Millie motioned to a low black leather and walnut seating area in the far corner. “Come, sit.”
“This is so nice,” I said as we made our way across the room.
There were huge windows on one side, with decent peek-a-boo views of the East River. The half-dozen desks, artfully arranged, were occupied only by men, presumably other investigators, all but one talking on the phone. At the back there were three large private offices, glass-fronted, but each with a door.
“We’re making a decent go of it here,” Millie said, looking around with a satisfied nod as we sat on the couches. “Don’t have an actual lab of our own yet, so we have to outsource the testing—print analyses, blood typing. But someday, I’m hoping. Vinnie makes the initial strategic assessment, figures out the right tests, the approach, while I run down witnesses and other investigative leads. Vinnie also has the connections at the medical examiner’s office.”
“Yeah, Vinnie has the connections,” he grumbled, taking a seat on the couch farthest away. “And he likes to get paid for using them.”
“Vinnie,” Millie snapped. “Stop with the money. She’s going to pay, for Christ’s sake.”
“She’d better.”
Millie rolled her eyes. “I explained to him that we couldn’t wait for a retainer, given that time is of the essence and your client is locked up at Rikers.” She shot a scathing look Vinnie’s way and then turned back to me. “We got burned a couple times when we first started. In Vinnie’s defense, it was on my say-so each time.”
“I can get Zach’s accountant to wire money today,” I said, turning to Vinnie. “I need to call him, anyway.”
He nodded, though he looked unconvinced. “Well, from what I hear frommycontacts at the ME, this is a blood case, no doubt.”
“That could be good news, right?” I asked tentatively. “At least they’re planning to rely on actual evidence. And blood evidence has got to be more reliable than eyewitnesses, or something, right?”
I was wading into unfamiliar waters now. Fraud cases were data and document cases. They didn’t involve blood, sometimes not even eyewitnesses. They were all about numbers, emails, invoices, and accounting ledgers. Over the years, I’d intentionally avoided learning much about violent crime scene forensics. But here I was. No more looking away. I’d have no choice but to suck it up and educate myself.
“Fuck, no. Blood spatter analysis is completely unreliable,” Vinnie grumbled. “In New York City, at least the people doing the analysishavesomeactual training. A lot of places send some regular old cops to a six-hour seminar before they get to start pretending they got the lead onCSI Fucking Fresno. Regardless, blood spatter in and of itself is more art than science, always.”
“That sounds bad,” I said. Sweat was trickling down my lower back. This was all getting to be too much.
“Look at this case—there’s so much blood spatter, in so many different variations. They can use it to prove anything they want. For sure, the DA will get some lab tech to walk the jury through every step of this crime like he watched it happen. Meanwhile, he might as well be reading his own fucking palm. In a case like this, I could find you three different blood guys who’d come to three totally different conclusions about the sequence of events on that staircase. That would say to me that they shouldn’t be using blood spatter, period, in a case like this. But I’m not the prosecutor, so fuck me.”
That sounded very, very bad. Hadn’t Millie said there was good news?
“And you heard all this from the medical examiner’s office?” I asked.
Vinnie nodded. “Apparently they’ve got the golf club with our guy’s prints on it, and rumor is the victim’s injuries are ‘consistent with’ a golf club, but there’s too much damage to get an exact match. My guess is all of that sounded a lot more definitive in front of the grand jury. That’s easy to do with no cross. For sure, they’ll spend hours crowing about their bullshit ‘airtight blood spatter’ at trial. And we’ll do the best we can to knock it down. But you ask me: we shouldn’t have to.”
We. Our guy.I tried to focus on the way Vinnie had said that, and not the rest of it. It was a relief to share the burden of Zach’s awfulness with somebody—if only for a second and somewhat begrudgingly. Vinnie was certainly right about the way grand juries worked, though. With no defense attorney present to point out the holes, testimony ended up being entirely one-sided. Witnesses weren’t encouraged to outright lie—after all, if they testified at trial, they could be confronted then by the defense—but there was an ocean of distance between a lieand a carefully asked series of questions.
“Which is why it was good that you called me over to the house,” Millie said, trying to strike a more optimistic tone. “The prints are gonna help.”
“You found something?”
“Yeah, a fuckload of prints,” Vinnie said, holding up a folder and eyeing Millie. “That we already fronted a shitload of cash to get some rushed comparison results on.”
“It’s nothing conclusive.” Millie tugged the folder out of Vinnie’s hands and handed it to me. Inside were twenty pages of item numbers, percentage ratings, and descriptive language. It was all completely indecipherable. “But we did run comparisons between some prints in key locations.”
“I’m sorry …,” I began. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Here.” Vinnie flipped to a page toward the back of the stack. “See this? We found two sets of prints on the golf bag, Zach’s and an unknown.”
“Amanda’s?”
Vinnie shook his head. “We had a control set from Zach and the victim. The other prints on the golf bag aren’t hers.”
But there had to be countless innocuous explanations for prints on the golf bag—housekeepers, movers, caddies, valets. Any number of people could have had a legitimate reason to touch it.
“Who do they belong to?”
Vinnie scowled. “How the fuck should I know?”
