Double Tap (27 page)

In the afternoon I get my shot at Perryman on cross.

“You say you found no spent cartridges at the scene, is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“That would mean that the killer must have taken the time to pick them up?”

“I don’t know,” says Perryman. “I can’t answer that question.”

“We are talking about a semiautomatic handgun here, are we not? The pistol you say police found in Madelyn Chapman’s backyard?”

“Yes. It’s semiautomatic.”

“That means each time it fires a separate shot, it ejects the empty cartridge from the gun, does it not?”

“Objection,” says Templeton. “The witness is not qualified as a firearms expert.”

“But he has found firearms at the scenes of numerous homicides, along with expended cartridge cases,” I say.

“I’ll allow the witness to answer the question if he knows the answer,” says Gilcrest.

“A semiautomatic handgun would normally eject an expended cartridge each time it’s fired,” says Perryman.

“Thank you. That means, assuming the state’s evidence is correct, you would expect to find at least two expended cartridges at the scene, is that right?”

“I suppose.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“So someone must have taken them.”

“I presume so.”

“Why would someone who had just murdered a woman—shot her twice with a handgun—stop to pick up expended cartridge cases?”

“Maybe they didn’t want us to be able to trace the cartridges back to the handgun,” says Perryman. “Tool marks,” he adds.

“But they left the handgun for you to find. Does that make sense?”

“That’s not true,” says Perryman. “From what we were able to deduce, the killer tried to throw the handgun over the wall in the backyard.”

“Ah. He tried to hit the ocean but he missed?”

This is their theory. Perryman doesn’t like the way I’ve put the question, so he doesn’t answer it. I ask it again.

“How could he—or she, for that matter—miss the ocean?”

“He didn’t throw it hard enough,” says the witness. “It probably hit the wall and bounced back into the yard.”

“Ah. I see. Your Honor, if I might . . .” I want Gilcrest to allow me to examine the firearm.

The judge nods.

This allows me a little freedom to move away from the podium and around the courtroom. I move to the table in front of the jury box and pick up the pistol. I smile at several of the jurors. Only one of them smiles back.

The slide of the pistol has been wired back, the chamber held open by a nylon cable tie so that it cannot be loaded without removing this: the standard safety precaution in most courtrooms and many private gun shops.

I turn toward the witness. “It’s heavy.”

He nods.

“Do you have any idea what it weighs?”

“If I could look at my notes . . .” he says.

“I have no objection.” I look at Templeton sitting on the box on his chair.

He shrugs a shoulder. “No objection,” he says.

Perryman rifles through a few pages until he finds the one he’s looking for. “According to the manufacturer, the handgun without a loaded clip weighs two point four two pounds.”

“So it would take a pretty good throw to make it to the ocean from the backyard of Ms. Chapman’s house.”

“My point exactly,” he says.

“Hmm. Can you show me where it hit?”

“Excuse me?” he says.

“Where this handgun hit the wall in the backyard. You say you believe that the killer threw the gun from the backyard but that it probably struck the wall and bounced back into the yard. That is what you just said. So, can you show me the marks on the gun where it hit the wall?”

Perryman is beginning to look a little uncomfortable in the witness box.

“That’s just one possible theory,” he says.

“Yes. Well. If I hand you the gun, can you show me what part of it struck the wall? May I approach the witness, Your Honor?”

Gilcrest waves me on.

I hand Perryman the gun.

He takes it like it’s some foreign object, not knowing which end is supposed to be up. He checks the handle first. It is pristine, as is the blued metal on the barrel, both sides, and the top of the slide.

“I can’t say,” he says.

“You don’t find any dents or scratches that might be consistent with the gun hitting the wall?”

He looks again. “There’s a little wear on the barrel near the crown. The bluing is off,” he says.

“But hitting the wall wouldn’t cause wear, would it?”

“No. Probably not.”

“Do you see any major nicks or dents?” I ask.

“No.”

“Do you remember what the wall behind Madelyn Chapman’s house is made of?” I ask.

He looks at me, not sure what to say or whether he should guess.

“What if I told you it was made of concrete cinder blocks covered with stucco? What would you say?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember,” he says.

“Regardless of what it’s made of, we know it’s not made of goose feathers or foam rubber. So, wouldn’t you expect a heavy object like the firearm in your hand, when thrown from some distance, to at least get scratched or dented somewhere when it strikes a solid object like a fence or a wall?”

“Not necessarily,” he says. “It’s possible it didn’t hit the wall at all—that perhaps the perpetrator just didn’t throw it far enough. It could have just landed in the flower bed.”

“Ahh. Theory number two,” I say. “The feeble-armed killer.”

As I turn from the witness, a couple of jurors crack a smile.

I can tell by the look on Templeton’s face he knows he’s in trouble. He’d like to get the witness off the stand. If he had a hook, he’d use it now.

“How far would you say it is from the back edge of the patio at the victim’s house to the point at the edge of the grass where the gun was found by the officer? Did you measure it?”

Perryman shakes his head.

“You have to speak up.”

“No. I didn’t measure it.”

“I did. Would you be surprised if I told you it was thirty-two feet four inches?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he says.

“Maybe we could have the photograph back up on the visualizer.” I turn toward Templeton.

He looks at me like I’m a man from Mars.

“The state’s photograph of the firearm in the rose bed,” I say.

“Ah.” He nods toward his computer assistant, and a second later the picture is back up on the visualizer.

“Can you see the picture?” I ask the witness.

“Yes.”

“Can you show me where this gun, the one in your hand, the one that weighs just a little under two and a half pounds, made an impression in the soil when it landed in the flower bed under the rosebush there?”

The look on Perryman’s face is that of a deer in the headlights. He doesn’t respond.

“You did say that no one touched the gun before it was photographed, is that correct?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, where is the impression in the soil where it landed?” There is a small puddle of water just at the bottom left corner of the photo. The ground is wet.

Herman checked it. The sprinkler system at Chapman’s house was on a rotating timer. It was set to water the entire yard, front and back, every day. The area around the bushes in the back had been soaked for over an hour just after three in the afternoon on the day of the murder. The killer dragged traces of soft peat from his shoes into the house near the window where he entered. The cops looked for shoe prints in the mud but found none. The killer was careful enough to stay mostly on the flat flagstones that formed a path through the garden to the back of the house.

I repeat the question: “Do you see an impression in the soil where the gun landed?”

“Maybe it bounced on the lawn,” he says.

“Well, then, where’s the skid mark in the mud? Wouldn’t you expect that if something weighing almost two and a half pounds and made of case-hardened steel were thrown, say, thirty feet, and bounced on the lawn and came to rest in the flower bed that it would disturb at least a little bit of the soil underneath the rosebush where it came to rest?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

I can tell by looking that Templeton would like to put his head in his hands at this point. But he resists the urge. At one time or another we have all been there.

“Let me ask you: Do you see any marks at all in the soil in that photograph?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I can’t tell.”

“Well, you and your staff took the photographs, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t see any marks in the soil, and the photograph looks pretty clear to
me
.”

“Objection.”

“Sustained. The jury will disregard the comment by counsel.”

They may disregard it, but unless they are blind, they can’t help but notice the undisturbed surface of the flower bed.

“Let me suggest another theory to you and ask you whether that theory is not in fact more plausible, given the physical evidence contained in your own photograph. Isn’t it more likely, given what you can see up there on that screen, that whoever shot Madelyn Chapman didn’t throw the gun at all but placed the gun—the one in your hand, the one weighing two and a half pounds—in the flower bed so that you could do exactly what you
did
do: find it there?”

If it were possible, Perryman would crawl out of the box at this moment on his belly, slither like a serpent out into the hall, and disappear. But he can’t. Instead he offers up the answer of all witnesses who have hit into a sand trap on the stand. “Anything is possible,” he says.

I take the pistol from his hand before he can run to a gun shop to buy a bullet. I head back toward the table.

“Can the witness be excused?” says Templeton.

“I’m not finished.”

I can almost hear Templeton groan as I say it. I put the gun down and pick up the silencer. The metal tube is only a fraction of the weight of the more solid handgun.

Perryman’s gaze settles on the silencer like a child looking at a hypodermic needle. It is the problem when you already know what is going to happen and all you can do is bend over.

“Do you have any idea how far it is from the back of Madelyn Chapman’s house—say, the edge of the back patio—to the rocks over the beach on the other side of the seawall where this silencer was found?”

“No,” he says, shaking his head, then tries to get cute: “But I’m sure you’re going to tell us.”

“Would you believe me if I told you sixty-two feet, give or take a couple of inches?”

“Objection. There’s no verification for this,” says Templeton.

“I can have our technician put the property plat map up on the visualizer if you like. It is drafted to scale, including the house. We’ve had each item of evidence marked on as to location where it was found.”

“That won’t be necessary,” says Templeton. “I withdraw the objection.”

I restate for the witness the distance of the supposed throw from the back of the house to the area where the silencer was found on the rocks: roughly sixty-two feet.

Perryman nods. “I’ll take your word for it.”

“Can we have the other photograph? The one showing the silencer on the rocks?” This time I’m looking directly at Templeton’s computer wizard. I spare Templeton the task of assisting in the burial of his own witness.

The photo flashes up on the screen showing the abrasive surface of the sandstone with a few jagged outcroppings of more solid rock where the silencer came to rest.

“Perhaps you can show me on the blued gunmetal here where the dents and scratches are located where this silencer hit the sandstone after it was thrown that distance.”

Perryman takes the silencer, turns it over in his hands. He would swallow it whole if he could. “Fine. So there’s no scratches.”

“How is that possible? How is it that an object like this could be thrown roughly sixty feet, land on a surface of hard sandstone, hit rocks, and yet the bluing on the metal shows no indication of this? No scratches, no dents, nothing.”

“I don’t know.”

“Could it be that somebody carefully laid it there?”

“As I said, anything’s possible.”

“But if they walked all the way out there with the silencer in their hand, why wouldn’t they just toss it into the surf? It can’t be, what, more than ten feet to the edge of the rocks?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t measure it. But I’m sure you did.”

“Mr. Perryman, nobody threw this silencer, did they?”

“I don’t know.”

“They laid it on the rocks, didn’t they? Just as they laid the gun under the rosebush, so that you and your staff could find both when you went looking for them. Didn’t they?”

“I don’t know.”

“The witness has answered the question,” says Templeton. Templeton wants it to end.

I head back toward the table with the silencer in my hand. “I’m not quite done.”

This time I return with the bag, canvas camo, desert colors with pockets inside for the two clips and the silencer, a larger space for the handgun, and one more square-shaped pocket underneath it.

“Have you looked at this gun bag?” I ask Perryman.

“I have.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“It’s standard-issue military for that particular weapon. The HK Mark Twenty-three forty-five automatic,” he says.

“Ah, I see you’ve done your homework. Did you take the time to place all of the various components of this weapon in their proper pockets to see if they fit?”

“I did.”

“And what did you discover, if anything?”

“They all fit.”

“Yes, but was anything missing in this bag from the standard kit as it was issued by the military for the HK Mark Twenty-three?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“A laser sight,” says the witness.

“Ah, yes. The missing laser sight. Did you find a laser sight anywhere at the victim’s house or in her yard or on the rocks beyond the seawall?”

“No.”

“So you never found the laser sight.”

“No, we didn’t.”

“And you never found any of the spent cartridges or additional loaded rounds for the gun, either, did you?”

“No.”

“Did you have divers check the water, the area of the surf beneath the rocks, looking for any of this evidence?”