But I remember working an interrogation with him, and he had the suspect so scared that he threw up on Frank’s shoe.
Danilo was dressed today in his Sunday best. He didn’t look comfortable in a shirt and tie. But he did look comfortable on the witness stand. He was the kind of cop juries liked.
I looked over my shoulder at Tori, who was now seated a few rows back next to the man who came in with her, presumably Tom Rangle. I was more interested in what she had to say than what Danilo did, but the judge wasn’t going to give me a break right now, because he’d want to give Wendy Kotowski the chance to complete Danilo’s direct testimony before lunch.
Wendy started with the basics, getting Danilo’s bio before the jury. He’d been a detective first grade for more than seven years now in the robbery-homicide division. He’d investigated over a hundred murders.
Danilo did a chronological tour of the night Kathy Rubinkowski died. The call came in a few minutes after midnight. Danilo and his partner, Ramona Gregus, responded to the shooting of a female DOA. Danilo was the DIC-the detective in charge-who oversaw the handling of the crime scene in every aspect. He and Wendy did an impressive show of how the evidence was collected, but in my opinion they went on too long. I say that because they ultimately didn’t find anything incriminating, so it only highlighted this point. But most jurors these days have watched CSI and expect these kinds of investigatory procedures. In fact, Wendy spent most of the voir dire making the point to the potential jurors that CSI is just fiction-that, in fact, finding fingerprints, for example, is remarkably harder than you’d think from watching TV. Prosecutors around the country face these unfairly high expectations from juries. I feel really bad for them. But that wouldn’t stop me from doing my “ CSI cross,” pointing out all the tremendous resources available to them but the lack of any physical evidence against my client.
By the time Wendy had gone through all of this and chain-of-evidence testimony-establishing that the evidence was collected and stored in proper fashion-the hour of noon had passed. That was okay with Wendy, who wanted to elongate this testimony because Danilo would probably be the last witness. And it was okay with me, for whom the end of the day could not come too soon.
But Judge Nash wanted to keep going, so Wendy didn’t miss a beat.
“The interview with the defendant was conducted by myself and Detective Ramona Gregus,” said Danilo.
“Did you record the interview, Detective?”
“We did.”
“Did you read the defendant his rights?”
Danilo nodded. “I informed him of his right to remain silent and the right to counsel. He indicated he was willing to speak with us.”
“And did he speak with you?”
“Yes.”
Wendy Kotowski retrieved the murder weapon from the evidence table and asked for permission to approach the witness. Most judges have dispensed with that formality but not Bertrand Nash.
“Showing you People’s Number Six,” said Wendy. “Did you show this firearm to the defendant?”
“I did.”
“And what happened next?”
“Without any prompting, he said, ‘That’s my gun.’ He said it twice. ‘That’s my gun.’”
“And after the defendant twice indicated to you that the gun belonged to him,” asked Wendy, following the time-honored tradition of repeating helpful information, “what happened next?”
Danilo said, “I asked him where he got the weapon.”
“Did the defendant respond?”
“No, he didn’t.”
Wendy nodded and reviewed her notes. She obviously wanted to save the confession for last, and wanted to make sure she’d gotten everything else from the witness.
Then she looked up at the judge and said, “Nothing further for this witness.”
Nothing further?
I jerked in my chair, a surge of electricity passing through me. Wendy wasn’t going to ask him about the confession?
I played it out. She had established that Tom claimed the gun as his own, so she would take that-without any statement to the contrary from Tom-to mean that Tom had owned that firearm for some time before the shooting. If left unchallenged, that would kill any argument I had that the weapon was planted, dumped into his lap by a fleeing murderer.
And that, she had decided, was good enough for her.
Because she had figured out my plan.
She knew Tom’s confession was shaky. She knew that a jury would watch the videotape and see Tom squaring off against an imaginary foe, shouting orders to “drop the weapon” and bursting into tears. She knew it would give me an opening to introduce my PTSD argument and Tom’s military history.
So she wasn’t going to argue that Tom confessed. She was going to take his claimed ownership of the gun as enough.
It had never occurred to me that a prosecutor with a confession on tape wouldn’t use it. When she didn’t mention the confession in her opening statement, I thought she was just holding back. I hadn’t realized what she was doing.
Wendy Kotowski had outsmarted me.
Judge Nash banged his gavel. “The court will recess until one-thirty,” he said.
I looked at Shauna. Her expression showed that she had worked through the same calculations. “Smart move,” she whispered to me.
I looked over my shoulder past Aunt Deidre to Tori, who nodded eagerly. I nodded back.
And hoped she had something really good.
77
At a quarter to two, I rose to begin my cross-examination.
“Detective,” I said, “upon arresting and booking Tom Stoller on the early morning of January fourteenth, you didn’t find any of Kathy Rubinkowski’s blood on his hands, did you?”
“We didn’t, no.”
“You didn’t find any of her blood on Tom’s shirt, did you?”
“No.”
“Or on his shoes?”
“Correct, we did not.”
“You searched the area where Tom lived, so to speak. Where he slept. At the southwest corner of Franzen Park. And you didn’t find any of Kathy Rubinkowski’s blood among his possessions, either, did you?”
“Correct.” He was answering matter-of-factly, as if these were not significant facts. He was a well-trained witness.
“Gunshot residue,” I said. “GSR. That’s residue of the combustion components of a firearm after it’s fired, right?”
“That’s right.”
“When a gun fires, it creates an explosion-combustion of the primer and powder.”
“True enough.”
“Gunshot residue is the residue of the combustion. Little particles, or residue, can be found on the arm or wrist or body of an individual after they’ve fired a gun, right?”
“It can be, sometimes. Not always.”
A good answer. He was going to say that on redirect, anyway. “You tested Tom Stoller for the presence of gunshot residue, didn’t you?”
“Yes, and we didn’t find any.”
