Robert Walker - Fatal Instinct

Just to get away from the body and to draw her breath, Jessica toured each room, examining for any clues that might tell her where Emmons was when she was first attacked. It appeared from the trajectory of blood against the walls in the kitchen that the killing had occurred there, as if she had been surprised and attacked on entry at the back door. A trail of her blood led Jessica deeper into the kitchen, where the body had been splayed open, her organs squandered about the room in what appeared to be a more violent rage than the Claw had heretofore exhibited.

Emmons was hardly recognizable.

The sight gave Jessica pause, which the police photographer and the evidence team seemed to take as a sign of weakness. She brought herself up quickly when she heard someone say that Dr. Archer had been located and was on his way.

She wanted to get as much accomplished as possible before Archer arrived. She gave orders for the E.T. people to concentrate elsewhere, and in particular to search for tools and deadly instruments. One of the men went straight for the open door of the basement, stepping directly into a smear of fluid. Jessica's shout-that he watch his step-came too late.

She placed her black valise within reach and knelt over Louise Emmons' disfigured corpse, trying to control her nerves, which threatened to erupt at any moment. Her immediate reaction was that the body had been here less than an hour. Even so, the flies had found it.

As she cut away patches of stained clothing, bagging these in paper, as was necessary in properly drying and preserving bloodstains, she thought once again about the letter of the law with regard to the chain of custody of medicolegal evidence of this nature.

She knew that the practicalities of proof did not require the State of New York to exclude every possibility of substitution or tampering; that it need only establish a reasonable assumption that there was no substitution, alteration or tampering of the sacrosanct evidence. All that was required was to establish a “chain of custody,” a reasonable assurance that the exhibits of trial were the same as those taken from the scene, and that they remained in the same condition.

A lot of assumptions and assurances were made and taken for granted along the way between scene of event and the medical examiner's office. She had learned from Dr. Aaron Holecraft that it was not sufficient merely to show the authenticity of the item on which analysis was based, but also to prove that the custody of the materials analyzed was absolutely reliable.

There was always danger of adulteration, even confusion, of materials in a busy lab, but worse, there was always the possibility, however remote, of tampering. She could recall word for word what Holecraft had said on the subject.

“ It is unnecessary that all possibility of tampering be negated, but where the forensic substance is passed through several hands, the evidence must not leave it to conjecture as to who had it and what was done with it!”

The bottom line, even for a bad M.E. who was faking it, was merely to establish a chain that afforded reasonable assurance. Archer knew this. Every M.E. knew this.

Could he have used it to his advantage, to further his career? It would be a simple matter for the acting head of the medical examiner's office, like a Mafia accountant doctoring and falsifying books.

As her mind played over the importance of the chain of custody in the Claw case, she took nail scrapings from below Emmons' already paper-white, stiff fingers.

She tried desperately to tell herself that perhaps she was being too critical of Archer's performance; that given the circumstances of his situation-a shortage of people, the sudden loss of strong leadership in the department, her own threatening presence-that maybe she herself had simply become overly suspicious of everyone's motives. She wasn't happy with the idea, for she was beginning to suspect even her friends of plotting against her, like J.T. He had put off her request for other, pressing work at Quantico, and there had been something in his voice the last time he had spoken with her, a kind of backscatter that was saying between the lines how sorry he was for something unspoken. As for the background check on Archer, he'd given her only a long series of generalizations, nothing concrete.

Maybe her growing paranoia was getting out of hand, affecting how she viewed people. Maybe…

“ Oh, God… God damn!” shouted the policeman in the basement.

She went to the door and peered down to where the flash lit up a lump of flesh. “What is it?”

“ Looks like her spleen or a kidney… I don't know,” he replied.

“ Leave it exactly as you've found it. Don't touch anything. Any tools down there?”

“ Nothing other than brooms and rakes. It's weird.”

“ What's weird?”

“ Got a workbench but no tool chest, no tools.”

“ They travel with this creep,” she said. “They're probably in his car. See if you can find a light switch down there, and I'll get that photographer back.”

It was a fundamental precept of jurisprudence that a jury, upon seeing the items presented in evidence relevant to a case, was powerfully affected. She knew from the Matisak case, in which she and J.T. has amassed a small mountain of forensic evidence, that such items as those from the basement of Leon Helfer's house would most certainly put him away for life. All she had to do was make sure that the genuineness of the article from here to trial was carefully authenticated by tracing its every movement and repository, and into whose hands it had passed from place to place. Only in this manner could a judge rule that the chain of custody was appropriate and thus the evidence permissible in a court of law.

A close reading of the records with respect to each of the Claw's victims had revealed-to her way of thinking-that Dr. Simon Archer had not always been careful about the integrity of the chain of custody. She thought surely that this must have been a very abrasive thorn in Luther Darius' side; no doubt they had arguments over it. On the surface, and especially to anyone who was not an M.E., it might look like simple relaxing of rules, carelessness, errors, but to Jessica Coran, a perfectionist, it looked far more like tampering, or at the very least negligence.

She'd earlier gone to the New York Times and had found Jim Drake at his desk, looking smug and pleased with himself. She asked him point-blank about who it was that had supplied him with the information about the poem written by the killer. He had refused to tell her.

“ You knew this would compromise our case, and yet you went ahead with the story without even giving us the benefit of knowing you had it or that you were publishing it, Drake. Don't you see that every time you do something like this, you erode any trust, confidence or cooperation built up between the press and the police?”

He rocked forward in his squeaky chair and stood up all in one fluid motion, speaking as he did so. “It was my editor's decision to run it, and I respect him for showing good sense and guts.”

“ That's a cop-out and you know it.”

“ Look, Dr. Coran,” he said, raising his voice, looking around at those who'd begun to stare, “I'm thirty-three years old, a veteran investigative reporter, and my first loyalty is to the story!”

“ The storyT she said snidely.

“ The story, the newspaper, the public-”

She snorted in disdain. “You don't give a rat's ass about the public's right to know. We both know that.”

“ All right, maybe I'm not so sure what the public wants or thinks, but-”

“ Public interest too big an abstraction for you?”

He stared a moment, realizing she was making him sound like a fool. “When I get any information that makes a good story, and it doesn't break the law, then I'm going to use it. If it upsets you or Rychman, the D.A. or the friggin' mayor, then that's no concern of mine.”