voice mails. Hell, by the time it’s over, I’ll have the jurors wondering if the DA or the judge might have done her in. Remember, we don’t have to prove who actually did it; all we’ve got to do is create reasonable doubt that
“Three thousand a day? That’s a lot,” I squawked. “Hell, that’s twice what I charged you to clear Eddie Meacham.”
He smiled. “And half what I’m charging you. You’re right-it
“There’s a police officer here.” I must have looked panicky, because I noticed Grease making soothing motions at me with one hand.
“Ask him to have a seat; tell him we’ll be with him as soon as we finish double-checking the video equipment.” After Chloe clicked off, he answered my unspoken question. “He brought over the tape from the surveillance camera. Can you believe it? KPD wouldn’t trust me with the tape.”
I laughed. “That elevates my opinion of KPD’s judgment quite a bit.”
He stuck out his tongue at me-not the sort of gesture one expects from a high-priced attorney in pinstripes- and led me across the hall to the conference room.
Half the tabletop was now covered with equipment. I recognized a Panasonic VCR and a computer keyboard, but the keyboard appeared connected to a clunky television set. Also connected to that was a slim vertical gizmo, about the size of a hardback book, whose brushed-silver housing sprouted a thicket of cables from the back. It was labeled AVID MOJO. There was also a microphone on a stand.
“Before we look at the video,” said DeVriess, “let’s get the doctor’s voiceprint.” Thomas nodded.
“What voiceprint?” I asked.
“We’ve obtained the threatening messages that were left on Dr. Carter’s voice mail,” said Grease. “We’ll want to suggest that whoever left those messages could be the one who killed her. We need a sample of your voice, saying the same things, in the same way, so we can rule you out. This should carry a fair amount of weight with the jury.”
Burt nodded at Thomas, and Thomas played the first message, one sickening phrase at a time. Jess had said they were graphic, but she had spared me the details. “I can’t say that,” I said.
“You have to,” said Burt. “We need an apples-to-apples comparison-your voice saying the exact same words, same inflections, same pacing. Don’t worry, we won’t play this in court.”
“Is there any chance the prosecution could play it?”
“I’d object strenuously to that,” said DeVriess. “I think I could block that. It would be irrelevant and prejudicial.”
“I’m really not comfortable doing this,” I said.
“You’ll be a hell of a lot less comfortable if the jury votes to convict you, Doc,” he said. “Besides, these messages could point to whoever really killed Dr. Carter. By proving you didn’t leave the messages, maybe we encourage the police to investigate other possibilities.”
I still didn’t like it, but I cooperated. Each of the messages took me several tries-I stumbled over some of the words and phrases, they were so repugnant-but I got through it. The messages began as litanies of sexual perversions; by the last couple, they were vicious, misogynistic death threats. “Yuck,” I said when it was over. “I feel like I need to bathe in Lysol now. I hate to think how Jess must have felt when she heard these.”
Owen had watched his computer screen impassively as I read the threats, but he, too, looked relieved to have put the distasteful task behind us. He closed the computer program he’d used to record my voice, unplugged the microphone, and coiled the cable neatly. “Okay, that’s out of the way,” he said. “Now let’s see what we can see on the video.”
DeVriess punched the intercom button on a phone that had been shoved precariously close to one edge of the table. “Chloe, would you mind showing the officer back to the conference room? Thank you.” He turned to Thomas. “Tell us a little about the system,” he said. He eyed Thomas’s clip-on tie. “But only a little.”
If he felt insulted, Thomas didn’t show it. “This is a turnkey system called dTective,” he said, “from a company called Ocean Systems. They start with an Avid video editing system-the thing most TV shows are cut together on-and they develop hardware and software tools to customize it for forensic work. They’ve sold well over a thousand of these to police departments all over North America, including KPD, here in Knoxville. Most of those are desktop or rack-mounted systems. They call this version the ‘Luggable’; I call it the ‘Hernia-Maker.’” So he had a sense of humor. I liked that.
Chloe appeared in the doorway and ushered in a uniformed officer who was carry ing a videotape case in one hand. Thomas reached out a hand for the tape case; the officer frowned, then handed it over grudgingly.
Thomas opened the case and studied it. “And this is the original tape, right?”
“Right,” said Burt, as if the police officer weren’t even there. “You wouldn’t believe how hard I had to fight to get this. The DA’s office and KDP insisted you could work with a copy. I told them the original was the best evidence, and reminded them we’re legally entitled to the best evidence.”
He nodded. “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll show you why in a minute.” He clicked the computer’s mouse, and the screen lit up. I had expected it to show a TV-like image from the UT surveillance camera, but instead it was a normal Windows screen, just like on my computer, except that it had a lot more program icons on it than my machine’s handful, and most of these looked unfamiliar. He clicked on one of the icons, and the screen filled with several horizontal bands, and a pair of dark circles that looked a bit like maps of the night sky, and a rectangle several inches square. He reached out a hand and Burt gave him the tape case, which he flipped open. He looked at one edge of the tape and frowned, then used a thumbnail to pry out a small tab of black plastic.
“Hey,” barked the officer, “what the fuck are you doing?”
“That’s the RECORD tab,” Thomas said. “If you want to make sure the tape doesn’t accidentally get erased or recorded over, you have to remove that tab. Your video guy should have done that the moment he got the tape.” He popped the tape into the machine, then hit PLAY. The small rectangle on his screen turned blue, with numerals, just like my television at home did when I put a tape into the VCR. Then the images began, a series of seemingly unrelated images, each on-screen for a fraction of a second, like a visual burst of machine-gun fire. After a few seconds, though, I detected a pattern. The images cycled past in a regular sequence, which I gradually recognized as hospital entrances, parking garages, and-the one that most caught my eye-the Body Farm’s gate. It was as if the pages of a dozen different books had been shuffled together at the book bindery, and to follow one story, you’d have to read one page, then flip forward ten or twelve pages to pick up the thread again. Suddenly my truck flashed past a couple of times, and I lunged toward the VCR’s controls to hit PAUSE. Thomas reached over and batted away my hand.
“Don’t touch that,” he snapped. “Do not touch that.” The officer grabbed my arm and pulled me back several feet.
“I just wanted to pause it on the truck,” I said.
“Do
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It won’t happen again. Promise. I just didn’t know.”
“Okay,” he said grudgingly, then-less grudgingly-“Okay, but you’re on probation.” It sounded like maybe I wouldn’t get kicked out after all.
“Well,” I said, “that sure beats death row.”
He snorted, and Burt laughed; the cop frowned. “We’ll look at everything a frame at a time in a minute,” Thomas said. “This pass, I’m just reviewing the tape, and optimizing the levels. Then we’ll digitize it-load it into the computer’s hard drive-and once we’ve done that, we can pause, or stop and start, as many times as we want without hurting anything. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “I am sorry.”
“If it makes you feel any better, cops make that mistake all the time,” he said with an apologetic glance at the officer. “They get to the spot on a tape where an incident occurs-a convenience store shooting or a bank robbery-and they stop and start and rewind and slo-mo, and by the time the case comes to trial, the tape’s useless. I make two passes, three at the most, without ever stopping the tape anywhere in the event sequence.”
As he talked and the images strobed by, he slid and clicked the mouse rapidly, and the computer’s cursor
