you learn that the third person on the premises is a fellow law enforcement official, you immediately conclude she is a mere witness and not a suspect, correct?”
A good question on cross-examination must be answered yes or no. And if the cross-examiner is really sharp, the question asks whether the witness has stopped beating his wife. If Racklin answered yes and admitted that he immediately concluded Jo Jo was free of suspicion, H.T. made his point: It was a hasty call by the cops. If Racklin answered no, then he knew the next question would be: When did you conclude she wasn’t a suspect? And on and on.
“ I’ve been doing this a while, and I concluded she was not a suspect. I considered her a witness. She seemed credible and-”
“ She seemed credible! I suppose Jeffrey Dahmer seemed like a good prom date.”
“ Objection!” Now McBain was on his feet. “Counsel keeps arguing with the witness.”
“ I withdraw the question,” Patterson said, graciously.
“ What question?” McBain muttered under his breath.
Ramrod straight, pulling himself up to his full five feet six inches, cowboy boots included, H. T. Patterson strutted to the clerk’s table and picked up the report compiled by the crime scene technicians.
“ Now, Detective Racklin, you have testified that Mr. Cimarron died of a nail wound to the head…”
“ No, I didn’t. I said I observed a head wound. I believe the deputy medical examiner will testify as to cause of death. That’s how we do it up here.”
Oooh. Racklin was no dummy. He was telling the jury to keep an eye on this slick-talking stranger.
“ Yes, thank you so much for that clarification. Did you observe any nails other than the one you described as having been embedded in the saddle?”
“ I believe the technicians came up with some in the corncrib. It’s in their report. You’ll have to ask them.”
“ I see.” Patterson came back to the defense table and was thumbing through his notes. You like to conclude cross-examination with a bang, but H.T. seemed to be out of bullets, or nails, as the case may be. Just then, one of Charlie Riggs’s old lectures popped into my head. Something about the four manners of death. Natural, accidental, homicide, and suicide. I wrote a single word with a question mark on a yellow pad and slipped it to Patterson.
My bantam rooster of a lawyer nodded and turned his attention to the witness stand. “Detective, when did you conclude the death was a homicide?”
“ Upon being shown the body by Deputy Dobson who responded to the call.”
“ Prior to taking Ms. Baroso’s statement.”
He thought about it a moment. “Actually, Deputy Dobson was telling me what the lady said, as he led me to the body.”
“ So you knew Ms. Baroso’s version of events even as you looked upon the body for the first time?”
“ That’s what I just said, yes.”
“ And you concluded it was a homicide.”
Racklin smiled a crooked smile. “It didn’t look like a heart attack or a fall down the stairs.”
“ Or a suicide?”
That stopped him a second.
“ Did it look like a suicide?” Patterson asked. “Yes or no?”
A perfect question. It’s fun to watch someone good at his work, whether it’s Marino finding the open receiver or Perlman plucking the right string.
“ No, not exactly,” Racklin said quietly.
“ So you never contemplated the possibility of suicide?”
Another problem for the detective. If he did contemplate the possibility, when and why did he rule it out? If he didn’t contemplate it, why not?
Racklin tried to hedge his bets. “Not in any great detail,” he answered, but the look on his face said he’d never even considered it.
“ In what detail did you contemplate the possibility?”
“ I can’t recall.”
“ Isn’t it true you never considered the possibility of suicide?”
“ I can’t recall spending time considering it. Like I said, it didn’t look much like a suicide.”
“ Did you fail to consider the possibility because it didn’t look like a suicide or because you immediately accepted Ms. Baroso’s version of events?”
Racklin’s pause said he was trying to figure out the ramifications of each possible answer. “Both, I suppose.”
“ But you have testified previously that the wound initially appeared to have been caused by a gunshot fired at point-blank range, correct?”
“ Yes.”
“ You have witnessed many such wounds, have you not?”
“ Some.”
“ Some? Let’s see, in your years as a homicide detective, first in Denver and then here, how many such gunshot wounds have you investigated, confining ourselves to those gunshots fired at point-blank range into the temple or ear?”
“ I m not sure.”
“ Five, fifty, a hundred, a thousand?”
“ I’m not sure. More than five, less than fifty. Say nine or ten.”
“ And in those dozen gunshot wounds, how many were homicides and how many were suicides?”
He paused and gave the impression of honestly trying to remember. “One was Russian roulette. I suppose that was an accident. Maybe two were gang killings. The rest were suicides, as I recall.”
“ But you never considered that possibility here because you immediately accepted as true Josefina Baroso’s version of events, isn’t that correct?”
Trapped. He’d already said it. Not that we could prove Cimarron killed himself. But there were two living people in that barn, and it damn sure helps a reasonable doubt case if the cops were too quick to grab one of them.
“ Yes, that’s right,” the detective said, just wanting to end the agony.
H. T. Patterson told the judge he had nothing further and gave the witness back to the prosecutor, who didn’t want him. Judge Witherspoon allowed as how it seemed like a good time for lunch, and no one disagreed.
By the middle of the afternoon, half the jury was dozing or looked as if they wanted to. Two crime scene technicians and a lab worker identified little bags filled with odds and ends, none of which you’d want in your refrigerator. The blood, skin, bone, and brain matter belonged to K. C. Cimarron. Fingerprints on the stud gun were smudged, and the handle may have been wiped with a cloth, but there were still latents on the barrel identified as belonging to Cimarron and me. A partial of a third person’s print was picked up there, too.
“ Do you have any idea who this final fingerprint comes from?” McBain asked on direct examination.
The prints guy, a bookworm type with a laboratory pallor, looked at the jury as he was doubtless instructed and said, right on cue. “All I can say is that it isn’t from Mr. Cimarron, Mr. Lassiter…” He paused for effect, “or Miss Baroso.”
McBain smiled at Patterson, and just in case anybody missed the point, he repeated it. “Not Ms. Baroso’s prints?”
“ No, sir.”
The other technician, a dark-haired woman in her thirties, testified about picking up the stud gun and delivering it to a Douglas Clifton who would perform certain tests on it. This was just chain-of-custody material, so the gun could be admitted into evidence. When she picked up the gun from the barn floor, or in her words, when she “secured the apparent weapon,” there was no nail in the barrel, but there was a plastic clip with nine. 27- caliber bullets remaining in the gun.
The nail pulled from the saddle was three inches long, made of carbon steel, and fit perfectly into the gun.
