Undue Influence Read online

  ‘Even if we succeeded, she fled the jurisdiction on the night of the murder. Laurel was due in court the next day on the custody case. She’s given the authorities no explanation for this trip. They claim this is highly suspicious,’ says Harry.

  He is right. They could hold her on this alone.

  What is more troubling is that Laurel has given no better accounting to us. She insists that she did not kill Melanie, but refuses to tell me what she was doing in Reno the night of the murder. She says she had a bona fide reason for the trip. Presumably she will share it with us sometime before she is convicted.

  ‘Maybe she’ll have an explanation ready for us in the morning,’ I tell Harry. This is when I am scheduled to see her again at the jail.

  ‘Sure.’ He cackles, always the artful dodger. Harry has seen clients like this before. People who wonder if they should tell their own lawyer and instead end up doing it for the first time on the stand. I shiver and put it out of my mind.

  I’ve told Harry about Vega and the fact that Jack was wired for sound in his office. He thinks Lama was trying to set me up, some compromising statement that perhaps I had knowledge of Laurel’s whereabouts. This could make me an accessory after the fact, or at very least cause the bar to launch a probe like a photon torpedo into my practice. Either way Jimmy Lama would have a psychic orgasm.

  Harry’s fanning through pages on his desk, materials copied by the police and given to him under our application for discovery. At this point, with an ongoing investigation they have supplied everything except the names and addresses of any witnesses, people who may have seen things outside the house that night. These they will hold back until their investigation is complete. Lama would not want us talking to these people until he can cast their stories in concrete. He will tape their words and take signed statements so that they cannot later have some altered recollection.

  ‘There is the rug,’ says Harry. ‘The one she was cleaning when they took her down.’

  I question him with a look.

  ‘Heard me right,’ he says. ‘She was not in the casinos pulling handles when they got her.’ Harry punctures what he knows was my best hope to explain Laurel’s trip. There are people who consider travel, blurry-eyed and at the speed of light over the mountains, as a quick fix for the gambling disease.

  ‘She was in a laundromat doing the spin cycle when she was rudely interrupted,’ he says. ‘She was washing a bathroom throw rug,’ says Harry. He gives me a look like this is some crazy lady. What makes this worse for our side, as he explains, is that this particular rug has been identified by Jack Vega as belonging to him, part of the spoils of divorce. Jack has told the cops that it was in the house on the night of the murder, somewhere on the floor near the bath where Melanie was found dead. What Laurel was doing a hundred and thirty miles from home washing a rug is not clear. Harry shrugs his shoulders on this one.

  ‘Did the cops find anything on the rug? Blood?’ I say.

  He shakes his head. ‘Clean as a whistle. She washed it in one of those chemical machines, the industrial ones with solvent.’

  ‘They’ll argue she cleaned it to destroy evidence,’ I tell him.

  ‘They already are, in a roundabout way,’ says Harry. ‘Powder residue tests on her hands. Came up negative. She’d dipped them into the solvent.’

  Visions of Laurel’s inflamed hands. Powder-residue tests are used to determine if a suspect has recently fired a gun. The discharge of trace elements, chemicals, can be detected on the hands, and in the case of a long gun other parts of the body.

  I sit, taking in air, like being sucker-punched. There is little that will ignite righteous indignation in a jury faster than inferences of evidence being destroyed.

  ‘Even assuming she did it, why would she take the rug? If it had blood on it, why not just leave it there?’

  ‘It’s one way to clean her hands and have an excuse for it.’ Harry’s tracking on what will surely be the state’s line of reasoning.

  ‘Next,’ he says. ‘One gold compact, with the initials MLH. This was found in Laurel’s purse at the time of the arrest.’

  This means nothing to me.

  ‘MLH,’ he says. ‘Melanie Lee Hannan. The victim’s maiden name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Harry can tell by the look on my face that this is daunting, Lama’s case against Laurel beginning to stack up.

  He gives me an expression, a tilt of the head, like who knows? ‘Never circle the wagons in defense too early,’ says Harry.

  We’re both beginning to wonder if Jack was not right. That perhaps we should maybe have some early conference with the DA before the tides of temper run high.

  ‘Then we have videotapes,’ he says.

  ‘More than one?’

  He nods.

  The most damaging, he tells me, is the security video from the porch of the house, the night of the murder. It has the time and date imposed at the bottom left corner.

  ‘I haven’t seen it,’ says Harry. ‘We’ll have a copy in a few days. But the description isn’t good,’ he says. He reads from a page prepared by one of the evidence techs. They have pictures but no sound, what is described as a lot of angry and threatening gestures by Laurel toward the victim followed by the destruction of the camera by Laurel after the door was slammed in her face. According to the report, at one point Melanie, in the doorway, threatened to call the police if Laurel didn’t leave.

  ‘How do they know that with no sound?’ I ask.

  ‘Lip-readers,’ says Harry. He’s talking about experts who can read lips with field glasses a mile away. These people can take the art of sounding out words from a tape to whole new levels.

  ‘Do they know what Laurel was saying?’

  ‘If they do, it’s not in the report,’ he says.

  ‘What time was the tape?’

  ‘Twenty-seventeen hours,’ he says. Seventeen minutes after eight, the evening of the murder.

  ‘Time of death?’ I’m making notes on a pad, the critical elements.

  ‘Ah.’ He’s looking. ‘Eleven-thirty.’ This is as close an estimate as the medical examiner can make.

  A little over three hours between the two events. ‘You said there were two tapes?’

  ‘Yeah. The courthouse earlier that day,’ he says. ‘There was a security camera in the ceiling when Laurel went after her.’

  ‘All we needed,’ I say. It was bad enough that there were a dozen witnesses. On film this attack will take on a whole new meaning. A skillful prosecutor can splice these pictures together with forceful argument. The image for our case is not a pleasant one. A brooding Laurel languishing over thoughts of vengeance for hours before presumably carrying out the deed. Their case is beginning to take form, handed to them on a platter, a blood feud between the two women, with one of them now dead.

  ‘The toughest part of their case,’ he says, ‘are the special circumstances.’ Harry does not believe that the DA can produce hard evidence that the killer, whoever he or she was, actually lay in wait for the victim.

  ‘No lurking in the corners on this one,’ says Harry. ‘Whoever did her came straight at her,’ he says. ‘And they fought. The evidence in the bathroom shows a scuffle. They’re playing it down,’ he says. ‘But the evidence is there. There was a perfume bottle shattered on the floor, like maybe she tried to throw it at the killer. A lot of stuff was knocked off the vanity. The scene was more consistent with evidence of a rash act of violence than somebody lurking in the shadows to do the victim quietly,’ says Harry.

  It would be our first break in what is an otherwise seamless case for the state. Perhaps I can tell Danny and Julie Vega that at very least their mother is not facing death if convicted.

  Tonight we will be burning the oil, a first cut on a pretrial motion to attack the indictment, to scuttle the special circumstances. For the first time in a week some of the knots in my stomach begin to unwind.

  ‘What else have they got?’ I ask him.

 
‘Bits and pieces,’ he says. ‘Very little blood in the tub, where they found the body. What was there is typed to the victim.

  ‘Melanie was shot near the tub in the master bath. She appears to have been unclothed. Probably getting ready for a bath. The cops are thinking she fell in when she was shot or else the killer picked her up and put her in the tub afterward. They’re still choreographing,’ says Harry.

  ‘Any powder burns?’ This could give a clue.

  ‘Pathology,’ he says. ‘Not in yet.’ We have a new medical examiner in this county. He is notoriously slow.

  ‘They did find some semen.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The sheets on the bed,’ he tells me. ‘Dried. No biggy. Police lab checked it. A secretor,’ says Harry.

  About sixty percent of the general population are what are known as secretors. These are people who carry in their bloodstream a specific substance that makes it possible to determine their blood group from other body fluids – tears, perspiration, saliva, and in this case semen.

  ‘Blood type matches the husband,’ says Harry. He’s talking about Jack Vega.

  ‘Still, I’d like to check it,’ I tell him.

  It is a problem most often in cases of disputed parentage, fudging on blood in a serology report. It is one of the areas I always check. Move a decimal point a few digits in one direction and the probability that blood belongs to one person or another, to the exclusion of all others, can go from one in a thousand to one in ten million.

  I have known some good-time Charlies, working stiffs with a roving eye for the ladies, who are now on an eighteen-year cycle of support payments – paternity cases involving promiscuous mothers with more lovers than a rock band and children who look like the random sampling of a gene pool. It is what can happen in a lab when the candidate is itinerant and Welfare gives a little nudge. They figure the law of probabilities. If he didn’t do this one, he surely did another.

  Though rarely is it a problem in a murder case, still I ask Harry to check the blood and semen, an independent analysis. Harry has the name of a good lab. I want to know if Melanie was bedding another lover, maybe passion gone astray as a motive for murder.

  ‘You think she was bobbing for apples with somebody else?’

  I give him a face, like who knows? Harry makes a note to take care of it.

  ‘Any prints?’

  ‘Nothing they’ve disclosed,’ he says.

  Fingerprints in a case like this can be a blade that cuts both ways. The absence of any prints tying Laurel to the crime, on its face, might lead to the inexorable conclusion that she was not there. On the other hand, if they can show by independent means that Laurel was inside the Vega home on the night of the murder – hair or fibers, a witness, any faint moves on the Ouija board of identification that a jury might buy – then the failure to find her prints in the house might lead to quiet conjecture, the kind you can’t counter, that she wore gloves. It is only a short hop from there to thoughts of premeditation.

  Harry fanning more pages in his pile of papers.

  ‘All we have left is ballistics,’ he says. ‘Single nine-millimeter slug,’ says Harry. ‘Thin copper jacket. Badly deformed from the head shot. One copper casing, nine-millimeter Luger, with multiple toolmarks.’

  ‘How do they account for that?’ I ask. I’m thinking dry fire. I have known shooters, mostly hobbyists, hunters, and marksmen, who will work the slide on a semiautomatic by hand with live rounds to ensure that the gun will not jam when fired. This would leave extra marks on the cartridges where the tiny metal teeth grip the rim for ejection.

  ‘They’re saying the casing had been previously fired. Expanded and resized,’ he says.

  ‘A reload?’

  ‘That’s what they seem to be indicating.’

  ‘Where the hell would Laurel buy reloaded ammunition?’ Their theory starts to have holes.

  Harry gives me a look like take your best guess. ‘You can buy the stuff at some ranges. Gun shows,’ he says. Harry plugging the leaks in their case. It might float, but these – gun shows and firing ranges – are not places I would ever expect to see Laurel.

  ‘Anything on the gun itself?’

  He shakes his head. ‘They’re still looking for it. Lands and grooves on the bullet are a right-hand twist. Could be any of a dozen models sold. But here’s the interesting stuff,’ he says. ‘Their lab found some striations not quite as deep as the grooves. Four of them at the edges of the bullet,’ he says. ‘Each one about the width of a piece of coarse thread.’

  ‘Do they hazard a guess?’ I ask.

  ‘Without another bullet fired from the same piece to compare, it’s tough,’ says Harry. ‘But they think it’s a defect in the barrel of the gun.’

  ‘It’ll make the murder weapon easier to identify than dental plates if they find it,’ I say.

  ‘Let’s hope they don’t find it in Laurel’s apartment,’ says Harry.

  Chapter 6

  This morning Harry and I are doing some cold canvassing. Wearing out shoe leather on the cul-de-sac where Melanie was murdered, a survey of the neighbors, anything they may have seen or heard that night. With the cops holding their witness statements for another day, we have no choice but to go door-to-door.

  We have an uphill battle. Like Harry says, ‘Anyone who ever fended off a murder case knows that shit always flows downhill.’ We are busy digging up dirt to build a dam.

  Two days ago the city’s mayor, Lama, and the Capital County DA, Duane Nelson, held a joint news conference on Laurel’s case. They cozied up to the camera lenses, basking in the glow of warm strobe lights like they were on some hot beach in Mexico. Nelson told the press he had a stone-solid case, then proceeded to give them no details.

  Nelson is a good lawyer and a better politician. Even though he can’t stand Lama, having canned him once as a DA’s investigator, he bestowed undue praise on Jimmy for netting the defendant so quickly. The event was one of those law-enforcement love fests that politicians crave – victory wreaths all around – a conquest in the war on crime.

  There was more than a little hypocrisy in this. The day before Nelson called me to ask for a continuance in Laurel’s entry of a plea. A reversal of roles. Prosecutors with a strong case are usually hell-bent for court. He gave me some babble about assigning the case to another deputy, some minor amendments to the indictment. My antenna is up. Something is wrong – hopefully with their case.

  I gave him the delay and told him I would get a gag order if he didn’t quit with the press. He laughed, good-natured, and assured me he would not do it again.

  Melanie’s murder has stirred particular anxieties in this city of political commerce, ‘Beltway West.’

  Government is a growth industry here, and the thought that legislators and their families are not safe is bad for business. Important people can leave to go live in the foothills.

  The responsible voices of leadership, the Chamber of Commerce and the City Council, have been busy building on the theme that this was not a random act of violence likely to be visited on another prince of politics.

  Laurel’s arrest serves a useful purpose. The city is hard at work on the message that a vengeful former wife, no matter how much she is vilified in the press, is not Jack the Ripper. The Speaker of the Assembly can curl up in confidence with his concubines and sleep in peace.

  I punch the bell and a woman comes to the door. A pleasant face, maybe sixty-five, white hair like the lady on candy boxes, but with more style.

  ‘Margaret Miller?’ I say. Harry’s gotten names where possible from voter records.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Paul Madriani, this is Mr. Harry Hinds. We’d like to talk to you for a moment concerning the death of Mrs. Vega.’

  The smile fades on Mrs. Miller’s face.

  ‘Are you with the police?’

  ‘We are lawyers, Mrs. Miller, hired to represent Laurel Vega. We’d like to talk to you if you have a moment.’


  ‘Oh.’ An expression like leprosy is now stalking her just beyond the screen door. There’s a lot of pained indecision. She would rather not, but doesn’t want to be unfair. It is what the criminal defense lawyer sees with the good citizen, the detached witness. I can tell by the way she studies us that Mrs. Miller is uncertain whether by merely entertaining us on her front porch she is now violating some criminal law.

  ‘I don’t know. I guess it would be okay. If it’s all right with the police,’ she says.

  ‘Last time I looked, they hadn’t repealed the First Amendment,’ says Harry.

  She’s giving him an imperious look as I knee him, a good one, in the thigh.

  Mrs. Miller gives me a smile. She unlatches the door and swings it open.

  Like a brush salesman I am busy giving her a full complement of teeth, artless smiles, and assurances that the law permits her to talk with us.

  Harry, properly rebuked, gives her a business card and a ration of happy horseshit. ‘It’s all part of the process of getting to the truth,’ he says, something Harry’s shown no interest in except for those few times in open court when it has reared up and kicked him in the ass.

  From the look on Mrs. Miller’s face, it is against her better judgment, but she invites us in.

  The Miller home is no hovel. Her living room has more bird’s eye maple than some palaces, enough antiques for a museum. It is festooned with trinkets from around the world, figurines carved of ivory, masks on the wall with the look of Polynesia. The lady, in her time, has the appearance of a global traveler. There is a picture propped on a table, of a man, she looks younger, his arm around her. They are in some far-off place, a lot of stone steps and jungle vines. There is no Mr. Miller. Or if there is, he does not vote. Harry’s guess, given to me on the street, is that the man has gone on to the great cul-de-sac in the sky.

  She offers us the couch, then fidgets, not sure whether we’re the kind of guests to whom she should offer coffee. She finally decides that the right to talk does not include beverages.

  ‘Mrs. Miller, we have a number of questions we’d like to ask you.’ I make it sound like I’m working from a questionnaire, some marketing survey, all very clean and clinical, ‘just the facts, ma’am.’