Lisa Black: Evidence of Murder

“I care.” Now. In the middle of the night, when you hadn’t slept well for months, when dying sounded like the only reward for living, caring had proved much more difficult. But she couldn’t confess that to herself, much less to Leo. “He was fishing for weaknesses so he could report back to his client and collect his fee.”

“That’s his job.”

“No, his job is to report facts and form an expert opinion. It’s the lawyer’s job to impeach me, and it’s not even his job, it’s his job to present his client’s case in the best possible light, not to use the most underhanded tactics he can think of to shred an impartial fact finder just so he can get a rapist out on the street again. Do any of these guys ever wonder how they’d feel if one of their former clients moved in next door? Would they still let their kids play in the backyard?”

“Theresa-”

“So he was hostile first,” she finished.

“Is that what you’re going to tell the judge? He started it? Sure, the school-yard defense never fails to impress the court.”

“His client raped a teenager at knife point. And I should guard the feelings of some hired whore trying to get him off?”

“That’s what jury trials are for. What you’re for is to maintain the reputation of this lab.”

“No, I’m here for the teenager, and to make sure the guy who did that to her goes away and never comes back.”

Then you should have cast the damn shoe print, shouldn’t you?

Leo’s elongated, sallow face exhibited several tics at once. One jumped at the outer edge of his left eyelid. A second prompted the muscles to bunch around the vein in his right temple. A third caused his mouth to open and say, “All the bad guys will come back if the work of this lab is not completely above reproach.”

Leo spoke the truth, even if the trace evidence department provided his only raison d’être, until he could not distinguish between the prestige and reputation of the lab and himself, and vice versa, though she would not say so, because if she did, she would surely be fired. Leo could weather any disaster except a blow to his ego. She wondered if it would be worth it but knew it wouldn’t, not with Rachael’s college tuition looming on the horizon. Her exhaled breath sent the surface of her coffee into ripples and she thought of student loans and the young female victim: “I know. Sorry.”

“Sorry? He’s coming back here on Friday with the friggin’ defense team and the judge and you’re sorry?”

“He’s dragging a judge here? Who the hell is this guy?”

“I expect we’ll find out.” A good supervisor would have let her stew for a while, think it over, but while Leo had his talents, supervising had never been one of them. So the man who spent at least one day each week red-faced and screaming added, “You didn’t used to have control issues.”

Again, he spoke the truth. Strict self-control had gotten her over the speed bumps of life, from her father dying a few days after her fourteenth birthday, to her husband racking up more girlfriends after their wedding than before, to raising a teenager. But it couldn’t get her past watching, via security cameras, her fiancé bleed to death on the marble floor of a bank building.

Don’t think. Just keep going.

“Maybe it’s age,” she told Leo. “I’m getting cranky as I push forty.”

His tone softened. “Maybe you’ve got that posttraumatic stress stuff from someone putting a gun to your head during that bank robbery. Just be ready to be nice to this guy when he comes back here on Friday. No comments on anything but the weather, got it?”

Nothing could be quite as deconstructing as unexpected empathy. “Sure.”

“And go take care of that homicide clothing.”

She took her coffee with her, down three flights of steps to the amphitheater, and retrieved the dead woman’s clothing from the locked trap room. Her name had been Sarah Taylor-the killer had emptied her wallet of money but not ID. A movie-star name but not a movie-star life. The thirty-year-old had supplemented her welfare checks with sporadic work as a prostitute. The killer had left her body propped up against the statue of Goethe and Schiller in the German section. The Cleveland Cultural Gardens in Rockefeller Park, begun in 1916, had areas dedicated to twenty-four different nationalities. Despite the park’s beauty, hers had not been the first body to appear there. Theresa wondered what the two poet-philosophers would have had to say about that.

Sarah Taylor had been strangled with her bra, and had shredded her own neck with acrylic nails as she fought for air. Theresa needed to tape the clothing for hairs, fibers, and other trace evidence the killer might have deposited during the brutal attack. The snow-soaked articles had needed to dry first-she hadn’t entirely fabricated that-but they had hung around long enough, and besides, it gave her something to do until her brain forgot all about defense experts, irritated bosses, and Jillian Perry.

Until her body turned up at Edgewater Park, two days later.

“I hope you weren’t planning on going home anytime soon,” the DNA analyst, Don Delgado, said to her at four o’clock that same Wednesday.

“It’s always a bad sign when you begin conversations that way.”

“You ain’t kidding. We got a dead kid.”

Everyone in law enforcement cringed at those words, perhaps because it made them think of their own children, perhaps because even bad kids were still kids, perhaps because they saw too many of them. Like most of her responses, Theresa had learned to stifle this one. “Sure, I can use the overtime. Rachael will be picking out a college soon. When will the kid get here?”

“They want us to go there. Apparently the circumstances are unusual.”

She folded up the last of the murdered prostitute’s clothing and sealed the bag with red tape, adding her initials and the date. “Unusual how?”

“He’s fifteen and he’s in the woods behind the zoo. That’s all I know.”

“The woods, as in outside?”

“It’s kind of hard to have a woods inside.”

“And the temperature is?”

“Five. Fahrenheit. And I didn’t wear my parka today either,” he added with deep gloom.

She gathered up the sealed paper bags into one larger one, to store on the shelves of the trap room, puzzling over this statement. Usually only one person from the lab went to a crime scene-they lacked the manpower to work in teams. “Are you joining me? Who is this boy? Somebody…?” She hesitated at the word important. Every human was important. Unfortunately, some people would always be considered more important than others, and this remained as true in death as in life.

“All I know is, he lived in the area.”

Hardly rich, then. So why-the morning’s conversation with Leo came back to her. “It’s not the kid, it’s me, isn’t it? Leo is sending you along to make sure I don’t screw up.”

Don rubbed his eyes, stood up, and said nothing, which probably meant that those had been Leo’s exact words. Don would never lie to her.

“I can be ready in ten minutes,” she told him.

Don parked the county station wagon on the side of Park Road, behind Frank’s worn Crown Vic, and Theresa pulled her crime scene kit from the backseat. The snowy expanse between the asphalt and the tree line had been reduced to a fractured mess of shoe prints and crime scene tape. One uniformed officer kept watch while the others huddled at the trees. Theresa wore a scarf, earmuffs, and two pairs of gloves, but the air wove through those items as if they were made of mesh. She complained as much to Don as they fought their way through the thick white blanket of frozen raindrops.