Chapter 7
“I need you to be brutal.”
Eric stood with his hands folded, staring down at the two long, foldable tables I’d set up in the apartment above the garage.
For the next few months, this would be my trial prep war room for Katy’s case.
Better to keep everything outside the office and away from Emma.
One week after Katy’s arraignment and I had my copy of the complete police report.
As expected, the district court judge denied bail. For strategic matters, we had chosen not to waive Katy’s right to a speedy trial. Time was more on the prosecution’s side than mine. Barring any delays, Katy would face a jury by the end of the summer.
Jeanie sat in a recliner against the wall, sipping green juice from an insulated mug. It turned out she liked camping out in my garage apartment more than her own office. The chair was Joe’s. He had rented the place from me for almost a year after he and Katy first split up.
“I mean it,” I said to Eric. “You’re my gut check on this. On the evidentiary side. Jeanie, you’re my ethical gut check. I want to make sure we’re on solid ground at all times.”
“How’d he take it?” Jeanie asked. “Judge Castor. When you filed your appearance. I realized I never asked you.”
“He wasn’t happy. But he couldn’t find any flaws in our legal argument. He was convinced this is what Katy wants.”
I had moved two whiteboards from the office and set them up in the corner of the room on easels. I wrote Guilty on one board and Not Guilty on the other. Today, we’d go over the basic case against Katy and figure out the shape of my defense.
Eric walked over to the Guilty board and picked up the red dry erase marker. In his neat block lettering, he wrote “Jenna Rodney” then circled it three times.
“What do we know about her so far?” Jeanie asked.
I picked up a one-page report Eric had compiled with Katy’s housekeeper’s background.
“Twenty-eight,” I said. “She’s lived in or around Delphi her whole life.
Has a high school diploma but no college.
She worked in food service at Great Lakes University just out of school.
She started cleaning houses for extra money.
As of four years ago, she transitioned to that as her main source of income.
Her client list includes two other houses in Tom Loomis’s neighborhood. One across town in Sycamore Hills.”
“Oooh,” Jeanie said. “Fancy. Those are million-dollar homes.”
“She also takes care of the vet clinic on Wood Lane. All word of mouth. She doesn’t advertise. Self-employed with no LLC or any formal business structure.”
“Do we know who she associates with?” Eric asked.
“Katy says she has an on-again off-again boyfriend but Jenna doesn’t go into much detail about her personal life. She’s just been a sweet, earnest, hard-working kid for as long as Katy’s known her.”
“No funny business between her and Tom?” Jeanie asked.
“Katy said no and was pretty adamant about it. She said she’s never had any issues with Jenna and boundaries.”
“No record?” Eric asked.
“Nope,” I said. “Clean as a whistle. Every single one of her clients hired her after a referral from another client on her list. Katy told me she actually has a waiting list because she’s so busy.”
“Somebody’s lucky day,” Jeanie said. “She’s recently had a spot open up.”
I shot her a look. Jeanie smiled. “Sorry. Too dark? Too soon?”
I rolled my eyes. “She even declares all of her income even though she gets paid under the table.”
Eric had Jenna Rodney’s formal statement in his hands. The prosecutor had also sent over the recording of her interview. I practically knew it by heart already.
“Her routine was to start at Tom’s at six a.m. every Friday. She’s worked for him for four years. He was one of her first clients. Katy says he’s directly responsible for referring her to two other people in his neighborhood.”
“Her alibi is about as solid as it gets. She came from the vet clinic first. Cleans there on Friday mornings. Gets there at three thirty and works two hours before they open at six. A couple of overnight pet care personnel vouched for her arrival time and that she left at 5:37. Then drives over to the Loomis’s.
She gets there a few minutes before six.
Neighbor’s security camera shows her car pulling into the driveway at 5:52,” Eric said.
“Walks into Katy and Tom’s bedroom. Sees Katy standing over Tom’s dead body with the knife. ”
“Then runs out of the house, hails a neighbor, calls 911,” I said.
“Katy’s story is that she slept through the whole thing?” Jeanie asked.
Eric turned around and wrote “Katy’s story” on the Guilty board.
“Unless she’s telling the truth,” Jeanie said. “Do we have toxicology?”
“We do,” I said. “It just came through. Her blood was taken at eight a.m. at the hospital under questionable consent.”
“BAC of 0.00,” Eric said. “She’s sober.”
“At eight in the morning she was sober,” I said. “She claims she had a few glasses of wine late evening Thursday. If we go with the theory that her being under the influence helps prove how she could sleep through something like that, I’m not sure if that BAC helps or hurts us.”
“There’s hard math to back up how quickly the alcohol in her system would dissipate hour by hour.”
“She says she had two glasses of wine later the previous evening,” I said. “There was an open bottle of Malbec in her fridge and a dirty wine glass in her sink. That part of her story tracks.”
“And the sleeping pills she said she took from Tom,” Jeanie said. “What do her labs show on that?”
“Zolpidem was present at levels consistent with recent ingestion,” Eric said.
“It wasn’t her prescription,” I said. “She got the pills from Tom’s medicine cabinet. She said they were ten milligrams each and she took two.”
“Had she ever taken them before that night?”
“She says no,” I answered. “She said Tom suggested she try them because she’d been suffering from a bad bout of insomnia for a few nights prior.
If she took twenty milligrams, that seems like a lot.
Just a quick internet search tells me that’s not usually a dose they’d start someone out with if she had gone to her own doctor first.”
“You asked me to be brutally honest,” Eric said. “I don’t buy it. I’m sorry. Even with mild sedatives and some wine, I have a hard time believing that she could have slept through Tom getting murdered three inches from her.”
“Maybe she’s a deep sleeper even without the meds,” Jeanie said. “There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry. Nothing that could concretely show this was a ruckus or a loud event.”
“Look, we all know the presumption,” I said. “Katy’s innocent until proven guilty. So if …”
“Which is bull,” Eric said. “You know it is. They’ll be instructed on the law.
Sure. But if you have a woman who was seen holding the murder weapon over a dead victim and all other things being equal, your risk is they’re going to think the opposite.
They’re going to assume Katy’s guilty until you give them a plausible reason not to.
Sleeping through it doesn’t cut it. Not to anybody with half a brain. ”
“Their witness didn’t see Katy kill the man,” Jeanie said. “That’s just a fact. You gonna put Katy on the stand?”
“Way too early to decide that,” I said. “Right now, I’d say no. I’m worried about her cracking under cross.”
“They aren’t going to like her,” Eric said.
“She’ll be viewed as the villain in their marriage as well as a murderer.
She’s a serial cheater. She was engaged to somebody else when she started up with Joe in the first place.
Then she cheated on Joe with Tom. Then turned around and cheated on Tom with Joe. ”
“Her sexual history isn’t at issue,” I said. “If DePaul tries to introduce that, I’ll block it. Though I can’t predict Castor’s rulings in advance, I’ve tried enough cases in front of him to know he won’t find that funny.”
“It’s an issue as far as establishing the disharmony between them,” Jeanie said. “Eric’s right.”
“Except the prosecutor can get there even without it,” Eric said. He picked up the flash drive containing the digital forensics. That had been the last thing the new prosecutor, Addison Quick, was waiting on before sending me the file.
I wanted to smash the drive with a hammer. Eric turned back to the Guilty board and wrote “Texts” on it. “I’m not the lawyer,” he said. “But if it were me, and I was the prosecutor, I’d put Katy’s friends on the stand first.”
I hadn’t read through everything, but during the time Katy was hooking up with Joe again, she’d sent a series of scathing texts to two of her friends, lamenting the state of her marriage.
She said multiple cruel things about Tom that if I couldn’t keep out, Addison Quick would project onto the largest screen he could and park it right in front of the jury.
Eric read the most damning text Katy had sent. “I can’t stand him. I don’t even want to look at his smug face. Mr. Charming. He’s got everybody fooled. I’d like to carve that handsome smile right off of him.”
“Ouch,” Jeanie said.
“Still doesn’t prove murder,” I said. “They were struggling. She won’t be the first wife who complained to her friends about her husband via text.”
“Most of them don’t end up murdering said husband,” Eric said.
I walked over to the Not Guilty board and picked up a blue dry erase marker. I wrote “old texts” on it and tossed the marker on the table.
“That text was sent five months before the murder,” I said. “They patched things up. At least as far as Katy knew.” I’d been given a bigger bombshell in DePaul’s report that I hadn’t even yet told Katy about.
“Can you back that up?” Jeanie asked. “I mean besides Katy’s own story. Do you have any witnesses who might have seen them together more recently? On a date night? Their neighbors?”
“Put that on the homework list,” I said. “I’ve got Katy putting together a timeline for me.”