The Guilty Plea (30 page)

Watching her cry, DiPaulo felt as if someone had sliced open his chest and torn a piece of his heart out with a scalpel. He put his arms around her.

“I didn’t tell you we were going out,” she said between deep breaths.

“It’s okay.”

“You were so busy with the trial, and …”

He couldn’t remember holding his daughter this tight in the last few years.

“Everybody knows about it.” She sniffled. “Lenny and Lauren. People liked making fun of our names.”

DiPaulo loosened his grip. “When I’m on a trial, Friday’s the only night in the whole week I can really relax. Let’s go for sushi tonight. Just the two of us.”

“But, Chiara—”

“The one near Dovercourt that Mom loved. You can get your own spider roll.”

DiPaulo’s wife had discovered the place a year before she’d gotten sick. Tokyo Sushi, tucked away in a grimy part of Bloor Street, was run by a young couple who worked seven days a week.

“Chiara won’t mind?”

“She’ll be happy about it.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” She reached under her sheets and pulled out a beat-up stuffed animal. It was a koala bear Olive had brought back from their Australian trip. “Sometimes I still sleep with this when I really miss her. I don’t like to talk about Mom, because I know it makes you upset.”

DiPaulo stroked the bear’s worn-down ear.

Lauren rubbed its legs. “Chiara’s great, Dad. But sometimes I miss Mom so, so much. It’s not fair.”

He was holding her again. Rocking back and forth.

“I’m sorry. You’re in this trial and everything. But Lenny was my first boyfriend.”

“I’m the one who should apologize,” he said.

Without a word, she slid over in her bed. He lay beside her, clicked off the lamp, and put his arm around her. The room was at the front of the house, and the light from the street filtered in through the corners of the curtains. DiPaulo found himself staring upward, knowing he wouldn’t get back to sleep.

His mind drifted back to the book he’d most loved to read to his daughter when she was a child. Over and over again.
Madeline
. How it made Paris come alive in her mind. Two lines were his favorite:

And the crack on the ceiling had the habit

Of sometimes looking like a rabbit.

He felt Lauren’s head settle on his shoulder. As she slipped into sleep, DiPaulo’s mind wandered from the streets of Paris to Samantha Wyler in the courthouse cafeteria—her face contorted in anger—to Detective Greene’s knowing grin. A loop that would keep playing until the sun came up.

Forget TGIF, Jennifer Raglan thought, it was more like TGGIFF, as in Thank Goodness God It’s Fucking Friday. She looked up at the courtroom clock ticking toward ten and felt like a kid in school waiting for the weekend. One more day of this. She was tired but satisfied.

They’d had three full days of evidence. The nanny, Arceli Ocaya, had been the first witness on Tuesday morning. Although nervous, she’d done well. The forensic officer, Zeilinski, came next. Despite her Polish accent, she was impressive. Raglan ended the day by passing around the bloody knife encased in a clear plastic box. Always good to send the jury home with something gruesome to think about.

The next day, she’d called Detective Greene. He put in the bulk of the evidence: background about Terrance and the divorce, Samantha Wyler’s voice mails and e-mails to him, the late-night e-mail from Terrance to Samantha saying he’d accepted her offer, and her response that she was coming over. He ended with the videotape of himself and Simon building trains in the playroom at police headquarters. Good to send the jury home weepy.

Yesterday was the boring stuff. All the other officers who’d been at the scene: the photographer, the artist who’d produced the scale drawing that sat on an easel situated so the judge and jury and lawyers could all see it, various scientists from the CFS—the Centre of Forensic Sciences—who’d tested blood and hair and fibers. An easy day for Raglan, who’d mostly just asked, “And what else did you find in your investigation?”

Sitting quietly at his defense table, Ted DiPaulo had been almost invisible all week. He asked each witness a few perfunctory questions—
enough so the jury wouldn’t forget he was there—flashed them his charming smile, but never objected, even when Raglan slipped into leading her witnesses. She sensed that he was holding his fire, waiting for the moment. Right now she had to get through this day and make it to the weekend.

“The first witness for the Crown will be Dr. Arthur Burns,” Raglan said after the judge and jury were all settled.

Burns, the pathologist who’d done the autopsy, was an arrogant man. He firmly believed that he’d never met anyone who was as smart as he was, and he usually found a way to work that bit of information into the first five minutes of every conversation. He had a wandering right eye that never seemed to focus on anything, so when you talked to him, he appeared to be looking away. It was disconcerting. And he was extremely short. Perhaps that’s why he loved to testify, because in the witness stand he was elevated two steps off the ground.

Raglan had received his postmortem report a few weeks earlier and passed a copy to DiPaulo. It was straightforward. Seven stab wounds to various parts of Terrance Wyler’s body. Cause of death—blood loss.

Burns scurried from his seat in the front row, an elf-like creature with a battered brown briefcase under his left arm, and scooted up into the witness stand.

“Dr. Burns,” Raglan said once he was duly sworn and faced her. He always stood, never sat. “I understand you are a pathologist with the Centre of Forensic Sciences here in Toronto and have worked there for twenty-three years.”

“Yes.” Burns reached into his case and pulled out two thick folders. “I’ve done more than two thousand autopsies, testified in court more than four hundred times, for both the defense and the Crown. I’ve also appeared in courts and coroners’ inquests in every province in Canada, the Northwest Territories, twelve American states, and six other countries. I’ve prepared a copy of my curriculum vitae for Her Honor, as well as an extensive list of my publications. More than three hundred, translated into seven languages. I’ve provided copies of all these to the defense, naturally.”

Without being asked Burns passed his thick résumé over to the judge. She recoiled, as if the pages were infected.

“Doctor, if you don’t mind, please give it to me,” Raglan said. This
was typical of Burns. The smartest kid in the classroom, but you had to control him. “I’ll pass it to the registrar, who can mark your resume as exhibits and give it to Her Honor.”

The little man looked at the jury and shook his head, letting them know he thought this was a waste of time.

“The Crown submits that based on his testimony and the materials filed, Dr. Burns should be qualified as an expert in the field of forensic pathology for the purpose of testifying at this trial.” Raglan sat down.

She looked at DiPaulo and noticed a large stack of photocopied papers on his desk that weren’t there moments before. Raglan had assumed that DiPaulo would agree that Burns was qualified. Clearly he had something else in mind.

“Defense counsel, any comments?” Norville didn’t even bother to look up from reading Dr. Burns’s résumé, which the registrar had handed to her. She too thought this was a nonissue.

DiPaulo rose slowly to his feet. He waited until Norville looked up, an expression of surprise on her face.

“You object to the doctor being qualified as an expert witness?” The judge sounded shocked.

“I don’t see this as a rubber stamp, Your Honor,” DiPaulo said. “I have some questions for the good doctor.”

His voice was firm, filled with resolve. Oh, you’re smart, Ted, Raglan thought. Play possum for a few days, and then when you finally start to growl, the jury is all ears.

“Go ahead.” Norville’s curiosity was now piqued.

“Dr. Burns, I’d ask you to turn to your list of publications,” DiPaulo said.

“Gladly.” Burns licked his lips. Relishing the prospect of talking about his favorite topic—himself.

“You testified that you have more than three hundred published works. By my count you’ve got three hundred and seven. Sound correct?”

“If you say so. I have my secretary update the list monthly, and honestly, I don’t bother to count.”

“And you’ve written five books, correct?”

“Five I’m sure is the right number. All still in print, I’m happy to report.”

DiPaulo didn’t even acknowledge Burns’s attempt at bantering. He pressed on.

“I did some calculations. By my estimate you’ve written more than seven thousand pages. Assuming four hundred words per page, you’ve written more than two and a half million words. That sound about right?” Raglan knew that complex numbers were powerful things in court. They had the ring of factual truth about them.

Burns grinned. He was eating it up.

Pride before the fall, Raglan thought. She knew her old mentor was going somewhere with this, and it couldn’t be good.

“Two and a half million words.” Burns smirked. “Never thought of it in those terms. Has a nice ring to it, if I do say so myself.”

“You’ve written articles about gunshot wounds, poisoning, bludgeoning, accidental and intentional falls, asphyxiation, choking, blunt force trauma, drowning, burning. You’ve practically covered the whole gamut, haven’t you?”

Burns’s eyes squinted and his cheeks bulged, making his little face look grotesque. “I like to think so.”

Shit, Raglan thought, seeing where DiPaulo was going with this. “Everything but knife wounds, correct?” DiPaulo was speaking gently now, but his words were as hard as steel.

“Well, perhaps.” Flustered, Burns reached for his stack of papers and began thumbing through his lengthy list of publications. It was the worst possible thing a witness could do, Raglan thought. Far better to admit it.

“You can look for as long as you like, Dr. Burns,” DiPaulo said. “I can assure you, there are no articles about knives or stab wounds.”

“Well, I may not have written a specific article about knife wounds, but I’ve done hundreds of autopsies of stabbing deaths. Testified in court about them many, many times. I consider myself an expert on them.”

“Perhaps we’ll let the judge make that decision,” DiPaulo said.

“Well, yes. Certainly.”

“Two and a half a million words. None about knife wounds. Agreed?”

“I can’t totally agree. I’m sure that I touched upon the topic, at least peripherally, in many of my publications.”

“I’m sure you did.” DiPaulo wasn’t the kind gentleman lawyer anymore. “But never in the title, right?”

“Well—”

“No further questions of this witness.” The way DiPaulo said the word “witness,” it sounded as if the doctor were a total fraud.

Raglan stood up. To try to rehabilitate him, she ran Burns through his résumé and let him go on and on about how many times he’d done autopsies involving knife wounds. He’s dying the death of a thousand cuts, she thought, the way DiPaulo had planned it.

When Raglan was done, Norville looked at both lawyers. “What’s the defense say about the qualifications of Dr. Burns to testify at this trial as an expert witness?” she asked DiPaulo.

“I have no submissions at all,” he said.

Very shrewd, Ted, Raglan thought. Norville would have no choice but to qualify Dr. Burns as an expert, and Raglan was stuck with him.

She looked back at the clock. It was 11:30 Friday morning. The weekend couldn’t come soon enough.

“Dr. Burns.” Ted DiPaulo bounded to his feet the moment Jennifer Raglan sat down. It was three in the afternoon. She’d had Burns on the stand the rest of the morning and for an hour after lunch, going through his autopsy report and the seven knife wounds.

DiPaulo made a point of not looking at the jurors, but he could feel they were on the edge of their seats. They knew from his earlier attack on Burns’s qualifications that he was up to something. His plan was to finish his cross-examination at the end of the day and send them home for the weekend with Dr. Burns foremost in their thoughts.

“There were seven stab wounds, correct?” he asked.

“Yes, I just testified to that,” Burns said.

“You’ve numbered them on your autopsy report and on the blowup you’ve placed on the easel?”

“Standard procedure.”

“May I please see Exhibit Fifteen E?” DiPaulo asked the registrar. He grabbed Burns’s autopsy report and moved swiftly to the witness stand.

“The wounds are numbered one to seven, but these numbers don’t indicate any order in which they were inflicted. Do they?” He shoved the report right under Burns’s nose.

“Correct,” Burns said, hesitant with this answer.

DiPaulo jumped right in. “Let’s be clear, Dr. Burns.” It was important to keep the pace of this cross-examination fast. That way, when DiPaulo backed Burns into a corner and the doctor’s answers slowed down, it would accentuate his uncertainty. “There’s no scientific or medical way to establish which of these knife wounds came first, second, or last. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“And you can’t even be sure if they were all done by the same knife, can you?”

This question took Burns by surprise. “That’s … true”—he stuttered—“but … I would point out that wounds three, four, five, and seven are all puncture wounds with a single-sided knife, so there’s some consistency there.”

“Even wound number one. It’s superficial, but it was probably a one-sided blade. Correct?” DiPaulo wanted the jury to know that he understood the evidence as well, if not better, than the Crown’s so-called expert.

“Yes.” Burns smiled. “I thought to mention that, but I couldn’t be entirely certain.”

DiPaulo gave him a broad smile. “And since you’re under oath in a first-degree murder trial, you want to be absolutely certain about any conclusions you draw for the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.”

“Right.” Burns’s little face lit up.

“Now, time of death—that’s one of those things we see on TV shows as something that can be easily ascertained. But that’s a fiction, isn’t it?” As he spoke, DiPaulo walked back to his counsel table and grabbed a stack of articles. “In fact, Doctor, one of your more than three hundred papers was on this subject.”