Winston Patrick Mystery 2-Book Bundle. David Russell W.
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with me?”
“Yes,” I confessed, “I have exhausted all other avenues of conversation for the time being.”
“In that case, I return to my original question: how well do you know this guy?”
I could tell by the tone of her voice she had found out something she knew she was not supposed to tell me because it wasn’t yet public information.
“Not all that well,” I admitted. “He’s basically just a guy I work with, but we’ve been friendly. He definitely helped me to get acquainted with the oh-so-subtle nuances of surviving in a public high school.” I paused and thought about one of my earlier encounters with Carl. “When I was bumbling through my first conflict with a student, he stepped in and helped. It kind of forged a friendship.”
“It doesn’t look good, Win,” she told me, then paused as the waitress returned with our dinners.
She thanked the waitress and, unbelievably, actually added hot sauce to what I’m sure was already a flaming hot, spicy meal. I had to draw the line somewhere; I opted to eat my dinner as was. I watched her in awe as she picked up a steaming bunch of noodles and sucked them indelicately into her mouth without even flinching. Gingerly, I pulled apart one tawny noodle and placed it daintily on my tongue. Immediately, I began to choke as my soft palate was suddenly aflame. At that moment I reached the panicked conclusion that I could actually die in a small Thai restaurant. How humiliating.
Andy was nearly beside herself with laughter. “Here,” she said, pushing my glass of water towards me, “take a drink, you dumbass!” I gulped water like a camel on its ninth day as perspiration broke out and began flowing down my forehead. “I told you not to order that,” she told me. “You don’t have to show off for me, remember?”
After a full minute of chugging water, dabbing my head with a napkin and loosening most of my clothing, I managed to recover sufficiently to sputter out a few syllables. “Tasty,” I gurgled out at her.
Andrea, meanwhile, had taken advantage of this medically necessary lapse in conversation to wolf down more than half of her dinner. I knew before the evening was done she would consume a fair portion of mine as well. The way Andy eats, the woman should be huge, but constant body-abusing exercise has fat cells scared to go near her.
“Are you all right?” she asked, giggling like the teenaged girl I remembered.
“I’m fine,” I gasped, my pulse slowly returning to normal. I signalled to the waitress, who found her way over to our table. “I’d like to just have some kind of house salad please. No dressing.” The waitress took my order and turned towards the kitchen. I turned back to Andrea. “You were saying it doesn’t look good?”
“No,” she replied, turning serious.
“Why?”
She gave me a look that reminded me I was receiving extremely privileged information. “There’s some pretty strong evidence.”
“The fingerprints? I thought we had pretty much debunked any significance those prints had. Those illegally obtained prints, I might add.”
“There’s more, Win. DNA. They got some preliminary results back today.”
“DNA? Where the hell did Furlo and Smythe get a DNA sample from?”
“The coffee cup in the interview room. A pencil in his biology lab with his teeth marks on it, and apparently a few other assorted odds and ends they found in the classroom.”
“Jesus Christ,” I complained, “what kind of detectives have you got working down there? I’ll move to strike all of that as illegal searches. You can’t go taking samples from coffee cops in the police station.”
“But you can from a public school classroom. He doesn’t have any guarantees of DNA privacy there,” she countered.
“We’ll see,” I threatened. “I don’t think the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will permit DNA sampling simply because my client is a public employee.” By then I was fuming as much from the tactics of Furlo and Smythe as I was from the Thai noodles. I thought we had established some parameters of how my client would be treated during the remainder of the investigation.
“Hey, Win!” Andy ordered. “I’m not opposing counsel here, remember? Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m only telling you what I’ve found out about your case.”
“You’re right,” I told her, exhaling heavily. “I’m sorry. It just pisses me off. Not so much that I’m going to have to file suppression motions, more that they’re wasting time with Carl that they could be using following other leads.”
“There are no other leads, Win,” she told me gently. “This is the direction they’re focusing on.”
“That’s bullshit. There are any number of ways that strands of hair, or fingerprints or whatever they’ve found on Tricia could have innocently come from my client. And I’ll fight them over using that as evidence anyway.”
“I don’t think you want to do that, Win. They’ll just get a court-ordered DNA sample from Turbot anyway. We’re not talking about a stray hair on the body.”
I looked at her quizzically. I could sense she was worried about telling me the next part, not only because a murder case is generally out of my purview of experience, but also because it involved a friend and colleague.
“What are you talking about?” I asked as the waitress returned with my very plain looking salad.
Andrea waited until the waitress had left the table, then looked at me and said bluntly, “Seminal fluid.”
I felt as though someone had punched me in the stomach. For a moment I found it difficult to breathe as I digested this new information. If the forensic scientists had found semen from Carl on Tricia, it pretty much blew away the notion that she had been concocting a scheme to hold over Carl’s head for whatever twisted reason we believed she had invented.
After a small eternity, I recovered enough to continue. “I thought there was no evidence of sexual assault?”
“There wasn’t,” Andy told me. She had finished her dinner. “There was no indication the body had been assaulted. They went to her house. They found trace semen evidence on a pair of underwear in her laundry hamper. They figure it was relatively, umm, fresh.” She said the last word uncomfortably.
“Holy shit,” I proclaimed, lacking any more suitable legal term for the turn my case had suddenly taken. “And it matches the samples they took?”
“Apparently enough that they’re not worried about you fighting the collection of those samples. They figure Tricia’s story is enough to get them a court order for a sample, and then they’ll have him.”
“That’s impossible. It can’t be right,” I protested feebly.
“Only if you refuse to believe it. Win,” she said, reaching across the table and taking my hand, “it looks pretty clear your guy was at least having sex with the girl. That’s going to give him proximity, motive. You sure you’re gonna be up for this?”
“I pretty much have to be. I wouldn’t be much of a lawyer if I suddenly bailed because I didn’t like the look of the evidence.”
“You don’t have to be much of a lawyer,” Andrea reminded me. “You’re a teacher now, remember? You could probably get a judge to excuse you from defending him.”
My cell phone rang from inside my jacket pocket. Extricating my hand from Andy’s, I reached into my pocket.
“Hello?” I asked. I listened quietly to the voice on the other end of the line give me information I knew was destined to come, having heard Andrea’s information and interpretation of the case. I just hadn’t thought it would come so quickly. After a moment or two, I thanked the caller and hung up the phone, simultaneously signalling the waitress to bring the bill.
Detective