Rosen had the clothing in the courtroom, separated into three plastic bags. After Cuneo had identified each of them, Rosen had them entered as the next People's Exhibits after the gun, the casings, one of the bullet slugs they'd recovered-they'd now gotten to numbers 5, 6 and 7. Then he came back to his witness. "And what did you do with these items?"
"Delivered them to the police lab to look for gunshot residue, bloodstains or gasoline."
"And was the lab successful in this search?"
"Partially," Cuneo said. "There were traces of gasoline on the pants and the shoes."
"Gasoline. Thank you." Rosen didn't pause, but walked back to his table, picked up a small book and crossed back to the witness box.
Hardy knew what was coming next-the diary. He really hated anew Catherine's insistence that Heather be excused from testifying. It might have caused her some temporary pain, true, but on the other hand, Hardy could have made Rosen look especially heartless and perhaps even nasty, forcing the poor girl to testify against her own mother. Jury sympathy for Catherine and her daughter would have flowed.
But there was nothing for all that now. It was going to play out. "Sergeant," Rosen continued in a neutral tone. "Do you recognize this item?"
Cuneo examined it briefly, flipped it open, closed it back up. "I do."
"And would you please tell the jury what it is?"
"Sure. This is Heather Hanover's diary. Heather is the defendant's youngest daughter."
While Rosen had the diary marked as People's 8, the gallery came sharply alive with the realization that this was the defendant's own daughter's diary. Part of the people's case?
"Inspector," Rosen asked, "when did you first see this diary?"
"The Monday after the fire. I was by now considering the defendant my chief suspect, and I obtained a second search warrant for documents in her house."
"What kind of documents?"
"I wanted to look at her financial records especially, but also downloads on the computers, telephone bills, credit card receipts, even Post-its with shopping lists. Anything written, which of course included diaries like this one, that could verify or refute her alibi for the day of the murders. The defendant had said her children were away. We wanted to check records to substantiate that."
"And what did you learn from this diary? Heather's diary?"
Cuneo turned his head slightly and brought his testimony directly to the jury. "Heather unexpectedly decided to come home after school and was home all that afternoon and night."
"And what had the defendant told you?"
"She told me that she came home after her afternoon talk with Paul Hanover and had stayed there all night until she'd seen the news of the fire on television."
"Inspector," Rosen said, "would you please read from the relevant portion of Heather Hanover's diary on the day that her grandfather was killed?"
Hardy stole a rapid glance at the jury. Every person on it seemed to be sitting forward in anticipation. As he'd known it would be, this was a damning moment for his defense; and doubly so now that he had just ascertained to his own satisfaction that Will Hanover had in fact been having an affair with his secretary. If he could at least demonstrate the truth of that assertion, it might lend credence to Catherine's actions on the night of the fire, even if she had originally lied about them. As it was, though, he only had Catherine's lie, no corroboration of the affair, and her own daughter's handwritten refutation.
Cuneo had opened the little book and now cleared his throat. "… for some reason Mom wanted us all out for the night and told us to stay out and get a pizza or something. But the homework this week is awesome- two tests tomorrow!!-so I told Saul to just drop me off here so I could study. Had to scrounge food since Mom was gone again which is, like, getting to be the norm lately."
Cuneo paused, got a nod from the prosecutor and closed the book.
"And did you later talk to the defendant's daughter about the entry?" Rosen asked.
"I did."
"And what did she tell you?"
"She said she was home alone that night. Her mother was not home." Cuneo skipped a beat and added, gratuitously, "The defendant had lied to us."
Hardy didn't bother to object.
22
Cuneo's testimony took up most of the afternoon, and Braun asked Hardy if he would prefer to adjourn for the day rather than begin his cross-examination and have to pick up tomorrow where he'd left off today after only a few questions. Like everything else about a trial, there were pros and cons to the decision. Should he take his first opportunity-right now-to attack the facts and impressions of Cuneo's testimony so that the jury wouldn't go home and get to sleep on it? Or would it be better to subject the inspector to an uninterrupted cross-examination that might wear him down and get him back to his usual nervous self again? In the end, and partly because he got the sense that Braun would be happier if he chose to adjourn, and he wanted to make the judge happy, Hardy chose the latter.
So it was only a few minutes past four when he and Catherine got to the holding cell behind the courtroom.
They both sat on the concrete bench, Hardy hunched over with his head down, elbows on his knees.
"What are you thinking?" she asked.
"I'm thinking that I wish you'd have gone home after you talked to your father-in-law."
"I know."
He looked sideways at her. "So how did you hear about the fire?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, if you weren't home, watching the news on television, and you weren't, what made you go back to
Paul's?"
The question stopped her cold. "I don't know. I must have heard it on the radio. Maybe I had the radio on… "
"Must have!" Hardy suddenly was sitting up straight and snapped out the words. "Maybe you had the radio on! What kind of shit is that?"
"It's not…"
"You went to the fire, Catherine. You were there, talking to Becker and Cuneo. What made you decide to go there?"
"I… I'm not sure. I mean, I knew about it, of course. You can hear something and not remember exactly where you've heard it, can't you? I was parked outside Karyn's for I don't know how long that night; then I drove all the way out to Will's office, and nobody was there that late, and after that I was just driving around, not knowing where to go. I'm sure the radio was on then, in the car. I must have had it on, and when they announced the fire…" She ran out of words.
"You told both of the inspectors and me that you heard about it on television."
"I did. I mean I remember…"
"You remember what? What you told them? Or what really happened?"
"No, both. Dismas"-she ventured to touch his arm- "don't be this way."
He pulled away from her, got to his feet. "I'm not being any way, Catherine."
"Yes, but you're scaring me."
"I'm scaring you? I must tell you, you're scaring me." He sat down again and lowered his voice. "Maybe you don't understand, but we're looking at something like five hours between when you left Paul's the first time and when you came back for the fire. You've told me all this time that you went to Karyn's house and sat outside and waited and waited for her to come home, just hoping that she'd come home, which meant she wasn't with Will. Now I'm hearing you drove out to God knows where, maybe-maybe, I love that-with the radio on… Jesus
Christ!"
Standing again, turning away from her, he walked over to the bars of the cell and grabbed and held on to them. It took a minute, but finally he got himself under control, came back and sat beside his client. "You know, Catherine, a lot of this-everything we've been through together on this, it's all felt like the right thing because I've taken so much of what you are, who you are, as a matter of faith. You're the first woman I ever loved and I don't want to believe, and have never been able to believe, that you're capable of what you're charged with here."