“That would be my understanding, yes.”
“Thank you. I have no further questions.”
I walked back to the defense table. Their own witness had just provided a link between the murder scene and the drug-dealing evidence I wanted to introduce later. Without that, Ruiz would’ve objected to my evidence, and the judge might’ve tossed it.
On my laptop, I sent a quick text to Garrett. He’d left a voicemail, but I wanted to cut out the phone tag and talk to him before I put the drug evidence on.
Ruiz called the medical examiner to the stand, and the gruesome part began. I’d stipulated to everything I could—the number and size of the wounds on Karl’s body, the fact there was postmortem predation by fish—so he would have no cause to show the most hideous photos to the jury. The fewer the better, since images like that tended to make juries want to punish the defendant.
The medical examiner, unfortunately, had a colorful way with language. He described Karl’s injuries so vividly that every gory photo I’d kept out with stipulations might as well have been emailed directly to the jurors. Then Ruiz added to the horror by putting a photo I hadn’t been able to keep out, a close-up of Karl’s swollen face and slashed neck, up on the screen. Several jurors looked nauseated, and the rest looked angry.
“That neck wound,” the witness said, “nearly severed Mr. Warton’s jugular vein, resulting in massive blood loss that in my medical opinion was the immediate cause of death.”
“So, to clarify,” Ruiz said, “when you mentioned earlier that the assailant inflicted head injuries using the boat’s railing, what was the order of events?”
“Well, I would say that first the assailant pounded Mr. Warton’s head against the railing—brutally and repeatedly, given the amount of tissue and blood that my colleague found there in his examination of the boat. And then, since the largest bloodstain was located just under five feet away, either Mr. Warton tried to escape or the assailant dragged him that distance. That’s where the assailant swung the crowbar, causing a hacking type of wound, as you can see there in the photo.”
“So at what point did Mr. Warton die?”
“Shortly after that hacking injury.”
“And, in your medical opinion, did Mr. Warton suffer pain?”
“Oh, most certainly. Extreme pain.”
I glanced at the clock. It was nearly five, so my cross-examination would have to wait until morning. Trial day one would end on this note, with the jurors ruminating on blood, gore, and suffering.
Ruiz had done well.
My phone rang as we were heading down the courthouse steps.
“Garrett!” I said. “It’s been a while!” I gestured to Mazie and Terri to go on without me. He and I spent a minute catching up, and then he said, “Hey, reason I called back so quick is I’m heading out of town tomorrow and won’t be back until just before New Year’s. But I’ve got nothing on the agenda for dinner—the wife and kids already left town—so if you can make it up here, we could talk tonight.”
I pulled into Garrett’s driveway outside Charleston at a little past seven. Our topic wasn’t something to discuss in public, so he’d ordered Chinese food and I’d swung by to pick it up.
Inside, we got our meal set up on the coffee table. He flicked the TV on to the shopping network and ignored it. I said, “Making it harder to eavesdrop? I do that too.”
He laughed. “My in-laws wanted to give my oldest girl one of those smart-speaker things for Christmas. I said, ‘I am not bugging my own home.’ I don’t know what folks are thinking these days.”
We were partway through the egg rolls when he said, “So, it’s not just to help you out that I wanted to talk. If we can establish a link, connecting your murder to my drug cartel could put my guys away for that much longer. So, fire away. What’s your story?”
I laid the whole thing out for him. What happened to Karl, what had led me to believe he’d gotten into drug dealing, and why I thought he’d found himself caught up in something bigger than he realized.
About Pete Dupree, he said, scooping out some more kung pao chicken, “Just speaking in generalities here, doesn’t waste hauling strike you as a good way to smuggle just about anything?”
Generalities meant he was talking about a case whose details he couldn’t share.
“It certainly does,” I said.
“And if you were moving drugs, would you rather do it in some vehicle that any traffic cop can pull over, or run a good part of the trip on board some high-end tourist boat?”
“Yeah. I think he may very well have infiltrated our local yacht charter for that reason. But he stopped working for them last spring, so I don’t know where that leaves us.”
“Infiltrated is an interesting word.” He didn’t look at me; he was getting more fried rice.
I took that to mean, The wrong word, but I can’t tell you why.
“Anyway,” he said, sitting back on the couch, “who’s got the waste contract now?”
That was a good question. I hadn’t seen anything about that in Blue Seas’ files. We had what seemed like every other contract Henry had ever signed. I said, “I’ll find out.”
We were on our third servings when I brought up Blount. I still had no information on what he’d wanted the Warton brothers to testify to, and no way of proving Blount wasn’t where he said he was on the night Karl was killed. “And above all,” I said, “if he’s lying, why?”
“Oh,” Garrett said, “you know there’s only ever two reasons. Either the liar’s getting paid or he’s getting blackmailed.”
“Well, his truck’s nearly ten years old,” I said. “And there’s nothing fancy about his house.”
He broke open a fortune cookie and tossed half of it in his mouth. “Without getting into details, I can tell you that we’ve recovered dozens of hours of surveillance footage, going back years, from a business down
