Murder One (35 page)

“No weapon was found at the crime scene,” she said.

“So your unit was unable to match the bullet found at the crime scene with any particular gun, correct?”

“We have not, no.”

“The bullet you located was subsequently identified by the Washington State Patrol crime lab as a thirty-eight Special, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“That’s one of the most popular bullets produced, is it not?”

“I don’t know.”

Sloane didn’t care. The answer was implied. “But you do know there are several different handguns on the market that are capable of firing a thirty-eight Special bullet, correct?”

“I would assume that to be the case. Barry Dilliard would be better able to answer that question.”

“In fact, isn’t it the case that even guns that aren’t thirty-eight-caliber, such as the three-fifty-seven Magnum revolver, are capable of firing a thirty-eight Special bullet?”

“Again, I would defer to Barry on that,” she said.

Again, Sloane didn’t care. “Isn’t it also true that some guns that aren’t even revolvers—semiautomatic pistols, for instance—are capable of firing the thirty-eight Special bullet?”

“Again, I don’t know for certain. But I can say that we did not find any spent cartridges at the crime scene.”

“Which led you to believe a revolver was used?”

“It is another piece of evidence factored in.”

“And did you factor in the possibility that the shooter could have used a semiautomatic and simply picked up the spent casing?”

“We don’t come to conclusions at the crime scene,” she said. “Our job is to process the information and provide it to the homicide detectives.”

“Is that why I don’t see any note in your report that the lack of a shell casing at the site could be due to the shooter picking it up from the ground after shooting a semiautomatic?”

“Again, that would be a conclusion, and that is not my job.”

And again, Sloane didn’t care. “How many registered owners of thirty-eight-caliber handguns live in the state of Washington, Detective?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about in King County?”

“I don’t know.”

“We could probably get those records, could we not?”

She smiled, indicating she knew what was coming next. “I’m sure you have.”

“Two hundred and thirty-six thousand, six hundred and nineteen registered thirty-eight-caliber handguns,” Sloane said, knowing he was testifying. It drew an objection from Cerrabone, which Underwood overruled. “And that wouldn’t include unregistered handguns, would it?” Sloane went on.

“Not as you have phrased it, it wouldn’t.”

“Nor would it include weapons that are capable of firing a thirty-eight-caliber round such as the three-fifty-seven Magnum, would it?”

“Again, not as you have phrased the question.”

“So, would it be fair for me to say that since you don’t have the gun that fired the thirty-eight-caliber bullet found at the crime scene, that gun could have been any of those two hundred and thirty-six thousand, six hundred and nineteen registered thirty-eight-caliber handguns, one of the unknown number of unregistered thirty-eight-caliber handguns, or one of the registered or unregistered handguns capable of firing a thirty-eight-caliber bullet? Would that be fair?”

Cerrabone was on his feet before Sloane finished the question. “Objection, Your Honor. Counsel is speculating and testifying again.”

“Sustained.”

Sloane looked at Stafford. “You can’t say for certain what caliber of gun was used, can you, Detective?”

“Not without the gun,” she conceded.

When they broke for lunch, Pendergrass, Sloane, and Barclay ate in the food court in the basement of a building near the courthouse. They took a table once satisfied that no jurors or courthouse
personnel sat nearby. Sloane didn’t each much, splitting a pastrami sandwich with Pendergrass and leaving half of that unfinished. Barclay didn’t order, and to Sloane, she looked to be losing weight, but she kept telling him she was fine and that she hadn’t lost a pound.

“Stafford went well,” Pendergrass said.

It had gone well, but mentally, Sloane had already moved on. He had retained his own ballistics expert to review the evidence and the report prepared by Barry Dilliard, the head forensic scientist of the firearms section of the Washington State Patrol crime lab.

“You don’t want to match wits with this guy in his arena,” Sloane’s expert had warned. “This is the Doogie Howser of ballistics.”

Sloane watched a woman behind a cash register at an establishment selling Mexican food reach behind her and slide open a glass door to retrieve two cans of soda. When she turned to put them on the counter, the sliding-glass door slid closed, but not completely, leaving a two-inch opening.

And the nagging thought that had bothered Sloane for two days finally crystallized.

“David?”

Sloane looked to Reid, knowing he had missed whatever question had been posed.

“Excuse me.” He walked away to make a call on his cell phone.

When Jenkins answered, Sloane said, “I need you to find Micheal Hurley.”

Though Barry Dilliard’s curriculum vitae said he was forty-six years old, nobody in the courtroom would have believed it. Sloane watched at least one juror mentally add the years as Dilliard recounted for Cerrabone how long he had been with the forensic unit. With an easy style, Dilliard told how he had received an MFA in English literature from a school on the East Coast, but when he moved back home to Seattle, he had been unable to find the teaching job he craved and took a low-level job in the crime lab to pay the bills and student loans. He joked that maybe if he had studied forensic science he’d be teaching James Joyce to college students. Once at the crime
lab, Dilliard found he had a natural aptitude for determining things like the trajectory of bullets. During his subsequent twenty-three years, he had been rapidly promoted and had developed innovative methods and equipment to re-create crime scenes that were being employed by crime labs throughout the country.

He didn’t look like Doogie Howser, the boy-genius doctor on the television show of the same name. He looked more like the actor Ron Howard when Howard played Richie Cunningham on the television show
Happy Days
—before he lost his reddish-blond hair. The hair swept across Dilliard’s forehead, and with clear blue eyes and boyish features he looked like he would have been more comfortable wearing long shorts and flip-flops instead of the hunter green suit, white shirt, and tie.

Dilliard said he viewed each crime scene much the way he considered jigsaw puzzles, one of his passions. “The pieces are all there but scattered. They need to be fitted together to see the full picture.”

Good at making the mundane interesting, when Cerrabone asked him about the use of a .38 revolver and whether it had enough power to shoot through the double-paned sliding-glass door, Dilliard related how Jack Ruby had used a .38 Special, a Colt Cobra, to kill Lee Harvey Oswald. “It has plenty of power, and it’s a reliable weapon.”

Dilliard became downright gleeful when asked to talk about his latest forensic toy—the $140,000 Leica ScanStation C10, which he called a “crime-scene time machine.” The machine took a 360-degree photo of the crime scene, then used lasers to scan it. The result was a 3D image that could be computer-manipulated “to re-create what the evidence and science indicate happened,” Dilliard said.

For the next hour and a half, the jury was treated to a simulation showing the crime scene in a 3D image, beginning with Vasiliev slumped on the sofa. Then the image changed to a 3D aerial view of the outside of the home, with the image of an androgynous-looking mannequin sitting and watching a flat-screen television mounted on the opposite wall.

“The image matches Mr. Vasiliev’s exact measurements,” Dilliard said. As the image rotated, an equally androgynous-looking figure appeared outside the back door, raised a gun, and fired a shot, a blue
line showing the trajectory of the bullet through the glass, striking the back of Vasiliev’s head, and deflecting off course before becoming wedged in the baseboard.

“Were you able to draw any conclusions concerning the height of the shooter, based upon your simulation?” Cerrabone asked.

“Based upon the trajectory of the bullet, which the ScanStation duplicated and which we confirmed the old-fashioned way through photographs and measurements and a scanner on a tripod, I concluded that the shooter was between five feet two and five feet five inches tall,” Dilliard said.

Cerrabone continued for another twenty minutes before concluding what had been the most entertaining witness to date.

Sloane stood. “Mr. Dilliard, how tall am I?”

Dilliard considered Sloane. “I don’t know.”

“Give me an estimate.”

“Maybe six-two or three . . .”

Sloane put his hands in front of him, as if holding a handgun the way the mannequin had held it in the video. Then he spread his feet, bent his knees, and lowered. “How tall am I now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your simulation shows the figure outside the sliding-glass door standing erect. What if the person were taller, like me, but spread their feet and squatted, as I just did. Wouldn’t that result in the same trajectory?”

“We used the information provided by Kaylee Wright, the tracker, concerning the location of the foot impressions on the concrete patio in relation to the sliding-glass door and to one another. You will note that in the simulation, the shooter stood with the right foot positioned sixteen inches in front of the left, measuring from heel to heel, and the width is eight inches. That is typical of someone who has taken a shooter’s stance, knees flexed, upper torso turned at an angle. That evidence was the basis for my providing the three-inch differential for the range in height.”

“But if they flexed their knees more than the simulation, they could have been taller than five feet five inches, correct?”

“Could have been.” He shrugged, letting both Sloane and the jury know he wasn’t buying the argument.

“And the stance you mentioned, right foot in front of the left”—Sloane stood as Dilliard had described, even angling his body—“would that not be a stance more commonly associated with someone shooting with the left hand?”

“It usually would, yes.”

It was a significant concession. Reid was right-handed.

“You also assumed, did you not, that the sliding-glass door was closed when the shot was fired?”

“The door was closed when I arrived, and I reviewed Officer Adderley’s report as the first responding officer, which confirmed that to have been the case.”

“Both of which still require that you make the assumption that the door was closed when the shot was fired, don’t they?”

Dilliard’s eyes narrowed. “I’m aware of no evidence that the door was open and then closed, if that is what you’re postulating. The measurements would not make sense. Based upon the distance the person stood from the sliding-glass door, the position of their feet, the height and location of the bullet hole, the angle and trajectory of the bullet to its target on the sofa, the glass door was closed. If it had been opened, the measurements would not have worked, the angle would be off.”

With the day drawing to a close, Sloane had one last line of inquiry and wanted to leave the jurors with something to ponder over the weekend.

“Did you draw any significance from the fact that just one bullet was found at the scene?” Nothing in Dilliard’s report indicated that he had, but Pendergrass had found a report Dillard had authored in another case in which he had drawn a significant conclusion from that piece of evidence.

“Nothing that I noted in my report.”

“I didn’t ask you what you noted in your report. I asked if you drew any significance from the fact that there was only a single hole in the glass.”

Dilliard smiled. “That just one bullet was fired?”

The jury laughed, and Sloane joined them. Then he said, “Mr. Dilliard, do you remember a case entitled
State of Washington
vs.
Allan Green
?”

Dilliard nodded. “I do, though not in a lot of detail.”

“You authored a report in that case.” Sloane handed Dilliard a copy of his report, had him authenticate it, and gave him the chance to read it while providing a copy to Cerrabone and to the judge’s clerk. After introducing the report, Sloane read from it. “‘The fact that we have located five spent cartridges is also consistent with an act of rage or vengeance.’” Sloane looked up. “Did I read that correctly?”

“Unfortunately you did, though I think my English-lit teachers would cringe that I wrote that.” This brought more smiles from the jury. “Can I explain?”

Sloane wasn’t about to cut off a witness who had cultivated such a good rapport with the jury. Besides, Pendergrass had also obtained a copy of the file for which Dilliard had written the report, and Sloane had familiarized himself with the facts of that case. Confident Dilliard could wiggle but not free himself of what he’d written, he let him go on.

“When I wrote this report, I did not have the experience or the technology we have available today. A husband came home from work after learning that his wife was having an affair and shot her five times. The detective wanted me to note that evidence of multiple shots fired was consistent with a crime of passion or anger. With experience, I have learned that not only are such statements speculative, I have no business making them. My job is simply to evaluate the physical evidence at the crime scene and let you lawyers argue about its significance.”

“A crime of passion,” Sloane said. “Sort of like a mother accused of killing the drug dealer who overdosed her daughter would be a crime of passion?”

Cerrabone stood. “Objection. Speculation,” he said.

Underwood looked at Sloane over the black frames of his glasses to convey that he was not pleased. “Sustained,” he said. Sloane had expected the objection and thought it a tactical mistake by Cerrabone. Sloane wasn’t the least bit interested in Dilliard’s answer, concerned that Dilliard would take the opportunity to contend the two cases were not comparable given that Carly had been killed seven months earlier. Now there was no reason for Dilliard to explain.