“I’m going to answer that,” Fisk said. She checked to make sure the camera was no longer recording, then said to Lucas: “Fuck you.”
Lucas pulled back: he was looking into snake eyes that were far harder than his.
—
The following week,after some experimentation, Gray brought his own cameraman to the balcony, and rolled five old Chuckit!s, recovered from the dog beds and the bushes around the yard, down the roof. He didn’t roll them straight down, but diagonally, letting them bounce off the extended side of the balcony. They had to make three trials, fifteen balls, to get two to stick in the gutter.
“They’re moving slower because they’re partially deflated and chewed up, which of course they would be, after your husband bounced them off the back wall for months,” Gray told Fisk. “If there were a situation where the dogs had fun recovering the balls in the backyard, then running them up here to roll them down the roof again, eventually some would probably catch in the gutter.”
Fisk lied easily: “We did that all the time. It was one of the dog’s favorite games. They might have been rolling them down over several days, and we didn’t notice they’d stuck in the gutter.”
“Really,” Gray said.
—
After Gray andFisk had to disclose the video as part of discovery, Roller went back to Fisk’s house with used Chuckit! balls and made a video that suggested the dogs couldn’t simply roll the balls to hit the side of the balcony—they would have to spit the balls at theside, to defeat the force of gravity enough to get them to roll diagonally.
He also presented the balls to the two dogs. The dogs happily grabbed them and ran off through the house. Brought back repeatedly, and given the balls, the dogs never attempted to roll them under the lower balcony rail.
—
Fisk made avaluable but serendipitous contribution to the defense, as the result of going to her dentist. There was a wait, and she picked up an olderNew Yorkermagazine that had a long story about a British nurse convicted of killing seven neonatal babies with a variety of injections. The main evidence against the nurse was her presence at the time the babies died—a statistical cluster of deaths matched to her work shifts. (The defense claimed the cluster was artificially constructed by the prosecution.)
She showed the article to Gray and said, “I did some research. There are all kinds of random, unexpected clusters that don’t seem to make any sense. Crimes, diseases, all kinds of stuff. If you have a big enough sample, the clusters not only occur, they’re inevitable. There are probably thousands or even tens of thousands of people in the United States who have been close to death clusters as big as the one Roller is trying to hang on me. They’re unusual, but they occur all the time—and the key thing is, they’re inevitable.”
Gray read the article and said, “We need a statistician. One who speaks English instead of mathematics. If we can get the judge to throw out the cluster of deaths around you and all we have to worry about is Doris Grandfelt…That would be excellent.”
“I think we can do that,” Fisk said.
—
In the midstof the maneuvering around the upcoming trial, Virgil married Frankie. Lucas was best man, and Moses gave away his mother. Weather cried, as did Virgil’s mother for the fourth time. By mid-November, the new stable was up. Frankie thought it looked quite handsome.
Despite the reconstruction of the stable, and continuing work with Roller on the Grandfelt case, Virgil finished the novel, spent a week agonizing over the question of whether it was good enough, and sent it off to New York. His editor accepted it two days later and his agent started pushing on the new contract. He asked her if it would be large enough to quit cop work, and she said, “Oh, yeah.”
—
In the end,the prosecution and defense disclosed information and witnesses each planned to use in the trial. Virgil, Lucas, and Duncan met with Roller on a cold winter day before Christmas to review it. The trial was set for late January.
“Fuckin’ Chuckit!s,” Lucas said.
“I think the jury is more likely to believe our videos than theirs,” Roller said.
“Are you even going to be able to get Carlson’s death up there?” Lucas asked. “All this bullshit about clusters…”
“I know the judge fairly well. He’s a smart guy,” Roller said. “I think he’ll let us put up all the deaths, but he’ll allow Gray to put up his math guy to talk about clusters and explain how they can happen. Then we’ll put our guy up there to explain how clusters oftendopoint to a single cause. Not always, but frequently. The jury will have to sort it out.”
“You think Earl will put her on the witness stand?”
“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Roller said. “She doesn’t appear to have any emotional range at all. If you asked her whether she was molested, if you ask her if she pushed Carlson off the balcony, I doubt that she’d break down and cry. From what Virgil says, and what the people who know her say, I’m not sure she’s capable of that. But if she did…that’s sort of a gusher of sympathy for her. Down in the dungeon, getting raped while her mother lets it happen? Seeing her husband fall to his death? But if she can’t do that, if she can’t cry, if she lapses back into her stone-eyed-killer act…that would work for us. So, I don’t know. Maybe she’s sitting up at night, practicing her best weeping hysterics act.”
“Getting raped and killing the rapist is one thing, but doing what was done to Don Schmidt, that’s a whole different thing,” Virgil said.
“It is,” Roller agreed. “The photography in the Grandfelt and Schmidt and Wise murders is going to be important. If the judge lets the jury see it, they’ll want to punish someone. Gray will challenge it as unnecessarily prejudicial—I don’t know what the judge will do. He might ban the pictures but allow detailed forensic testimony, which is not the same. Not the same impact. We’ll have to see what he does.”
“What about the biker guy?” Virgil asked. “Rufus Bends?”
“Turns out he’s a Christian biker, and was, before the murder. In fact, his whole gang was Christian, you know, they supposedly turn the other cheek,” Roller said. “He denies doing anything about Schmidt, which is good for us. His daughter was molested, but not raped. She’ll testify to that, that Schmidt kissed her and put his hands all over her, skin-to-skin, including the vaginal area, but she says there was no penetration. There was mutual masturbation, no oral sex. Bends took her to a doctor at the time, and the doctor agrees thatthere was at least no deep penetration. But: the key thing is, she shows that Schmidt was a predator and a pederast, which may convince a jury that he messed with Fisk, as her father believes. There’s your motive for his murder and mutilation.”
