Quincy Griswald, whose eyes had so often filled with anger, and whose mouth had so often been twisted with rage, had a look on his face of puzzled innocence, as if he could not understand why anyone would want to bring him harm. I looked at that picture a long time before I gave it back to the clerk. All the years that had left their mark on his deep-lined features seemed at the moment of death to have faded away, and all the disappointments of his life vanished with them. He looked almost young again.
The next morning, Loescher called the coroner, who described the cause of death, and then called Detective Kevin Crowley, who had been in charge of the investigation. I was becoming more and more impressed with the way Loescher did her job.
Each witness was called in a perfectly calculated, completely logical sequence, their testimony part of a story told according to a strict chronology. She would ask the same question three different ways if it was the only way to make the details clear. And she wanted more than to describe it to the jurors. She wanted them to know what it was like to discover someone you knew stabbed to death; she wanted them to know what it was like for the victim in that instant when he knew he was about to die.
Wearing a dark brown dress and flat shoes, she stood in front of the jury, patient and attentive, listening as Detective Crowley reported how the police had apprehended the suspected killer.
“He had the knife in his hand when you found him?”
Short and stocky, with small quick-moving eyes, Crowley was a little too eager to answer. “Yes,” he said before she had quite finished.
“I’m sorry,” she said without any apparent irritation. “What was your answer?”
This time he waited. “Yes.”
“What did you do with the knife after you removed it from the defendant’s possession?”
“I put it inside a plastic bag, sealed it, and tagged it.”
Loescher had gone to the table in front of the clerk, where she picked up a large clear plastic bag containing a kitchen knife with a black wooden handle and a six-inch blade. She handed it to the witness.
“Is this the bag?”
“Yes.”
“And is that the tag you mentioned?”
He held it up and examined it closely. “Yes, that’s my mark.”
“What did you do with it then?”
“I placed it in the evidence room at police headquarters and then had it sent to the police crime lab.”
“And what was the reason it was sent to the crime lab?”
“To examine it for fingerprints and to have it examined for DNA evidence.”
“We’ll have testimony later about the fingerprints that were found on the weapon as well as the results of the DNA testing,”
Loescher remarked as she returned to her place next to the jury box. “But let me ask you, Detective Crowley, what further steps were taken in the investigation after you learned whose fingerprints were on the handle and whose blood was on the blade?”
He glanced at the plastic bag and the knife inside it. “We closed the investigation,” he said, looking up.
Loescher cast a meaningful glance at the jury, and then, turning back to the witness, said, “Thank you, Detective Crowley. No further questions.”
“When you began the investigation,” I asked as I rose from my chair at the start of cross-examination, “were you not struck by the similarities between the murder of Quincy Griswald and the murder of Calvin Jeffries?”
“I wasn’t involved in the Jeffries investigation.”
I stared hard at him. “That wasn’t my question, detective. And, by the way,” I added almost as an aside, “if you weren’t involved in that investigation, you were the only police officer in the state who wasn’t. Let me repeat: When you began this investigation weren’t you struck by the similarities between the two murders?”
“There were some similarities,” he allowed. He sat forward, spread his legs, and rested his hands on his knees. As I began to pace back and forth in front of the counsel table, he followed me with his eyes.
“They were both circuit court judges, correct?”
“Yes.”
“They were both killed near their cars in the structure where they both parked?”
“Yes.”
“They were both stabbed to death?”
“Yes.”
“Then tell me, Detective Crowley, as the lead investigator in this case, what investigation did the police make into the possible connection between the two murders? Let me be even more specific.” I stopped pacing and raised my head. “What effort was made to determine whether there was anyone-perhaps someone they had both sentenced to prison-who might have had a motive to want both of them dead?”
“The Jeffries case had already been solved. There was no connection. There could not have been.”
“In other words,” I asked impatiently, “you couldn’t conduct an investigation into that possibility because you assumed it didn’t exist?”
“Objection,” Loescher interjected before he could answer.
“That’s an assertion, not a question.”
Bingham considered it. “Perhaps you could rephrase the question, Mr. Antonelli.”
“You testified a moment ago that you weren’t involved in the Jeffries investigation, correct?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So your knowledge of it-your knowledge of what really happened-is at best secondhand, correct?”
“I suppose,” he replied, watching me with sullen eyes.
I turned until I was facing the jury and the witness was on my right. “There’s another similarity, isn’t there? In both cases the police were told where to find the person who supposedly committed the crime. Isn’t that true, Detective Crowley?”
“We were given information from an outside source-yes.”
I kept looking at the jury. A thin smile flashed across my mouth.
” ‘An outside source.’ You mean an anonymous phone call, don’t you, Detective Crowley?”
“Yes, we received a call.”
“An anonymous call,” I said as I turned to face him. “An anonymous call in which the caller in both instances sought to disguise his voice, isn’t that true?”
He tried to turn it back on me. “The caller wanted to remain anonymous.”
I ignored it. “And don’t you think it a little strange that both times-in these two cases in which you assume there was no connection between the murders-the police were told they could find the killer in the very same place, a homeless camp under the Morrison Street Bridge?”
He jumped at it. “You forget: The killer in the first case confessed and then killed himself. He couldn’t have had anything to do with the second case, could he?”
With a bored expression, I shook my head and dismissed it with a cursory wave of my hand. “Move to strike, your honor.
The answer is nonresponsive. Besides that,” I added with a glance at Loescher, “it’s nothing but hearsay.”
Bingham instructed the jury to pretend they had never heard what they were not very likely to forget. With no more questions to ask, I sat down and waited for Loescher to call the next witness for the prosecution.
With a drooping gray mustache and disheveled gray hair, Rudolph Blensley looked more like an aging professor of mathematics than he did a police detective. Loescher first established his credentials as a fingerprint expert and then asked him whose fingerprints he had found on the knife that had been taken from the defendant.
“The only fingerprints found on the weapon,” he replied,
“matched the fingerprints of the defendant, John Smith.”
Blensley was suffering from a cold, and his words came out muffled and garbled. When Loescher sat down, he removed a large white handkerchief from his side coat pocket and blew his nose. He put the handkerchief in his pocket and with the back of his hand tried to wipe his red, runny eyes.
“Would you like some water?” I asked. We had been in court together before, and he had always answered my questions in the same straightforward manner he answered those asked by the prosecution. “Summer colds are the worst,” I remarked while he took a drink.