“I could be way off base on this,” Brad hedged.
“Mr. Miller, I respect people who think outside the box. You can get A’s on law school exams by having a good memory, but you can’t ace a real case without exercising a little creativity. So let’s have it. The worst thing that will happen is that you’ll be wrong.” Kineer smiled. “If you are I promise it will not go on your permanent record. And if you’re right-and Agent Evans thinks you may be-then you’ll have saved us all from looking like fools.”
“Okay. We know that President Farrington couldn’t have personally killed Charlotte Walsh.”
“Agreed,” Kineer said.
“Well, Mr. Hawkins couldn’t have done it either. It takes about forty-five minutes to go from the Theodore Roosevelt Hotel to the Dulles Towne Center mall, about an hour to go from the mall to the safe house, and roughly an hour to go from the hotel to the CIA safe house. The picture in the New York Times proves that Hawkins was still at the hotel at nine-thirty-seven.
“We know that Charlotte Walsh was dropped off at the mall around eleven and the Secret Service logged Hawkins in at the farm at eleven-fifteen. If Hawkins got to the mall around ten-thirty and waited to kill Walsh at eleven, there’s no way he could have gotten to the safe house at eleven-fifteen. If he went from the hotel to the farm and arrived at eleven-fifteen, there’s no way he could have killed Walsh after she returned to her car.”
“We’ve already worked that out,” the judge said, “but it’s encouraging to see that you know enough about the case to come to the same conclusion.”
“Okay, well, Hawkins has men who are willing to commit murder for him. He sent them to Dana’s apartment, Marsha Erickson’s house, the hospital, and the motel in West Virginia. So Hawkins could still be guilty of Walsh’s murder as an aider and abettor. But there’s a problem with this theory. The earliest Hawkins could have learned about the location of Walsh’s car in the mall was eight, when Cutler phoned in her report, but there’s no record of anyone phoning to retrieve voice messages from any spot in the Theodore Roosevelt Hotel that’s connected to Hawkins until the call that was made from the suite adjoining the first lady’s suite around nine-forty-five. If Hawkins didn’t learn the location of Walsh’s car until then, he would have had to find Tierney and organize the hit fast enough to get Tierney to the mall before eleven. I guess that’s possible, but it would be hard.
“Also, Tierney denies that he or any of his team killed Walsh. He could be lying, but seeing that he’s already admitted to several murders it wouldn’t make much sense to deny killing Walsh.”
“We’re with you so far, Brad,” Kineer said.
“Once I realized that President Farrington and Hawkins couldn’t have murdered Walsh personally and it was improbable that men working for Hawkins or the president had committed the murder I started to wonder if everyone wasn’t approaching the case from the wrong direction. We’ve been assuming that Rhonda Pulaski, Laurie Erickson, and Charlotte Walsh were murdered because they were a threat to Christopher Farrington’s political career, but they all have something else in common. Farrington was cheating on his wife with each of them, and that gave Claire Farrington one of the oldest motives in the book to kill them. When that thought occurred to me I remembered something I’d read in Laurie Erickson’s autopsy report.
“According to the medical examiner, Erickson was almost decapitated when Clarence Little hacked away at every inch of her neck with a sharp object, tearing the skin to ribbons. The report also said that Little had sliced off several body parts after Erickson was dead. The only point about which the medical examiner had any question was the discovery of a subdural hemorrhage over the brainstem for which he could find no source.
“I asked a doctor in Portland about the subdural hemorrhage. He said that sticking a sharp object into the base of the back of the neck between the skull and the first cervical vertebra would sever the spinal cord and cause instant death without much bleeding. If the medical examiner didn’t remove the brain, the only evidence of the cause of death would be a subdural hemorrhage.
“The ME in Oregon was sloppy and had his pathology assistant remove the brain. That’s why he didn’t look at the injury in situ. He couldn’t see the entry wound for the sharp object because the neck had been hacked to pieces, and he didn’t find a source for the subdural hemorrhage because he was so certain that Little murdered Erickson that he didn’t pay attention to the spinal cord injury.
“I asked Agent Evans about the Walsh autopsy report. He told me that there were a large number of slashing wounds all around the neck, which is similar to what was done to Laurie Erickson’s neck. He also told me about a difference between the way Walsh was assaulted and the assaults on the other Ripper victims. The other victims were mutilated before they died, but most of Walsh’s wounds were postmortem.
“Now, here’s the crucial piece of information from Walsh’s autopsy: she died because a sharp instrument was thrust into the base of the back of her neck between the skull and the first cervical vertebra, just as in the Erickson case. This severed Walsh’s spinal cord and caused instant death but hardly any bleeding. The doctor who conducted the Walsh autopsy found the wound when he took out the brain.
“I asked the doctor in Portland if a scalpel could have been used to kill Laurie Erickson. He said it would do the trick. Claire Farrington is a medical doctor. She’d have a scalpel and would know how to use it to kill someone in the manner in which Erickson and Walsh died. Dr. Claire Farrington had the means and motive to kill both women.”
“Didn’t Mr. Hawkins see Erickson alive when Dr. Farrington was at the library fund-raiser?” Kineer asked.
“We only have Hawkins’s word that Erickson was alive when he saw her. What if Dr. Farrington dosed her son so he would sleep all night then killed Laurie just before she left for the library, wrapped her in bedsheets, and dropped her down the laundry chute? At the fund-raiser, she tells Hawkins what she’s done. Hawkins rushes back to the governor’s mansion on the pretext of retrieving his notes, gets rid of the body, and makes the murder look like the work of Clarence Little.”
“Why would Hawkins do that?” Kineer asked.
“Three reasons. One, he’s been in love with Dr. Farrington since college; two, he’s fanatically loyal to the Farringtons; and three”-Brad paused-“he’d done it before.
“Judge, I have no evidence to prove this-not one iota of proof-but the police never figured out who killed Rhonda Pulaski. What if Claire Farrington ran her down and told Charles Hawkins? What if Hawkins sanitized the hit-and-run car to protect Claire then got rid of the chauffeur?”
“That’s an interesting idea, but, as you just said, there’s no evidence to support your theory. Hawkins is taking full responsibility for the Pulaski and Houston murders.”
“True, but President Farrington wouldn’t have had the money to pay off the Pulaski family to keep them from going to the authorities after they learned that he was sexually involved with their daughter. He’d have had to turn to his wife, who was from a wealthy family. If he did, you can bet that Dr. Farrington knew what was going on.”
“You can’t get an indictment with guesses so why don’t we move on to Charlotte Walsh. Assuming you’re right about Dr. Farrington killing Laurie Erickson, how did she murder Charlotte Walsh when she was asleep in her suite at the Theodore Roosevelt?”
“Agent Evans told me that Claire Farrington went into her suite around ten and left a little after one. No one checked on her during that time. Dr. Farrington asked Hawkins to reserve adjoining suites. What if she suspected that her husband was having an affair with Charlotte Walsh? Maybe someone saw them together in Chicago. She could have been the person who asked Dale Perry to hire someone to follow Walsh and report to her.”