and according to the police all of those coins are missing.”
“I didn’t take them,” she says.
“I know.” Harry is starting to believe her. It’s the problem of there being almost too much evidence, when all the ducks line up too neatly.
“Both Pike and the maid were stabbed with a knife from the kitchen downstairs,” he says. “The police found it. There were no fingerprints on the weapon. Whoever used it washed and dried it, then left it on the sink. There was just a single tiny spot of blood near the handle. What they call a trace. The blood matched that of the maid.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“The police are assuming that whoever killed Emerson fled down the stairs and ran into the maid. They may not have wanted to kill her, but they panicked. They had to kill her in order to escape.”
“What does this have to do with me? I didn’t go out that way. I went out through the garage, down the back stairs. I had to use the remote control from Emerson’s car to open the gate.”
“And how do we prove that?” says Harry.
“My fingerprints. They must be on the door to the garage,” she says.
“Unfortunately, your prints are all over the house,” says Harry. “You lived there for several weeks. Even if we found your prints on the back door, there’s no way to prove when they were placed there. It could have been that night, or it could have been two weeks earlier.”
You can see the hope as it dies in Katia’s eyes. Then another spark: “The remote,” she says. “The one for the gate out in front. I threw it into some bushes off the road. We can find it,” she says. “It will prove that I went to the garage, into the car.”
“Even if we could find it, all that proves is that you left by the gate,” says Harry. Harry knows, as I do, that the state’s theory of events following the murders will be highly malleable, sufficiently pliable to embrace a number of different avenues of escape. They will have already identified several problems with the evidence. Not only was the murder weapon, the knife from the kitchen, cleaned and lying on the counter for the world to find, but no fingerprints were found on the front door, just smears of blood around the doorknob. This is in fact not uncommon at bloody crime scenes. In a frantic headlong escape a clear, readable print is more often the exception rather than the rule.
And it gets worse. Emerson Pike’s body was found with two major wounds, one in the back that was by all accounts fatal, causing shock and massive bleeding. The second wound is the problem. Harry tries to explain this to Katia, who seems dazed by the details, all of which seem to drift in a vicious circle ultimately coming back to point at her.
“The second wound,” says Harry, “was postmortem, inflicted, done after Pike was already dead. The police are saying this second wound was the result of anger on the part of the killer.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“They have to explain to the jury why anyone would bother to stab a person who is already dead,” I tell her.
“It’s sick,” she says. “A person who would do that es loco, crazy.”
“We can hope but I don’t think the DA will go quite that far,” says Harry. “They might go as far as angry, maybe mad as hell, but crazy is one we’d have to prove ourselves. What is more likely is that their shrink is going to say the killer was trying to send a message to the dead by leaving one of Pike’s expensive toys sticking out of his chest.”
Harry gives her a moment. He stands there watching her, waiting to see, if given this mental image, she might suddenly crack and come clean.
She shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. “
“A psychiatrist,” I tell her.
“Ah.”
“Head doctor,” says Harry. “You understand that the police will put one on the stand to testify?”
“I see. Yes.”
“Well. He may tell the jury that in his opinion the second wound was intended as an angry message to Emerson Pike after he was dead that he had too much money. That perhaps he wasn’t sharing enough of it with his killer.”
She sits there, eyebrows furrowed and a puzzled expression. If Harry is touching any sensitive nerves, you wouldn’t know it.
“There is nothing you want to tell us?” says Harry.
She shakes her head, looks at me.
“Okay.” Harry expels a big sigh. “The weapon the police found sticking out of Emerson Pike’s chest was a very expensive dagger,” says Harry. “Word is, he used it as a letter opener.”
With this Katia’s face lights up like a lantern. “Yes, I remember it,” she says. “It was on his desk.”
“Is that where it was the last time you saw it?” I ask. “On the desk?”
“Yes.” But as she says this, a dark expression crosses her face.
“The police found a set of latent fingerprints on the dagger’s handle,” says Harry. “Guess who they belong to?”
“No. No. No-no.” Frantic eyes, Katia looking first at Harry, then back to me. “No.” As if by saying it enough times she can make the dagger and the prints vanish. For several seconds she seems to struggle for breath. One hand to her stomach, as if Harry’s words have squeezed every ounce of air from her lungs, like a bellows.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Please. I can esplain.” She reaches out and touches Harry’s arm. He steps back, away from the chair. “You misunderstand. Listen to me, please.”
In thirty years of practicing law, Harry has heard it all, so why not? “Go ahead.”
“Es true, I picked it up. I would have told you. I forgot.”
“The dagger?” says Harry.
“Yes. But it’s not what you think. I picked it up to put it on top of the note. I told you about it, remember? I wrote to Emerson that night, a short note, telling him I took the coins and not to follow me.”
“Yes.”
“I left the note on Emerson’s desk, in the study. I picked up the dagger. It was on the desk. I put it on top of the note to hold it there. So he would find the note, that’s all.”
“A paperweight.”
“Yes.” She nearly jumps out of her skin, pointing at me as I say the words.
“Essactly,” she says. “I used it to make a paperweight. Do you understand? That’s how my fingerprints got on it. Don’t you see?” She looks at me and then back to Harry with pleading eyes. “You do believe me, don’t you?”
Harry thinks about it for a moment. He fixes her with a long and uncomfortable stare, and then glances over the top of his glasses at me. “What do you think?” He’s asking me.
Before I can answer, Harry does it himself. “A paperweight for a nonexistent note, one you say you left at the scene, but the cops never found.” He gives her one of his sardonic smiles. “Do you have any idea what the police would have done if you told them that the day they arrested you?”
Katia swallows hard. “No.” From her expression, if Harry told her “summary execution” she would believe it.
“They’d still be laughing,” he says. “Do you know what that means?”
She shakes her head. “No.”
“That the police sometimes don’t know the truth when they hear it.”
