John Lescroart - The 13th Juror

"And what time was this?"

Gage reluctantly replied. "I got there at 10:10, so this must have been maybe 10:15."

Powell frowned. "But you received a dispatch from 911 much earlier than that, didn't you?"

Officer Gage nodded. "Yes, sir. We received a DD call – that's Domestic Disturbance – at 9:40."

"Exactly 9:40?"

Gage again looked down at his notes. "That's what I've got here, sir, 9:40. They radioed it through to me." Gage shrugged. "It was after Christmas. A lot of people were having family fights. Sometimes it takes a while."

Powell nodded, walked back to his table and took a yellow sheet from his assistant, read it, put it back down. "What did you do then?"

"Well, I was going to go check around the back, but just then Mrs. Witt came back from running. She asked what I was doing there, and I explained about Mrs. Barbieto's call, hearing some yelling between her and her husband, maybe some shots."

"How did she respond to that?"

Gage fidgeted slightly, raising his eyes to take in Jennifer. He wanted to get it out straight: "She, uh, she told me there wasn't a problem anymore. She had just been out running. Obviously, if there had been a fight, it was over."

"Did you get the feeling she was dismissing you?"

Freeman objected to that and was sustained, but Powell didn't break stride. "What did you do then?"

"I told her I'd rung the doorbell and no one had answered. She said her husband had probably gone out to cool off, just like she had. And taken her son."

Next to Hardy, Jennifer was whispering to Freeman that she hadn't wanted the cop to have to confront Larry because she knew he would beat her up for getting the police involved.

Gage was going on. "I said I'd like to see the house, make sure, in view of the suspected shots, that everything was okay. She again told me she was sure that everything was in order but I insisted, so finally she opened the door."

"And then what happened?"

Gage swallowed. "Well, I smelled the gunpowder immediately, so I told her to sit on the couch. I drew my weapon and began to walk through the rooms of the house, first downstairs then up, until I found the bodies."

The courtroom was still. Gage was sweating, apparently reliving the moment – Jennifer seated on the couch in the living room, waiting while he looked…

"And what did you do then?"

Gage took a breath. "I came out onto the railing and looked over and down at the defendant, at Mrs. Witt there. I said, 'Stay here, please. There has been a shooting'."

"And what did she do?"

"She looked up at me and said, 'I know'."

After the lunch recess Inspector Sergeant Walter Terrell took the stand for the second time.

The Walter Terrell who was sworn in this afternoon was not the eager young man of only a few days before. Gone was the flight jacket and casual slacks, the hair half-uncombed, the designer shirt unbuttoned to the neck. For his testimony this time he wore a three-piece charcoal pinstriped suit that had to have set him back plenty – a lawyer's suit – complete with red tie and white shirt. He had cut his hair and it lay where he had put it.

Even the aggressive demeanor had been tempered. Hardy knew that if you wanted to succeed in this theater you sometimes had to grow up in a hurry, and obviously two things had happened since Terrell's last appearance as a witness in the hardball of a capital murder trial – someone had spent time coaching him, and he had wanted to learn.

At first glance it looked as though Powell had made Terrell understand something that had been foreign to him before – that a witness didn't need a macho personality out on his sleeve to be effective. If placed in a careful arrangement of the facts.

Powell, for whatever his flaws in preparing this case, continued to exude confidence – that he was winning.

It was unsettling.

"Inspector Terrell," Powell began, "since your credentials have already been established, let's begin with your arrival at the murder scene, the Witt house on Olympia Way. This was when?"

This time up Terrell didn't break out his winsome smile – all business, not trying to please anybody, just here doing his job. "I arrived at the scene at 10:43. There were already officers there and the room had been secured."

"Did you see the defendant, Jennifer Witt?"

"Yes. When I came in she was sitting on a couch in a large room off to the right of the entrance. One of the officers there pointed her out to me and I went over to speak with her."

"What was her demeanor at that time?"

"She was sitting with her feet tucked under her, her hands crossed in her lap. She was quiet."

"She was not crying?"

"No, sir."

"And she could speak coherently?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you, Inspector Terrell, have any reason to suspect that Mrs. Witt had committed the murders at that time?"

Terrell thought for a beat. "Not really, other than that, statistically, spouses often kill each other." Terrell sat back, for the first time comfortable in the hard witness chair.

Powell probably looked genuinely puzzled to the jury. "But didn't Officer Gage tell you about Mrs. Witt's saying 'I know' when he told her about the bodies upstairs?"

"Yes, but I guess I chalked that up to shock. Plus she might have come to that conclusion while waiting for him to check the house."

This was good, but not for Jennifer. Terrell was repairing his hot-head image of the other day. He hadn't jumped all over Jennifer like a rabid dog. He had waited for the evidence to pile up. And Powell was leading him toward it, toward his certainty that Jennifer had done it. "During later interviews, did you ask Mrs. Witt who she thought might have done this?"

Now Terrell sat forward. "Well, in law enforcement we always ask the question 'cui bono? ', which means who benefits? And, of course, when I learned that Mrs. Witt would inherit something like five-million dollars, well, it got my attention. I asked if anyone else would inherit. She said no."

"Go on."

"The next thing was that she had told me her husband had no enemies, and if that were so, the motive for the murders had to be impersonal. Robbery, for example. I asked her to search the house and list anything – however small – that was missing."

Hardy had heard all this before, but it was now coming out in a believable and damning fashion. The gun never mentioned as missing by Jennifer, her belated memory of the strange swarthy man in a trenchcoat walking up the street as she walked down it.

When Powell was finished and turned the questioning over to Freeman, the defense attorney started with the same line Hardy would have taken – the only pinhole in an otherwise seamless fabric.

"Mrs. Witt told you her husband had not enemies, is that so?"

"Yes, sir."

"And in the course of your investigations, you looked into this assertion?"

"Yes, I did." Terrell was volunteering nothing, playing Freeman's game, pausing before he spoke, never giving a word without thought. He met Freeman's stare with his own.

Hardy knew a little of what made Terrell tick – the inspector was daring Freeman to try and come get him. And somehow he was pulling it off without appearing belligerent. Powell had trained him well.

But something was up. Suddenly Hardy put together Powell's confidence and Terrell's attitude – the defense was walking into a trap. He raised a hand. "Excuse me, Your Honor."

Freeman, interrupted as he was trying to find his rhythm, turned around, glaring. "I'd like to request a short recess."

Villars frowned – the afternoon had been long enough without these constant interruptions. "If there are no objections." There were none. She called a fifteen minute recess.

"There's something going on," Hardy said. "We're going to get sandbagged."