Guilt

Wes was asking himself why hadn't he seen this before? Why hadn't Sam given it to Amanda Jenkins? If she'd done that, Wes would have read it in the discovery documents. But it hadn't been there.

But what did it mean anyway?

Legally, it was worthless. Purportedly, this was nothing but copies of pages, maybe from a diary, of twenty-some years before. The entire package could have been reconstructed, or originally created, in the past month. In no way was it evidence.

But, as Sam had said, it wasn't meant to be evidence. The pages weren't for the trial, they were for Wes.

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

On Monday morning at 9:35, Wes Farrell stood before the witness box in Department 26 and said good morning to Dr Harris. The two men had had a long talk on Sunday afternoon, discussing what they would say this morning. Harris had always liked Mark Dooher – had liked Sheila, too. The police had more or less set him up to make Mark look bad, and he was more than willing to try to work some damage control.

'Doctor,' Farrell began. 'On Friday, you testified that you lost a vial of blood from your office on May thirty-first. Have you ever located that vial of blood?'

'No.'

'In other words, it's lost.'

'That's right.'

'How did you discover it was lost?'

'It didn't come back from the lab when it was supposed to.'

'Oh!' Farrell was intrigued.'This blood then, was it supposed to go to a lab from your office?'

'Yes. We send our blood work out to the Pacheco Clinic where they've got a lab facility.'

'Is the Pacheco Clinic far from your office?'

'No. A mile, maybe a little more.'

'All right, then. Now, Doctor, how do they keep track of the blood they work on in this lab?'

'We have a requisition slip that we attach to the vials with tape. Then they fill in a report form for results.'

'Let's back up a minute, shall we? You attach your requisition slip to these vials with tape?'

'Yes.'

'What kind of tape?'

'Regular Scotch tape.'

'Scotch tape on glass vials. Hmm. Is that sticky enough, Doctor? Does the tape ever come off?'

'If the vial gets wet, sometimes, yes.'

'All right. Did you discover that this missing vial of blood – Leo Banderas's blood – never got to Pacheco lab because it wasn't logged in? Was that it?'

'No, not exactly. They're not logged in as such.'

'So you don't know whether this vial of blood ever got to the Pacheco lab?'

'No, I don't know.'

'It could have been delivered there and lost there, isn't that true?'

Jenkins objected to the question as speculation, and she was sustained, but Farrell thought he'd made his point anyway. He decided to move along. He turned to the jury and gave them a relaxed smile.

'Dr Harris, you testified that you'd lost other vials of blood from your office, is that true?'

'Yes.'

'Many of them?'

Harris thought a minute. 'Over the years, say three or four.'

'Three or four? Has it ever happened, to your knowledge, that someone has dropped a vial of blood?'

'Yes.'

'Is this something – dropping a vial of blood – that could get someone fired if it happened a lot?'

'Possibly.'

'Your honor, objection! Speculation.'

Again Thomasino sustained Jenkins, and again Farrell didn't care. He was putting points on the board.

'Dr Harris, did you have the opportunity to review the lab report that Mr Drumm signed?'

'Yes, I did.'

'And the blood in the second vial, was it the blood of your patient, Leo Banderas?'

'I don't know. There was no way to tell.'

'But the blood in the vial was A-positive, was it not?'

'Yes. But there was nothing to compare it with. Mr Banderas died several months ago and was cremated. There's no trace of his DNA left.'

'So you're saying, Doctor, that there's no way to tell if the blood in the second vial belonged to Mr Banderas or not, is that right?'

'Yes, that's right.'

'Then there is no particular reason to believe that the blood in the second vial, the blood found at the crime scene, had ever been in your office, is there?'

'No.'

In his free time over the weekend, when he wasn't chatting with Dr Harris – and amid all different kinds of soul-searching regarding Diane Price – Farrell had tried intermittently to focus on Abe Glitsky. He wished he'd had better luck formulating a plan, because the Lieutenant was in the witness box now and Farrell was approaching him and didn't know what he was going to say. Glitsky's testimony, easily delivered over two hours with Amanda Jenkins leading him every step of the way, had done some damage. This was in large part due to Glitsky's air of authority on the stand – if he had come to suspect Mark Dooher, there had to be some reason. He was a professional cop with no particular ax to grind. In fact, he was the Head of Homicide. It looked to him as though the defendant was guilty. That's why he had delivered Dooher's case to the DA, and why the Grand Jury had indicted him.

'Lieutenant, you've given us Mark Dooher's version of the events of June 7th, and then your own interpretation of those events, which led you to arrest him for the murder of his wife. For the benefit of the jury, can you tell us a specific instance of an untruth you uncovered in Mr Dooher's statement to you on the night of the murder?'

'A great deal of it was untrue. That's what all these other witnesses are here to talk about.'

'Yes. But do you have any proof you can show us that Mr Dooher lied? Say a credit-card receipt that proves he was really buying clothes downtown when he said he went to Dellaroma's Deli? Anything like that?'

'I have statements of other witnesses,' Glitsky repeated.

'And the jury will get to decide who they believe among those witnesses, Lieutenant. But to get back to my question – now for the third time – do you, personally, have something you can show us, or describe for us, that proves anything about Mark Dooher's actions on the night of the murder?'

Glitsky kept his composure, wishing that Jenkins would object about something. The testimony of the other prosecution witnesses – taken together – would constitute proof, he hoped. But he didn't have a smoking gun, and Farrell was nailing him for it. 'I don't have a credit-card receipt, no.'

'Isn't it true, Lieutenant, that you don't have anything that proves Mark Dooher told even one small lie?'

'Not by itself, no.'

'Not by itself or not at all? Do you have something specific, or don't you?'

Farrell was going to squeeze it out of him. He glanced at Jenkins. Couldn't she call this speculation or leading the witness or something? Evidently not.

'No.'

But Farrell wasn't going to gloat over this minor victory. He simply nodded, satisfied, and took aim at his next target. 'Now, Lieutenant Glitsky, as the investigator in charge of this case, did you analyze the reports of the crime-scene investigator, Sergeant Crandall, and the lab reports on blood submitted by Mr Drumm?'

'Yes, I did.'

'And yet didn't you hear both of those gentlemen testify that they found no evidence tying Mark Dooher to the scene?'

'No.'

A look of surprise. There was some whispering in the gallery. A few of the jurors frowned and leaned forward in their seats. Farrell took a step towards him. 'You did not hear them say that?'

'No, sir. That was a conclusion you drew.'

This stopped Farrell cold. Glitsky had maneuvered him into a trap. Crandall's testimony – the knife, the fingerprints – did not preclude Dooher from being on the scene. Neither did Drumm's tainted blood.

But two could play this game. They were going to do a little dance. 'Your honor,' Farrell said, 'would you please instruct the witness to answer only the questions I ask him?'