Judge Bingham looked at me, waiting.
“I’m trying to establish a pattern, your honor. In both cases an anonymous caller informed the police where they could find the al-leged killer, and both times it was in the same place. I’m trying to find out who could have had this information about both murders.”
Loescher stretched out her hands. “It’s simply a coincidence. The detective has already established by his testimony that the killer of Calvin Jeffries could not possibly have had anything to do with the murder of Quincy Griswald.” She darted a glance at the jury. “Being dead and all.”
“You’ll address yourself to the court,” Bingham snapped. “Now, Mr. Antonelli,” he went on in his usual tone, “are you about finished with this line of inquiry?”
“Almost, your honor.” I turned back to the witness. “Did Whittaker know anything about the informant?”
Stewart tilted his head, pursed his lips, and shut his eyes into long thin slits. “I don’t know if he did or not. But if he did, he didn’t tell us.”
“When he was arrested and brought in, you assumed he was one of the homeless, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Tell me, Detective Stewart, did you discover before or after you closed the investigation into the murder of Calvin Jeffries that the man who confessed to his killing was a mental patient at the state hospital?”
The courtroom erupted, and for the first time in the trial Bingham had to use his gavel to quiet the crowd. The public had never been told that Jeffries’s killer had been an escaped mental patient.
From the look on Loescher’s face, she had not been told either.
“Whittaker was arrested, confessed, and died, all in the same day,”
Stewart explained when the courtroom became quiet. “We did not know who he was, or what he was, until his fingerprints came back a few days later.”
I went after him as if we were old adversaries instead of recent friends.
“You were in the room when he confessed and you didn’t notice anything strange about him? He struck you as a completely normal, a completely sane individual?”
Even if I had been acting in anger, it would have had no effect: Stewart was unflappable. “There were things about him that didn’t seem normal.”
“Such as?”
“The way he kept repeating the same phrase over and over again when I asked him why he did it. He kept saying, ‘I really can’t say.’
At first I thought he meant he didn’t know, that he couldn’t explain why he had done it. Then, gradually, I began to believe that he knew, but that for some reason he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about it.”
I stood completely still. “That he wasn’t allowed to talk about it?”
Stewart was not going to be led into saying something he did not believe. “That he knew why he had done it, but that he wasn’t going to tell us. Why he wouldn’t tell us is a question I can’t answer. I just don’t know.”
“But it struck you as odd that someone would confess to a murder-tell you he’d done it-but refuse to tell you why?”
“Yes, it struck me as odd,” he agreed.
That was all I would need: the admission by the state’s own witness-the lead investigator in the murder of Calvin Jeffries-that there was something odd, something not quite right about the confession of the killer. It gave me the opening to argue that there was a reason to doubt that the person responsible for Jeffries’s death had ever been found, and that there was a reason to believe that the two murders were connected. Loescher, too smart not to see it too, closed it with a few well-phrased questions on redirect.
“You just testified that Jacob Whittaker confessed to killing Calvin Jeffries, but would not tell you why he did it,” she asked as she rose from her chair.
Stewart nodded. “Yes.”
She stood at the table, resting the fingertips of her left hand on top of it. “Mr. Antonelli asked you if you agreed that this was-I believe the word he used was ‘odd’-correct?”
“Yes.”
She indulged herself in one of those smug little smiles that the smartest girl in class used to have when she knew the answer and, worse yet, knew you did not. “But Mr. Antonelli also asked you if you knew that Jacob Whittaker was a mental patient. In your experience, Detective Stewart, would it be unusual for a mental patient to do things or say things that the rest of us would consider odd?”
“No,” he agreed.
She raised her chin, the smile replaced by a look of earnest conviction. “You were the lead investigator in that case. Just tell us: Do you have any doubt-any doubt whatsoever-that Jacob Whittaker is the person who murdered Judge Jeffries?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, Stewart replied, “No, no doubt at all.”
Turning toward the jury Loescher repeated the question for effect. “No doubt at all?”
Bingham, sitting sideways to the bench, looked up from something he was reading in his lap. “Recross?”
“Detective Stewart,” I said as I got to my feet, “why are you so certain that Jacob Whittaker killed Judge Jeffries? People have been known to confess to things they didn’t do, haven’t they?”
“Yes, but in this case Whittaker knew things about the murder-
details-that weren’t released to the public.”
“What details, Detective Stewart?”
“Judge Jeffries was not just stabbed to death: The killer disemboweled him.”
“Gutted him?”
“Yes.”
“And when Whittaker told you this, his account was both clear and convincing?”
“Yes.”
“He wasn’t ranting, or raving, or doing any of those other ‘odd’
things we tend to associate with lunatics?”
“No, he wasn’t doing any of that.”
“You discovered that Whittaker was a mental patient. Why was he a mental patient? Was he there because of a civil commitment or a criminal commitment?”
“Whittaker had been found incompetent to stand trial for a crime he committed.”
I walked toward the jury box. “And what crime was that, Detective Stewart?” I asked, my head bent down, my hands locked behind my back.
“Murder.”
I could feel it, the inaudible gasp, the tension that gripped the room at the knowledge that the killer of Calvin Jeffries had killed before. I did not look up.
“And who did he murder, Detective Stewart?”
“His father.”
I slowly raised my head. “His father? With a knife?”
“No, he beat him to death with his bare hands.”
“Why did he do it?”
Stewart was leaning forward, his elbows braced on the arms of the witness chair. His head moved from side to side. “There was a long history of abuse. His father was a drunk, and he made a habit of beating up his wife-Whittaker’s mother. Finally, something snapped, I guess, and he literally went out of his mind.”
“So he had a motive?”
“Yes.”
“What motive did he have to kill Jeffries?”
Stewart shook his head and shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Well, did he know Jeffries?”
“No.”
“Was Jeffries the judge who sent him to the state hospital?”
“No.”
“It’s true, isn’t it, Detective Stewart, that you weren’t able to find any connection at all between Whittaker and the man he killed?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“And there was no other obvious motive either, was there?”
“No.”
He looked at me, a quizzical expression on his face.
“It wasn’t a robbery, was it?”
“No.”
“Nothing was taken from Judge Jeffries, was there?”
“No.”
“So it wasn’t a robbery, it wasn’t revenge; he did not even know him and without any motive just decides to lie in wait for him and kill him in a particularly gruesome manner. But, of course, he was a mental patient-insane-and that explains everything, doesn’t it?” I asked rhetorically, glaring across at Cassandra Loescher.