In Self Defense Susan Sloan (summer reads .txt) 📖

“Are you prepared to call your first witness?” she inquired.

“We are, Your Honor,” Mark Sundstrom replied.

And so began the trial of Clare Durant.

Ten

              The King County medical examiner took the witness stand just after two o’clock that afternoon.  Roger Figg was a slight man in his late fifties, with wispy brown hair, prominent cheekbones, and a twenty-five-year, unblemished record.

“Dr. Figg,” Mark Sundstrom began, once the witness’s credentials had been established, “you performed the autopsy on the body of Richard Durant, did you not?”

“I did,” Figg confirmed.  “On Friday, October 20th of last year, at one-thirty in the afternoon.”

“And what were your findings?”

“I found that Richard Durant’s death was as a result of multiple gunshot wounds.”

At that point, Tom Colby, Sundstrom’s second chair, almost a carbon copy of the prosecutor himself, stood up and positioned a large monitor within view of the jury. Sundstrom then invited the medical examiner to step down from the witness box and stand next to the monitor.  From a computer back at the prosecutor’s table, Colby pressed several keys and a series of photographs began to appear on the screen, showing Richard Durant’s body, laid out on a metal table.  Meticulously, Dr. Figg took the jury through the various injuries that had led to the victim’s death.

“I removed two bullets from the neck,” he said, using a laser pointer, “three from the chest, two from the abdomen, one from the pelvis, and one from the right thigh.”  The red beam of light highlighted each entry wound.

“Do you know which bullet it was that actually killed him?” Sundstrom inquired.

“It could have been any one of three,” Figg replied.  “The one that bisected the aorta, the one that severed the spine, or the one that penetrated the heart.”

Clare sat at the defense table, with her hands folded quietly in her lap, and watched the jury watching the show.  It was gruesome stuff, but all twelve jurors, as well as the alternates, were sitting forward, at the edge of their seats, with their eyes fixed on Dr. Figg and his exhibits.

The medical examiner’s direct testimony lasted the rest of Tuesday and enough of Wednesday so that it wasn’t until almost the end of the day that Mark Sundstrom was satisfied he had gotten all the information and enough of the gore before the jury to turn the witness over to the defense.

David Johansen stood up.  “Nine bullets,” he said.  “Isn’t that a lot of bullets to kill someone standing less than fifteen feet away?”

“It doesn’t usually take that many, no,” Figg agreed.

“In your history as a medical examiner, Doctor, how many gunshot victims have you autopsied?”

“Perhaps five hundred.”

              “And how many of those five hundred had as many bullet wounds as Richard Durant?”

“In my twenty-five years, I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen,” Figg replied.

“What was the nature of these shootings?”

“Most were gang-related.”

“You mean, as in several people shooting one victim at the same time?”

“Yes.”

“And the rest?”

“One was a father who shot the man who had raped and murdered his daughter.  He fired seven bullets into his victim.  One was a teenager high on drugs who put six bullets into a postman because he thought he was the devil.”  The medical examiner sighed.  “And the last was a woman who killed her husband after years of abuse.  We recovered twelve bullets from his body.”

“And you can still remember every one of those shootings?”

“They’re some of the ones that are hardest to forget,” Figg said.

“Was there any way to tell, from the autopsies, why these people were shot?”

“No, of course not.”

“So this information you’ve just provided the jury came from other sources?”

“Yes.  From the associated trials.”

“I see.  So, based on your autopsy alone, there would really be no way for you to tell why Richard Durant was killed, would there?  I mean, you can’t say with any medical certainty that he was shot out of fear or panic, or anger -- or even that he was shot in cold blood, can you?”

“No,” Figg admitted, “I can’t.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” David said.

***

“What would you like for dinner?” Doreen asked.

              “To tell you the truth,” Clare said, “I’m not very hungry.”  Two days of watching gut-wrenching autopsy photographs flashing across a giant screen had left Clare with little appetite, and no interest in worrying about it.

              “All the more reason you have to eat,” the housekeeper, who wasn’t privy to the courtroom show, insisted.  “The children are going to have macaroni and cheese.  I’ll throw in a little sausage for you.”

Clare shrugged.  It didn’t matter.  Lately, picking at Doreen’s food had become something of a game, something done to placate the woman.  It wasn’t that Doreen wasn’t an excellent cook.  She was.  It was just that, whatever the outcome of the trial, Clare knew her days of being a hearty eater were over, and one thing had begun to taste more or less the same as another.

***

Erin Hall was next to take the witness stand.  Beginning on Thursday and continuing through Friday, she carefully recounted for the jury each step of her investigation, from the circumstances surrounding the initial discovery of Richard Durant’s body to Clare Durant’s ultimate arrest.

“How is it that you, your partner, and some sixteen other members of the Seattle Police Department happened to be outside the Durant home on the night in question?” Mark Sundstrom asked.

“We had reason to believe that Mrs. Durant was being targeted by a serial stalker,” Erin replied.  “We had reason to believe that the stalker was going to strike during the few days that her husband was supposed to have been out of town on business.”

“Initially, Detective, you believed that Richard Durant’s death had been merely a matter of mistaken identity, did you not?” the prosecutor inquired.

“Yes, we did believe that,” the witness confirmed.

“At what point did you begin to think that the defendant might not have been acting in self-defense?”

“When certain evidence began to come to our attention that seemed to indicate that the defendant might have known