Page 18 of The Best Lawyer
“We do,” I said. “It just came through. Her blood was taken at eight a.m. at the hospital under questionable consent.”
“BAC of 0.00,” Eric said. “She’s sober.”
“At eight in the morning she was sober,” I said. “She claims she had a few glasses of wine late evening Thursday. If we go with the theory that her being under the influence helps prove how she could sleep through something like that, I’m not sure if that BAC helps or hurts us.”
“There’s hard math to back up how quickly the alcohol in her system would dissipate hour by hour.”
“She says she had two glasses of wine later the previous evening,” I said. “There was an open bottle of Malbec in her fridge and a dirty wine glass in her sink. That part of her story tracks.”
“And the sleeping pills she said she took from Tom,” Jeanie said. “What do her labs show on that?”
“Zolpidem was present at levels consistent with recent ingestion,” Eric said.
“It wasn’t her prescription,” I said. “She got the pills from Tom’s medicine cabinet. She said they were ten milligrams each and she took two.”
“Had she ever taken them before that night?”
“She says no,” I answered. “She said Tom suggested she try them because she’d been suffering from a bad bout of insomnia for a few nights prior. If she took twenty milligrams, that seems like a lot. Just a quick internet search tells me that’s not usually a dose they’d start someone out with if she had gone to her own doctor first.”
“You asked me to be brutally honest,” Eric said. “I don’t buy it. I’m sorry. Even with mild sedatives and some wine, I have a hard time believing that she could have slept through Tom getting murdered three inches from her.”
“Maybe she’s a deep sleeper even without the meds,” Jeanie said. “There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry. Nothing that could concretely show this was a ruckus or a loud event.”
“Look, we all know the presumption,” I said. “Katy’s innocent until proven guilty. So if …”
“Which is bull,” Eric said. “You know it is. They’ll be instructed on the law. Sure. But if you have a woman who was seen holding the murder weapon over a dead victim and all other things being equal, your risk is they’re going to think the opposite. They’re going to assume Katy’s guilty until you givethem a plausible reason not to. Sleeping through it doesn’t cut it. Not to anybody with half a brain.”
“Their witness didn’t see Katy kill the man,” Jeanie said. “That’s just a fact. You gonna put Katy on the stand?”
“Way too early to decide that,” I said. “Right now, I’d say no. I’m worried about her cracking under cross.”
“They aren’t going to like her,” Eric said. “She’ll be viewed as the villain in their marriage as well as a murderer. She’s a serial cheater. She was engaged to somebody else when she started up with Joe in the first place. Then she cheated on Joe with Tom. Then turned around and cheated on Tom with Joe.”
“Her sexual history isn’t at issue,” I said. “If DePaul tries to introduce that, I’ll block it. Though I can’t predict Castor’s rulings in advance, I’ve tried enough cases in front of him to know he won’t find that funny.”
“It’s an issue as far as establishing the disharmony between them,” Jeanie said. “Eric’s right.”
“Except the prosecutor can get there even without it,” Eric said. He picked up the flash drive containing the digital forensics. That had been the last thing the new prosecutor, Addison Quick, was waiting on before sending me the file.
I wanted to smash the drive with a hammer. Eric turned back to the Guilty board and wrote “Texts” on it. “I’m not the lawyer,” he said. “But if it were me, and I was the prosecutor, I’d put Katy’s friends on the stand first.”
I hadn’t read through everything, but during the time Katy was hooking up with Joe again, she’d sent a series of scathing texts to two of her friends, lamenting the state of her marriage. She said multiple cruel things about Tom that if I couldn’t keep out,Addison Quick would project onto the largest screen he could and park it right in front of the jury.
Eric read the most damning text Katy had sent. “I can’t stand him. I don’t even want to look at his smug face. Mr. Charming. He’s got everybody fooled. I’d like to carve that handsome smile right off of him.”
“Ouch,” Jeanie said.
“Still doesn’t prove murder,” I said. “They were struggling. She won’t be the first wife who complained to her friends about her husband via text.”
“Most of them don’t end up murdering said husband,” Eric said.
I walked over to the Not Guilty board and picked up a blue dry erase marker. I wrote “old texts” on it and tossed the marker on the table.
“That text was sent five months before the murder,” I said. “They patched things up. At least as far as Katy knew.” I’d been given a bigger bombshell in DePaul’s report that I hadn’t even yet told Katy about.
“Can you back that up?” Jeanie asked. “I mean besides Katy’s own story. Do you have any witnesses who might have seen them together more recently? On a date night? Their neighbors?”
“Put that on the homework list,” I said. “I’ve got Katy putting together a timeline for me.”
