I tended to agree. Contradictory stories of that nature often canceled each other out in the minds of the jury.
“Blood? Hair? Fiber?” I asked. “Especially blood. I’d expect to find something on her clothing.”
Larry nodded. “You would, but we didn’t. It was my theory that she changed and dumped the clothes she wore when she killed him.”
“Anything to back that up?” I asked.
“Now we come to the good part,” Larry said, showing some enthusiasm for the first time. “We found fibers on the ax that didn’t match what Zack was wearing. And given the way that ax had been wielded, anything that had been on it before the murder would likely have been shaken off or buried in the body.”
“So they were most likely from the clothing worn by the killer.”
“Correct. Our hair and fiber guy was a whizbang. He looked at the five or ten fibers we had and offered a few suggestions as to what kind of fabric and the color of fabric they could’ve come from. Wanna know what we found?” Larry now had a real smile on his face.
“Nah,” I joked.
“A photograph of Lilah with Zack up in Lake Arrowhead, wearing what? A coat that fit the exact fabric and color description given by our whiz-bang analyst. And where was that coat?” Larry asked.
I had a pretty good guess but shook my head to give him the satisfaction.
“Nowhere. That coat was nowhere to be found.”
“But that wasn’t definitive,” I said, plugging in the language fiber guys always used in their testimony. “The most he could’ve said was that the fibers appeared to be of the type that came from a coat like that or any other coat of a similar-”
“Blah, blah, blah,” Larry interrupted, waving a hand. “Yeah. But there’s more. We had evidence of forced entry at a side door they seldom used. A small-I mean a pin dot-of blood with skin was lodged in the splintered wood. We had just enough for DNA-it came back to her.”
“But she could’ve scraped her hand on that spot before, or even shortly after, the murder-,” I began.
“And that’s what the defense argued,” Larry said. “Except we had a neighbor with a colicky baby who woke her up at two thirty a.m. She was walking the floor, trying to pat the baby to sleep, when she noticed our girl Lilah standing at that side door at about two thirty-five a.m. Looked like Lilah was jiggling the door handle.”
I sat back in my chair. Proof that Lilah had deliberately rigged up evidence of forced entry was pretty powerful stuff. So how the hell?
Larry watched my face and nodded. “Uh-huh. Well, first off, the neighbor went south on me when she took the stand. Said she was sure she saw someone at that door at two thirty-five, she just couldn’t be sure it was Lilah.”
I was perplexed. “What made her flip?”
Larry’s face darkened. “I never could figure that one out. She seemed sure of it during the interview. And when she flipped at trial, I questioned her up one side and down another, but there was nothing to indicate that she’d been bribed or threatened.”
“You don’t think Lilah got to her somehow?” Bailey asked.
Larry shook his head. “We checked the neighbor out. Went back as far as her freshman year in high school. Couldn’t find anything Lilah could’ve used against her, and I didn’t ever believe Lilah would’ve tried to physically threaten her.” He sighed. “Don’t get me wrong, that devil’s spawn wouldn’t have hesitated if she’d thought she could get away with it; but she was smart enough to know better.” Larry fell silent for a moment. “I guess I’ll never know why that neighbor went belly-up.”
Bailey was frowning. “They find blood anywhere else?” she asked.
“There was a small blood transfer on the wall next to the staircase that led up to the bedroom,” he replied. “But not enough to do any kind of typing. We questioned Lilah about it, but she didn’t take the bait. Said she didn’t know how it got there.”
Once again, an indication that Lilah was cool under pressure. Suspects often can’t resist the urge to explain everything in an effort to show how innocent they are, and those explanations can be the best gift the prosecution ever gets. A provably false story shows the defendant’s not only guilty but also a remorseless liar.
“The way it sounds from the cheap seats, even with the neighbor dumping you out, the case wasn’t a slam dunk, but it was there,” I said.
“It was,” Larry agreed. “But the defense had a helluva hole card.” I could hear the anger in his voice. “Six months before Zack’s murder, the Glendale Police Department had been targeted by PEN1, Public Enemy Number One, a skinhead group affiliated with the Aryan Brotherhood. A lieutenant in Glendale had targeted them after they shot one of his officers during a pursuit. The Glendale cops made a lot of busts, mostly for meth, and that really messed up PEN1’s major source of income. So the skins declared war on the Glendale PD. They rigged a zip gun to the gate at the officer parking facility-just missed killing a sergeant. Redirected a gas pipe to shoot toxic fumes into the lunchroom, and then firebombed the evidence room.”
That was big-time…and outrageous. How come I’d never heard a word about it? Bailey looked equally shocked. As much as anything, the fact that we hadn’t gotten wind of this showed just how sprawling this county really was. But, intriguing as it seemed, I didn’t see how this tied into Zack’s murder.
“I get how the murder looked like the kind of overkill meth heads do,” I said. “But I thought you said Zack was a political player, not a big gun out in the field-”
“Yeah. No reason to think he got up in anyone’s face,” Larry confirmed.
“Then why Zack?” I asked, perplexed. “And why in his own home? I mean, it’s one thing to target the police at the station, but breaking into the man’s home and chopping him up in his own basement-”
“Is another,” Larry finished for me. “Which is, of course, what I argued.”
“Did the defense come up with anything to back up the ‘skinhead did it’ story?” Bailey asked.
“Sort of.” Larry sighed. “After they put the lieutenant on to testify about war with the skinheads, prison guards seized a kite between a couple of PEN1 inmates. Of course, the defense waved that puppy around the courtroom like it was their national flag. Which it pretty much was.”
A note between inmates could be pretty compelling evidence.
“What’d it say?” I asked.
“That PEN1 was getting the ‘credit’ for the hit and no asshole Nazi Low Rider better try and claim it-something to that effect. Rick’ll have the actual note if you want to see it.”
“No names mentioned?” Bailey asked.
“Nope,” Larry replied. “And it wasn’t even in code, which you know their stuff almost always is.”
That was significant. The white-supremacist gangs had an elaborate system of secret codes they used for all written communications. It usually took an FBI specialist to crack it. The fact that this note wasn’t coded was some evidence that it was just a couple of jerks bragging, rather than a real admission that PEN1 was behind Zack’s murder.
“And you let the jury know what that meant, I’m sure,” I remarked.
“Oh yeah,” Larry replied.
“Did you ever come up with any affirmative evidence to disprove that theory?” I asked.
“What was I going to do, put a bunch of skinheads on the stand to say they didn’t do it?”
I shook my head. “Probably only make the jury believe it more. Was there evidence connected to the scene that pointed to someone else being in the house besides Lilah?”