I set my cup down and then freeze beside our table, unable to sit. Smithy Stewart has been Chatham’s harbormaster for decades. He doesn’t ordinarily deal with the folks from the ME’s office.
The Kydd stays quiet until the line clears. “I called as soon as I could,” he says. “They just left.”
Not only am I able to sit now; I need to. “With a corpse,” I say as I drop into the chair across from Harry. My comment makes him set his fork down. It makes the elderly couple at the next table nervous. They gape at each other, then at me, then at each other again.
“That’s right,” the Kydd says. “Smithy spotted it during routine patrol this morning. In Pleasant Bay, floating toward shore with the incoming tide.”
“Incoming tide,” I repeat. Smithy doesn’t ordinarily deal with floating bodies, either. Harry leans toward me. The elderly man and woman collect their belongings and move to a different table.
“Kydd,” I ask for the third time, “where the hell are you?”
“Smithy brought the body to the nearest town landing,” he says. “We all met him here. At Cow Yard.”
Cow Yard. Off Old Harbor Road. A quarter mile from the Kendrick estate.
I force myself to breathe. “And?” I ask the Kydd. I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming, though.
“On the record,” he says, “nothing. Not a single comment for the press yet.”
Our line is noisy again, but I can still understand him. “And off the record?” I ask.
The Kydd takes a deep breath. “Caucasian female,” he says as he exhales. “Between twenty and thirty. Shoulder-length hair. Black.”
I press against the high-backed chair and close my eyes, my mind unwillingly traveling to the Forresters’ wraparound porch in Stamford. I try hard not to imagine the knock on the front door that will rouse first Catherine, and then Warren, from their well-worn family-room chairs. I try even harder not to picture their faces as they struggle to comprehend the hushed words delivered by some unlucky Connecticut cop. And I battle against the image of Catherine picking up the kitchen telephone, dialing Meredith’s number, and telling her that the world—the one that’s been spinning wildly for the past six days—has just come to an abrupt end.
The line is suddenly clear. “Marty,” the Kydd says.
“I’m here,” I tell him.
“Smithy recognized her from the news,” he says. “It’s Michelle.”
Chapter 18
Tommy Fitzpatrick is a cop’s cop. Tall and broad-shouldered, with a full head of strawberry blond hair going pale—but not gray—as he ages, he’s a commanding presence in any room. The courtroom is no exception. He’s in full dress blues, entirely at ease in the witness box, his hat resting on the railing, his written report in his lap. He speaks directly to the jurors as he answers Geraldine’s questions, as if he’s known each member of the panel all his life. He’s been Chatham’s Chief for one decade, he tells them, on the force just shy of three. He’ll mark his thirtieth anniversary in June, and he’ll retire at the end of that month. He plans to work on his less-than-stellar golf game, explore Ireland with his wife of twenty-eight years, and spend a lot more time sport-fishing with their four grandchildren.
Harry turns to me, his eyebrows arched. Neither of us saw the gold watch on the horizon. And from where we sit, it’s not a welcome prospect. Tommy Fitzpatrick plays by the rules, runs a clean department. Not all of them do.
Geraldine half sits on the edge of her table, digging a spiked heel into its leg, while the Chief chats comfortably with the jurors. She’s trying to be patient, doing her best not to rush the preliminaries. She wants these jurors to like Tommy Fitzpatrick, after all, to trust him. He’s a critical prosecution witness. Even so, patience doesn’t come easily to Geraldine Schilling. She’s fidgeting, dying to get to the good stuff.
The Chief pauses for a sip of water and Geraldine bolts from her table as if fired from a cannon. She carries two small stacks of eight-by-ten glossies to the witness box and sets them on the railing. Harry pulls our copies—a half dozen in all—from his schoolbag. They’re shots taken by the crime scene photographer in St. Veronica’s sacristy last Christmas Eve. Unlike the autopsy photos introduced this morning, these are in vivid color. And they’re coming into evidence. Every last one of them.
During pretrial motions, Geraldine pushed hard for a jury “view”: a field trip, of sorts, to the crime scene. While Judge Gould deemed a view unnecessary, he allowed Geraldine substantial leeway to introduce photographs of the scene instead. Of the dozen she proffered, half are coming in. And they’re not pretty.
Harry spreads our copies across the table so we can follow along as Geraldine recites the necessary litany for each. Were you present when this photograph was taken? she asks the Chief. Was it taken pursuant to your order and under your supervision? Does it accurately depict St. Veronica’s sacristy as it appeared on the night in question?
The Chief delivers the requisite number of affirmatives for each glossy and Geraldine moves the Court for permission to “publish” the first—yet another archaic term our bar association clings to. She wants to give it to the jurors, tell them to pass it around. Judge Gould nods his assent and Geraldine hands the first glossy to Gregory Harmon. He doesn’t flinch when he takes it, but Cora Rowlands does. She looks sideways over his shoulder, erect in her chair, both hands pressed to her mouth.
Crime-scene photographs tell the part of the story no witness can convey. Even when the victim of a violent crime survives and testifies, and even when that testimony is so powerful it brings the room to a standstill, its impact often pales when compared with that of the crime scene photos. Words are essential, of course. And so is forensic evidence. But pictures like this one change jurors’ lives, shatter the foundations of their views of humanity.
Cora Rowlands’s eyes fill immediately. She doesn’t take the glossy when Gregory Harmon offers it, instead signals for him to pass it to the juror on her left. She doesn’t touch it, doesn’t even look down when Harmon reaches across to hand it to her neighbor. She gazes up at the ceiling for a moment, then takes her glasses off and cleans them with a lace handkerchief. No doubt she hopes to erase the unwanted image from her mind’s eye while she’s at it. She can’t, of course, not now and not any time soon. I feel a twinge of sympathy for her. At times, our system demands extraordinary efforts from ordinary citizens. This is one of them.
Geraldine takes a glossy from the second stack—a duplicate of the one being circulated in the jury box—and hands it to the Chief, asks him to identify it.
“This is the sacristy as we found it,” he says, “when we first arrived on the scene, before anything was touched.”
Harry pulls our copy to the edge of the table. Francis Patrick McMahon is sprawled on the gray slate floor, his black cassock twisted and soaked in a sea of blood. His head is pointed toward a corner of the room and his eyes are open, his frameless glasses a few feet away on the floor, one lens shattered. His face, though uncut, bears half a dozen maroon blood blotches. And the white plaster walls on both sides of him are blood-spattered too. The body of an average-size adult holds about ten pints of blood; this photo makes it seem more like ten gallons.
Geraldine asks Tommy Fitzpatrick to walk the jurors through each of the remaining photos and she publishes each one to the panel as he does. The next four are close-ups of Father McMahon’s wounds, most notably the fatal puncture to the aorta, the one we viewed in black and white with Dr. Ramsey. These photos aren’t pleasant for the jurors to absorb, but they’re not nearly as difficult as the first one was. These are anonymous body parts. The first was a whole human being.