Steve Martini - Undue Influence

Tonight we will be burning the oil, a first cut on a pretrial motion to attack the indictment, to scuttle the special circumstances. For the first time in a week some of the knots in my stomach begin to unwind.

‘What else have they got?’ I ask him.

‘Bits and pieces,’ he says. ‘Very little blood in the tub, where they found the body. What was there is typed to the victim.

‘Melanie was shot near the tub in the master bath. She appears to have been unclothed. Probably getting ready for a bath. The cops are thinking she fell in when she was shot or else the killer picked her up and put her in the tub afterward. They’re still choreographing,’ says Harry.

‘Any powder burns?’ This could give a clue.

‘Pathology,’ he says. ‘Not in yet.’ We have a new medical examiner in this county. He is notoriously slow.

‘They did find some semen.’

‘Where?’

‘The sheets on the bed,’ he tells me. ‘Dried. No biggy. Police lab checked it. A secretor,’ says Harry.

About sixty percent of the general population are what are known as secretors. These are people who carry in their bloodstream a specific substance that makes it possible to determine their blood group from other body fluids — tears, perspiration, saliva, and in this case semen.

‘Blood type matches the husband,’ says Harry. He’s talking about Jack Vega.

‘Still, I’d like to check it,’ I tell him.

It is a problem most often in cases of disputed parentage, fudging on blood in a serology report. It is one of the areas I always check. Move a decimal point a few digits in one direction and the probability that blood belongs to one person or another, to the exclusion of all others, can go from one in a thousand to one in ten million.

I have known some good-time Charlies, working stiffs with a roving eye for the ladies, who are now on an eighteen-year cycle of support payments — paternity cases involving promiscuous mothers with more lovers than a rock band and children who look like the random sampling of a gene pool. It is what can happen in a lab when the candidate is itinerant and Welfare gives a little nudge. They figure the law of probabilities. If he didn’t do this one, he surely did another.

Though rarely is it a problem in a murder case, still I ask Harry to check the blood and semen, an independent analysis. Harry has the name of a good lab. I want to know if Melanie was bedding another lover, maybe passion gone astray as a motive for murder.

‘You think she was bobbing for apples with somebody else?’

I give him a face, like who knows? Harry makes a note to take care of it.

‘Any prints?’

‘Nothing they’ve disclosed,’ he says.

Fingerprints in a case like this can be a blade that cuts both ways. The absence of any prints tying Laurel to the crime, on its face, might lead to the inexorable conclusion that she was not there. On the other hand, if they can show by independent means that Laurel was inside the Vega home on the night of the murder — hair or fibers, a witness, any faint moves on the Ouija board of identification that a jury might buy — then the failure to find her prints in the house might lead to quiet conjecture, the kind you can’t counter, that she wore gloves. It is only a short hop from there to thoughts of premeditation.

Harry fanning more pages in his pile of papers.

‘All we have left is ballistics,’ he says. ‘Single nine-millimeter slug,’ says Harry. ‘Thin copper jacket. Badly deformed from the head shot. One copper casing, nine-millimeter Luger, with multiple toolmarks.’

‘How do they account for that?’ I ask. I’m thinking dry fire. I have known shooters, mostly hobbyists, hunters, and marksmen, who will work the slide on a semiautomatic by hand with live rounds to ensure that the gun will not jam when fired. This would leave extra marks on the cartridges where the tiny metal teeth grip the rim for ejection.

‘They’re saying the casing had been previously fired. Expanded and resized,’ he says.

‘A reload?’

‘That’s what they seem to be indicating.’

‘Where the hell would Laurel buy reloaded ammunition?’ Their theory starts to have holes.

Harry gives me a look like take your best guess. ‘You can buy the stuff at some ranges. Gun shows,’ he says. Harry plugging the leaks in their case. It might float, but these — gun shows and firing ranges — are not places I would ever expect to see Laurel.

‘Anything on the gun itself?’

He shakes his head. ‘They’re still looking for it. Lands and grooves on the bullet are a right-hand twist. Could be any of a dozen models sold. But here’s the interesting stuff,’ he says. ‘Their lab found some striations not quite as deep as the grooves. Four of them at the edges of the bullet,’ he says. ‘Each one about the width of a piece of coarse thread.’

‘Do they hazard a guess?’ I ask.

‘Without another bullet fired from the same piece to compare, it’s tough,’ says Harry. ‘But they think it’s a defect in the barrel of the gun.’

‘It’ll make the murder weapon easier to identify than dental plates if they find it,’ I say.

‘Let’s hope they don’t find it in Laurel’s apartment,’ says Harry.

This morning Harry and I are doing some cold canvassing. Wearing out shoe leather on the cul-de-sac where Melanie was murdered, a survey of the neighbors, anything they may have seen or heard that night. With the cops holding their witness statements for another day, we have no choice but to go door-to-door.

We have an uphill battle. Like Harry says, ‘Anyone who ever fended off a murder case knows that shit always flows downhill.’ We are busy digging up dirt to build a dam.

Two days ago the city’s mayor, Lama, and the Capital County DA, Duane Nelson, held a joint news conference on Laurel’s case. They cozied up to the camera lenses, basking in the glow of warm strobe lights like they were on some hot beach in Mexico. Nelson told the press he had a stone-solid case, then proceeded to give them no details.

Nelson is a good lawyer and a better politician. Even though he can’t stand Lama, having canned him once as a DA’s investigator, he bestowed undue praise on Jimmy for netting the defendant so quickly. The event was one of those law-enforcement love fests that politicians crave — victory wreaths all around — a conquest in the war on crime.

There was more than a little hypocrisy in this. The day before Nelson called me to ask for a continuance in Laurel’s entry of a plea. A reversal of roles. Prosecutors with a strong case are usually hell-bent for court. He gave me some babble about assigning the case to another deputy, some minor amendments to the indictment. My antenna is up. Something is wrong — hopefully with their case.

I gave him the delay and told him I would get a gag order if he didn’t quit with the press. He laughed, good-natured, and assured me he would not do it again.

Melanie’s murder has stirred particular anxieties in this city of political commerce, ‘Beltway West.’

Government is a growth industry here, and the thought that legislators and their families are not safe is bad for business. Important people can leave to go live in the foothills.

The responsible voices of leadership, the Chamber of Commerce and the City Council, have been busy building on the theme that this was not a random act of violence likely to be visited on another prince of politics.

Laurel’s arrest serves a useful purpose. The city is hard at work on the message that a vengeful former wife, no matter how much she is vilified in the press, is not Jack the Ripper. The Speaker of the Assembly can curl up in confidence with his concubines and sleep in peace.