidence, Paget realized. It was as if she knew that the same calculation which had caused Brooks to stick her with Mary Carelli gave her much more leeway than usual. He decided to speak for Brooks’s benefit.

‘But what does it mean?’ he asked. ‘Ransom’s rape fantasies and the Laura Chase tape
mean
something.’

Without responding, Sharpe turned to Shelton. Her look was a curious admixture of deference and command; Paget perceived that Shelton had been summoned to speak on cue.

‘There’s one more thing,’ Shelton said slowly.

‘What is it?’

Shelton turned from Sharpe, speaking to Paget as if they were alone. ‘Do you remember that night, on the elevator, when you asked me about the scratches on Ransom’s buttocks?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve gone back over them, thought about it quite a bit more.’ She paused, then added quickly, ‘I don’t think they were made until after Ransom died.’

Paget stared at her. ‘After?’

‘Yes. Not seconds after, or even a couple of minutes. Appreciably after.’

Paget tried to organize his thoughts, found none. ‘On what do you base that?’

‘The scratches themselves.’ Shelton’s gaze held his. ‘The normal scratch, such as those you saw on Mary, are like a red welt. The red color comes from bleeding under the skin, broken capillaries. But Random’s scratches are white.’

Paget noticed that Brooks had gotten up and was standing behind Shelton. Reluctantly, Paget asked, ‘What does that tell you?’

‘Ransom’s skin was damaged, just as Mary Carelli’s was. But there was no bleeding, no burst capillaries. Because, in my opinion, his heart had stopped pumping blood.’ Shelton leaned forward, hands clasped in her lap. ‘It’s really just a matter of gravity. A dead person’s blood ends up in the lowest extremity, like a garden hose after you turn off the spigot. By the time the buttocks were scratched, most of Mark Ransom’s blood had gone to his chest.’

Paget touched the bridge of his nose. ‘Are you certain of that?’

‘Not certain. No.’

‘But it
is
your opinion,’ Sharpe interjected.

Shelton gave a reticent nod. ‘What I would testify, if asked, is that what I have just told you is more probable than not.’

‘Which means,’ Sharpe said to Paget, ‘that Ms Carelli waited at least thirty minutes to call 911. Before which she left several scratches on the buttocks of a corpse, quite possibly to make Ransom’s death look different than it really was.’

Paget gave her an incredulous look. ‘That’s bizarre. This is San Francisco, not Transylvania.’

‘That may be.’ Brooks stepped between them, as if he had heard enough. ‘And it may be too little to indict on. But it’s too much to ignore. For now, we’re going on with this.’

Teresa Peralta opened the door of Mark Ransom’s suite.

She hesitated; for a moment, Terri felt that if she did not enter, nothing would happen to Mary, and Ransom would still be alive. Then she stepped inside and saw the bloodstain on the carpet.

She was still staring at it when Paget and Johnny Moore came in behind her.

It was a moment before she turned. ‘Could you see me from the elevator?’ she asked.

Paget nodded. ‘Clearly enough.’

It was a little after eleven-thirty in the morning, roughly the time that Mary had arrived, four days prior. The door bore a sign that read:
CRIME SCENE
–
CITY AND COUNTY OF SAN FRANCISCO
.
KEEP OUT
. A policeman had broken the tape sealing the door; he waited for them by the elevator.

Terri looked around the room. The furniture was unremarkable – two end tables, a bookshelf, a small desk. The two windows of the sitting room faced east, across the city and toward Berkeley; there was enough morning sun left to make the room somewhat bright.

‘You couldn’t have seen my face, though,’ Terri said.

‘No, the angle’s wrong, and there’s also the distance. Johnny and I paced it off at about sixty feet. But even three or four seconds would be enough to describe height, weight, and hair color.’ Paget looked down at the bloodstain. ‘Put it this way,’ he finished slowly. ‘I could tell the difference between you and Mary Carelli.’

A sudden shadow fell across the bloodstain.

Terri and Paget looked up. Johnny Moore had pulled down a blind and was walking toward the second window. ‘Makes a difference,’ he said, and yanked down the other blind.

It was like instant dusk: a bright room, suddenly dark enough to sleep in. Johnny Moore’s ruddy face and white beard had turned gray.

‘It’s depressing,’ Terri said to him.

‘Unless you’re Edgar Allan Poe.’ Moore walked to the end table by the far side of the couch and switched on a lamp. The effect was dim and unnatural, like a lamp in one corner of a windowless cell. ‘Maybe it was Ransom’s idea of romance.’

‘Ransom’s idea of romance,’ Paget answered, ‘was “Mutant Cheerleaders in Bondage.”’

Terri shook her head. ‘There’s no way,’ she said slowly, ‘that I’d have felt comfortable in this room.’

Paget gazed at the stain and then at Terri. His look was curious, reflective. ‘Of course,’ he observed, ‘you know what happened here.’

‘That’s not it.’ She looked around the room. ‘This just doesn’t feel right. If it had been me, and Ransom had pulled down the blinds . . .’

She stopped there. ‘You’d have left?’ Paget asked.

She folded her arms. ‘I don’t know.’

Paget regarded her another moment. ‘In any event, it seems that it would have made an impression on Mary.’

Moore walked to the middle of the room. ‘Probably so, before she shot him.
After
, telling it to the cops, what happened might have gotten pretty confused. Like reading
Ulysses
for the first time.’

Paget smiled faintly. ‘You like the Irish writers, don’t you?’

‘The Irish who
stayed
.’ As he glanced down at the stain, Moore’s Irish lilt became slightly more pronounced. ‘Personally, I always thought Mark Ransom’s work would gag a vulture.’

Paget ceased to smile. ‘Not unlike Marnie Sharpe’s theory of this case.’

Moore considered him and then nodded toward the couch. ‘Why don’t we three rest awhile,’ he said, ‘on the Mark Ransom memorial love seat. You can explain why Miss Carelli defaced the poor man’s arse
after
she shot him.’

‘Oh, that,’ Paget said. ‘Because then he couldn’t complain, of course.’

Terri realized that she was hugging her shoulders. ‘Would you two mind,’ she asked quietly, ‘if I pulled up the blinds?’

‘I’ll do it,’ Moore said. He opened the blinds and looked back to Terri. ‘It was becoming a bit like a séance, wasn’t it?’

Paget stood to the side, watching her face. ‘Johnny’s spent far too much time among the dead,’ he said finally, ‘and I spent too much time with Ms Sharpe this morning. I’m a little off my feed.’

Staring at the coffee table, Terri imagined the tape of Laura Chase. After a moment, she asked, ‘What’s Sharpe thinking?’

The two men sat on each side of Terri. Paget was quiet, ordering his thoughts. Resting his feet on the coffee table, Moore gazed slowly around the room.

‘It’s pretty simple,’ Paget said. ‘Sharpe’s been arranging and rearranging the facts – or the absence of facts – until Mary comes out a liar.

‘First, Mary says Ransom tried to rape her. To which Sharpe, or Shelton, says that there is no sign of seminal fluid and hence no evidence of sexual arousal. And as we know, there was no penetration.’

Terri felt cold. ‘Mary kept making mistakes. She should have let Ransom deposit the evidence.’

‘You’re beginning to sound like me,’ Moore told her. ‘That is, of course, the irony of Sharpe’s scenario.’

‘Granted,’ Paget said. ‘But fact two, according to Shelton, is that Mary’s statement that she shot Ransom from two or three inches isn’t even close.’

Moore nodded. ‘I ran that one past my forensics guy at Berkeley. Take a Walther .380, and the absence of gunshot residue, and he says Shelton has to be right. Liz Shelton’s a professional; to get someone to testify against her on
this
point, you’ll have to find a whore.’

Paget shook his head. ‘If I put on some hired gun, Shelton would kill him. I’ll have to find another way around it.’

‘In other words,’ Moore said carefully, ‘things happened much too fast for Mary to be sure.’

‘Of course.’ Paget paused. ‘But there’s also the lack of gunshot residue on Ransom’s hands. Mary says they struggled and the gun went off. Residue would help confirm that. There wasn’t any.’

‘And needn’t be,’ Moore answered. ‘Depends on how it happened.’

Paget shrugged. ‘The next thing is the blinds. Mary says they were drawn when she got here. But the room service waiter, who has no ax to grind, says they were open. It’s hard to miss the difference. From which Sharpe no doubt posits that Mary drew the blinds, presumably after she shot him, and presumably because she didn’t want to be seen.’

Moore got up from the couch without responding, looked through one window, then another. Arriving, Terri had seen that the Flood was not a perfect rectangle but a courtyard surrounded by two wings that faced each other. Ransom’s suite was near the center of the top floor; through the window, the city and the bay were framed by wings on either side.

Moore pointed to the right. ‘I’ll have to check it out,’ he said. ‘But from here it looks like the last couple of windows on that wing could see into this room. At least it’s something you’d think about if you were standing here, wanting privacy.’

Paget considered that. ‘It works best,’ he said, ‘if this waiter isn’t sure. That way, the blinds are drawn when she gets here, which makes better sense for us than Mary
or
Ransom pulling them down.’

Moore sat again. ‘I’ll find the waiter.’

Watching them, Terri was struck by their total absence of sentiment. Moore did not ask if Mary was telling the truth; Paget’s focus was on what the prosecutor could prove. Neither showed passion or outrage. Which, Terri thought, was more to be expected in Johnny than in Paget: Mary Carelli was the mother of his son.

‘That gets us,’ Paget continued, ‘to Mary’s fingernails as compared to Ransom’s. There are scratches on both Mary and Ransom, but Shelton was only able to find traces of skin under
Mary’s
fingernails, not Ransom’s. To Sharpe, the least that means is that Ransom didn’t scratch her.’

Moore leaned back on the couch. ‘Interesting,’ he said, ‘but not very compelling. It’s kind of like listening to someone’s theory about life on other planets. Maybe, you think, but you can argue it a thousand different ways, and who knows?’

‘Until we get to Sharpe’s little surprise. The scratches on Ransom’s backside.’ Paget’s face was so expressionless that, to Terri, it reflected some deliberate effort. ‘Shelton’s theory is that the scratches weren’t made until a half hour or so after Ransom died. If you believe that, it gives them two things: the passage of time, and the calculated alteration of a crime scene in the most cold-blooded way – the disfigurement of a corpse. And that pulls it all together for them.’

Terri felt reality slip from her grasp. The day before, listening to Melissa Rappaport, she was certain that she had found the truth. But in the suite where Ransom died, truth had become a kaleidoscope: the pattern kept shifting, as did her sense of Paget himself. That, and the strangeness of the room, put her off balance.

‘The case Sharpe is making,’ Paget said, ‘is that Ransom died in another way than Mary described, for some other reason than rape.’ Paget gazed at the bloodstain. ‘Then Mary pulled down the blinds and for over a half hour worked on Ransom’s body, and her own. She pulled down his pants, scratched him, scratched herself. And when she’d done all she could, she called 911 and kept on lying until she got too lost. After which,’ he finished softly, ‘she called me.’

The last words seemed to have taken him somewhere else. As if to reclaim him, Terri said, ‘Ransom
hit
her.’

‘Oh, something happened in this room. Just something quite different from what Mary described. That is, if you’re Sharpe.’

Moore considered him. ‘How sure is Liz Shelton about
this
one?’

‘Sharpe’s pushing her some, although I expect there’s only so far she gets pushed.’ Paget shrugged. ‘I think I could get her to say she’s not sure.’

The last phrase jarred Terri again; it was the pragmatic calculation of a defense lawyer, not the musing of a friend or lover.

They fell silent. ‘Give me a
reason
,’ Moore said at last.

‘Sharpe has none,’ Paget answered. ‘She can make up a how, but she can’t figure out a why.’

He stared out the window, chin propped in his hand. After a time, he asked Moore, ‘Have you seen what you needed to see?’

‘Pretty much.’ Moore stared, spent another minute checking the drawers of the end table and desk, and then said, ‘Let’s go.’

Outside the room, they stopped for a moment, looking around the corridor. There was little there: more doors; a smoke alarm; a mail slot across from Ransom’s suite. No telephone, Terri thought, nothing of interest to anyone who was thinking clearly.

She paused, making sure that the policeman who waited could not hear.

‘What’s Sharpe’s point,’ she asked Paget, ‘about Mary being in the hallway before she called 911?’

‘No idea – just a discrepancy. But I’m sure Sharpe’s working on it.’ Paget nodded toward the mail slot. ‘Probably figures Mary found herself with a half hour to kill, scribbled a few postcards on Ransom’s rear end, and then mailed them to all her friends.’

Moore gave Paget a quizzical look; all at once, Terri felt how shaken Paget was.