The Motive (33 page)

“It’s not exactly news,” Elliot said. “Man loves wife. You know what I mean?” He knew what Hardy was talking about, however, and said, “But I’ll see what I can do.”

The three of them stood chatting in the press of people as the courtroom slowly emptied, the jury first. Hardy noticed Cuneo, who’d nearly bolted from the prosecution table, drumming the back of a chair in front of him. His face was a black mask as he tried to keep his cool, or rather not to show his self-evident fury, as the other people in his row (four rows away from Hardy) patiently awaited their turn to file out. There was only the one center aisle in Department 21, so exiting this courtroom was always a bit like leaving an airplane—slow, slow, slow. While the people in front of you struggled to get their luggage out of the overhead bins, or helped their children or older parents, or just talked and talked and talked, unaware that they needed to keep the
goddamn line moving
.

And then at last Cuneo was on his way up the aisle, his back to them after a few furtive and angry glances. When Elliot, Hardy and Frannie at last got out into the hallway, there was Cuneo again, in a heated discussion with Rosen. And again, as he saw Hardy, a flash of pure hatred.

“Who’s that?” Even through the milling crowd, breaking up in various permutations as people went to lunch, Frannie noticed the directed glare.

Hardy still had his arm over her shoulder, and turned her away. “Cuneo.”

“That would be
Inspector
Cuneo to you.” Elliot was wheeling himself along next to them. “He seems a little perturbed.”

Frannie turned for another look back. “I’d say scary.”

“He’s just a cop,” Hardy said dismissively, “and not a particularly good one.” They were waiting with several other citizens for the elevator on the second floor to open. “And speaking of cops, did either of you see Abe around this morning before my brilliant opening?”

“You had a flash of brilliance? When was that?” Elliot asked. “Darn, I must have missed it.”

“Come on, Jeff,” Frannie said. “He was.” She looked up at him, amusement in her eyes. “Or at least, as David used to say, he was ‘fairly competent.’”

“You’re both too kind, really,” Hardy said. “But Abe?”

Frannie shook her head no. So did Jeff Elliot. “Haven’t seen him.”

John Strout shambled over while the three of them were eating their lunch at Lou the Greek’s. The medical examiner hovered over the table like a smiling ghost. “Y’all havin’ the Special?” An unnecessary question, since Lou’s only served one meal every day—the Special—always some more or less bizarre commingling of Asian and Greek foodstuffs. Today the Special came under less bizarre, although still passing strange—a “lamburger,” with a bright red sweet-and-sour pineapple sauce over rice.

Strout peered down at the plates through his bifocals. “As a medical man, I’d recommend caution. You mind, Jeff?” He slid into the booth next to Elliot, shot an appreciative glance at Frannie, then held out his hand. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

In the middle of a bite, Hardy swallowed. “I’m sorry. John, my wife, Frannie. Frannie, John Strout, who gave such a fine performance this morning.”

“Thank you,” he said. But the smile faded. “Though I must tell you, Diz, that little primrose path you led me down in there don’t lead nowhere.”

Hardy put down his fork. “Never said it did, John. But now Mr. Rosen is going to have to talk about it. Might put him off his feed, that’s all.”

“My husband has a cruel streak,” Frannie said. “It’s well documented.”

“I’ve seen it in action myself.” Strout was all amiability. “You going after my forensic colleagues, too?”

“And who would they be?” Hardy asked.

“You know, the teeth people.”

“Whoever’s up next, John. I’m equal opportunity at skewering prosecution witnesses. But I’m saving the big show for later.”

“Who’s that?”

Hardy smiled. “You’ll have to wait around and find out. Maybe I can get you a special pass to let you back in the courtroom.”

“Put me on your witness list.”

“That might do it.” Hardy’s fork had stopped in midair. He chewed thoughtfully for a second or two.

“He’s thinking cruel thoughts again,” Frannie said. “I can tell.”

“Dr. McInerny,” Hardy began his cross-examination of Hanover’s dentist. “For how long was Paul Hanover your patient?”

“Twenty-seven years, give or take.”

“And in that time, how many X-rays of his mouth did you take?”

“I don’t know exactly. Usually we do one a year, but if a tooth cracks or…well, really any number of other reasons, we’ll do another.”

“So it’s not a complicated process?”

“No, not at all.”

“Would you describe the X-ray process for the court, please?”

Rosen spoke from behind him. “Objection. Three fifty-two, Your Honor.” This was a common objection raised when the relevance of the testimony and its probative value was substantially outweighed by the time consumption, prejudicial effect, or by the likelihood of confusing the jury. “We all know how X-rays work.”

Braun nodded. “Any particular reason to do this, Mr. Hardy?”

“Yes, Your Honor, but I’m trying to draw a distinction between how X-rays get taken in a dentist’s office and how he took the X-rays of the male victim’s mouth at the morgue.”

“To what end?”

“What I’m getting at, Your Honor, is that if the picture is taken from a different angle in the morgue, or with a different technique, it will look different than a typical office X-ray, and the identification of the victim might then not be as certain.”

McInerny, apparently in his late fifties or early sixties, carried twenty or so extra pounds on a midsize body. Pattern baldness was well advanced, and what remained of his hair was snow white. But his face looked like it spent a lot of time outdoors—open, intelligent, expressive. Now he spoke up, helpful, but out of turn. “Really, though, that’s not a concern.”

Braun, surprised at his intrusion, swung her head to look at him. “Doctor,” she said mildly, “just a moment, please.” She looked out at the still-standing Rosen, then came back to Hardy. “I’ll overrule the objection at this time. Go ahead, Mr. Hardy.”

“Thank you, Your Honor. So Doctor, those X-rays. Is there a difference in the way you take standard diagnostic X-rays at your office, and the way you took them to help identify the victim in this case at the morgue?”

In his element now, enjoying this chance to explain the intricacies of his work, McInerny first walked through the familiar procedure that took place in his office—the film in the mouth, the big machine, the lead-lined sheet. “But of course in a forensic laboratory setting, such as a morgue, we typically don’t take a picture at all.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, because we can simply look at what’s there and compare it to our known sample. Let’s say, for example, you look in a victim’s mouth and have seven fillings, a crown, and a root canal or extraction site, and they’re just where they are in your sample. Well, then, you’ve got a match.”

Hardy, sensing an opportunity, jumped at it. “So you can get a match with only, say, a few matching teeth? Less than a whole mouthful?”

“Sometimes, of course. Sometimes you don’t have a whole mouthful. But you work with everything you have. In the case of Mr. Hanover, I compared all of the teeth. There was a one hundred percent correlation.”

“And so you positively identified the victim as Mr. Hanover?”

But McInerny was shaking his head. “Not precisely,” he said.

“No? Could you explain.”

“Sure. I simply verify the match. My dental records match the victim’s. And in this case they did.”

Hardy, having wasted twenty minutes of the court’s time on this dry well of a cross-examination, realized that he let himself succumb to the luxury of fishing. He’d gotten an unexpected and gratuitous, entirely minor victory of sorts from Strout during the morning session and he’d let it go to his head. He was going to alienate the jury if he kept barking up this kind of tree, to no effect.

Acknowledging defeat, he tipped his head to Dr. McInerny, thanked him for his time, and excused him.

The afternoon passed in a haze of redundancy.

Toshio Yamashiru was, as Rosen took pains to point out, not only the dentist of Missy D’Amiens, but one of the top forensic odontologists in the country. As Strout had told Glitsky so long ago, he had assisted in the identification of the 9/11 victims. He had twenty-plus years of experience not only in general dentistry, but in advanced forensics.

No doubt prompted by Hardy’s aggressive cross-examination of Dr. McInerny, Rosen went to great lengths not only to establish Yamashiru’s credentials, but also the techniques that he’d used in the morgue and then in his own lab to exactly correlate the various fissures, faults and striations of each tooth in the skull he examined with the dental records of Missy D’Amiens.

After an hour and forty-one minutes of this excruciatingly boring detail, he finally asked, “Doctor Yamashiru, what was the correlation between the teeth you examined at the morgue and that of the woman whose records are in court, Missy D’Amiens?”

“One hundred percent.”

“You’re certain?”

“Completely.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” Rosen turned to Hardy. “Your witness.”

Hardy blinked himself to a marginally higher state of awareness and stood up. “Your Honor, I have no questions for this witness.”

With ill-concealed relief, Braun turned to Yamashiru. “Thank you, Doctor, you may step down.” She then looked up, bringing in the jury, and raised her voice. “I think we’ve had enough for today. We’ll adjourn until tomorrow morning at nine thirty.”

In the holding cell just behind the back door of the courtoom, Catherine, caged, paced like a leopard.

Hardy, who’d endured complaints—many justified, he’d admit—about the family since Catherine had gone to jail, felt compelled to try and tolerate another round. Even if he were wrung out and ready to go home—or really, back to the office for a minimum of a couple of hours where he would check his mail and e-mail, answer urgent calls from other clients and deal with any other outstanding firm business that needed his input—he had to let her get some of her frustration out. Because if she didn’t blow off steam back here, out of sight, she might do it in front of the jurors, and that would be disastrous. So he let her go on, unaware that with the tensions of the day his own string was near breaking. “I was just so conscious of them all day long, sitting there in the gallery, watching my back, my every breath, I think, and all of them believing I could have done anything like this. How could they even think that?”

“I don’t think they do.”

“Ha. You don’t know.”

“No, I don’t. That’s true.”

She got to one end of her twelve-foot journey, grasped the bars for a moment, then pushed off in the other direction. “Shit shit shit.”

“What?”

“Just shit, that’s what.” She opened her mouth and let out something between a scream and a growl.

“Hey, come on, Catherine, calm down.”

“I can’t calm down. I don’t want to calm down. I’m
locked up
, for Christ’s sake. I might be locked up forever. Don’t you see that?”

She reached the other end, turned again.

“Catherine, stop walking. Please. Just for a second.” He patted the concrete bench next to him. “Come on. Sit. You’ll feel better.”

She didn’t stop walking. “I’ve been sitting all day.”

He sighed, let the words out under his breath. “Christ, you can be a difficult woman!”

She stopped and looked at him. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

“No, Catherine. How could I be mad at you? I make a simple request for you to sit down so
you’ll
feel better and, because I’ve been working all day every day for eight months already on your behalf, of course you completely ignore what I want and continue to pace. This makes me happy, not mad. And why? Because I need the abuse. I thrive on abuse, if you haven’t noticed.”

“I’m not abusing you.”

Hardy had to chuckle. “And I’m not mad at you. So we’re even. You continue pacing and I’ll just sit here, not being mad, how’s that?”

She stared down at him. “Why are you being this way?”

“What way? Calling you on your behavior? Maybe it’s because how you behave in the courtroom is going to have an effect on the jury.”

“Okay, but we’re not in the courtroom now.” Some real anger crept into her tone. “I’ve been behaving well in there all day and now, if it’s all the same to you, Dismas Hardy, I’m a little bit frustrated.”

“Well, take it out on me, then. I’m a glutton for it. Here.” He got to his feet. “I’ll stand up, be your punching bag. Go on, hit me.”

She squared around on him as though she actually might. Hardy brought a finger up to his chin, touched it a few times. “Right here.”

“God, you’re being awful.”

“I’m not. I’m facilitating getting you in touch with your inner child who wants to hit me. You’ll really feel better. I swear. This is a real technique they teach in law school.”

In spite of herself, she chuckled, the anger bleaching out of her, her face softening. “I don’t want to hit you, Dismas. We can sit down.”

“You’re sure? I don’t want to stem your free expression.”

She lowered herself to the concrete bench. “It’s just been a long day,” she said.

He looked down at her. “I hate to say that it’s only the first one of many, but that’s the truth. We ought to try to keep from fighting. I’m sorry if I pushed you there.”

“No. I deserved it. I pushed you.”

“Well, either way.” Hardy put his hands in his pockets, leaned against the bars behind him. “This is worse for you, and I’m sorry.”

They were in a cell in an otherwise open hallway that ran behind all of the courtrooms. Every minute or so, a uniformed bailiff or two would walk by with another defendant, or sometimes an orange-suited line of them, in tow. The place was lit, of course, but in some fashion Hardy was dimly aware that outside it was close to dark out and still cold. Down the way somewhere, quite possibly in an exact double of the cell in which they sat, but invisible to them, they both could hear someone crying.