Joseph Teller - Overkill

And it was true. Regina Fortune had been a terrible witness, far too ready to testify to things about which she knew little or nothing. And Katherine Darcy had been complicit in unmasking the detective by asking her questions she didn’t need to and never should have.

But Jaywalker knew something his daughter didn’t. From Detective Fortune’s scale-drawn diagram of the crime scene, the jurors would be able to determine the precise distance between the area where Jeremy Estrada and Victor Quinones had fought to the spot where Victor had ultimately sustained the fatal shot and bled out onto the pavement. That distance, Jaywalker also knew, would form the cornerstone of Katherine Darcy’s summation argument that Victor had indeed attempted to flee from Jeremy after being shot the first time, and that Jeremy in turn had run him down and executed him.

That distance had been forty-five feet.

As Jaywalker was busy explaining that little detail to his daughter, Jeremy’s mother sidled up to them, another greasy paper bag in her hands.

“She’s your daughter,” said Carmen.

Not “Is she your daughter?” or “This must be your daughter.” No, the way Carmen stated it left absolutely no room for doubt. She might just as easily have been presenting a newborn baby to a mother in the delivery room, or announcing the results of a DNA test excluding any other possibility by a factor of a billion to one. And while it was true that there was a certain resemblance between Jaywalker and his daughter, it wasn’t like they were mirror images of each other. Which made Carmen’s pronouncement seem all the more like something straight from the mouth of a clairvoyant or a Gypsy fortune-teller.

Jaywalker introduced the two of them, and they traded a “Pleased to meet jew” for an “I hope things work out for your son.” Then Carmen turned back to Jaywalker, and the dreaded moment came.

“Chicken,” she said. “I made jew chicken with brown graven.”

Jaywalker took the bag and thanked her. They spoke for a few more seconds before a court officer anxious to clear the courtroom ushered Carmen out. Jaywalker and his daughter he left alone, knowing they’d know to use the side door.

“Thanks for stopping by,” said Jaywalker, who saw little of his daughter these days, now that she was living in New Jersey with her husband and children of her own. “I miss you. And do me a favor, will you?”

“What’s that?”

He extended the bag in her direction. She laughed at the offer, but immediately put her hands behind her back. Family resemblances were one thing, and blood might indeed be thicker than water. But when it came to chicken and brown graven, it seemed Jaywalker was still pretty much on his own.

That afternoon Katherine Darcy called Dr. Seymour Kaplan to the stand as her eighth and final witness. Dr. Kaplan was an assistant to the chief medical examiner of the City of New York, and he would prove to be as good a witness as Detective Fortune had been a bad one.

Darcy began by having Dr. Kaplan run through his credentials and qualifications, and they were truly impressive. After graduating from Harvard, he’d earned a doctorate in neuroanatomy, and taught anatomy and histology at Albert Einstein Medical School, before enrolling there himself. Following graduation and an internship, he’d completed a three-year residency in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. From there he’d returned to New York to accept a teaching fellowship in forensic pathology at Mount Sinai. He was board certified in both anatomical pathology and forensic pathology, which he described as the interaction between the science of the medical cause of death and the legal world of the criminal justice system. He’d worked as an assistant medical examiner in New York for eleven years, during which time he’d performed over two thousand autopsies himself, as well as assisting at more than three times that number.

Twice during the recital Jaywalker offered to stipulate that Dr. Kaplan was qualified as an expert in forensic pathology. But Katherine Darcy could evidently sense the jury’s reaction to her witness’s resume and intended to play it for all it was worth. Finally, on the third attempt, Jaywalker’s offer was accepted. At that point Judge Wexler took a moment to explain to the jurors that having been qualified as an expert, Dr. Kaplan would be permitted to offer his medical and scientific opinion within the field of his particular expertise.

Darcy had him describe what an autopsy was, and how he’d performed one on the body of Victor Quinones. In response to her questions, he stated that he’d found two gunshot wounds, a non-fatal one to the torso, and a fatal one to the head, both complete with telltale entrance and exit holes. He was careful to say that from his examination he had no way of telling which wound had been sustained first.

DARCY: Would you describe for us the shot to the torso?

KAPLAN: Yes. That shot was actually a bit unusual, out of the ordinary in terms of its geometry. It was a shot through the body wall. It entered just below the ribs on the left side, and the bullet stayed within the soft tissue of the body wall. It came out the body wall without ever entering the abdomen or causing internal damage. It formed a very nice linear streak, which is visible on the body. I probed the line, opened it up. And found there was no injury at all from it.

What also made it unique was that after the bullet left the body, there was a gap of a few inches where the skin was perfectly normal. And then there was an extension of that same line on the hip, indicating what appeared to me to be the continuation of the path of that bullet. It caused a grazing wound, a contusion. There was a bruise of the hip without the skin being broken. In other words, a bruising injury in a perfect line with the streak on the body wall that I described earlier.

Because I didn’t think these injuries were fatal, I didn’t include them on the death certificate as contributing in any way to the cause of death.

Darcy asked him to describe the other wound, the one that had proved fatal.

KAPLAN: There was a small, well-circumscribed wound just above the bridge of the nose, equidistant from the eyes. By “well-circumscribed,” I mean it was almost a complete circle in shape. I deemed it to be an entrance wound of a projectile, almost certainly a bullet. Following its trajectory with a thin metal probe, I discovered that it went through the skull, breaking off several small fragments as it did so. From there it entered the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain, just slightly off the midline that divides the two hemispheres. At that point the projectile began to “wander” somewhat in what appeared to me to be a tumbling motion. As it did so, it caused massive damage to both hemispheres. There was significant evidence of herniation, or swelling of the brain itself within the skull. That would have happened as a result of bleeding, most of which would have taken place in the minutes following the impact.

After passing through the brain, the projectile again encountered the skull, this time from the inside, as it exited through the back of the head, the upper portion of the neck. Unlike the entrance wound, this exit wound was large and irregular, further evidence that the projectile had tumbled in the brain and had picked up both skull fragments and brain matter as it did so.

I deemed that shot to have been the fatal one.

A polite way, if Jaywalker understood correctly, of saying that Victor Quinones had died as a result of having a combination of metal and bone churn through his brain. Not too different from having had the Roto-Rooter man clean an ever-widening path through his skull, from front to back. But if that wasn’t bad enough, the worst was still to come. Darcy wanted to know if Dr. Kaplan was able to say how close the gun had been to the victim’s head when the fatal shot had been fired.