‘Excuse me, Dr Strout,’ Pullios said. ‘Distasteful as this is, would you please be more precise as to the location of this first wound?’
The drawl became more pronounced. ‘Well, if we don’t want to get into Latin, Counselor, the pubic area is relatively precise. It’s the area covered by pubic hair above the genitals.’
‘In other words, within an inch or so of the penis?’
Hardy saw where she was going. If a man were eliminating his sexual rival…
‘Objection. Leading the witness.’
Pullios quickly said she’d rephrase. ‘Can you tell us the location of this first wound in relation to Mr Nash’s penis?’
‘It entered just about at the base of the penis, slightly high and to the right.’
Some of the men on the jury seemed to wince.
‘Any more about this wound?’
Strout went into some detail about the bullet’s passage through Nash’s body, nicking the ilium, depositing some chips of bone in the greatest gluteal muscle before exiting through it. He went on, at Pullios’s careful prodding, to make the point that this wound had in all probability been the first one.
‘And why do you say that, doctor?’
Strout recrossed his legs. ‘Well, the second shot was fatal, almost immediately. It went right through the heart, struck a rib and ricocheted up into the left lung. Now, unless Mr Nash stood a while on his feet after he was dead, we can assume he fell within about a second of being shot. And if he was on the ground, the bullet through his pubic area would have been lodged in the deck, not on the side under the railing, which was, I believe, where it was found.’
Hardy objected, citing relevance, but he knew the testimony was relevant to what Pullios was doing, which was planting in every juror’s mind a vivid picture of the actions of a jealous and jilted suitor. First he would shoot his victim in the crotch. Then he would aim for the heart, killing him after he’d maimed him as a man.
Chomorro overruled Hardy, but Pullios didn’t pursue it. She graciously thanked Dr Strout and told him she had no further questions.
So the dike was already leaking where he’d foreseen no damage. He had to try and put his finger in.
‘Dr Strout,’ he began. These.25-caliber bullets that produced the wounds in Owen Nash. For the jury, can you describe their impact as opposed to different sized slugs?‘
Strout, no less relaxed than he’d been with Pullios, sat back in the chair. He looked directly at the jury and answered in his pleasant twang. ‘Well, they’re in the lower-end range according to size for handguns. The smallest is a.22 and it’s slightly larger – the diameter is slightly larger than that.’
‘Thank you. Now was there anything you could determine from your autopsy about the load in the bullet itself? The amount of powder in the casing?’
Strout got thoughtful. This was the kind of question he liked. ‘Judging from the fact that the second bullet didn’t make an exit wound, it could not have been a particularly heavy load.’
‘About average, you’d say?’
‘Yes, about average.’
‘So, Dr Strout, what we’ve got here is a small bullet with about an average powder load hitting a full-grown man. Would the impact of that bullet necessarily throw the man backward, even if it hit him squarely in the chest?’
‘Objection, Your Honor. That’s not Dr Strout’s area of expertise.’
‘What’s the point, Mr Hardy?’
‘Ms Pullios went to some length to bring out Dr Strout’s belief that the first shot was to Mr Nash’s pubic area.’
Chomorro chewed on it a second, then overruled Pullios.
‘Dr Strout. Is it possible that a man, even if hit in the heart by a bullet of this size, with this sort of charge behind it, could remain standing for half a second, particularly if he were moving toward the gun when the bullet was fired?’
‘Yes, I’d say so.’
‘And would that be enough time for his assailant to get off another shot with an automatic such as the murder weapon?’
‘Half a second? I’d say it’s possible.’
‘That’s all. Thank you, Doctor.’
‘What bothers me is I didn’t even see it coming.’
‘You did fine,’ Fowler said. ‘I doubt it’s relevant anyway. Who cares where the first shot went?’
They were taking a ten-minute recess, still sitting at the defense table. Hardy explained what he thought was the connection and Fowler doodled on a pad for a moment. Then he said, ‘Look, Diz. It doesn’t tie directly to me, therefore it’s not relevant. It’s speculation, conjecture, call it what you will, but keep me right in the center of this picture or we are in trouble.’
‘You were in the center of that, Andy.’
Fowler, showing displeasure for one of the first times, shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the murderer was.’
After Strout, they heard from a ballistics specialist who identified the murder weapon as a Beretta model 950, a single-action semiautomatic that held eight rounds of.25 ACP. The gun, registered to May Shinn, was introduced as Peoples Exhibit 1, and Hardy could tell the jury was surprised by the size of it – it was very small, with a barrel only two and one-half inches long.
The bullet that had passed through Nash’s body had been found imbedded in the side paneling of the boat behind the wheel. There was a fifteen-minute slide show on the similarities of the striations on the recovered slugs with others fired from the same gun. When the lights came up, so did a few heads that had been nodding. Pullios was explaining the obvious – how this testimony conclusively proved that Exhibit 1, May Shinn’s gun, was the murder weapon.
Big deal, Hardy thought, and chose not to cross-examine.
The fingerprint specialist was a young black woman named Anita Wells. She testified that there were two sets of identifiable fingerprints on the gun – those of May Shinn, the registered owner, and of the defendant, Andy Fowler.
Hardy had badly wanted to get the May Shinn fiasco introduced into the record, and he knew Pullios had no choice but to let him if she wanted to get Fowler’s prints in, which she had to do. It was, he was sure, why she had called Wells on day one.
When Pullios had finished a cursory interrogation. Hardy went to the center of the courtroom. ‘Ms Wells,’ he asked, ‘have you had occasion to test People’s Exhibit One for fingerprints more than once?’
Wells looked up at the judge, then at Pullios. She nodded, and the judge told her to speak up, answer with words. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘And when did you first see this gun?’
The witness thought a minute. ‘Around the beginning of July.’
‘And at that time, when you tested it for fingerprints, can you tell the jury what you found?’
Pullios stood up and objected. ‘Asked and answered, Your Honor.’
Hardy shook his head. ‘I’ll rephrase it. The first time you looked, did you identify the defendant’s fingerprints?’
Wells swallowed. ‘No.’
‘Did you identify any fingerprints at that time?’
‘Yes. May Shinn’s.’
‘May Shinn. The registered owner of the gun. And where were Ms Shinn’s prints?’
‘There were several clear impressions, on the barrel and the grip.’
‘All right. Now after you identified Ms Shinn’s fingerprints, what did you do?’
‘Well, first I verified the comparison – they were what I was looking for.’
‘So, in other words, you went looking for May Shinn’s fingerprints? Isn’t that true?’
‘Yes.’
‘And after the case against Ms Shinn got thrown out, you went looking for Andy Fowler’s fingerprints, and you found them, isn’t that true?’
Pullios objected, but Hardy didn’t want to let this one go. ‘Your Honor, when the case against Mr Fowler gets dropped, does the prosecution plan to go looking for other prints at that time? The defendant’s fingerprints on this gun are critical to the case against him. The jury can’t know too much about how they were identified.’