"That might explain why it didn't come up in your three-hour testimony. By the way, there was no defense lawyer at the grand jury, was there?"
"No."
"No one to ask you the sort of questions I'm asking now?" Hardy didn't wait for the answer. "No one to challenge your account of what took place?"
"No."
"Would it be fair to say, Sergeant, that you could talk about anything you wanted to the grand jury and no one would hear the other side of the story? Could it be, Sergeant, that you never brought up the incident because Catherine Hanover did not, in fact, extend any such invitation?"
"No. She did."
"She did? Can you recall her exact wording?"
"I don't think so. It was almost a year ago. She asked me if I liked homemade pasta and said her husband wasn't going to be home."
"Ah. Her husband. Since he was the son of the deceased, weren't you interested in his whereabouts?"
"Yes, of course."
"Since you've told the jury that everyone was a suspect at the time, was Will Hanover a potential suspect as well?"
"Yes."
"And did you ask his wife where he was?"
The questions were flying fast now, in a rhythm, and Cuneo answered without any forethought. "Yes."
"And wasn't it this, Sergeant," Hardy continued, "your question about her husband's whereabouts, and not an improper advance, that prompted Catherine's admission that her husband was gone and wouldn't be home for a few more days?"
Suddenly Cuneo straightened up in the witness box. "I took it as an improper advance."
"Obviously you did. Was that because this kind of thing had happened to you before?"
Rosen must have been waiting for his chance to break it up, and this was it. "Objection!" His voice had taken on some heat. "Irrelevant."
But Hardy wasn't going to let this go without a fight. "Not at all, Your Honor," he jumped in. "This jury needs to hear if other female witnesses have found Sergeant Cuneo irresistible."
"Your Honor!" Rosen was frankly booming now, outraged anew. "I object!"
Bam! Bam! Bam! Braun's gavel crashed down again and again. "Counsel! Counsel, come to order! Both of you approach the bench." When they were before her, she fixed them with a frozen gaze. "That's it from both of you. Last warning. Clear?"
It might be clear, but that wasn't the point to Rosen. "Your Honor," he began, "this line of questioning…"
"I heard you, Mr. Rosen. I'm going to sustain your objection and instruct the jury to disregard any innuendo contained in the question. Mr. Hardy, this is my second warning to you in the last ten minutes. There won't be a third. Now we're going to take a short break and let everybody calm down." She looked over the lawyers' heads to the gallery, slammed down her gavel again. "Five-minute recess," she said.
Hardy hated to leave off on the sexual harassment, but he knew he'd be able to come back to it. Meanwhile, he'd soon be talking to eyewitnesses who'd identified Catherine, and the jury needed to understand how Cu-neo's methods in securing those identifications had been flawed. So he walked back to his table and picked up a small manila folder.
It looked like the kind you could get in any office-supply store, but one side had six holes cut in it. Through the holes you could see six color photos, three on top, three on the bottom. Each was a front mug shot-style color likeness of a young woman's face. The women were all brunette, all of a similar age and hairstyle. None wore jewelry, none were smiling or had their mouths open. There was no writing. Nothing distinguished one photo from the others except the facial features of the women depicted. One of the women was Catherine.
"Now, Inspector," he began, "I'd like you to take a look at what I'm about to present to you and describe it for the jury."
Taking the folder in his hand, Cuneo opened it, glanced at the plastic pages inside, then closed it up and faced the jury. "It's a folder used to hold photographs."
"Have you ever used something like this in your work, Inspector?"
"Sure. All the time."
"In fact, this sort of display is used so commonly that it has a nickname, doesn't it?" "We call it a six-pack." "Why is that?"
"Because each page holds six pictures in the slots." "Not just six pictures, Inspector, but six photos as similar as possible to one another, right?"
"Yes."
"Sergeant, in your career as a homicide inspector, in roughly what percentage of your cases have you employed the use of a six-pack to assist you in obtaining identifications?"
Cuneo again looked at Rosen, but this time there was no help. "I don't know exactly," he said.
"Roughly," Hardy repeated. "Fifty percent, sixty percent?"
"Maybe that much, yeah."
"More than that? Eighty percent?"
"Your Honor! The witness says he doesn't know."
But Braun shook her head. "Overruled. Give us an estimate, Inspector."
"All right. Say eight out of ten."
"So a great majority of the time. And a hundred percent of the time when the ID is in doubt, correct?"
"Yes."
"Now, Inspector, can you explain to the jury why, in the great majority of cases, you would use six photographs of similar-looking individuals to positively identify a suspect, as opposed to simply showing the eyewitness a picture of that suspect and asking if it's the same person they saw commit the crime?"
Cuneo hated it and was stalling, trying to frame some kind of response. Hardy jumped him. "It's to be sure the witness can really make an ID, right? That he can pick out the suspect from similar individuals."
"That would be one reason."
"And another would be to protect against the witness feeling pressured by police to agree that the one photograph they're shown is, in fact, the suspect?"
"That might be one reason."
"Can you give us another, Inspector?"
Cuneo rolled his shoulders, crossed his legs. "Not off the top of my head."
"So at least one good reason that the police, and you yourself, commonly use a six-pack is to avoid the witness feeling pressure from police to identify their suspect?"
"I guess so."
"So an eyewitness who identifies a suspect from a six-pack would be more reliable than one who was only shown one picture and asked to verify its identification?"
This time Rosen stood. "Objection. Speculation. Calls for conclusion."
Hardy didn't wait for a ruling. "Let me ask it this way, Inspector. You've had lots of training, including preparation for the examination to become an inspector, that taught you that this is precisely the function of the six-pack, to avoid mistaken identification, right?"
Cuneo hesitated. Hardy pressed on. "That's a yes or no, Inspector. Haven't you had literally hours of classes about the identification of suspects, where you learned that the six-pack is one way to avoid mistaken identification?"
Cuneo ducked. "I've had hours of training on IDs, yeah. I don't recall how many involved six-packs specifically."
Hardy felt the lame answer made his point better than either yes or no, and sailed on. "Inspector Cuneo, at any time in your investigation of Catherine Hanover, did you use a six-pack to assist eyewitnesses in their identifications?"
Cuneo didn't answer. Braun looked down at him. "Inspector?"
"Should I repeat the question?" Hardy asked, all innocence.
This earned him a glare from the judge, who repeated, "Inspector?"
"No, I did not."
Cuneo just couldn't let it go, so he made it worse. "We use this to confirm an ID when the witness doesn't know the person. When you know somebody, we might use a single photo just to be sure that we're talking about the same person. I mean, if you say you saw your cousin, we might show you a photo of your cousin just to be sure we got the right guy." Shoulders twitching, Cuneo tried an evasion. "It's pretty obvious."
"I'm sorry, Inspector. What's obvious? That witnesses can make mistakes, or that you shouldn't coach them to make an identification?"
Rosen was up in a second, objection sustained. Hardy didn't even slow down.