Kathy smiled faintly. “I need to get back to the lab, Margaret. How long do you think it will take to get a subpoena to get some hairs from Rawls so that we can compare them to the other stains?”
Suddenly Margaret looked petulant. She sat back in her chair and touched her cell phone as if preparing to make a call. “Kathleen, that’s our job. We do the mosaics. We pull all of the evidence together, not just DNA. Your job is to give me the pieces; mine is to do the mosaic. I’ll have to talk to Menachem. And to Richie, of course. And to Halsey. We can’t just go out and get a judge to issue a search warrant to cut the pubic hair of a former U.S. Senator and a bereaved billionaire widow. But you don’t need to worry about that, Kathleen. We’ll deal with it.”
“But I do need to worry about a complete report, Margaret. That’s my job.”
“I’ll read your report. Maybe you’re short-changing yourself. Maybe it’s complete just as it is. I’ll let you know.”
It was only when Kathy walked through the bright mid-autumn air of the parking lot toward her Mazda that she realized how the odor of perfume-which she had loved as a teenager when she took bottles of inexpensive perfumes from her mother and sprayed herself but now never used-disturbed her. There was an odor, very faint, of perfume that enveloped Margaret Harding and permeated her office. Kathy, who no longer noticed the stench of blood and flesh, had an almost physical revulsion to the scent; it made her throat constrict. But soon the clear snapping air took away all traces of the perfume that had settled on her own clothes while she was in Margaret’s office.
17.
After so many years in public life, Hank Rawls couldn’t remember when he felt as uncomfortable as he did now. As Menachem Oz pretended to glance at some yellow notepaper, Hank on the witness stand shifted his nervous gaze from this homely man whose yarmulke somehow stayed in place on his bald head to the three rows of people who sat behind Oz. The faces of these twenty-three people, all white, all members of the Grand Jury, most in their fifties and sixties, were focused on the witness. Hank Rawls, himself a performer, knew that this poorly dressed lawyer was simply pausing for effect to let the last series of questions and answers resonate with the intent people behind him. I’m sweating, Hank Rawls thought in that long drawn-out pause, like fucking Richard Milhous Nixon. No matter how he tried to compose and settle himself, he couldn’t make the sweating stop. He could only hope that his weathered blond skin made it undetectable.
There was a nasal intonation in Menachem Oz’s voice. “Let me ask you this, Mr. Rawls. You told us you couldn’t remember how many times you saw Ms. Richardson in the month before her husband was killed, is that right?”
“I really can’t, Mr. Oz. That was two or three months ago, wasn’t it?”
Menachim Oz didn’t answer questions, he asked them. “And you can’t even give us an estimate, correct?”
“I just don’t remember, Mr. Oz. I don’t want to guess. My new book had just come out. I was traveling a lot. I told you that I can give you copies of my diary for those weeks. They show where I traveled.”
“We’ll get to those, Mr. Rawls. But what I want now is simply your best recollection.”
“Of what?”
“The number of times you saw Joan Richardson during those four or five weeks.”
“The weeks before Brad died?”
“Those weeks, Mr. Rawls.”
“Three times, four times, maybe six.”
“Did she travel with you?”
“During those weeks before her husband died?”
“Those weeks.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why absolutely, Mr. Rawls? Didn’t she travel with you to Paris just a week ago? You remember that, don’t you?”
That riveted Hank Rawls’s attention. How the hell would Menachem Oz know that? Hank toyed with the idea of asking for a recess so that he could leave the room and talk to his lawyer, Josephine Hart, in the hallway where she had been waiting just outside the locked Grand Jury room. He knew that Josephine, a black woman in her mid thirties and a former federal prosecutor, would tell him that there was nothing she or he could do and that he had to go back into the room alone and answer anything and everything that Menachem Oz asked him or risk being taken in front of any available judge to be threatened with contempt for refusing to answer a question. “The only way you can refuse to respond to a question,” Josephine had said in her languorous Southern accent, “is if you take the Fifth Amendment. You probably don’t want to take the Fifth.”
“Look, Mr. Oz, I know I didn’t travel with Mrs. Richardson in the four or five weeks before her husband died.”
“But you did travel with her before that period, correct?”
“I said that, Mr. Oz, a few minutes ago.”
“And after he died, isn’t that right?”
“Right.”
“To Paris, correct?”
“To Paris.”
Suddenly, as if on some cue, a woman in a black sweater and expensive black slacks entered the room. He assumed she was the lawyer whose name Joan had mentioned several times as “that Harding bitch.” The jurors obviously knew her: they continued to stare at him, not at Margaret Harding.
Without skipping a beat or glancing at Margaret, Menachem Oz asked, “Now you told us before our break that you were with Joan Richardson on the night Detective Halsey called her, correct?”
Hank shook his head as if to say an exasperated yes.
“Remember, Mr. Rawls, you have to answer with words.”
“Yes. The answer is yes. I said that already.”
“And you were with her during all that day, correct?”
“That’s right.”
Suddenly there was, Hank Rawls sensed, an even more rapt attention among the people in the room; a few of them whispered. And Margaret Harding leaned forward, anticipating something.
Joan Richardson, he now fully realized, had lied to these people about almost everything.
“Were you in her apartment that day?”
Hank took a sip of water from a steadily deteriorating paper cup. “I was.”
“From when to when?”
“Late morning to the time we left for a party.”
“How many hours?”
“Five, six, seven, I’m not certain.”
“Was anyone in the apartment with you?”
“No.”
“Did you make any cell phone calls in those hours?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Did she?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did you use a computer?”
“No.”
“Did she?”
“I didn’t see that happen, Mr. Oz.”
“Do you have a BlackBerry or iPhone?”
“Of course. An iPhone. I couldn’t communicate with my five-year-old granddaughter unless I had one.”
Menachem Oz didn’t smile. “Did Mrs. Richardson use your iPhone during the day?”
“Mr. Oz, we weren’t there to make calls or send emails or text messages.”
“What did you do during those hours?”
“What do you think we did? Use your imagination.”
“What did you do during those hours?”
“Had sex. I made lunch for us. Then more sex.”
“How often?”
“Come on, Mr. Oz.”
“How often?”
“Five or six times. The miracle of Viagra.”
Even Menachem Oz smiled as some of the people in the Grand Jury laughed. “Did the two of you talk about Brad Richardson that day?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“When did you find out that Brad Richardson was dead?”
“That night, at the party in the museum.”