Page 102 of One of Us Is Guilty

‘You don’t know me,’ I said.

‘I want to know you. I want to know every inch of you.’

A wave hit me, and I almost lost my footing, but he grabbed me and held me, and kissed me.

And right then everything I thought I knew fell away. I was lost in that sea, and I cried. At least I think I did. It was hard to tell. All I knew was that he was strong, and full of life, and powerful and rich and he held me tight against those waves.

There was very little chance someone could drown when this man was beside them.

‘I’m scared,’ I said.

‘Don’t be afraid. I’ve got you. Nothing will happen to you when you’re with me.’

‘I’m not a great swimmer. Didn’t someone, a girl, drown on this beach?’

He stared at me, cold, dead eyes boring into mine.

‘I never heard anything about that. You’re fine.’

He kissed me, and we held each other in the waves.

He’d lied.

And I knew then, for sure and beyond any doubt in my mind.

This man had murdered my half-sister.

41

Eddie

‘The People call Dr. Morrow,’ said Riley.

Medical examiners all have that same kind of look.

Dr. Morrow was a young man in a somber suit with a somber expression on his face. He made his way to the witness stand and took the Bible, repeated the oath. He had superbly clean hands and thick white fingers, like sticks of chalk. That same pallor spread over his face. It was always the same with those who work with the dead. Perhaps it was because they spent hours in basement morgues with no sunlight, or maybe they took on the color of the bodies who were the subject of their work. I don’t know which, but I’d never met a coroner or a medical examiner with a tan.

‘Dr. Morrow, you examined the body of Molly Green. Correct?’

Riley’s assistant DA had a laptop open in front of him, about to cycle through a series of photographs of the victim’s body, and the horrific way that she had been mutilated. Part of this was to generate the evidence that was required, through Morrow’s testimony, to prove how the victim died, but there were parts of that chain that were missing. Maybe Riley would ask Morrow to stretch the truth, to get a win. I would have to wait and see. The other reason to call him to testify was to shock the jury. To show them the visceral effects of murder. This wasn’t Hollywood. This wasn’t a TV showor a movie. This was real life, and murder was nasty and disturbing and violently real.

Part of it would lean toward tapping into the jury’s emotions. Breaking their hearts. Scarring their minds.

As my mind ruminated on all of this, that last thought stuck there for a second, like a spinning wheel.

Emotion.

Riley’s weak point with a jury.

The easiest way for a prosecutor to access the raw emotional anger of a jury toward the perpetrator of a crime was to make the victim a real person, and not just a photograph.

I opened my trial bundle, found the DA’s list of potential witnesses. Not all of them would be called, and the list ran to seventy-four names. Way more than would ever be used in this case. That’s an old prosecutor’s trick. Flood the defense with a huge witness list. Let them waste time chasing down irrelevant people, interviewing them, investigating them, burning through the defendant’s cash reserves on billable hours and distracting from the real work, the relevant witnesses, the prime issues in the case.

Very few of the witnesses would fulfill an essential element in the DA’s case of making an emotional connection between the jury and the deceased victim. The prosecution’s motive was that the only way to make a jury grieve for a victim is to show them someone else’s grief. There were some of her work colleagues on the list, people from Patrick’s campaign team, but none of her friends and, more importantly, none of her family. No one who would really grieve her loss.

Riley began settling Dr. Morrow as a witness, running through a series of questions on his qualifications and experience to establish him as an expert and to impress upon the jury that whatever this man said was fact. I turned to Harry, whispered so our client wouldn’t hear.

‘It’s just hit me – there’s no one from the victim’s family on the DA’s witness list. Just work colleagues.’