Murder One (41 page)

“Did she say what else triathlons included besides running?”

“Swimming and riding a bike.”

Cerrabone asked about Reid’s training, how far she swam, ran, biked. Then he had Rowe tell the jury the distance from the public easement where Joshua Blume claimed he saw Barclay to the back of Vasiliev’s house, as well as the distance from her home to the public easement. Both distances were well within what Reid had told Rowe to be her regular training regimens.

Despite his best efforts with Blume and with Oberman, Sloane could see some of the jurors nodding as Cerrabone and Rowe methodically laid out the evidence that had led Rowe to arrest Reid. No matter how good Sloane’s cross-examinations had been to that point, there remained the unspoken question—if Barclay had not killed Vasiliev, then who had? It was not his burden, but human nature being what it was, several jurors would be asking that question in the jury room.

Sloane approached. Ordinarily, he did not ask open-ended questions on cross-examination, but felt comfortable if he knew the answers. “Detective Rowe, did Barclay advise you when she began to train for triathlons?”

“She said it was shortly after her daughter’s death.”

“Did she say why she took up triathlons?”

“She called it her therapy.”

“Did she explain that further?”

“She said that after her daughter’s death, she was depressed, and rather than go on prescription medication, as the doctors had recommended, she began to exercise and eventually began to do triathlons.”

“She didn’t say she began training so she would be in shape to bike, swim, and run far enough to go and shoot Filyp Vasiliev a year after the fact, did she?”

Rowe couldn’t hide a smirk. “No. She didn’t.”

“You asked Ms. Reid how she heard of Mr. Vasiliev’s death, did you not?”

“I did.”

“And she told you that I had informed her, didn’t she?”

“That’s what she said.”

“She told you that she had sought to retain me the day before Mr. Vasiliev was shot; that she wanted to file a wrongful-death civil action against Mr. Vasiliev to recover monetary damages against him, didn’t she?”

“She said that, yes.”

Sloane would leave it for his closing argument to point out the inconsistency of someone intent on killing Vasiliev also hiring an attorney to sue him for money the prior day.

“Let’s talk about the shoes you took from Barclay’s home,” Sloane said. “You took every pair of athletic shoes in the house, did you not?”

“Every one we could find.”

“You searched her office and car as well, I presume?”

“We did.”

“You’re confident you have every pair of athletic shoes from her house, car, or office?”

“Reasonably confident.”

“You and Detective Cerrabone were present when each of the search warrants were executed, were you not?”

“We were.”

“It was a very thorough search, was it not?”

“It was thorough, Mr. Sloane. We took every athletic shoe we found.”

“And so we have these five pairs, correct?” Sloane placed each of the five pairs on a table.

“That’s correct.”

“As part of a separate subpoena, you also sought Barclay’s financial records—records of her credit-card and debit-card purchases—correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you went through those financial records carefully?”

“I went through them, as did my partner, Detective Crosswhite.”

“Did you note credit-card purchases of athletic shoes?” Sloane knew they had.

“I believe we did.”

“In fact, you highlighted each of the purchases on a copy of the documents produced in this litigation, did you not?”

“Yes, we did.”

“You highlighted six purchases of running shoes?”

Rowe didn’t immediately answer. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, let’s be sure, Detective.” Sloane handed Rowe a stack of the records, the same documents Reid had found in his office and said,
I think we may have something
.

Rowe went through them, hesitant. “There are five purchases.”

“On the credit card statements, yes. But there is also a receipt for a cash purchase, isn’t there?”

Rowe flipped the pages and reconsidered the documents. Though the jury likely did not detect the brief moment Rowe’s eyes closed, Sloane did. “Yes, there is,” Rowe said.

“So the total would not be five.”

“The total would be six.”

“I suppose that, as an experienced investigator, you could infer from that evidence that Barclay, as the perpetrator of this crime, disposed of the pair of shoes she wore the night when she biked and swam all the way from her house to Vasiliev’s house to shoot him.”

“I accounted for five pairs of shoes. But to answer your question, yes, a sixth pair could have been worn and disposed of.”

“Just as you would like the jury to infer that Barclay disposed of the gun she used to kill Mr. Vasiliev, right?”

“I’m just here to testify about the evidence.”

“And the inferences you made from that evidence that led you to arrest Barclay, correct? I mean, you wouldn’t have arrested her unless
you inferred that she had biked to the easement, run to the water, swum to the house, shot Vasiliev, and returned home, disposing of the weapon somewhere along the way, right?”

“As an investigator, I do make inferences from the evidence.”

“But you also keep an open mind, don’t you? You don’t rush to conclusions, right?”

“You consider all the evidence.”

“Just like you considered me a suspect at one time, didn’t you?”

“We thought it prudent to talk with you.”

“Because I had been in Ms. Reid’s home the morning before Mr. Vasiliev was shot, correct?”

“Ms. Reid told us that you had been present.”

“And so you contemplated the
possibility
that I might have taken her gun and used it to kill Vasiliev, didn’t you?”

“We followed up on several leads.”

“I’m sure you did, including the possibility that someone other than Barclay, perhaps even me, somehow got ahold of her gun and used it to kill Vasiliev?”

“We had no such evidence that was the case.”

“And yet you interviewed me about it for two hours in my home, didn’t you?”

“We did.”

“So you had to have at least thought that a possibility, right?”

Rowe shrugged. “As I said, we try to follow up on every lead.”

“Did you suspect anyone else besides me could have taken the gun and used it to kill Mr. Vasiliev?”

“No, we did not.”

“But if someone had taken and used the gun to kill Vasiliev, couldn’t that same person have taken the sixth pair of athletic shoes that cannot be accounted for?”

“I wasn’t aware of the sixth pair of shoes.”

“So you didn’t have all the evidence when you decided to arrest Ms. Reid?”

“We believed we had sufficient evidence to warrant Ms. Reid’s arrest.”

Sloane held up the financial records. “But not all the evidence.”

Rowe tilted his head, a tacit acknowledgment.

Cerrabone’s redirect took up the rest of the afternoon. When he had finished and Underwood asked him to call his next witness, Cerrabone stepped forward. “The state rests, Your Honor.”

Underwood dismissed the jury with a warning that the weathermen were predicting snow flurries that could persist throughout the night. He advised them to give themselves plenty of time in the morning to arrive by nine and to not leave for the night without his bailiff’s cell phone number in case they had difficulty. After the jury departed, Underwood heard Sloane’s motion to dismiss and promptly denied it.

In the morning Sloane would begin his case in chief.

Pendergrass walked into Sloane’s office looking perplexed. He explained that he had been reviewing the stack of documents from the state.

“There’s a gap in the Bates-stamp numbers.” Pendergrass showed Sloane the numbers stamped in the lower right corner of the documents. “The number jumps from P-six-nine-eight-seven to P-six-nine-nine-five.” Pendergrass also said he found other, smaller gaps.

“Could they have gotten out of order? There’ve been a few of us looking through them.”

“I checked. The pages aren’t here. We don’t have them.”

Sloane didn’t have the time or inclination to get into a fight with Cerrabone about it. “Determine what pages we’re missing, call up Cerrabone’s paralegal and ask her to send them over. Better also prepare a motion to compel, just in case.”

As Pendergrass left his office, Carolyn walked in carrying three piles of documents, each secured with a rubber band.

“What are those?” Sloane asked.

“The documents you subpoenaed. Do you want me to give them to Tom?”

“Yes,” he said, not believing he’d have time to go through them, then realizing he’d just tasked Pendergrass with another motion. “No.”

Carolyn spun. “I don’t care what you decide so long as I can put these down sometime tonight.”

“Leave them here. I’ll have to look at them later.”

Just after nine in the evening, Sloane slipped the rubber band from the largest pile, documents from the home-security company that installed and monitored the alarm in Barclay’s home. He’d gotten the idea to subpoena the documents the night he had accidentally set off the alarm by opening the sliding-glass door. He flipped the pages to the date that most interested him and saw what he had expected, then something he had not. He reread the information, then read it a third time. He considered his watch, hurried down the hall, and pushed open the door to the office at the end.

Jenkins and Alex looked to have been engaged in an intense conversation when Sloane interrupted.

“I’m going to need you to serve two more subpoenas, and I need the witnesses in court first thing tomorrow morning.”

TWENTY - EIGHT

T
HURSDAY,
D
ECEMBER
8, 2011
K
ING
C
OUNTY
C
OURTHOUSE
S
EATTLE
, W
ASHINGTON

T
hursday morning it was Sloane’s turn to test Judge Underwood’s patience. Cerrabone stood, red-faced, and advised that the state had a matter to take up with the court before the jury entered. Sloane had faxed a revised list of witnesses to Cerrabone’s office at seven o’clock that morning, and the list included the names of two witnesses not on any prior list. To make matters worse, Sloane advised that he intended to call the two witnesses first thing that morning.

Cerrabone did not try to hide his annoyance. Voice animated, he argued that the “surprise” witnesses prevented the state from adequately preparing for cross-examination. He called it a sandbagging.

Sloane fell on the sword, apologizing profusely, but he also had decided it was time to get even with the state for dumping thousands of documents on his doorstep on the eve of trial. He advised Underwood that he had not known he would need to call the witnesses until late the prior evening, when he came across certain documents. He added that it now appeared the state had unilaterally withheld certain documents, the sequence of numbers for which Pendergrass had listed on a short motion to compel. Sloane knew Underwood would be reluctant to issue any ruling that could be construed as preventing Barclay Reid from putting on a complete defense. This was, after all, a first-degree-murder trial. No judge liked to be reversed on appeal, especially on a case that continued to generate daily headlines. After asking Sloane the nature of the two witnesses and their testimony, he issued his ruling.

“I’m going to allow the two witnesses to testify. Mr. Cerrabone, if you determine that you need additional time to prepare to cross-examine these witnesses, you may defer and recall them.”

With that, the bailiff brought in the jury, and Sloane called his first witness.

Damon Russo looked apprehensive when Sloane greeted him in the austere hallway outside the courtroom and quickly introduced himself. He apologized for the short notice and thanked Russo for being there—not that he had a choice, once Jenkins handed him the subpoena. Sloane told Russo to just answer the questions he asked, and things would be fine.

Russo took the witness stand in black polyester pants and a white long-sleeved shirt that looked to have been purchased when he was ten pounds lighter and worn to every occasion that required something more formal than jeans and a T-shirt. The cuffs and collar were threadbare. Russo parted his prematurely gray hair in the middle and pulled it back in a ponytail that extended to his shoulders.

Sloane walked him through the preliminaries, hoping they would give Russo time to relax.

“You and I have never spoken before, have we, Damon?”

“Not until just now in the hallway.”

“And before I introduced myself in the hallway, we’d never met, had we?”

“No.”

“In fact, my investigator, Mr. Jenkins, served you with a subpoena this morning when you walked in the door to work, didn’t he?”

Jenkins sat in the back row of the courtroom, head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd.

Russo nodded and gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah. He . . . Not exactly how I intended to start the day.”

“I’m sure it isn’t,” Sloane said. “Where do you work?”

“I’m head of the technical and customer-support division of American Security Systems.”

“And what type of business is American Security Systems?”

“We’re the largest residential home-security company in the world,” Russo said. “We provide systems that monitor the home in case of burglaries, fires, floods, carbon monoxide poisoning . . .”

Russo sounded so proud Sloane thought the man might take out a brochure and solicit the closest juror. “And how long have you been working for American Security?”

“I’ve been with the company eight years, the last five in my current position.”

“What do you do on a daily basis as head of the technical and customer-support division?”

“I oversee our monitoring centers.”

“Does that include the monitoring center for your Seattle region?”

“It does.”

“And what does the monitoring center monitor?”

“We monitor our clients’ security systems twenty-four/seven. Anytime there is an alarm, for any reason, it triggers a dedicated cellular connection to one of our interconnected customer-monitoring systems. We also provide technical service to our customers, such as if they can’t get the alarm to reset—any number of things.”