With pliers on one rainy night, she pulled the silver spike from her eyebrow; she had a festering infection for a few weeks. When the eyebrow healed, it was almost as though it had never been pierced. Only one of the two men who became her lovers in East Hampton ever noticed the almost effaced hole. “I had a spike,” she said. It was important to Kathy Schiavoni to tell the truth.
She had worked in the police lab in Smithtown for seven years when she was given the plastic bag tagged with the identification “Richardson sheets.” Normally unfazed by any evidence she was handed for testing, she immediately recognized that the Richardson case was what she had heard described at headquarters as a “big, big one, the biggest ever out here.” None of the several dozen cases she had testified in as an expert had ever received attention from the newspapers. They were anonymous, unremarkable trials. Kathy was a stolid, careful witness. In every case in which she testified, the defendant had been convicted.
In handling the “Richardson sheets,” she didn’t want to be distracted by the visibility of the case, but she was even more careful than usual. She was given several strands of hair from Juan Suarez’s head. She also had a group of ten of his wiry jet-black pubic hairs. There were at least five distinct areas on the luxuriant sheets from the Richardson bedroom that she recognized even before testing them were stained with vaginal fluids and semen: the stains were flaky and off-white.
Working quietly, knowing that Margaret Harding, the assistant district attorney handling the “billionaire murder” case, was waiting impatiently as usual for the results, Kathy spent several days before she made an appointment at Harding’s cluttered office in Riverhead.
When she arrived with her report in a document-sized plastic cover for her appointment at ten, she had to wait for Margaret Harding for a full hour. Harding was a late riser. She was, in Kathy Schiavoni’s eyes, a prima donna, more like a manicured Manhattan woman with a house in the Hamptons than a local working girl. Kathy neither liked nor disliked Margaret Harding. The lawyer had a job to do, and Kathy understood that she did it well, although she was difficult.
Margaret Harding was always late. It was her entitlement. Everyone knew that for the last several months she’d been spending late afternoon and early evening hours at her apartment in Quogue with her boss, Richie Lupo, the Suffolk County District Attorney. Although Richie was the boss, he never tried a case and rarely walked into a courtroom. He often called press conferences. He loved being on camera: with the even, regular features of Mitt Romney, he looked more like a WASP than an Italian. Richie Lupo was married. A Republican who ran on law-and-order, family values advertisements, he had been re-elected three times to four-year terms. He was certain he would never lose an election. He called himself “the DA-for-Life.”
“Kathleen,” Margaret said when she swept into her office at eleven-thirty, knowing that she was the only person in the world who called Kathy anything other than Kathy, “can I get you a cup of coffee?” The bitch, Kathy thought, she isn’t even going to apologize for being late.
“I’ve had six already, Margaret. Thanks.”
“How do you stay so calm with so much coffee?” Margaret sipped her own black coffee from a plastic cup. She grimaced. It was bitter. Even when she grimaced, every fine feature of her face was attractive.
“Beats me,” Kathy answered. She always maintained a terse blandness with Margaret because she knew she could never engage her in that level of quick conversation Margaret had mastered.
Margaret’s cell phone chimed a refrain from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. She snapped the small, shiny instrument open, without hesitation, as if Kathy weren’t even in the room. Whoever was on the other end of the conversation spoke more than Margaret, who was smiling. Although reserved and private herself, Kathy had become an acute observer of people, and she knew it was Richie Lupo, calling to follow up on the evening before or even on the sex they had that morning.
As soon as Margaret flipped the phone closed, Kathy said, “I’ve got the Richardson test results. At least as far as I can go on what I’ve been given.” She slipped a copy of her eight page report, labeled Confidential, out of her valise.
“God,” Margaret said, smiling, “I thought I’d never see this day. Talk to me.”
“Why don’t you read it,” Kathy said. She found it difficult to have a conversation with Margaret Harding, an impatient woman who had a reputation for interrupting the Pope.
“No, talk to me, Kathleen. I can read it later. Give me the skinny.”
“Suarez’s DNA is all over the place. There was even a pubic hair from him wedged in the stitching of the sheets in the Richardsons’ bedroom.”
“Really?” Margaret was excited, as if sharing a racy secret with another woman.
“Yes, really.” Kathy placed the report on the edge of Margaret’s messy desk. How could such a sleek, fastidious woman, Kathy wondered, be such a slob?
“I’ll read this later. Go on, girl.”
Kathy paused. “There were other secretions.”
“Lordy! Quite a busy bed. Maybe Joan Richardson isn’t the corn-fed country girl we see in Town & Country, or Eleanor Roosevelt, or Malala?”
“One of the other semen stains is a near-perfect match for Brad Richardson.”
“My, my, who do you think he was in bed with?”
“It was his bed,” Kathy said, laconically. “He had a right to sleep there, too.”
“God, is she something else. First the gardener and then the hubby, or the hubby and then the gardener, or could it be both at the same time?” Margaret took another sip of coffee. “It’s convenient that way: she wouldn’t have to change the sheets, if it all happened together. A conga line.”
“Actually, and you may enjoy this even more, there is at least one other semen stain that doesn’t match either Brad Richardson or Juan Suarez.”
Margaret leaned forward and lifted the report. “God, how I love this job.”“So who was the third stain? Sounds like a good movie title: The Third Man. The Third Stain.”
“I don’t know whose semen it is. What I need to complete the report are samples from any other men who may have been in the house for the two or three days before the killing.”
“That could be a cast of thousands.”
Kathy recognized that Margaret was trying to be chummy, to have a girl-to-girl conversation. Kathy, stolid and persistent, said, “I’d also like to have a sample of Joan Richardson’s DNA, preferably a vaginal swab.”
“Listen, between us girls, I think Joan is interested in protecting her family jewels from any more exposure.”
“We know,” Kathy said evenly, “that her friend Senator Rawls was around. I’d like a DNA sample for him, too. There’s a mosaic, I think, on these sheets. I want to be thorough.”
And then Margaret surprised Kathy Schiavoni. Margaret said, “I also know that Brad Richardson had special friends. This can get naughty, but it could even be, Kathleen, that the stain from the unknown male was dropped there at the same time as the stain from Brad. I don’t think Senator Rawls was taking care of the wife and the husband at the same time. At least his publicity people have wanted us to believe for a long time that he plays for one team only. You know, that Clint Eastwood style.”