Brian Freeman - Immoral

"No."

"And yet you're sure that Rachel is dead."

Stride nodded. "We found additional evidence in this case."

"A drop or two of blood. A scrap of cloth."

"It was Rachel's blood. Rachel's shirt."

Gale rubbed his goatee thoughtfully. "Was there enough blood found to suggest someone bled to death?"

"No."

"There wasn't even enough blood to prove any kind of crime took place, was there?"

Stride eyed Gale calmly. "I doubt Rachel cut herself shaving."

"But you don't really know, do you? She could have reached into the toolbox, cut herself on the knife, and bled on the carpet and on her clothes. Isn't that possible?"

"Only if you take the evidence out of context. We also found blood and fiber evidence at the barn."

"But still not enough evidence to suggest someone died, isn't that right?"

"On the contrary. I think that's precisely the conclusion this evidence suggests."

Gale raised a furry gray eyebrow. "So you say. Tell me, Lieutenant, do you know how many teenagers run away from home each year?"

"Thousands."

"Tens of thousands, in fact," Gale said. "Rachel wasn't happy at home, was she?"

"No."

"In fact, Rachel fits the classic profile of most runaways, doesn't she?" Gale asked.

"I'd have to say no. Runaways don't leave behind the kind of evidence we found. Her blood. Fibers from the shirt she was wearing that night."

"But what if she didn't want people to look for her?" Gale asked.

Stride hesitated, briefly losing his cool. "What?"

"Well, if she had taken her car, as you suggest, everyone would have known that she had run away, right? You'd be looking for her all over the country. But let's say Rachel wanted to disappear, and she didn't want the family she hates or the nosy police on her trail. Couldn't she have pricked her finger and left behind a hint of physical evidence that she met with a dark end?"

Stride shook his head. "That doesn't make sense. If she was faking her death, she would have made the evidence obvious. As it was, we did look for her all over the country. We did conduct an exhaustive search. Rachel had no way of knowing we ever would have stumbled on the evidence in the van-and certainly not at the barn."

"And yet here we are." Gale straightened, studying Stride, then the jury. "Let's talk about the barn, Lieutenant. This is a place where high school kids go to do all the things their parents don't want them to do at home, right?"

"Pretty much."

"Do you have any idea how many teenagers go there in any given week?" Gale asked.

"No."

"All right. Well, do you know how often the police were called about the barn in the last year?"

Stride shook his head. "I don't know."

"Would you be surprised if I told you it was thirty-seven times?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"And would you be surprised if I told you there were eight accusations of rape involving the barn in the past five years?" Gale asked. His smooth voice took on a hard edge. His eyes became hard azure points.

"That's possible."

"More than possible. It's true, Lieutenant. This is a dangerous place, isn't it?"

"It can be," Stride acknowledged.

"You've got teenagers raping teenagers, and the police don't seem to do anything about it."

"The barn is periodically raided," Stride said. "The kids keep coming back."

"That's right, Lieutenant. Kids. This is a place where kids do bad things. Doesn't the fact that evidence of Rachel was found at the barn suggest that another teenager may have been involved?"

"We investigated that possibility and discarded it," Stride said.

"In fact, it was your first thought, wasn't it? You sent people out to the high school to question teenage boys immediately after the bracelet was found. Didn't you, Lieutenant?"

"Yes, we did," Stride said.

Gale nodded. He chewed on his glasses again and then took a long swallow from a paper cup. He dabbed at his lips with the handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow.

"What size shoe do you wear, Lieutenant?" Gale asked.

The man was good, Stride thought to himself. He wondered how Gale had found out. "Twelve."

"I see. So it could have been you who left those footprints at the barn, right?"

"Objection," Dan Erickson snapped.

Judge Kassel shook her head. "Overruled."

"I don't own a pair of shoes that match the pattern of the tread found at the barn. Whereas Graeme Stoner bought such a pair only four months prior to Rachel's disappearance. And those shoes are now missing."

"But do you know how many of that brand of shoe, in size twelve, were sold in Minnesota in the past year?"

"I don't," Stride admitted.

"It's more than two hundred. Couldn't any of those people have left the footprints?"

"Yes. But none of them is Rachel's stepfather. And they don't own a van in which we found Rachel's blood."

"But apart from those footprints that could be from you or several hundred other men, you don't have any evidence to place my client at the barn on Friday night, do you?"

"No."

"In fact, you don't know when those footprints were made, do you?"

"No."

Gale paused to let the jury focus on this exchange.

"How about the van, Lieutenant? You make a big point of finding my client's fingerprints on the knife you found in the toolbox."

"That's right."

Gale shrugged. "But it's his van and his knife. Wouldn't you expect to find his fingerprints on it?"

"If someone else had handled the knife and wiped it clean, there would have been no fingerprints on it at all," Stride pointed out.

"Unless whoever handled it wore gloves," Gale said. "Isn't that true?"

"That's possible," Stride acknowledged. "But doing so very likely would have smeared other fingerprints, which didn't happen."

"But couldn't Rachel have deliberately left the evidence on the knife herself, knowing that Graeme's fingerprints would be there, too?"

Stride shook his head. "There's no evidence at all that she did that."

"There's also no evidence that she didn't, is there? But let's stay on the van for a while longer. No witnesses saw Graeme Stoner driving the van that Friday night, did they?"

"No."

"So we don't know that the van went anywhere that night, do we?" Gale asked.

"I disagree. The fibers found in the van match the fibers found near the barn. Rachel's bracelet was also found at the barn. Rachel was wearing the bracelet and the white turtleneck on Friday night. Connect the dots, Mr. Gale."

Gale smiled. Stride saw a brief twinkle in the lawyer's eyes, like a nod of appreciation. Score one for the good guys.

But Gale wasn't finished.

"If someone did take Rachel in the van, Lieutenant, how do you know it was Graeme Stoner?"

"It was his van. It was locked."

"Oh, it was locked. I see. No one else could have taken it."

Stride nodded. "Not without hotwiring the engine. Plus, if you suggest someone else took the van, that person would have had to use his own car to get to Rachel's house. It's ridiculous to think a murderer would park his own car on the street, kidnap a girl, steal a different car, drive to the barn, then come back to collect his own car again."

"Unless the killer walked," Gale said.

"Maybe he flew," Stride retorted. The jury laughed. Judge Kassel frowned and looked sharply at Stride.

Gale waited for the amusement to subside. "You took photographs at the Stoner house when Rachel disappeared, am I right?" he asked quietly.

"That's standard procedure," Stride said. He wondered where Gale was going.

Gale returned to the defense table and retrieved a photograph of his own. He put it on an easel near Stride, in full view of the jury.

"Is this an enlarged detail from one of those photographs?"

Stride studied the photo briefly. "Yes, it is."