Chapter 41
Eddie
‘The People call Dr. Morrow,’ said Riley.
Medical examiners all have that same kind of look.
Dr. Morrow was a young man in a somber suit with a somber expression on his face.
He made his way to the witness stand and took the Bible, repeated the oath.
He had superbly clean hands and thick white fingers, like sticks of chalk.
That same pallor spread over his face. It was always the same with those who work with the dead.
Perhaps it was because they spent hours in basement morgues with no sunlight, or maybe they took on the color of the bodies who were the subject of their work.
I don’t know which, but I’d never met a coroner or a medical examiner with a tan.
‘Dr. Morrow, you examined the body of Molly Green. Correct?’
Riley’s assistant DA had a laptop open in front of him, about to cycle through a series of photographs of the victim’s body, and the horrific way that she had been mutilated.
Part of this was to generate the evidence that was required, through Morrow’s testimony, to prove how the victim died, but there were parts of that chain that were missing.
Maybe Riley would ask Morrow to stretch the truth, to get a win.
I would have to wait and see. The other reason to call him to testify was to shock the jury.
To show them the visceral effects of murder.
This wasn’t Hollywood. This wasn’t a TV show or a movie.
This was real life, and murder was nasty and disturbing and violently real.
Part of it would lean toward tapping into the jury’s emotions. Breaking their hearts. Scarring their minds.
As my mind ruminated on all of this, that last thought stuck there for a second, like a spinning wheel.
Emotion.
Riley’s weak point with a jury.
The easiest way for a prosecutor to access the raw emotional anger of a jury toward the perpetrator of a crime was to make the victim a real person, and not just a photograph.
I opened my trial bundle, found the DA’s list of potential witnesses.
Not all of them would be called, and the list ran to seventy-four names.
Way more than would ever be used in this case.
That’s an old prosecutor’s trick. Flood the defense with a huge witness list. Let them waste time chasing down irrelevant people, interviewing them, investigating them, burning through the defendant’s cash reserves on billable hours and distracting from the real work, the relevant witnesses, the prime issues in the case.
Very few of the witnesses would fulfill an essential element in the DA’s case of making an emotional connection between the jury and the deceased victim.
The prosecution’s motive was that the only way to make a jury grieve for a victim is to show them someone else’s grief.
There were some of her work colleagues on the list, people from Patrick’s campaign team, but none of her friends and, more importantly, none of her family.
No one who would really grieve her loss.
Riley began settling Dr. Morrow as a witness, running through a series of questions on his qualifications and experience to establish him as an expert and to impress upon the jury that whatever this man said was fact. I turned to Harry, whispered so our client wouldn’t hear.
‘It’s just hit me – there’s no one from the victim’s family on the DA’s witness list. Just work colleagues.’
‘Riley doesn’t have the same years of experience as we do, probably just an oversight,’ said Harry in a hushed whisper.
‘I think he’s good enough to know his weaknesses. Something is wrong here.’
Harry frowned, leaned back in his chair, then began to rub the top of his head, letting his fingers comb through his gray hair. He often did this when he was thinking.
Suddenly, he leaned forward, grabbed his trial bundle and began flicking through the pages.
I kept an ear on Riley and Dr. Morrow, still on his work history with the city.
They hadn’t gotten to the meat of his testimony yet.
Vanessa was listening to the witness, but I saw her glance at Harry and I, just to see what we were up to.
She soon turned back to listening to the testimony.
Ripping a page from his trial bundle, Harry handed it to me, said, ‘You’re right. Something’s wrong with this picture.’
The document was only a paragraph long. A statement from a uniformed cop, one of the officers who had attended at the crime scene – Officer Garcia.
In the statement he said that he had attended the morgue and accompanied Alison Karim who identified the remains as that of Molly Green, from her body shape, approximate height and a small tattoo on her left wrist of a dolphin.
‘There’s nothing about Garcia making an effort to get her driver’s license, birth records or any kind of search for a family member,’ I said, keeping my voice low.
‘Maybe he did, but he couldn’t find anything,’ said Harry. ‘We know nothing about this young woman, and Riley hasn’t done the leg work on her life either.’
This was all too strange. It wasn’t a coincidence.
I texted Lake, told him to see what he could find in public records for Molly Green including any family history.
Surely, the NYPD would have made an effort to contact her family.
It’s protocol. It had to have been done, but Garcia didn’t make any note of it in either his statement about attending the scene, nor this statement about body identification.
Lake texted back, said he was on it.
‘What do you think?’ asked Harry.
‘Could be three things. Either the NYPD didn’t do their job, Riley didn’t do his due diligence or they couldn’t find anything.’
‘What does that even mean? They would’ve found something,’ said Harry.
‘Not if Molly Green wasn’t who she said she was. What if she was working for Patrick Vanderpool under a false identity? What if she had an alternative agenda? This murder could be about a lot more than a scandalous affair.’
‘Dr. Morrow, did you examine the body of the victim in this case, Molly Green?’
‘I did. I carried out a full postmortem examination . . .’
We were now getting into real territory with Dr. Morrow. I gave him my full attention, and tried to push thoughts of Molly Green to the back of my mind. Nothing about this case was straightforward.
An image flashed on the large screen for the jury.
The headless body of a young woman.
A few members of the jury gasped. Some looked away, then forced their gaze back at the screen.
The image came up without warning to the jury.
No words of comfort from Riley, no apologies for showing them the result of an evil, murderous act of violence.
He knew most, if not all, of those jurors would take that picture to their grave.
That they would close their eyes at night, for a long time after this trial was over, and they would see this young woman lying on a steel table.
It was what he wanted. What he counted on.
Riley wanted to shock.
He got it.
I heard Vanessa sniff, softly. It was then I noticed she was crying. Her face wet with tears, the grief and loss writ large on her features. Normally, I tell my clients not to react to anything in the courtroom. Just look neutral, let me do the reacting.
But there was no hiding this.
This was what the prosecution case lacked – genuine grief, empathy.
I caught some of the jurors staring at Vanessa.
They were trying to figure out if she was crying because someone she had known had been murdered and mutilated in this way, or if she was staring back at her own handiwork with shame and disgust.
Was she crying for Molly? Or crying for herself?
Harry gave her a handkerchief, and she dabbed at her eyes, reddening now from crying.
‘Dr. Morrow, what in your expert opinion was the cause of death?’
I leaned in, listening carefully.
There was only one possible answer from his point of view. The same conclusion that was in his preliminary report. He had to say that cause of death was likely unnatural, but he could not say exactly what caused her death. That was the only reasonable, professional opinion he could stipulate.
Dr. Morrow shifted his attention from Riley to the jury, and spoke directly to them when he said, ‘Probable cause of death was blunt-force trauma to the skull.’
Riley couldn’t resist shooting a smug grin in my direction.
Now we had a ball game.