John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

“No. I can stay.” She raised her eyes and met his. “I hate all dope,” she said, “you know that?”

Since her mother had died from an overdose, this shouldn’t have been so surprising; but Hunt knew or guessed that she and Craig were occasional pot users. “I’m not too wild about it myself, to tell you the truth. Is that what the fight was about? Stop me if I’m prying.”

She gave him a weak smile. “You’ve earned pry rights.” Crossing her arms, she stared into the space between them. “I mean, everybody says a little weed’ll never hurt you, you know? It’s not addictive, safer than alcohol, blah blah blah. And maybe a little won’t, but a lot…”

“Craig does a lot?”

“I don’t know how much. I don’t monitor it. But we told each other we were going to stop. Or at least I thought we told each other that. Maybe we didn’t. I don’t know. I’m not trying to get him in trouble with you, Wyatt. He doesn’t get high when he’s working. I know he doesn’t do that.” She shook her head. “I just wish he could stop.”

“He can’t?”

“Oh, he says he can. Anytime he wants. He just doesn’t want to.” From the shine in them, her eyes were on the verge of tears. “It just reminds me so much of what my mom used to say. How she used to act. And I kept telling myself that that was different, she was actually truly addicted to heroin, not the same thing as weed at all. But now, I don’t know, somehow it seems a lot more similar than not. But I just don’t think I want any of it in my life anymore, and I try to say that to Craig, and he’s all… he just doesn’t think that way.”

“Even if it means losing you?”

Now a pair of tears broke and rolled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to think that, Wyatt, but that’s what it seems like is happening. I never meant to make it either me or weed, you can’t have both, but I think it’s come pretty close to that.”

Hunt rubbed a finger against the grain of his desk. “I’ll tell you one thing, if he picks the weed over you, he’s a bona fide moron.”

“But I think he might,” Tamara said. “I really think he might.”

Debra Schiff hadgiven her direct testimony to Paul Stier and now was well into her second hour on the stand. She thought she was holding her own pretty well in the first twenty minutes of cross-examination by Dismas Hardy, most of it dedicated so far to the murder of Dylan Vogler. He might have thought he’d scored some points off her on the gun issue, but she’d stuck to her guns, reiterating how Maya had lied to them initially about whether she’d even been in the alley that morning. Beyond that they had Defendant’s registration of the gun in her name, and her fingerprints, for God’s sake, on the magazine.

What more could the jury want?

In Schiff’s mind there was no question of what had happened on that Saturday morning, and she knew that she was conveying it to the jury effectively in spite of Hardy’s best efforts. Now he turned and walked back to his counsel table. He turned a yellow legal pad around and appeared to read from it for a moment-although Schiff knew, since both Jerry Glass and Paul Stier had told her, that much of this extraneous physical activity was choreographed so that attorney and witness didn’t just transmogrify into talking heads to the jury.

Hardy walked back to the middle of the courtroom, eight feet or so in front of her. “Inspector Schiff,” he began again, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about the Levon Preslee murder scene. We’ve seen the pictures. There was a great deal of blood, was there not?”

“I’d call it more a moderate amount, but there was blood, yes.”

“A moderate amount, then. But certainly puddles of it both on the table and also on the floor between the table and the kitchen sink, yes?”

“Yes.”

“So the blood dripped from the table down to the floor, did it not?”

“That’s what it looked like, yes.”

“But no blood was found on the cleaver, which Dr. Strout has identified from the deceased’s injuries as consistent with the murder weapon. Is that true?”

“Yes. No blood was found on the weapon. It had been washed.”

“And how do you know that?”

Schiff, for the first time, showed a brush of annoyance-a small pursing of her lips-gone almost as soon as it appeared. “Well,” she said, now directly at Hardy and not to the jury, “it appeared damp at the scene, as if it had been washed, and there were traces of the decedent’s blood in the disposal under the sink and in the pipes underneath. And the cleaver was next to the sink in a drying rack.”

“So presumably, someone had washed the murder weapon in the sink, is that right?”

“That was our assumption, yes.” Schiff cast a passing glance over at Stier, hoping that he might object. She was a little uncomfortable talking about what the crime scene meant, since that was really the provenance of the CSI team. But her ally the prosecutor just offered her a faint smile and sat with his hands crossed on his table.

“All right,” Hardy said. “That was your assumption. That the cleaver was the murder weapon, is that true?”

“Yes.”

“All right. Accepting that hypothesis for the moment, were there any other clues that indicated to you, a trained investigator, how the murder had actually taken place?”

“I’m not sure what you mean. The deceased was hit from behind with the cleaver.”

“Yes, but just before that. The deceased was seated at the table when he was struck, granted. But was there not a water ring on the table?”

“Oh, that. Yes.”

“And what did you assume from that?”

“That Defendant was sitting-”

“Excuse me.” Hardy, playing with her rhythm, interrupted and looked up at the judge expectantly. “Your Honor, move to strike that last phrase.”

“Granted.” Braun frowned down at Schiff, who was all of a sudden aware that Hardy had tricked her-she really should have known better. He’d lulled her with these mundane questions and caught her off guard. She would have to be more careful or risk losing her credibility. “Sergeant,” the judge intoned at her most sanctimonious, “the jury will decide whether this defendant or someone else entirely was sitting with Mr. Preslee. Just stick to what you observed.”

Hardy was graciousness itself. A quick, warm smile, a barely perceptible nod. “Thank you, Your Honor. Now, Sergeant, again…”

She wanted to punch him.

“We were talking about a water ring on the table, Sergeant, and your theory of the murder.”

Schiff tossed another look at Stier, who’d developed a frown, and then at the jury. “It appeared that the assailant, Mr. Preslee’s murderer, had been sitting across the table from him, perhaps just talking, having a glass of water, and possibly smoking marijuana. At some point the assailant got up-maybe on the pretext of refilling the glass-got behind Mr. Preslee, grabbed the cleaver, and hit him.”

Hardy stood relaxed in front of her. “Very succinct, Sergeant, and I believe supported by the evidence.”

Herself confused by Hardy’s comment, Schiff could only manage a small nod. “Thank you,” she murmured, and realized that this interrogation had somehow gotten away from her.

Hardy was moving ahead. “Sergeant, what was the approximate distance between where the deceased was hit and the kitchen sink right behind it?”

He was off on another apparent tangent. Schiff didn’t see the point of any of these questions, and yet Stier was allowing them. Why wasn’t he objecting to something? Her sense of dread increased, and she felt a drop of perspiration fall out of her hairline. She brushed it away and tried to narrow her focus. Just relax and stay with the facts, she told herself. And then, aloud, “Not far. Maybe eighteen inches.”