“You better hurry or we’ll be late for the flight,” I said to Candace.
She walked out of her bedroom down the long hall with oak wainscoting. “I’m never late.”
“First for everything,” I said, looking her up and down. I walked down the Oriental runner and stood before her, a full 6 inches taller than she. I straightened out the collar on her pantsuit.
“What are you doing, Saul?” she said as she stepped a few inches back, uncomfortable with other peoples’ sense of social distance.
“What’s it look like I’m doing?” I said. “I’m symmetrizing.”
“That’s not a word.”
“It is now.”
In an act of understated rebellion, she unstraightened it.
She was always so unkempt. For someone so even and straight-lined and straight-laced, she couldn’t ever dress herself right. “Okay, let’s go.” I picked up her roller bag, opened the door to her apartment, and lifted it over the threshold. She hated scuffmarks.
She closed that heavy oak door, and a look of shock lit the gray eyes behind her thick glasses. She tried the knob, but it’d locked automatically.
“Forget your keys again?” I asked.
She nodded like a child might.
I shook my head, then produced them from my pocket, where they glinted in the soft sun that poured through the skylight in the hallway.
She swiped them and deadbolted the door.
We drove the 40 miles from the Animas Air Park, which served the10,000 people of Animas, to the even smaller hamlet of Low Water, which had about 1/100th the people. We’d flown from Denver to Animas, and from Chicago to Denver.
It’s Main Street off the main highway was lined with catalpa trees unsuitable to these high, arid lands. A man named Arvold, we learned, kept the trees with the giant, spade-shaped leaves and smelly seed pods watered. He was a retired bean farmer out from the country and it was his main aim to keep those alive during the severe droughts which afflicted this red-tilled land. One of those droughts gripped the region all year. They hadn’t had but 1/8th of an inch of rain since New Year’s Day, and this was August.
I drove. Candace didn’t know how. “In some ways,” I was fond of reminding her, “you’re as dependent as a child. You don’t even know how to go online.”
“That’s what I have you for, Saul,” she’d reply. “To take care of the mundane tasks so I can think.”
“Want me to brief you on the case?” I said as we rode in the rental car, a Mini Cooper, the last on the lot, down the two-lane highway toward Low Water.
“You know I don’t,” she said. She liked to see things undistorted by the conclusions of others.
“In this case, I think you might need a primer.”
“Why?” She looked out at the barren, red fields. Bean plants should’ve rowed them by now, but the plants were crisped and brown and dead, fried by a vast heat lamp called the sun. “You’ll notice that most of the growers out here – I believe that’s what they call themselves – practice dryland farming.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because the crops are withering. Bean plants take advantage of the moisture in the topsoil, so they don’t need to be irrigated.”
“You want to know about this case because of the lay of the local politics,” I explained. In 20 yards, turn left on County Road N, the app with the mellifluous, feminine tone almost sang. I turned down a dirt road, following the prompts of the map app on my phone.
“What are the politics?” she asked, inspecting her cuticles as if she cared anything about appearance.
“Ah, I can tell your nervous, ’cuz you’re looking at your nails. You only do that when you’re nervous.”
She looked up and squinted through her side mirror at the cloud of ferrous dust our car raised. “Why would I be nervous?”
“Because you detest politics. You think you’re no good at it. You hate games of tactics and strategy. And you’re out of your element, a big city woman out in the southwest United States.”
She sighed. “Do you mean I’m big, or that I come from a big city?”
“You know I’m right.”
“Okay, tell me what you think I need to know, keeping any possible suspects and any profile data out of the brief.”
I angled the little car, its royal blue already coated in a film of red, gently into a turnout off the road. The glint from the sun ricocheting off parked cars caused her to shield her eyes. “Too late now. We’re already here,” I griped, and eased in next to the Manikin County Sheriff’s vehicles.
“We preserved the scene as best we could, ma’am,” the Sheriff said.
“Thank you, Sheriff,” she said absently, walking around the wood splitter. The blood stains still seemed fresh along the log track.
“And what of the body?” she asked as she circled the scene, which consisted of at least a cord of wood in two piles, one split to the right of a machine up on wooden blocks, and one unsplit on the left side.
“That’s down at the M.E.’s,” Sheriff Donegan said. “There’s a full autopsy bein’ performed as we speak. The head was half split. The body’s intact.”
She moved in on the machine that was at the center of it all.
“Do you know what this machine is, ma’am?” his deputy asked, assuming Candace’s ignorance. She was wearing thick spectacles, a pantsuit and loafers, after all.
“A log splitter,” Candace replied as she examined the pile of split fuel, about a cord’s worth, piled beside the wooden horses that elevated the splitter. The machine was plugged in to an exterior outlet on the garage wall.
“You know what one of these can do?” said the Sheriff.
Candace picked up an unsplit pinyon limb laying in the raw pile to the other side of the splitter. She set it in the cradle, pressed a green button, and worked the yellow handle. The arm of the splitter droned to life and slowly made its way across the cradle’s track until it hit the cross section of the pine. It worked the log into the sharp, unmoving maul on the right end of the track, and POP! The wood exploded into the air in two pieces along natural faults within the wood, flying like a shell casing ejected from an automatic.
The Sheriff, his three deputies and two evidence techs and I stood frozen at Candace’s impulsive act as the arm on the splitter slowly retracted back to its starting position, then shut off as she lifted her fingers from the controls.
“Now, ma’am—”
“—I’m a doctor,” she cut the Sheriff off.
“Doctor. You could’ve destroyed trace evidence,” he whined in his high-pitched voice.
“Did I?” she said as she started to remove splits from the finished pile, tossing them over her shoulder, getting sawdust on her suit jacket and in her short, chestnut hair.
“Well, no, but you are not in charge of this investigation.” He followed her to the far side of the woodpile as she removed more splits, in search of something only she could fathom. “You are here as a courtesy. As a consultant, to render profile evidence.”
“A profile’s not evidence,” she explained. “It’s a working hypothesis.”
“Sheriff Donigan didn’t want you in on this case,” his deputy, a young, plump woman who also bore Donnigan’s last name, said. “You’re here because the CBI looped you in.”
Candace kept chucking wood chunks from the pile, looking for something. “That wood mound’s evidence,” Donnigan himself said. “So stop riflin’ through it.”
“If I don’t,” she said, “you might not find this.” She pulled a shock of black hair from the pile, glued to a split of pinyon by a plug of rodent shit.
“Oooh, missed that,” one of the evidence techs said as she swiped it from Candace and set it in an evidence bag. Everyone wore disposable, nitrile gloves.
“Now, we been through that pile five times,” Sheriff Donnigan said. “Think we woulda found that by now.” He glared at his daughter.
She kept pulling blocks of whitish aspen, tossing one after another over her shoulder until she almost tripped over the pile she was making behind her. “You see, Saul,” she said to me, “the reason why I don’t like being briefed on cases, is precisely because of this.” Then she started whispering to herself in a breathless way in the dry heat. None of us could catch a word of her meaning.
“Ma’—,” Donnigan corrected himself. “Doctor Ma’am, we still don’t want you disturbing our crime scene, regardless of what you find. There was an order to this.”
“You said you preserved the crime scene, Sheriff,” Candace said sotto voce. “You either disturbed this pile or you didn’t.”
She reached for something none of us could see from near the middle of the heap, collapsing the woodpile like bricks. “This is what I’ve been looking for,” she whispered to herself, reaching her hand in to the rodent shit-infested pile of woody fuel.
“There could be widows and recluses in that pile,” one of the deputies warned in a drawl.
She held up between two fingers a bicuspid, and as she filtered the debris in her other hand, and as the evidence tech grabbed the tooth, Candace picked out a molar with a gold filling, then another molar with a composite filling.
“A composite filling, Sheriff,” Candace said. “Without considerable wear.”
“So?” a third Donnegan, an evidence tech, replied. “We already got the vic’s head. What’s left of it must be scattered all over this pile.”
“So, how old was your victim?” Sheriff Donnegan asked his son.
“Fifty,” the son said.
“It shows age. They used gold fillings back when this filling was most likely emplaced,” the heavyset daughter explained to her brother.
“Indeed. They haven’t used gold in fillings for many years” Candace said. “I would check the dental work on your victim for fillings. I would, if I were you, Sheriff, have a look at his dental records. There may be two victims here.”
“And I would reinterview our suspect,” Sheriff Donnegan castigated his son. He turned to Candace. “The suspect’s the kid who the vic hired to empty out this woodshed,” explained Sheriff D. “He had motive, plus opportunity of course.”
“I’d like to see him,” Candace said.
Though Candace wasn’t the man’s lawyer, they turned off the cameras. She insisted on that. No windows, of course. They let me in to take notes, as Candace claimed her disability under the ADA. She was so nearsighted and so afraid of enclosed spaces without windows, and her handwriting was so bad, and the list went on with Candace.
She was bespectacled genius. Urban. Disheveled. Dressed tastefully in clothes she never knew how to wear. Clumsy. Gold-rimmed, smudged glasses. Absent-minded. Helpless without me, her admirer, her envious right arm.
So, I took notes. They brought him in after they’d seated us in a way that we couldn’t touch him, with us at the end of a long table, and he at the other, manacled to the table by his wrists and to the floor by his ankles. We maintained an enforced social distance. It seemed as if we sat at a large, if cheap and graffitied dinner table and were about to partake in a feast the Sheriff’s deputies would soon bring in. She and I the hosts, our orange-suited guest, Giddings Beaumont, with a black eye the deputies denied giving him, all the way across the room.
She glanced up at him from the autopsy photos spread before her. The picture on top showed a mélange of skull and grey matter and blood and scalp. She nudged her bifocals down so she could get a better look at him with her long-range lenses. What she saw was a short Navajo man with a shimmery mop for a haircut. He, too, wore thick wireframes which rested on his fleshy cheeks. He smiled in a guileless, endearing way that made him seem boyish.
He ‘appeared his stated age,’ according to the PSI report, and that age was 25. Actually, I thought he looked about 18, 19. His shoulders slumped into round bookends. He was pudgy and short.
“Hey,” he said. “They say you’re here to help.”
“No, we’re here to find out what happened, why you’re here,” she said.
Her aloofness erased the smile from his easy-to-read face.
“I’m here ’cuz they said I killed Mr. Drewery, the guy whose woodshed I was cleaning out. I didn’t kill him.”
“Can you tell us what happened then?” I asked, taking down his denial on my white legal pad.
“Well, Mr. Drewery’s a carpenter, and I helped him out framing houses sometimes. He grew vegetables and sold them at the Farmer’s Market in Animas. I helped him with the vegetables, put the plastic on top before the hard frosts. Used killer on the weeds. He didn’t like to breathe it in, but he looked out for me so I didn’t get no cancer. He made sure I wore a hankie over my mouth when I sprayed.”
“How very thoughtful of him,” she remarked under her breath.
“He asked if I could clean out his woodshed. It was a terrible job,” he said as chewed his thumbnail. “I could use a smoke, but they don’t let us. There was all this rat shit, you know, from pack rats, and squirrel shit and it would stick to the logs. He rented this splinter and it was really fun, that part was. You stick a log on the track and POW! It explodes out sometimes, crack in two and flies in different directions,” and he split his manacled hands as far as he could to show us. “If it’s cottonwood or aspen, you just gotta let the maul – that’s what Mr. Drewery calls it, or called it – just touch the top of the log with the maul and it splits right down the middle and you can let your hand off the tiller, that’s what he called the yellow lever. But with pinyon, man, the pieces, they crack and pop out like a clay pigeon when you’re shootin’ skeet. You’re standing on the wrong side of that, man, and you can get smacked in the cheek. Hit me in the face once. I—”
“—Mr. Beaumont,” I interrupted.
“Call me Gid. My full name’s Giddings, but my friends call me Gid.”
“Gid, they only gave us 30 minutes. Could—” Candace set her hand on my wrist to stop me.
“What happened after it hit you in the face?” she asked.
“My mouth’s sore, but they won’t give me any meds.”
“Gid, we might need to interrupt you from time to time, and ask you more direct questions,” I said.
He nodded. “Sorry. I got this ADHD thing, and a lot of people need to do that. Redirect me, I mean.”
I looked down at his Presentence Investigation Report. His IQ was in the high 70’s, in the borderline range of intellectual functioning. This was going to be a tough interview.
“Did you finish splitting all of Mr. Drewery’s woodpile?” she inquired.
“Yeah, Mr. Drew – he’s OK, he was OK before he died – he had all kinda jobs for me. This one was pretty gross. The wood, I mean, it was fulla crap. Some guy dropped a couple cords off in his truck. He said it’d been sittin’ next to his barn for a few years. The rats make their nests in it then. And their crap sticks to the wood and I mean you can’t get it out. Like rock, it is. The pee’s like this varnish that they pee on top of the turds, and then it’s like rock, man.” He pinched his almond, childlike eyes into a sour memory. “I scraped it and hosed it and still it wouldn’t come off. Mr. Drew made me make a second pile for the stuff that was full of the piss and crapola. He said he wouldn’t let that wood into his house, because of the hanta.”
“The hanta?” I asked.
“It makes you sick.”
“Hanta virus,” she explained. ‘Plague, too.”
“That part wasn’t fun.” And his eyes widened as he fumbled with his fingers, always close together in those cuffs. “It would like be granola when it was loose and I had to shovel it with this coal shovel when it got too deep around my boots. Sometimes, like toffee, or brickle, or like that stuff in turtles, not the green kind with the shell, yecch, but the chocolate kind of turtles.” Candace glanced at me and we traded hidden, sour grins.
“Did you—, did you, uh, have any reason to hurt him?”
“Mr. Drew? No. I mean, we used to kid each other. He’d call me Gid the kid, and I’d call him Drew the Stew.”
“Why did you call him the Stew?” I asked.
“I dunno. Just ’cuz it rhymed, I guess. I mean, he didn’t make no stew or anything.”
“What happened next?” she asked.
It was the question I most often heard when she was conducting a forensic interview. It was a question I’m sure she used again and again on direct examination when she’d been a prosecutor. And open-ended questions like that were standard in psychotherapy as well. And she’d been that, too. Candace had two D’s at the end of her name, first JD when she’d gotten that at the University of Chicago, and then PhD when she’d gotten that at Berkley.
“Gid, do you know what motive is?” she asked.
He shook his head in an exaggerated way, as if the question made him nervous, because doctors and psychologists like Candace had been asking him questions like that all his short life, and he’d always had to play catch up.
“Motive is when you have a reason to do something, like kill someone.”
“But I didn’t kill him. I—”
“—I know you didn’t,” I said. By this time, neither of us could’ve believed this innocent boy could kill anyone. “But the police think, the Sheriff and his deputies think you had motive. That simply means a reason. Doesn’t mean you did it.”
“Oh.” He thrummed his chubby, dirt-worked nails on the table as he thought about why he might’ve had motive. “You know, out here, everybody knows everybody. Sometimes, our families go way back. My family being Navajo, his being Anglo, there was some blood,” he related, suddenly a little more sophisticated in his explanation. Blood. That word raised Candace’s chestnut brows a little in cold suspicion behind those heavy specs.
“My older cousin, he uh…,” and he inspected his nails like Candace might her own, with grime from rat shit worked into his as he took jobs from old White men no one else would for shitty pay. “He did something.”
Candace leaned in. “What?”
“We’re not s’posed to say. A cousin isn’t a cousin like White people mean. He’s closer, more like a brother sometimes. But he may not even be a real cousin, like he is with White people. So I’m not s’posed to say.”
“Say what?” I wondered.
“What they did.” He looked at me with innocent eyes that clarified in intent. “He’s a relation.”
“And you’re not supposed to rat on family,” she replied. Candace looked at her own nails. She seemed distracted, like she’d already moved on. I’d seen this before. She’d already come to her conclusions. She’d lost interest.
“But you have to tell us what the beef was between your cousin and that old man, Gid. Your life depends on it. Otherwise,” I said, looking up at the high white, ceiling with the recessed tubed lighting. “Otherwise, you’ll end up in a place like this for the rest of your life.”
“He stole from him,” he said without hesitation. “I was doing a job for Mr. Drew and I took my cousin along to help. We were cutting down some dead pinion on Mr. Drew’s land. My cousin handled the saw. I helped him rope the bigger trees. I carried the gas and chain oil and pruned off the smaller branches.”
“What happened after that?” Candace asked in her whispery voice.
“My cousin said we should go inside the house. Mr. Drew, he was out a town on business. He wanted to see inside the house. I said no. But he went in anyway.”
And?” she prodded, inspecting a gang symbol some other suspect had carved into the side of the tabletop.
“He took a bunch a stuff: guns, a power drill, binocs.”
“How long ago was that, Gid?” I said as Candace seemed to stare out an imaginary window.
“I have a hard time with time like that.” He looked at me earnestly. “I don’t know.” We looked it up later in a burglary report Mr. Drewery had filed with the Sheriff’s office. It’d been 18 months before.
“What happened after that?” I asked.
“Well, my cousin, he’d done some bad things before. He struck out.” Gid teared up and I couldn’t figure out what he meant by ‘struck out’ or why he seemed so upset.
Candace’s focus came back to the room. “It’s like baseball, right?” she said.
Giddings nodded. “His first strike was an assault over in Shiprock. That was like, five? No, ten years ago. I can’t remember. His second strike was on a drug thing. It was big. Meth. This one was his strike out, what he did at Mr. Drew’s place.” He glanced down, said. “They say he’s never getting away from prison for 15 years.”
She dispatched a look of cold, clinical calculation down that long table. I was the one who carried the empathy. “You thought you could’ve done something about it,” she reasoned, this time more like a therapist, but without the warmth. “You can’t stop thinking that you should’ve stopped him.”
Gid nodded. “You know, lady.” Then he sobbed softly.
After about half a minute of sniffling, he leaned down and wiped the snot with the inside of his arm. “His moms, my auntie, she said it was my fault, that I shoulda stopped him. She said I shouldn’t’ve stayed friends with Mr. Drew after he dimed my cousin. She said I should be in prison instead a him. And now, she won’t talk to my moms. Nobody in the family will. Her brothers won’t give us money no more.” He let the tears drain down back inside him. “And I didn’t even tell on him.” When the last sniffle was dried as a crust in the crook of his elbow, he put on a distant look. “And it’s my fault, ’cuz I didn’t stop him.”
“It’s not your fault,” I whispered. “But what they’ll say, Gid—”
“—The Sheriff?”
“Yeah, the Sheriff. They’ll say you got back on Mr. Drew for calling rh Sheriff on your cousin. They’ll say you killed Mr. Drew because he made sure your cousin went to jail.”
“But I didn’t.”
“We know,” I assured him.
“But now we have to find out who did kill him,” Candace said. She got up, waved her arm in front of the camera as I took the last of my notes.
“The cameras aren’t on,” I reminded her.
The metal gears in the door meshed loudly. She gave me a look.
I opened the heavy door, and we escaped, letting in a rush of cold, indifferent air that ruffled the innocent bangs of Giddings Beaumont.
“Now what do we do?” I said to Candace as walked down the white, cinderblock corridor, swallowing the shared burden of having the fate of an innocent kid in our hands.
“How many times have I told you, Saul.”
“I know, I know. ‘Even though the burden isn’t ours,’” I recited from the Introduction to her tome on forensic psychology which she used in her class at the University of Chicago, “…and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, often, the forensic psychologist working on behalf of the criminal defendant is placed in the unfortunate position of having to prove a negative. That negative is the innocence of her client.”
“I can prove statistically that the suspect you have in custody is highly unlikely to have murdered the victim in this case,” Candace testified at the prelim.
She once told me that she’d conducted over 200 preliminary hearings during her time as an Assistant State’s Attorney in Chicago. It must’ve been different for her sitting in the witness box. She’d probably testified in just as many cases as an expert. She carried her purse with her, something she rarely did anywhere. Candace didn’t use purses. And she had to use both hands to haul it with her/ What was she up to?
“Can you begin by reciting some of these statistics,” I questioned her, standing at defense counsel’s table, next to Giddings Beaumont, who wasn’t wearing orange for a change.
She gave me one of her looks, which basically said you’re fucking up again, Saul.
“Oh, the theories behind the stats might come in useful,” said I. I’d forgotten to lay the basis for the numbers.
“Suicides are most common among middle-aged white men,” she said. “Especially among those living at high-altitude environments. The correlation holds in geographic locations all over the world. In the United States, suicides are most common among white males in the 45-64 age demographic, who have recently lost a spouse—”
“Objection to ‘recently,’” the DA rose and stated, perfunctorily. He seemed bored.
“Within the period of bereavement specified in the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition,” she said as she looked up at the judge, a graying, old woman who had membership in the Ute Mountain Ute tribe just outside of town. We’d done background on her before the preliminary hearing. “That would be 18 months.”
“Continue with your testimony,” Judge Yellowhair told her.
“Additional factors which increase risk include the recent loss of a pet. The decedent was a widower who had recently lost his dog, and in addition had a terminal illness. The deceased had a cirrhotic liver, according to medical testimony previous adduced by the coroner.” Candace had been in the gallery to hear that testimony. An expert was permitted to base her opinion on in-court testimony. It was a category of evidence that an expert witness could reasonably rely upon in forming her own opinion.
“Alcoholism is another factor which increases the odds of suicide,” Candance testified. “In the decedent’s case, he had attended group treatment for outpatient substance abuse subsequent to two convictions for driving under the influence of alcohol. The probation officer’s testing of the victim found him to suffer from alcohol use disorder, severe, along with a moderate depressive disorder.”
“Objection to the basis, Judge. The information she’s relying on regarding alcohol history isn’t proof.”
“Nevertheless, I can take judicial notice,” the judge replied. “I happened to have sentenced the decedent to his DUI’s based on plea agreements you reached with his defense counsel. I mandated the outpatient treatment based on your recommendation. His diagnoses can serve as the basis for an opinion,” the judge said, delivering the gotcha.
“Are there any other bases for your opinion?” I asked Candace.
“Males in particular are more likely to complete suicides. Males with an alcohol use disorder and a co-occurring depressive disorder are more likely still.”
“What are the odds, then, in your opinion?”
“Although suicide cannot be predicted in any individual case, with the combination of factors just described, the statistical odds of suicide in the decedent’s case are more likely than not, at 51.4%.”
“Hah!” the DA scoffed.
“Your scoff is duly noted, Mr. Prescott,” the judge said with her jaw resting on one hand as she took notes with the other.
“And what do you base this percentage on?” I asked.
“The Association of American Insurers has kept tables of suicide statistics and demographics since 1922,” she explained. “The data I’m citing has remained remarkably consistent—”
“Objection to ‘remarkably,’” Prescott piped in.
“Sustained.”
“—has remained between 50.3% and 52.4% since 1922, with the exception of the years 1941 through 1945, during which the rate for that same demographic described earlier – white male, age 50, who has lost a spouse and a pet, suffering from alcohol use disorder and a depressive disorder – in my testimony ticked down to 45.2%, 47.8%, 44.9%, 43.4% and 46.9%, respectively for each year.”
“And that is all you’re basing your opinion on, Dr. Mondrian,” the judge wondered. “Probabilities?”
“That’s right, Judge,” the DA stood up and practically shouted. ‘More likely than not’s. This is a probable cause hearing. All the State has to show is that there is some evidence that this suspect has committed this crime sufficient to bind the defendant over for trial.” Then he sat back down, all his air out of his lungs.
“Judge, I’ve also studied the forensics in this case,” said Candace.
“The psychological forensics or the physical?” the judge wondered.
“Both.” She seemed a little boastful.
“Move to suppress any testimony she may offer as to the physical evidence,” DA Prescott said. “I’ve stipulated to her qualifications as a psychological forensic examiner only. She’s been brought in to provide profile evidence on the psychological type of individual who could commit this type of gruesome and heinous act. Now she’s not only talking about suicide, but trying to provide physical forensics as well.”
“May I respond to that, Your Honor?” I asked, always looking for permission from women in authority. Candace had analyzed that for me.
“You may, Counsel.”
“The physical evidence in this case bears on the psychological evidence. It supports it as a basis for Dr. Mondrian’s psychological opinion testimony. In addition, the finder of fact may take up matters of common knowledge which any individual, regardless of their additional qualifications as an expert, may testify to.” I could hear Candace think that I should not end a sentence in a preposition, if I didn’t have to. “In this case, the witness has examined the crime scene.”
“In other words,” the judge said, “you’re arguing she shouldn’t be barred from testifying as to facts she may have observed as a lay witness simply because she encountered them in plain view during her examination of the crime scene as an expert.” She was trying to help me along.
“That’s correct, Judge.” I was a beginning lawyer, pretty much, at 28.
“Your motion is denied, Mr. Prosecutor,” she said. She turned down to Candace: “You may testify as to your observations, purely as a fact witness.”
“Alright, then,” she said, understanding the circumscribed bounds of her testimony. She wouldn’t be allowed to draw conclusions from her physical observations. This really put me in a spot, since I had no forensic expert on the physical evidence.
“Did you have an opportunity to visit the crime scene, Dr. Mondrian.”
“I did.”
“And when would that have been?”
“A week ago, on June 15th at 9:48 a.m.”
“Who else was present?”
“The Sheriff over there, his son, his daughter, another evidence technician and a Sheriff’s deputy. They’re all over there in the jury box. You were there as well.”
“Were you given an opportunity to examine the wood splitter?”
“Objection, leading.”
“Overruled. It’s foundational.”
“Yes, I examined it.”
“Could you tell us what you saw?”
“Well, based upon the engineering of the wood splitter, as well as my examination of the autopsy photos previously adduced by the State in this case, I saw that the skull was splintered at the rear, and did not crack at the front.”
I couldn’t ask her the significance of it. That would’ve put her in the realm of the experts in physical forensics. And she was an eyewitness here. Nothing more. But I thought of a backdoor in. She would’ve thought of it, too.
“Doctor, did you take observation of which end of the log splitter was sharp-edged? I think they call that part the maul.”
“It was the edge away from the controls that was sharp-edged. The non-moving edge. Not the part of the splitter that moved along the track.”
I walked over to the exhibit easel. There was a closeup shot of the whole device. The DA even added big red arrows to show the moving blunt end that received the split of wood along the track, the sharp, unmoving edge – the maul – and the two controls that needed to be operated at the same time to work the moving edge of the machine.
“The fact that the nonmoving edge of the track was sharp-edged, is that suggestive of anything?”
“Objection. He’s trying to use her as a physical forensic expert again.”
“Sustained. Counsel, you are on the verge of drawing the rebuke of this Court,” the Judge said without looking up from her notes. “That will have consequences.”
“Judge, I’m seeking her expert opinion as to forensics alright, but as to psychological forensics.”
“What’s your offer of proof?” she glanced up and asked me, massaging the bridge of her nose under her glasses.
“That if someone wants to commit suicide, they would do so looking away from the point of contact of the weapon of their choice.”
“That’s a stretch, Counsel, but I’ll allow you to tread. Carefully.”
“Dr. Mondrian, you’ve talked about suicide as a probable cause of death in this case. You’ve cited statistics which, in theory, you’ve testified made the decedent’s death at his own hand probable, but was there any factual indication at the crime scene which would support your opinion that this victim killed himself?”
“Yes. It would be unusual for a suicide victim to face the point of danger if he could avoid it.”
“Couldn’t he just close his eyes?” I asked.
“Object. He’s crossing his own witness, Judge.”
“Sustained.”
“The study of cognitive psychology tells us that organisms try to avoid danger when they can. I cite Breslow et al, The Fight-Flight Mechanism, pages 34 and 35, published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, December, 2014 in support of my opinion. That meta-analysis has been cited no fewer than 549 times. The survival mechanisms in our basic brain instinctively habituate us to fight, flee, hide, freeze or submit.”
“Could you explain these five survival responses for the Court?”
“Submission is the reaction when all other defenses are unavailable to us, or when we encounter more powerful members of our own species or of more powerful predators. We submit to them. Freezing and hiding are usually available as adaptations to children or those unable to escape or defend themselves. In the case of suicide, these survival responses are unavailable to the victims. Either is fighting for obvious reasons. A suicide victim chooses not to escape the fate they set for themselves. This leaves them only the attempt to avoid the oncoming danger by turning away from it. In this case, it means the victim tried to avoid facing the sharp edge of the splitter, the part that was non-moving. The autopsy photos and accompanying coroner’s report indicate that the skull was split at the rear, known as the occipital bone.”
“Objection, she’s not a medical expert,” Prescott interjected.
“The M.E. testified to it. Overruled.”
“The location where the skull broke open is consistent with the back of the victim’s head emplaced at the sharp, non-moving edge of the track,” Candace said. :The part of the machine referred to as the maul.”
“I see. Is your opinion as to suicide based on any other facts?”
“Objection, leading.”
“Overruled.” Her Honor went back to notetaking.
“Yes, it is.” Candace took off her glasses and looked at the judge, as if to empathize with those who wore eyeglasses. “It would be a natural reaction to simply let one’s fingers off the controls which operate the splitter at the head’s first contact of the crushing mechanism with the rear of the skull. The log splitter is designed so that when the hands cease operating the controls, the moving part of the crusher immediately disengages and goes back to rest at its starting position. This would prevent further injury. My examination of the machine led me to find these.” Candace produced from her purse two discs, weight plates you put on a barbell.
They were in evidence bags. It took both hands for her to pass each 5-pound weight on to me. These were a complete surprise to me.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
“The Sheriff’s evidence technician gave them to me after the victim’s autopsy was completed.”
The DA leaned back and whispered to Donnegan’s daughter, the evidence tech.
“We’ll stipulate to chain of custody, Judge,” the DA said.
I took them back to my table and carefully took each one out of its bag. They weren’t wholly solid, but had a central metal hole for fitting around a weight bar, and three smaller, ovoid holes in the outer diameter. And they were rusty, as if they’d been exposed to the elements.
“What can you tell us about these?” I asked her.
“I had a conversation with Deputy Donnegan, the evidence technician who have them to me. She informed me that were found on the woodpile of split logs,” she testified. “She stated that—”
“—Objection, hearsay.”
“But her statement’s not being introduced for the truth of the matter asserted, Your Honor,” I replied. “It’s serving as the basis for her opinion.”
“In that case, overruled.” The judge cast her glance at the weights I hefted, one in each hand.
“Deputy Donnegan told me that they she found them on top of the woodpile, and I found that to be significant.”
“Why is that?”
“Because police reports indicate that the defendant denied any knowledge of where they came from.”
“Objection!”
“Sustained. You have crossed the line, Counsel. If you want that testimony in, your client will have to testify to it.”
“How else are these weights important to your opinion?” I wondered.
“Deputy Donnegan’s report on these items shows that the suspect’s fingerprints are not on them. Either were anyone else’s. I found that to be curious.”
“Why is that?”
“The woodpile is 100 feet away from the victim’s home or any other structure. If there are no fingerprints on the weights, then how did they get where they were found?”
“We heard testimony during the State’s case-in-chief that the suspect told investigators he was wearing protective gloves while he operated the splitter,” the judge interjected. “An inference could be drawn that he placed them where they were later found.”
“There’s no evidence of that,” I retorted.
“Return to your witness,” she admonished.
I couldn’t think of a question. I’d forgotten where we’d left off. “Is your opinion as to the defendant’s innocence based on any other facts?”
“Yes. It is my opinion that the weights in your possession were transported to the woodpile by other means.”
“Could you explain?”
“I asked that an independent fingerprint expert examine them again. They found something.”
“What, if anything, was found?”
“Objection, foundation. We need the testimony of the fingerprint expert.”
“I can interrupt this witness’s testimony and produce our fingerprint expert,” I gambled, not even knowing whether they were in the State.
“Alright, then produce the fingerprint expert,” the judge said, calling my bluff.
I’m fucked. “Of course, Your Honor.”
I hated hearings, trials of any kind. No plan of battle ever survived the first moments of the courtroom. Witnesses disappearing, witnesses changing their testimony, judges ruling against me, opposing counsel badgering me with unanticipated, unwarranted objections.
Now, it was my own witness, my mentor setting me up for a contempt citation or a beef to the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission in a State where I’d been given leave to file an Appearance pro hac vice, for this case only. I was an out-of-stater, after all.
We took a recess while I tried to unfuck my career. Or my client’s case.
Candace and me stood in a side room reserved for lawyers trying to unfuck their cases. The only other person in there was a man in a rumpled, grey suit who reeked decidedly of alcohol. He did a Sudoku and kept checking the horse race results on his phone through an Offtrack Betting app. Must’ve been an attorney waiting to have his case heard after ours.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I whispered to Candace as loud as I could whisper.
“You doubt me.”
“Well, where is he?”
“Or she.”
“I don’t care what kind of reproductive machinery they have. I want a fingerprint expert so my license doesn’t get beefed by the State of Colorado back to the State of Illinois. I promised the judge a fingerprint expert I don’t got!”
“Breathe, Saul.”
I practiced my deep breathing as I worked through a panic attack.
“And if even I don’t get beefed, and we can’t produce the expert, that kid is fucked. This is a prelim. The court’s not gonna continue it so we can get our expert in, and that’s our best shot at getting this whole thing dismissed.”
“Are we ready?” the man in the pilled suit who stunk like booze asked. “Am I on after recess?”
I pointed at him. “Him!?” I was apoplectic. “You hire a drunk as our fingerprint expert?” I just hated hearings.
“Allan Rothman,” Candace addressed him, “I’d like to introduce you to the attorney who’ll be examining you today, my judgmental colleague, Saul.”
“Are you from India?” he squinted at me, belching up sewer gas. “Or Israel? Saul’s a Jewish name, but you look Indian.”
All rise, we heard outside in court.
“But I haven’t even prepared him,” I protested to Candace.
Allan set his shaky fingers on the inside of my elbow. ‘Don’t worry, buddy. I’ve only done this about a couple thousand times.” And he patted my arm before he walked out.
Vodka. That’s what he smelled like.
Allan Rothman was good. Smooth, and as long as I stayed back by counsel’s table, I didn’t have to worry what he smelled like.
I began trotting out his qualifications and tendered him as an expert while the DA perused the man’s CV along with me, both of us for the first time.
“I’ll stip as to his qualifications,” the DA finally said.
“Witness is qualified in the area o fingerprint analysis,” the judge said.
“I’m tendering what I’ve marked as defense exhibits 6 and 7. Did you have an opportunity to examine these weights?”
“I did. I was told that they were found on top of a woodpile at the crime scene.”
“Did you perform any tests on them?”
“I did. I performed a standard, latent fingerprint analysis through the dusting of powders that contained rosin, black ferric oxide and lampblack.”
“And what were the results?”
“I found no fingerprints.”
“Did you perform any other tests or examinations on them?”
“Yes, I performed a subsequent analysis using the cyanoacrylate fuming method, a fingerprint analysis designed to detect prints not recoverable through standard techniques.”
“Could you tell us what that involved?”
“The recovery method utilized a common super glue to develop latent prints. Fingerprints are left behind due to the presence of certain oils and perspiration from pores in the skin of the fingers. Specifically, amino acids, certain proteins, potassium and sodium. Super glue has a high affinity for these proteins, amino acids and fatty acids left behind by the skin.”
He belched silently into his fist. An instant later, the judge whiffed the gas and soured her face.
“The weights at your table were placed into a developing chamber containing super glue and water applied to separate warming plates, which are simple coffee cup warmers. I placed water on one warming plate in the chamber to induce a vapor, and the glue on the other plate. This allows the vaporous water-glue admixture to adhere to the print, making it visible.”
“What happens then?”
“I then enhanced the prints by using fluorescent dye in powder form. I applied the fluorescent dust and held up the surfaces of the weight to ultraviolet light. The entire surfaces of the weights were so treated.” The guy was automatic.
“What were the results of your latent analysis?”
“I recovered latent partial thumb prints on the outer edges of both weights, both of the left hand, as well as index and middle finger partials on the central hole, inner surface, in each disc weight, also of the left hand.”
I had to make a bunch of assumptions since Candace had decided not to read me into this, but I had this intuitive sense. One thing about me in a courtroom; I had good instincts.
“And were you able to match those latent prints?”
“I was.”
But I’d blown a foundational point and Allan Rothman, who seemed very sober, helped me out.
“I had the opportunity to examine the fingerprints of the defendant in this case, Giddings Beaumont, when I visited the Colorado Bureau of Investigation’s fingerprint database.”
“Were there points of similarity?”
“There were none,” said Rothman. “There was no match.”
“Did you examine any other fingerprints?”
“I did.”
“Whose might they have been?”
I heard Candace rolling her eyes behind me. It was a terrible question.
“The decedent’s. I was able to obtain his fingerprints through the County Medical Examiner’s office. I have an exhibit, if you’re interested. It’s up on the easel.”
“Objection, the witness is examining himself.”
“Overruled. We need to expedite. I have other matters on my docket, Dave.”
I glanced over and up on the easel was a blow-up of three partial prints on the left, with numbered points of similarity in red. On the right side of the poster, those same points were identified in the same three fingers – thumb, index and middle fingers.
“You’ll see I’ve identified 16 points of similarity between the latent fingerprints and those of the deceased, left hand.”
“What are the odds of this being a coincidence; in other words, of the prints lifted from the weights matching the decedent’s in this case?”
“The odds of the latent prints not belonging to the decedent are millions to one,” he said.
‘Nothing further,” I said.
“Cross?” the Judge asked the DA. He didn’t even bother.
“And so, your opinion of suicidality is, in addition to the statistical evidence you previously testified to, based on fact evidence?”
“It is,” Candace replied in her dispassionate way. She seemed to have moved on to the next already.
“And what is that evidence?”
“The disc weights discovered on the woodpile.”
“Could you elaborate, Doctor?”
“I noted that the weights were found on top of the woodpile, according to crime scene photos.” Which were now up on the easel. “That meant that no more wood was cut after the weights were placed on the pile.”
“Objection. More likely than not that’s the case.”
“That’s a matter for your cross, Counsel,” said Judge Yellowhair.
“Does that in itself mean suicide is more likely?” I asked.
“No, but the latent prints discovered on the weights is significant to my opinion.”
“Why is that?”
“You’ll note from the photographs of the log splitting machine,” which I did my best Vanna White to move to and show while Candace testified, “that the controls for operating the ram – the moving part of the splitter – are situated so that nothing higher than one inch can operate them. It’s also noteworthy that both controls must be operated simultaneously. The instructions from the operating manual indicate that at least one finger must depress each control simultaneously – one a lever and one a button. Only by this two-finger method can one activate the moving ram along the track.”
“But if Mr. Drewery out his own head in the splitter?”
She grimaced. Never refer to the vic by name. It personalizes him for the factfinder.
“If the victim tried to do this with his own head emplaced in the splitter, even if he was looking away, his fingers would reflexively cease depressing the trigger mechanisms once the ram made contact with the back of his skull. Then the ram would instantly return to its starting position.”
“So the significance of the weights?”
“The weights would counter this. If the deceased placed the weights on the triggering lever and on the button, the ram would continue to operate and crush the victim’s skull. The latent thumb print on the outsides of the weights and the fingerprints on the insides of the weights indicate hthat the victim himself lifted them at some point.”
“Objection.”
“Most likely, he handled them,” she replied. “It’s a reasonable inference.”
“Withdrawn,” appended the DA.
“But why two weights?” I wondered.
“Because the button and the lever are each designed so that they require four pounds of pressure to activate the ram.”
“Objection!”
“It’s in the instruction manual,” she said, anticipating his grounds.
“So two weights, each five pounds, would be needed to trigger the ram mechanism?” I asked.
“That’s correct,” she reasoned.
“A reasonable inference can be drawn that, based upon the statistical probabilities and the on-scene evidence, that the victim committed suicide,” I wrapped up my argument and sat down. “The suicide statistics cited by our expert, when combined with the factual inferences which may be drawn based on crime cene evidence, make suicide more likely than not. For these reasons, we believe there’s insufficient evidence to bind the defendant over for trial, Judge.”
The prosecutor stood: “I’ll just reiterate,” he argued. “The defendant could have killed his victim, and then put Mr. Drewery’s fingers on the weights after he was dead. That’s all I have to say in rebuttal. Even if you take the defense’s version of the facts as true.”
“For what purpose?” the judge wondered. “Why would your defendant handle the weights and then place them on top of the woodpile?”
“To create the impression that the victim killed himself,” the DA argued.
“Mr. District Attorney, what is the IQ of your suspect?”
“I don’t know, Judge.”
“It’s in the Pre-Sentence Investigation. It’s in the 70’s. A reasonable inference can be drawn that he doesn’t have that kind of capability.” She turned to me. “Make your motion to dismiss.”
“I move to dismiss all charges against my client, with prejudice.”
“It’s so ordered.”
“Damn,” the DA whispered as he removed his papers from the edge of the witness box.
The judge turned to the court reporter. “Off record,” she said, and he turned off the recorder.
The judge turned to Candace. “What do you think his motive might’ve been?”
“The decedent’s?” she asked.
The judge nodded. “Just between us.”
The DA stopped moving in disgust toward his table. He wanted to know what Candace thought, too.
She shrugged and shook her head. “I really couldn’t say.”
“I mean, c’mon. Have you ever seen such an elaborate suicide?” Judge Yellowhair asked. “The man had a house full of guns. That would’ve been the way to go.”
Gid had been mostly quiet throughout this daylong affair. It was doubtful, we all thought, that he could really understand the nuances of the arguments and counterarguments. But his huge smile, and the fact that he wasn’t being led away again, showed that he got the bottom line: no probable cause and you walk.
So, when the voice from behind us piped up, we all turned in surprise: “Mr. Drew, I think he wanted to kill himself because he was sad. And I think he wanted to hide it, and blame my family for his death. Because of what my cousin did to him.”
“For breaking into his house and stealing some stuff?” I asked Giddings.
He shook his head. “He did more than that. He killed his dog. He was the one killed Mr. Drew’s dog with one of the guns he stole. The dog was in the house and he went after Damen, my cousin. Damen grabbed the gun and shot the dog. Mr. Drew was out of town. He really loved that dog. After his wife died, he always said it was the only thing he had to outlive, and then he could go, too.”
I squinted. I’d never heard Gid talk like this before. His reasoning was pretty advanced for someone with an IQ of 76.
“That’s what I think,” he said with a cold look on his face.
I looked back at the Judge, then at Candace, finally at the DA. We all wore that look of wonder. Wondering maybe whether we’d been played.
We hadn’t had time to subpoena Giddings’s school records to see if he’d been in special ed. It was pretty easy to fake intelligence tests given as part of his PSI. What if?
What if he’d schooled us? What if he succumbed to family pressure and sought revenge for what’d happened to his cousin? And tried to stage Drewery’s death as a suicide.
It was too late now. The charges had been dismissed with prejudice. Double jeopardy was enshrined in the Constitution. The State couldn’t refile the same charges.
But those blank stares on each of our faces meant that we all wondered: had Drewery set up Gid? Or had Gid set up Drewery? For the rest of our lives, we’d each wonder who’d gotten away with murder.
We were on the plane back to Denver for our connecting flight when I remembered it. “The teeth,” I said.
“What?” Candace said over the drone of the props of the twin-engine Beechcraft as it jostled in the wind over the still-snowclad San Juans. She gripped my hand. She hated flying.
“The front tooth and the two molars you found in the woodpile. One molar had a gold filling. The other was a bicuspid, a biting tooth. But the other molar had a composite filling in it. You asked Donnegan to do a dental check in the autopsy. The teeth were missing from Drewery’s mouth. They came out when his skull got crushed. Dental records showed that the one with the gold filling belonged to Drewery. The front tooth as well.”
“Wish that benzo would kick in,” she said, even though I could tell from her sleepy voice that it already had.
“But the second molar with the composite filling wasn’t worn down. They couldn’t find a match for Drewery. If it wasn’t Drewery’s, then who did it belong to?”
“I think here we must surmise, Saul. Giddings Beaumont told us when we interviewed him that his mouth was sore. He said a log had hit him in the face when a wood chunk popped out from the splitter. I speculate that the ‘newer’ molar might have been his. He may have been testing his plan out on himself, to see if the weights would apply sufficient pressure on the controls. It’s possible that he set his own head in that splitter, applied the weights to the controls, and pulled them out just as the maul made contact with his cranium, but not before it put enough pressure on his jaw to eject a molar. When he discovered that his plan would work, he forced Drewery into the same position, possibly at gunpoint, and set the man’s fingers on the two weights after he’d killed him, as the DA argued.”
“The missing gun,” I mumbled.
“He blamed the theft on his cousin, though his cousin denied ever stealing it. Perhaps our defendant stole the firearm on his own.”
“Giddings Beaumont would have to have nerves of steel, and reflexes to match. To serve himself up, and set his head on that splitter. Then get his head out of there before the maul really bit. I don’t know. What was his motive?”
“Every crime’s a puzzle with a missing piece,” she said. “Maybe he hated Drewery for exploiting him. Perhaps Drewery discovered that our defendant had burgled his house. Maybe he hated his cousin and wanted to set him up for prison, and Drewery found out.” She yawned. “We’ll never know, will we?”
“Don’t you care that we might be responsible for the acquittal of a murderer?”
She shrugged. “What people do with our gifts to them is their business. Besides, he might be entirely innocent.”
She stared out the window, just wishing this flight were through. She set her head on my shoulder and fell asleep.
© 2024 by Michael C. Just
Mike’s short story collection, Canyon Calls, was published by Zumaya Publications in 2009. Mike’s novel, The Dirt: The Journey of a Mystic Cowboy, is available in softcover or eBook formats through Amazon.
Mike’s other titles, including his novels, The Crippy and The Mind Altar, as well as Canyon Calls, are available through his websites, https://justmikejust.com and https://canyoncallsthebook.com or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002
Five of his short stories have recently been published online:
Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)
The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW
I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October
Offload, has been published by The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within
You Get the Two has been published by Hellbound Books and is available in print, eBook, kindle or audio format at Kids are Hell!- Anthology (hellboundbookspublishing.com)