Immoral (31 page)

Stride sighed heavily. “Look, Dan, what’s the point of excuses? We fucked up. Pure and simple. We should have caught it, and we didn’t.”

“Humor me,” Dan hissed. “Tell me why.”

“We interviewed hundreds of witnesses in those first couple days. We were looking for people who had seen Rachel. Someone seeing a teenage girl on the street several blocks away, who didn’t match Rachel’s description, just wasn’t going to be high on our list.”

“Why the hell not?”

Stride shook his head. “Sally was never a suspect. Hell, she’s still not a suspect. I don’t believe for a second she had anything to do with Rachel’s murder. There’s no physical evidence at all to connect her to any of this.”

“Maybe she’s just too smart for you,” Dan said.

“No way. If this was really a crime of passion, she would have left evidence all over the scene. Put me back on the stand tomorrow. I can point out that there were no unidentified fingerprints, no hair or fibers, nothing to put Sally in the van or at the barn. It wasn’t her.”

“You have no new evidence,” Dan said. “I can’t put you back to reiterate what you already told the jury.”

Emily cleared her throat. The two men stopped, looking at her as if for the first time. Her face was white.

“I don’t understand,” Emily said. “You sound like this was a bad thing for the case. Shouldn’t this be a good thing? I mean, she made the connection you needed. She heard Graeme and Rachel arguing that night. It puts them together.”

Dan nodded. The anger drained away, and his eyes softened. “I’m afraid it’s more complicated than that.”

“But why?” Emily asked. “This should guarantee a conviction.”

Dan took one of her hands in his. He met her eyes. “The question is, will the jury believe her? Mr. Gale raised doubts about Sally’s credibility. We know she told one lie, about not going to see Rachel that night The jury is likely to think she’s telling another lie, to cover up something.”

“Is that what you think?”

Dan sighed. “I really don’t know, Emily. I’d like to believe her. It makes sense, given all the other evidence. If Sally had come forward with this immediately, we’d have a conviction now, no doubt about it. Under these circumstances, I’m afraid it makes it worse, not better.”

“But why?” Her voice was plaintive.

“Well, it may open up reasonable doubt in the jury’s mind. They may be sufficiently concerned about Sally’s testimony that they feel they can no longer be absolutely certain that Graeme is guilty.”

“He is guilty,” Emily said passionately. “He did this. I know it.”

“Many of the jurors may think so, too. The question is, are they sufficiently convinced to convict him?”

The reality seemed to dawn on her. “Are you telling me the son of a bitch could be
acquitted
? He could walk out of here?”

“I’m afraid that’s possible,” Dan said. His voice was hoarse and angry, as if that reality were only now dawning on him, too.

Stride looked up, hearing the thud of the courtroom door. Maggie was inside again, hurrying down the aisle, beckoning to him. He saw urgency written in her face. Without a word, Stride left Dan and Emily, pushed through the swinging gate, and met Maggie in the middle of the aisle.

“We found a body,” Maggie said breathlessly. “Guppo’s on the scene.”

“Rachel?”

“No way to tell. It’s just skeletal remains. The son of a bitch tried to burn her. Could be Rachel. Could be Kerry. Could be someone else.”

Stride closed his eyes. A month ago, this would have been tremendous news. Three months ago, even better. One of Gale’s best theories, that Rachel was really still alive, might have been stripped away.

“Where was she found?” Stride asked.

“Just a few miles north of the bam. If our search radius had gone another mile, we might have found her.”

“Does Guppo have the scene sealed off?”

“Yeah. The medical examiner is up there, too.”

“What’s he say about it?” Stride asked.

“For now, not much. All he’ll say is that the skeletal structure is consistent with that of a teenage girl. Otherwise, we’ll either have to wait for the DNA or dental records or hope something turns up in a search of the surrounding area.”

“Not a word to the press yet,” Stride said. “Play it cool. I’ll tell Dan, and then you and I can go up there.”

Stride looked back at Dan and Emily and wondered how you break news like this in front of the girl’s mother. He took a deep breath and told Maggie to wait for him. Returning to the front of the courtroom, he saw Dan and Emily watching him. There was no gentle way to say it.

“We’ve located a body in the woods north of the city,” he told them.

Emily’s eyes widened, and her hand flew to her open mouth. “Oh, no!”

Dan said, “Shit.” He repeated it several times.

Emily crumpled into a seat. She sat there silently, like a piece of broken eggshell, then finally looked at Stride with bloodshot eyes. “Is it—is it her? Rachel?”

“We don’t know yet,” Stride said. “I’m very sorry. We only have skeletal remains, so it’s going to take time to identify them.”

“How long?” Dan asked.

“We’ll probably have to wait for DNA tests, unless we can do something with dental records. Either way, it’s likely to be a few weeks.”

Dan shook his head. “We don’t have a few weeks. We don’t even have a few days.”

Stride nodded. “I know.”

“What do you mean?” Emily asked.

“The trial is almost over,” Dan told her. “Without positive identification, we can’t raise the issue in front of the jury. Our suspicions aren’t evidence.”

“But we have her body now,” Emily pleaded. “You can’t let that man continue to pretend to the jury that she may be alive.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t know yet that it is her body,” Stride reminded her gently.

“This is insane,” Emily said, shaking her head “I can’t believe this. My God, they can’t just let him walk away now. They have to postpone the rest of the trial. They have to give you time to prove it’s Rachel.”

Dan sighed, and Stride knew what he was thinking. It was too little, too late.

“That’s up to the judge,” Dan said.

“A continuance?” Judge Kassel’s eyebrows twitched, and her voice climbed an octave. “Mr. Erickson, please tell me this is an example of your charming sense of humor.”

Dan spread his hands plaintively. “I realize this is unusual, Your Honor.”

“Unusual?” Gale snorted. “Try outrageous.”

The two men leaned closer to the judge’s bench. Behind them, the courtroom was packed again, with hushed conversation buzzing through the crowd. Judge Kassel banged her gavel, but it did little to quiet them. Graeme Stoner sat alone at the defense table, his face stoic. Today, Emily sat immediately behind him, as if she wanted Graeme to feel her presence. Her eyes burned into her husband’s neck. Graeme, after noticing her there when he first sat down, hadn’t looked back once, but it was obvious that he could feel her there, close enough for her scent to reach him.

The jury was absent, secluded in the jury room while Dan pleaded for more time. They were the only people in the state of Minnesota who had not awakened to the headline splashed across the newspaper:

RACHEL’S BODY?

“No one could have anticipated something like this,” Dan said. “But in the interests of justice, we simply must take the time to analyze the remains.”

“He wasn’t concerned about a body before, Your Honor,” Gale said.

Judge Kassel stared down her nose at Dan. “That’s true.”

“He felt confident enough to make his case without any proof that the girl was dead,” Gale continued. “He’s had his chance.”

“I haven’t rested my case,” Dan pointed out.

“Yes, but he has nothing more to add, Your Honor. I don’t see any evidence. I don’t see any witnesses.”

Dan shook his head. “Much of Mr. Gale’s defense was predicated on leaving the jury with the impression that Rachel might still be alive. He used that implication to try to establish reasonable doubt. If we can prove conclusively that Mr. Gale’s insinuations were false, the jury deserves to know that.”

The judge crossed her arms and leaned back. “Mr. Gale?”

“The whole situation is prejudicial,” Gale argued. “The jury has heard all the evidence. It’s fresh in their minds. Giving the prosecutor time to let the jury’s memory fade is both unfair and unreasonable. The body could well turn out to be unrelated to this case, and it will be too late to repair the damage. Besides, we have no idea how long it will take them to make a conclusive identification, assuming they can do so at all.”

“Archie, you should want the delay,” Dan said. “Your Honor, even sequestered, the jury may very well know about the body. It’s too easy for news to seep through one way or another. They’ll conclude it’s Rachel. It will influence their decision. We should allow them to decide on facts, not innuendo.”

Judge Kassel offered a faint smile. “That’s very charitable of you, Mr. Erickson. But the fact is, the jurors will not hear anything about any body if there’s no delay. As soon as you called me last night, I shut down all phone calls in and out. That was before Mr. Finch’s little broadcast, thank God. There are no televisions and radios in the rooms. Their transport this morning was closely monitored. They don’t know now, and they won’t know when they start deliberating in a day or so if we take appropriate precautions. I’ll clear the courtroom if I have to.”

“You could declare a mistrial,” Dan suggested. “We could start over.”

Gale opened his mouth, but Kassel waved him to silence. “I’m way ahead of you, Mr. Gale. No mistrial, Mr. Erickson. There’s nothing wrong with this one.”

“Your Honor, the people shouldn’t be penalized because the defendant did such a good job of hiding his crime that we didn’t find the body until now.”

Gale corrected him. “They found
a
body, not necessarily
the
body. And even if it is Rachel, they have no additional evidence to tie Mr. Stoner to the body or the scene. It adds nothing of value to the record.”

“We don’t know that yet,” Dan said heatedly. “We haven’t fully analyzed the crime scene.”

“Yes, let’s not get carried away, Mr. Gale,” Judge Kassel said. “Mr. Erickson is right You got a lot of mileage out of the people’s failure to produce a body. You can’t argue that it’s meaningless now that they’ve got one.”

“They chose to proceed without a body,” Gale repeated. “If this discovery had been made a week from now, Mr. Stoner would already have been acquitted.”

“That’s irrelevant, Your Honor,” Dan said.

“Perhaps, but you did seem pretty anxious to get Mr. Stoner in front of a jury. Now you seem less anxious to have them decide his fate.” Judge Kassel pursed her lips and again held up her hand before the lawyers could continue. “I’d like to find out more about this discovery and how long it might take to get some answers.”

Her eyes found Jonathan Stride in the third row of the courtroom, and she crooked her finger, beckoning him to the bench.

Standing up, Stride felt all the eyes of the courtroom on him. He wasn’t prepared. He hadn’t slept, and his clothes were stained with mud. From early evening until two hours ago, when he sped back to the city, he had tramped through the mushy ground, under the glare of searchlights, hunting along with twenty other officers for additional clues. He knew it was a doomed effort, although they would sift through the dirt for days to come. After six months of rain, snow, and ice, there was nothing left to tie Graeme Stoner to the scene, no footprints, no fibers, no blood, nothing except a body that was no more than a jumble of bones.

But they had a body. The question was, whose?

Stride pushed through the swinging door at the bar and joined Dan and Gale in front of Judge Kassel. She eyed his clothes and the bags under his eyes.

“You’ve had a long night, I gather, Lieutenant”

“Very long, Your Honor,” Stride said.

“I assume you can keep your eyes open long enough to answer a few questions.”

Stride smiled. “I’ll do my best”

“Thank you. Now, first of all, who told Mr. Finch and the rest of his friends in the media about this body?” Judge Kassel demanded. “It’s bad enough to have this in the middle of trial, but worse to have it blared all over the state. We’re lucky the jurors didn’t hear about any of this.”

“I’m very sorry about that, Your Honor,” Stride said. “I wish I could tell you how Bird gets his information. I have no idea.”

“All right, well, I guess that’s his job. Now tell me exactly what you found. These are definitely human remains?” Judge Kassel asked.

“Yes. We confirmed it with the medical examiner.”

“Sex?”

“The ME says female,” Stride said.

The judge nodded. “And no ready means of identification? It could be Rachel or Kerry or some other girl?”

“There was nothing left to identify. No clothes, no personal effects. The body was partially burned. We’ll be running DNA tests on the surviving bone.”

“How long will all of this taker”

Stride shook his head. “I wish I could give you a clear answer, Your Honor. It could be a couple days, and it could be a few weeks.”

“And you found no other evidence of note near the body?”

“No. We’ll continue searching, but I’m not optimistic, given the amount of time that has passed.”

Dan interrupted. “But the real key is the identity of the body, Your Honor. If this turns out to be Rachel, it has an enormous bearing on the trial.”

“If, if, if,” Gale said. “If this, maybe that. No evidence, but we’ll continue searching. Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks, maybe never. Mr. Stoner should not have to sit around while the police and the prosecution stall us with vague promises of evidence yet to come. Neither should the jury. There is really nothing here, Your Honor, except smoke.”

Judge Kassel sighed. “I’m inclined to agree.”

Dan grabbed the bench with both hands. “Your Honor, just a few days. Give us until the end of the week to confirm the identification. If we don’t have anything by then, we’ll wrap up the trial.”