The Fifth Witness - Michael Connelly [26]
I had to be careful about soliciting information that would constrain me this early in the case. I knew this was a contradiction. My mission was to know all I could and yet there were things I didn’t want to know right now. Sometimes knowing things limits you. Not knowing them gives you more latitude in crafting a defense.
Aronson was staring at me, obviously wondering why I wasn’t asking the follow-up question. I just gave her a quick head shake. I would explain my reasons to her later—one more lesson they didn’t teach her in law school.
I stood up.
“Lisa, I think that’s enough for today. You’ve given us a lot of information and we’ll go to work on it. I’ll have my driver take you home now.”
Seven
She was fourteen years old and still liked to eat pancakes for dinner. My daughter and I had a booth at the Du-par’s in Studio City. Our Wednesday night ritual. I picked her up from her mother’s and we stopped for pancakes on the way back to my place. She did her homework and I did my casework. It was my most treasured routine.
The official custody arrangement was that I had Hayley every Wednesday night and then every other weekend. We alternated Christmases and Thanksgivings and I also had her for two weeks in the summer. But that was just the official arrangement. Things had been going well over the past year and often the three of us did things together. On Christmas we had dinner as a family. Sometimes my ex-wife even joined us for pancakes. And that was worth treasuring, too.
But on this night it was just Hayley and me. My casework involved my review of the protocol from the autopsy of Mitchell Bondurant. It included photos of the procedure as well as the body where it was found in the bank’s garage. So I was leaning back in the booth and trying to make sure neither Hayley nor anybody else in the restaurant saw the gruesome images. They wouldn’t go well with pancakes.
Meantime, Hayley was doing her science homework, studying changes in matter and the elements of combustion.
Cisco had been right. The autopsy concluded that Bondurant had died from brain hemorrhaging caused by multiple points of blunt-force trauma to the head.
Three points exactly. The protocol contained a line drawing of the top of the victim’s head. Three points of impact were delineated on the crown in a grouping so tight that all three could have been covered with a teacup.
Seeing this drawing got me excited. I flipped to the front page of the protocol where the body being examined was described. Mitchell Bondurant was described as six foot one and 180 pounds. I did not have Lisa Trammel’s dimensions handy so I called the number of the cell phone Cisco had dropped off to her that morning—since her own phone had been seized by the police. It was always a priority to make sure a client could be contacted at any time.
“Lisa, it’s Mickey. Real quick, how tall are you?”
“What? Mickey, I’m in the middle of dinner with—”
“Just tell me how tall you are and I’ll let you go. Don’t lie. What’s it say on your driver’s license?”
“Um, five three, I think.”
“Is that accurate?”
“Yes. What is—”
“Okay, that’s all I needed. You can go back to dinner. Have a good night.”
“What—”
I hung up and wrote her height on the legal pad I had on the table. Next to it I wrote Bondurant’s height. The exciting point was that he had ten inches on his suspected killer and yet the impacts that punctured his skull and killed him were delivered to the crown of his head. This raised what I called a question of physics. The kind of question a jury can puzzle over and decide for themselves. The kind of question a good defense attorney can make something with. This was if-the-glove-doesn’t-fit-you-must-acquit stuff. The question here was, how did diminutive Lisa Trammel hit six-foot-one Mitchell Bondurant on the top of the head?
Of course, the answer depended on the dimensions of the weapon as well as a few other things, such as the victim’s position. If he was on the ground when attacked then none of this would matter. But