Chapter 4
Evidence
Priya Raman had a theory that you could tell the strength of a prosecution's case by the weight of the boxes.
"Light boxes, they're hoping you'll plead," she said. "Heavy boxes, they've already decided you won't." She set the last one on the conference table with a thump and straightened, pushing back a lock of black hair that had escaped from the clip. "There are eleven."
"Eleven."
"And a hard drive. And a bag of what I'm told is the victim's hairbrush."
It was the twenty-eighth of October, two weeks after the murder, and we had been given the State's initial disclosure at nine that morning by a courier in a gray van, with a receipt for me to sign. I had sat in my office for an hour before opening the first box. I had read, in that hour, every word of the indictment twice, which was a thing I did out of a kind of superstition. It was four pages long. It said, in the plain legal prose that has always seemed to me the most frightening kind, that on or about the fourteenth of October, in the County of Calder, the defendant Victor Augustus Hale did unlawfully and with malice aforethought kill and murder one Eleanor Marguerite Hale.
Priya was twenty-nine and the best young lawyer I had hired. She had grown up in a two-bedroom flat above a dry cleaner's in the Eastgate neighborhood, the daughter of a pharmacist and a seamstress, and she had gotten herself through law school with a scholarship and three jobs and an attitude toward authority that was best described as courteous skepticism. I had hired her after she had spent forty minutes taking apart one of my own motions in a moot court and then, when I asked her what she would do differently, told me. She wore low heels and no jewelry and kept a pack of nicotine gum in every pocket. She was also, I had begun to suspect, quietly better at this than I was.
"Where do you want to start?" she asked.
"The thing they're proudest of."
"That's the weapon."
"Then the thing they're proudest of second."
She smiled. It was a small dry smile, but I saw it. She picked up a marker and went to the whiteboard on the far wall, the one that had once held a flow chart for the Ferris Bridge case and had never been quite wiped clean, and wrote, in block capitals across the top: WHAT THEY HAVE.
By noon the board was full.
I will set it down the way it stood, because that is how I saw it then, and because when I look back at that board now I see exactly what I did not see at the time: that every line on it was true.
The weapon. A bronze heron, fourteen inches tall, six and a quarter pounds, found on the floor nine feet from the body. Eleanor Hale's blood and hair on the base. Victor Hale's partial fingerprints on the neck, left thumb and two fingers, in a position the State's examiner described as consistent with a grip.
The cause of death. Three blows to the left temple and parietal bone. The medical examiner, a quiet, meticulous woman named Dr. Imani Okonkwo, put death at between nine and ten-thirty p.m., based on body temperature, the degree of rigor, and the state of the stomach contents. Cold chicken. A salad. Consistent, in other words, with a dinner at half past six and a death some two or three hours later.
The motive. A prenuptial agreement, signed fourteen years earlier, that gave Eleanor Hale a fixed sum of two million dollars in the event of a divorce and nothing else. A life insurance policy on her life, bought two years before, with a face value of thirty-eight million, naming her husband the sole beneficiary. A consultation, three weeks before her death, between Eleanor Hale and a divorce lawyer named Roberta Kline, whose notes the State had obtained after a fight about privilege that I intended to examine very carefully. And a quarrel, overheard by a housekeeper, two days before the murder, in which a man's voice had shouted the words you'll leave with nothing.
The witness. Gerald Pruett, seventy-four, retired surveyor, of 22 Cranmoor Lane, three doors up from the Hales' gate. At about 9:48 on the night of the murder, Mr. Pruett, who suffered from insomnia and sat most evenings at the front window of his study, saw a silver Bentley turn off Cranmoor Lane and into the Hales' drive. He had seen the car a thousand times. He identified the driver as a tall man with gray hair. He was certain.
The vehicle logs. The Hale Meridian executive garage, on the building's second sublevel, was monitored by a license-plate reader at each of its two lanes. The system recorded every plate that came and went. The State's chart, which was color-coded and rather beautiful, showed four entries for the Bentley with the plate HALE 1: an entry at 9:03 p.m., an exit at 9:26, an entry at 10:09, an exit at 10:49.
The cameras. On the thirty-first floor, outside the chief executive's private suite, a bank of four security cameras had been offline between 9:12 and 9:57 p.m. for what the building's management company described as a scheduled firmware update. The stairwell door at the end of that corridor opened from the inside without a badge.
The statements. Victor Hale had told the police that he never left the building between 9:03 and half past ten. He had told them he had never, at any time that evening, been on Cranmoor Lane. He had told them, in the first hour of a four-hour interview, that he had thought his wife had fallen.
"They're going to say that last one's the lie that matters," said Priya.
"The ME will say no one could look at that wound and think she'd fallen."
"He says he thought it. He was in shock."
"They'll say he was lying about being in shock."
She capped the marker. "Is he?"
I looked at the board. The words stood on the white surface in neat black capitals, one under the other, a column of sober facts, and I felt the weight of them as one feels the weight of a coat that has been put on in the rain. Each of them was explicable. That was the trouble. A bird in a study. A prenup. A neighbor with good eyes. A parking system that did not lie. Taken alone, any of these was something a decent lawyer could carry. Taken together, they made a picture.
A jury doesn't think in prints, Hollis had said. A jury thinks in pictures.
"I don't know," I said. "That's not the question."
"I know it isn't." She put the marker down. "I'm asking anyway."
The bail hearing was on the thirtieth.
It lasted eleven minutes. Judge Rosalind Teague, who had been assigned the case, was a lean, gray, upright woman in her sixties with rimless glasses and an air of having heard every argument at least twice. She listened to Whitlock describe the defendant's extraordinary financial resources, his aircraft and vessels, his connections in eleven jurisdictions, and the likelihood that he would flee. She listened to me describe a man with a spotless record, no passport in his possession, a mother in a nursing home and a company of eleven thousand employees that depended on him. She took off her glasses and cleaned them with a corner of her robe.
"Mr. Cole," she said, "I take your point about the passport. But I observe that Mr. Hale has been able to charter a vessel in under four hours on three occasions in the last five years. The State has demonstrated, I think, a real risk. Bail is denied."
It was the answer I had expected. I did not argue. It is a rule I have kept: there are moments in front of a judge to fight and moments to make the fight look as if it had never been necessary. Beside me, Victor sat quite still in a dark suit that someone had brought him from home, his big hands folded on the table, looking at the wall behind the bench with an expression of polite attention. He did not look at Whitlock. He did not look at the gallery. When they stood him up and the deputy fastened the cuffs, he held out his wrists with a kind of absentminded courtesy, as a man gives up his coat to an attendant.
He looked back once, near the door, and caught my eye.
Don't worry, I thought he was saying. Or: I'm not. I could not tell. It was a very good face for not telling.
In the front row behind the prosecution's table, a woman in a black dress had risen when he was led out. She was about forty, tall, with Eleanor Hale's cheekbones, which I knew from photographs, and a great mass of dark hair pulled back severely from a face that had gone gray with sleeplessness. She did not cry. She stood with her hands pressed flat against her thighs, staring at Victor's back, and when the door had closed behind him she turned her head and looked straight at me.
I knew who she was. Clare Voss, the sister. I had read her statement. It was two paragraphs, and it ended with the sentence Eleanor was afraid of him, and I should have done more.
I inclined my head to her, a small courteous nod. Her lip lifted, very slightly, from her teeth. Then she turned and walked out with her chin up, and the heels of her shoes were loud on the marble all the way down the corridor.
I found it at ten past eleven that night, in the ninth box.
I was alone in the conference room. Priya had gone home at nine, with her gum and her laptop, and I had told the cleaner to leave the lights. The windows were black and running with rain. Out on the river a tug sounded its horn, once, a long hollow note that came up through nineteen floors of concrete and glass. I had the printouts of Victor Hale's telephone records spread across the table in front of me, forty pages of tiny gray columns, and I had been going down them with a pencil, line by line, for the better part of an hour.
10/14 — 18:41. Outgoing. Singapore. 6 min.
10/14 — 20:34. Incoming. Rotterdam. 3 min.
10/14 — 21:18. Outgoing. Rotterdam. 16 min.
I stopped.
My client had told me that he had made two calls that night, one to Rotterdam and one to Singapore. The Rotterdam lawyer had been called, according to this record, at 9:18. It had lasted sixteen minutes, until 9:34. And it was followed, after a gap of ten minutes, by a line I had read twice and missed both times.
10/14 — 21:44. Incoming. UNKNOWN / VOIP. 4 min.
I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes.
An incoming call, four minutes long, from a number that the carrier could not resolve. Not Singapore. Not Rotterdam. Not a lawyer or a ship's agent or a contract clause. Something answered, at 9:44 p.m., on a phone that was supposed to be sitting on a thirty-first-floor desk, by a man who had said he was doing nothing but working. And it was, I noticed, the only call that evening which he had not mentioned.
Nine forty-four. Four minutes after Eleanor Hale's phone had last touched a tower a half mile from her home.
I put the glasses back on. I turned the page over, and the next, and went through every line to the end, and there was nothing else. No second unknown number, no explanation, no footnote. A single four-minute gap, in the middle of the most important night of my client's life, which no one in the State's file had yet remarked upon.
They'll find it, I thought. Whitlock will have a man at a desk in the next week going through every call, and he'll find it, and she'll ask me what it was.
And the question that ought to have followed, the only one worth asking, was one I did not allow myself to ask. I wrote the line on a sticky note instead, in small letters, 9:44 — ask V., and pressed it to the edge of the table. The ink bled a little in the damp.
It was very quiet in the building. The radiator was off. Somewhere above me a pipe ticked twice and was still. I sat for a long time looking at the yellow square on the dark wood, with the rain going on and on against the glass, and I clicked my pen in and out, in and out, until I realized that I was waiting for it to tell me something.
It did not. It only clicked.