Steve Martini - Prime Witness

“Do you know this woman?” I say.

He looks hard, at the dead head of Karen Scofield, then swallows. The brown hues of congealed blood and the empty eye socket stare back at him from the table.

He shakes his head.

“You didn’t know her, but you’ve seen her before, haven’t you, Cleo? On the creek that night?”

“No,” he says. “I’ve never seen her.”

“These marks.” I point with a finger to her brow and cheek. “You know how they were made, don’t you, Cleo?”

He shakes his head.

It is something that has burdened this case from the beginning, the profile experts and their theories of facial disfigurement, the violence to Karen Scofield’s face, the missing eye. It had troubled me for weeks, until yesterday when it finally struck me in the quiet of my office, in the dead of evening, working alone, the pincher marks, the deep wounds on the brow and cheek of Karen Scofield.

“Let me tell you how they happened,” I say. “They were made by the talons of a large bird,” I tell him. “A bird of prey. They were made by your bird, Cleo. They were made by Harvey.”

He’s shaking his head, his eyes closed, all the motions of denial, but not a word is passing from his lips.

This morning I had Claude wire a copy of this photo to William Rattigan at the World Center for Birds of Prey. He has told me what none of the shrinks or pathologists could, that Karen Scofield’s eye was not removed by the killer at all, but was gouged from her head by the razor-sharp talons of a giant bird of prey.

I give him a moment, the photo lying on the table before him.

“It’s been a long day.” I soften my voice. “And I’m getting a little tired. So I’m going to tell you what’s going to happen to you. And you can believe that this is gospel.”

There is no sense in drawing this out any longer.

“Have you ever heard,” I say, “of DNA?”

“I’ve heard of it,” he says.

“It has to do with genetics,” I tell him. “Chromosomes, the basic building blocks of life that make each of us different. You have different chromosomes than I do, different from Lieutenant Dusalt here.”

Coltrane looks at Claude and I think is pleased by this thought.

“Your chromosomes are specific to you,” I say, “and they can be traced from hair and blood-even your saliva,” I tell him.

He stops chewing for the moment. Dense thoughts. Did he spit up in the perch? From the look in his eye, he cannot be sure.

“With a little of your saliva, and a drop of your blood we would be able to determine whether these each came from you, to the exclusion of nearly everyone else on earth,” I say.

As I say this I am reaching into my pant pocket.

He looks at me wondering, I think, whether I’m about to produce something sharp, a needle for blood.

Instead, when my hand comes out it’s holding a single small feather, delicate and gossamer under the florid lights, which I pinch from its point between finger and thumb, and twirl in a slow revolution.

“Cleo, we can get the blood later,” I say, “because Harvey has chromosomes too.”

From the look in his eye one can tell that my words, the soft drama of the quill, something from a pigeon in the plaza on the way over here, has struck a deep responsive chord with Cleo, like the impact of a laser-guided bomb-he and Harvey are trapped, birds of a feather.

He is swallowing a lot of air now. Looks to me, then to Claude.

“You can do that?” he says. He’s talking about DNA.

“We can do that,” I say. “And if we have to, you are going down for the hard fall.” There’s an edge to my voice now. I’m tired of screwing around.

His Adam’s apple is going up and down, dunking like a doughnut, his eyes making the rounds in this room, to Claude, then back to me.

“The minimum, they tell me, for what you’ve done is three years,” I say. “The parole board will not look kindly on the fact that you refused to help us catch a killer.

“Cleo-” I lean down into his face-“you can believe me when I tell you that if you don’t help us, you will do more than three years.” My tone carries the authority of Yahweh carving the Commandments on tablets of stone.

He looks at me, big round eyes. A time for silent thought. Seconds go by as Coltrane weighs this. He is teetering on the verge. His jaw slacks a little.

Just then the door behind me opens. I turn.

It’s Denny Henderson.

If looks could kill, Henderson would need the services of an undertaker at this moment.

Coltrane’s trance is broken, the momentum stopped.

I look back to Henderson. “What the hell is it?”

“I thought you’d want to see this,” he says. He hands me a slip of paper. I look at it. A name or other written on what looks like the torn corner of a yellow page from a phone book.

“What’s this?”

“The name of the property owner. Along the Putah Creek,” he says. “Where the doer did the Scofields.”

I look down at the ragged-edged little corner in my hand, the note handed to me by Denny.

The cold acid of alarm spreads through me an instant before full comprehension. It was there before me all the time. I can feel the blood drain from my face, settle like lead in the pit of my stomach, more fear here than anger. I look up at Claude.

“What is it?” he says.

I crumple the note in my hand, reach over and grab Coltrane by the collar of his shirt. It is pure adrenaline that hoists him out of the chair, throws him with his back against the table. A pained expression as the corner catches a kidney, the small of his back.

“Tell me about the man on the creek,” I say. “Now.” I make this single word sound as if it has a dozen W’s.

Coltrane is bug-eyed. This is a whole new side of me he has never seen.

Claude and Denny are on me from behind grabbing my arms, trying to keep them from Cleo’s throat. It is the thing about an adrenaline rush. It would take an army at this moment.

Cleo is gasping, struggling with his hands. Nodding like if I’ll let him, he’ll talk.

“OK,” he says. “Get offa me. I’ll tell you. Tell. .” he says. Cleo’s face is flushed. His body shaking as I finally loosen my grip.

Self-conscious, I straighten his collar a little, pat the front of his shirt, help him back down into his seat. Claude and Denny slowly ease their grip on me, but stay close, in case I should suffer a relapse.

I move around them, pick up the newspaper, which Claude scattered to the floor earlier in our session. I lay this on the table before Coltrane, front page up, and slap my palm hard on the picture.

“Now identify the man you saw on the Putah Creek that night,” I say, “the one with the two bodies on the ground.”

He flinches once, then stops. He looks up at me one last time, the futile thought written in his eyes that maybe in this last moment I will lift this cup from his lips. He sees the answer carved in my unremitting gaze as I fix my eyes on the picture before him.

Then in the most deliberate of moves, quick and sure, Cleo Coltrane points with a gnarled outstretched index finger, to a single image, a face burned into the newsprint on the table before him.

In this instant of revelation wild thoughts flood my mind, images of flashing metal stakes driven through soft flesh, the hellish visage that was the end of Abbott and Karen Scofield-the night they were murdered by Adrian Chambers.

As the three of us cross the city plaza there is but a single thought running through our minds. It is repeated on our tongues in all the myriad forms that make up nervous banter: whether Adrian Chambers has any idea that we know.

“Maybe Ingel didn’t say anything.” This is Claude’s happy thought for the day. He is hoping that maybe the judge has kept his mouth shut, not carped and complained after calling my office that I was meeting with someone named Coltrane at the jail. Claude knows as do I that Coltrane’s name could be the password to violence.