For a minute or more, Harry and I stand there on the street studying the brief lines on the paper like analysts trying to decipher language in a diplomatic code.
“The word ‘original,’” says Harry. “I’ll give you ten to one that’s Scarborough talk for the J thing, Mr. Jefferson’s infamous letter. Remember what the gal in D.C. told you?”
“Trisha Scott.”
“She said Scarborough only had a copy of the letter. That’s why he needed the original, to authenticate it. It’s dead-on,” says Harry.
“She also said that Ginnis didn’t know anything about the letter.”
“Fortunately for you and me,” says Harry, “we never believe people.” We had already dropped both Trisha Scott’s name as well as the name Arthur Ginnis into the middle of our witness list of possibles to be called, just in case. At the moment Scott’s looking like an odds-on bet for a subpoena. Of course, there’s always the risky unknown, what she might say if you put her on the stand.
“What do you make of this?” says Harry. He’s pointing to language in one of the e-mails. “Scarborough’s asking for the original, and then he says, ‘As I stated previously, a copy does not satisfy the requirements of my third party.’”
Harry gives me a quizzical glance. “Is he trying to publish the letter, or is he trying to sell it?”
I shake my head. We need to move quickly.
“Tell Herman to hire a gumshoe in D.C.,” I say, “somebody he knows or a good referral. Have them find out what’s at this street address.” I point to the D.C. address on the Court’s e-mail reply. “And if it’s a drop box, who rents it. Also ask them to check out the name A. Aranda on a directory of the Court’s employees. I assume there must be one. If not, tell them to do whatever they have to, but find out. Tell them we need the information by tomorrow.
“This next item I don’t want to job out. Ask Herman to get on his traveling clothes and catch the first flight back to D.C. If we end up having to drop a subpoena on Ginnis, first order of business, we’re going to have to know where he is.”
After Detrick was saved by the bell at yesterday evening’s break, you can bet Tuchio spent much of the night with him in the woodshed doing a refresher course on their theory of the case. This morning the detective is looking a little worn and frazzled.
Between the saucer-size eyes and the razor-quick double take Detrick does when I say his name, you might think Tuchio has been feeding him Benzedrine all night.
I don’t even ask Detrick about the detective’s note from the interview in New York with Richard Bonguard, including the early reference to the “J letter” and why the police didn’t follow up on this. This is another instance of their shoddy investigation, rush to judgment. But if asked, Detrick would no doubt simply say it was irrelevant. They already had their man and all the evidence that went with him.
This morning Detrick and I parry over one final point. We know that the killer tried to dispose of the raincoat by throwing it into a Dumpster. So if Carl killed Scarborough, why didn’t he do the same thing with his pants and shoes instead of trying to clean them? After all, he had the better part of twenty-four hours to get rid of them.
Detrick and I go back and forth over this several times, tugging and pushing. At one point he tries to repeat the statement that Carl gave the cops during interrogation, that he kept them because he couldn’t afford to replace them. I cut Detrick off before he can go there.
“Wouldn’t you get rid of them,” I ask him, “if you were the killer?”
“Oh, I would,” he says. “But then in my experience as a homicide detective over the years, I’ve seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid things.”
I could ask him whether in his long experience he has seen people burning their clothes or throwing them in Dumpsters when their only act was the misfortune of stumbling onto a crime scene where they’d picked up traces of blood. But that would be one question too many. Detrick would say, No, of course not, but then those people would have gone to the authorities and reported the crime.
“Thank you. That’s all I have for this witness.”
Tuchio spends twenty minutes on redirect trying to undo some of the damage from yesterday. He has Detrick repeat the state’s theory of the key in the lock, a secretive entry into Scarborough’s hotel room, and then emphasizes that in that case the killer would have been wearing the troublesome raincoat before he entered. It’s this image that Tuchio wants to leave with the jury before we move on.
He excuses Detrick. I let him go, subject to recall in my case in chief.
Tuchio’s next witness is Dewey Prichert, an employee of the police crime lab whose specialty is trace evidence.
Prichert has a kind of sad-sack look to him. If he were a dog, he’d be a basset hound. His sandy-colored hair is disappearing from his forehead faster than a glacier in global warming. The knot on his tie is a little crooked. He wears thick glasses and carries a small plastic pouch sprouting a couple of pens and a tiny metal ruler, all stuffed into the breast pocket of his sport coat. Professor Nerd, pass him on the street and you’d swear he spent his days in a physics lecture hall instead of squatting with tweezers plucking fibers and hair from around lakes of human blood.
The prosecutor moves quickly with Prichert as he has the witness identify specific photographs of blood spatter, close-ups of several small articles that were in the room. Prichert was the crime tech at the scene who lifted the two shoe impressions from the blood in the entry hall and gathered bits of fibers from the floor and multiple strands of human hair, none of which, it seems, matched the hair of the defendant and several of which appear to be idle strands belonging to no one in particular, at least that the police could identify.
“How do you explain that?” asks the prosecutor. “The unidentified strands of hair?”
“Any hotel room is going to be a transient scene,” says Prichert. “We were able to account for several of the darker strands of hair that were found. They belonged to two of the maids who routinely cleaned that room. Others we assume at this point probably belong to previous occupants of the room.”
“So what you’re telling us,” says Tuchio, “is that it’s normal, that you might expect to find unidentified strands of hair in a place like a hotel room?”
“It’s not as bad as an airport terminal, but basically, yes.”
What Tuchio is trying to do here is to close the door on us, to diminish these loose strands of hair as SODDI evidence-“some other dude did it.” He knows that I have an expert on my list of witnesses prepared to jump on the unanswered question of hairs found at the scene.
Tuchio has the witness specify the number and various colors of hairs he collected in the hotel room. You would think the hotel didn’t own a vacuum. According to Prichert, he gathered eighty-seven separate strands, including fourteen hairs from three different animals. For a hotel with a “no pets” policy, if you could fork over the gold brick to pay the daily fare on the Presidential Suite, it seems the room came with a courtesy case of cataracts to blind hotel staff whenever Fifi or Fido emerged from the elevator.
Of the eighty-seven human strands, a good number, fifty-six, were multiple offenders. That is, they were classified as “questioned hair samples,” meaning that their owners were unknown but that microscopic examination revealed they were duplicates and in some cases triplicates coming from the same unknown person.
According to Prichert, this would not be unusual for a hotel room where tenants might spend anywhere from one to several days in close living quarters. He tells the jury that most of the hair samples were collected using a special vacuum with a small micron filter to trap the hair and small fibers. In areas close to the victim’s body where he did not want to disturb other potential evidence, he used tape to lift any hairs or fibers. He explained to the jury that in a suite that size, with deep plush carpets, heavy upholstered furniture, and heavy curtains that hung to the floor, you could easily find a good number of hair samples, most of which have probably been there for a long time.