Deadly Lessons. David Russell W.
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To her credit, his much more mature partner gave me the same roll of the eyeballs performance she had demonstrated at our last meeting. Clearly, she was a detective of a different calibre.
“Let me guess,” she said to me. “Clerk had no idea who you were and insisted on checking all the credentials before he let you in. This despite the fact he was informed we would be waiting for you. Christ, Mike,” she complained to her partner, “I have kids at home I wouldn’t mind seeing eventually.”
“So should we cut him loose now,” I said, “and avoid all the needless wrangling, at the end of which I will end up taking my client home anyway, or do you have a masochistic notion of dragging this out all night? I do have classes in the morning that I would rather be preparing for.”
“Absolutely,” Smythe assured me. She had a smooth quality in her voice that made me think she could probably sing jazz. I’d bet she sang a lot to her kids when they were little. She maybe even still did.
“Oh?” Furlo feigned surprise. “Was your client under the impression that he was being held? We just wanted to ask him a few more questions is all.”
“This despite the fact you were fully aware he had retained counsel. Did you read him his rights, or did you not bother with the police academy at all?” My insomnia was catching up to me, and I was getting testy.
“And in case you’ve forgotten, your client was given the chance to call you, which brought you here. I don’t think that we’ve done anything wrong here, counsellor, so can the sanctimonious bullshit.” Furlo may also be an insomniac.
“Sanctimonious? Someone got a thesaurus for his birthday?”
“God,” Smythe complained. “Why couldn’t he have had a woman lawyer? Like I don’t have to wade through enough testosterone during the day around here? Can you two little boys behave, and let’s get through what we have to do so we can all go home?” Her exasperation was completely unfeigned, and I thought we might really be in trouble.
Furlo and I looked at each other like two sons caught quarrelling in church. For the moment, I thought it was best to behave. “Okay,” I conceded. “Do you have something new that we didn’t cover earlier today, or is this exploratory drilling?”
“We have something new, Counsellor,” Furlo explained calmly, apparently also agreeing to a temporary cease fire.
“Winston,” Smythe faced me, “how well do you know your client?”
“You know I can’t go into the specifics of our relationship. He’s my client and colleague.”
“I know you’re focusing more on a teaching career than a legal one now,” she continued. “I just thought you might want to reconsider working with Mr. Turbot, since you’re planning to spend more time in schools.”
“What are you telling me, Detective Smythe? What did you find?”
“Fingerprints,” Furlo announced with no small amount of pleasure, “on the body.”
“Take me to my client,” I said calmly, masking the emotions that were tugging beneath the surface.
Detective Smythe rose from her desk and headed down a hallway at the end of the room. Furlo gestured grandly, even bowing slightly at the waist, for me to follow Smythe down the hall. He was enjoying his perceived advantage. It wasn’t unusual for the police to pick up a suspect for further questioning with evidence as strong as fingerprints. That at least placed Carl in close contact with Tricia. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to lay criminal charges, but it did call into question the veracity of Carl’s insistence that no physical relationship had taken place between him and Tricia Bellamy. If he was physically involved with her—and his fingerprints on her body certainly lent credence to her accusations—it provided the police with a motive in her killing. What’s worse, from a personal perspective, it made me question the client and my desire to represent him. I was now wishing that I hadn’t been in my classroom when Carl had come to see me.
We found Carl sitting in a desolate room, at a particle board-and-veneer table with a half-empty cup of cold coffee in front of him. Despite the fancy new police headquarters, it was well known among employees and regular visitors to the police station that one area the new facilities had failed to address was the abysmal quality of the coffee provided. It was even worse than the brew found in teacher faculty lounges in public schools. Carl had wisely given up drinking the police department standard issue swill.
“Winston!” Carl jumped to his feet, suddenly reinvigorated when I entered the room.
“Hi, Carl,” I responded. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay, I guess,” he replied. He seemed happy to see me, which was understandable. Somehow my students haven’t yet begun to feel quite the same way.
“Good.” I turned to face the two detectives. “So what’s the story, Detectives? Are you going to lay a charge, or do we go home?”
“We still have nearly twenty-three hours, you know that,” Smythe gently reminded me. Under Canadian law, Furlo and Smythe could detain Carl for twenty-four hours without laying a charge. At that point, he would need to be charged with a crime or released.
“If you think you have enough evidence to charge him, what are you waiting for? I have class in the morning.” Sometimes being brash and up front was the best defence.
“Why don’t you ask your client how his fingerprints got onto Tricia Bellamy?” Furlo challenged.
“I told you,” Carl began.
“Carl! Just wait a moment,” I admonished him. “Exactly where were the fingerprints found?”
“Where?” Furlo asked.
“Yes, where. Where on the body were my client’s prints allegedly found?” Carl visibly flinched as I began referring to Tricia as “the body.” It couldn’t be helped. It was important to distance myself from the victim if I was going to mount a decent defence to what was looking like a stronger case.
“Your client’s prints were found on the victim’s watch and a partial print that looks very close to your client’s was also found on both of the victim’s hands,” Smythe responded to my question.
“That’s it?” I tried to sound confident. Homicide wasn’t my specialty.
“What more do you need?” Furlo sneered.
“Well, for starters, I understand Tricia Bellamy was strangled. How about fingerprints around her neck? Find any of those?” Carl was visibly paling by the syllable.
“No,” Smythe admitted, “we did not.”
“Ever heard of gloves, Counsellor? I refer you to U.S. v. O.J. Simpson,” Furlo quipped.
“I’ve heard of it, yes. Though it was a state, not a federal case, which makes it State of California v. Simpson. Your point being that you found no prints whatsoever on the victim’s neck?”
“That’s correct,” Smythe returned. “At this point, no prints of any kind, even partials, have been found directly on the victim’s neck.”
I turned to face Furlo, since he was the more aggressive of the two. I couldn’t even get a rise out of Smythe, which meant the likelihood of flustering her into a mistake was much less than with Furlo. “I suppose you have a scientific theory about the prevalence of prints located anywhere except on the one part of the body where death would have been caused?”
“Yeah, smartass, he put the gloves on so he could strangle her without leaving prints.”
“And the victim stood there calmly watching her assailant putting gloves on so she could be strangled? This is what you’ve got?”
“Or maybe, he felt remorse after he offed her, and while weeping over her body, removed his gloves to wipe his eyes.”
“Then ran his fingerprints