“He looks guilty,” Bradley says. “On that tape, he looks guilty.”
“I know he does.” Jason knows it, too.
I crinkle up the empty bag of chips and toss it toward the trash can. The bag unfolds midair and glides to the carpet, wide right. Golf was always my game.
“And the house key?” Bradley says. “I mean, if Jason didn’t say a word to the cops, they’d still be trying to piece together the sequence of events. But Jason told them he came home and found her there dead, and now we’re stuck explaining how she got into a locked house without a damn house key and no sign of forced entry. I mean, am I missing something? Do we have an answer for that stupid house key?”
“I don’t know of any answer,” I concede, feeling sweat dripping down my armpits.
“No. So that’s all I mean. Jason did himself no favors.” He shakes his head. “It was my job to stop him and I didn’t, Shauna.”
“Let’s not relitigate the past,” I say. Bradley has beaten himself up over this countless times. I thought I was done listening to it. It’s the trial, I guess, the public unveiling of the interrogation for the jury, that has brought down a fresh rainfall of remorse on our associate.
“We have our case and we’re going to make it,” I say. “It may not be the greatest, but it’s all we have, and we have to believe it with every fiber of our beings.”
“Right. That’s right.” Bradley gives a presumptive nod and snaps back into trial mode. “You’re right. Jason didn’t kill Alexa, right?” He gives me a playful push. For some reason, he likes to push me.
I busy myself with my notes, fitting them together sequentially and lining up the edges like a schoolgirl would.
“They can’t prove that he did,” I say, more to the point.
41
Jason
“Good afternoon, Detective Cromartie. I’m Shauna Tasker. I represent Jason Kolarich.”
“Counsel.” Cromartie coughs into his fist and eyeballs Shauna.
“Detective, you are familiar with the concept of gunshot residue, or GSR?”
“I am,” he says. “But it doesn’t-”
“It was a simple question, Detective. Are you or aren’t you?”
Cromartie frowns. He also pauses, wondering if either Roger Ogren or Judge Bialek will rise to his defense. But they won’t. Judge Bialek usually likes to give witnesses a little freedom to elaborate on answers-especially because if they have something meaningful to say, they’ll end up saying it, anyway, when the other side gets to ask questions-but Cromartie was going too far with a simple question.
“I am familiar with it,” he says, tucking in his lips, his attention enhanced now. He’ll be more careful next time, a little more reticent to stray too far. Good for Shauna. Cromartie is probably an old-schooler; how he was going to react to questioning by a woman was anyone’s guess. We’re not guessing now.
“Gunshot residue, or GSR, is residue of the combustion components of a firearm after it discharges a bullet, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Basically, when a gun fires, the primer and powder combust and create an explosion.”
“That’s right.”
“And GSR is the residue from that combustion. Residue, dust, particles might be found on the arm or wrist or hand of an individual after they’ve fired a gun. Is that correct?”
“Emphasis on the word might,” Cromartie says. “It might leave residue. It might not.”
“Well, the reason you perform a GSR test is to determine whether an individual has fired a gun recently, correct? That’s why you do the test?”
“Yes, it’s a crude test, but that’s the idea.”
Shauna properly ignores that remark. “On the night of Ms. Himmel’s death, you had Jason’s hands swabbed for GSR at his house, isn’t that true?”
“Yes, I believe we swabbed his hands at some point after we arrived. What Mr. Kolarich did before we arrived is un-”
“You answered my question, Detective. And the results of the GSR test you performed on Jason were negative, correct? No gunshot residue was detected.”
Cromartie, realizing he’s again getting no help from Roger Ogren, stops fighting. “That’s correct.”
“Very good.” Shauna, who hasn’t looked down at her notes once, now reviews them, flips a page. More for a segue than anything else. I’m going to revise my assessment of Cromartie as a witness. He’s fighting unnecessarily with Shauna. All the counterpoints he wanted to make-the GSR test isn’t perfect; I might have washed up, even taken a shower before calling the police to remove any residue from my hands-he will make in redirect with Roger Ogren. To fight with Shauna here has diminished him and highlighted the strength of our position. I would expect more from a veteran cop, and more from Ogren, who probably figured he didn’t need to tell Cromartie these basics, Testifying 101.
“We heard excerpts of your interrogation of my client following the death of Ms. Himmel, didn’t we?”
“We did.”
“This interview took place at four in the morning, correct?”
“Yes.”
“My client hadn’t had any sleep prior to the questioning, correct?”
“Any sleep? No, neither of us had slept.”
“And he was dealing with the loss of a woman with whom he’d shared a romantic history, isn’t that true?”
I like how Shauna phrased that. When she was mock-crossing Cromartie in our office, with me playing Cromartie, I kept nailing her when she said the loss of his girlfriend. Saying it the way she did now-a woman with whom he’d shared a romantic history-sounded innocuous enough but was meaningfully different.
“Dealing with the loss? If killing someone means you’re dealing with the loss, then yeah, I guess he was, y’know, dealing with the loss. It’s kind of like killing your parents and then asking for mercy from the judge because you’re an orphan.”
That line gets some snickers from the gallery, one person laughing outright. The answer jars Shauna to attention. She could object and move to strike the statement, but she doesn’t.
“You don’t know my client killed Alexa Himmel, do you, Detective?”
“It’s what I believe.”
“But you don’t know that for a fact, do you?” She approaches the witness.
“For a fact? I know the evidence strongly-”
“It’s up to these good men and women of the jury to make that decision, isn’t it, Detective?”
He gives an exaggerated sweep of his head. “Of course it is.”
“You don’t get to play accuser and juror, do you, Detective?”
He raises a hand, almost smiling. “Luckily, I do not.”
“The evidence will decide this case, not you. Is that okay with you, Detective?”
“Objection,” Roger Ogren says. “Argumentative.”
“Sustained.” The judge looks over her glasses at Shauna. “We get the point, Ms. Tasker. Let’s move on.”
Shauna, thankfully, doesn’t miss a beat. “My client was sleep-deprived, and a woman with whom he’d been romantically involved for several months had just been found dead in his house. Isn’t that all true, Detective?”
Cromartie starts to answer but pauses, his eyes on the ceiling. “I don’t know about sleep-deprived. It was late, yes. All of us were probably tired.”
“And on top of that,” says Shauna, “my client was under the cloud of a painkiller addiction at the time of the interview, wasn’t he?”
“Oh, objection.” Roger Ogren springs to his feet. “Sidebar, Judge?”
The judge waves him forward. She steps off the bench over to the corner of the courtroom, away from the jury box. The court reporter picks up her stenography machine and joins the attorneys and judge.
I can’t hear them any more than the jury can, but I have a pretty good idea how this conversation is going to go. Shauna and I argued the point, with me playing Roger Ogren, several times over the past week.