A Criminal Defense Read Free Page A

detective hadn’t rubbed his hands together, but had nonetheless sounded to Donnally as though he was about to sit down in front of a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast.
    Haddad looked over at Navarro. The doctor wasn’t smiling. His tight mouth communicated his disapproval of those who chose to escape from the horror of violent death into macabre linguistic dances of irony or burlesque.
    â€œThat line is getting old,” Haddad said.
    In Navarro’s continuing grin, Donnally saw Navarro hadn’t grasped the comment wasn’t directed at the line as much as at Navarro himself.
    Haddad gestured with his scalpel toward two ligature marks around Hamlin’s neck. One ran just above his Adam’s apple and circled his neck like a collar. The other looped under his chin and angled upward behind his ears and disappeared into his black hair.
    Haddad pointed from one to the other.
    â€œYou can tell from the lack of blood in the abrasions in this diagonal one that it occurred after death.”
    â€œYou think he was strangled from behind?” Donnally asked. “Then strung up?”
    Haddad nodded. “That’s my theory, but we’ll only know for certain after I shave off his hair to look for bruising and after I open him up and examine the back of his head and neck.”
    Donnally leaned down to inspect the marks. An undercurrent of lavender flowed beneath the churning stench of cleaning fluid. He glanced at Navarro.
    â€œSmell that.”
    Navarro bent over and took a sniff.
    â€œSoap. Some kind of scented soap.” Navarro looked at Donnally as he straightened up and said without a smile, “Smells like somebody washed him off before they hung him out to dry.”
    Donnally considered that crack to be Navarro’s second strike. He’d never met a competent homicide detective who made a habit of gallows humor. He’d always found it was the outward expression of a counterproductive kind of imagination, one that tended to take the detective off course, diverting him away from a mental cause-and-effect re-creation of the events that led to the death.
    He’d been willing to give Navarro a break because, at least for the moment, sarcasm had been better than his expressing outright the hatred cops felt toward Hamlin, something that might be quoted later and would cast doubt on the integrity of the investigation.
    But twice was enough, and he didn’t want to fight Navarro all the way through the case.
    Donnally glared at Navarro while holding up two fingers and shaking his head. The detective spread his arms as he raised his eyes toward the ceiling, then looked back and nodded in surrender.
    At the same time, Donnally was grateful for that hate, even though it had been sublimated into humor, for it seemed better than the brute reductionism of the medical examiner’s office by which still-warm humans devolved into mere fields of evidence.
    Now conscious of the war between the odors of the lab and the aroma of lavender surrounding the body, Donnally realized something didn’t make sense.
    â€œThere seems to be a contradiction,” Donnally said. “Someone was rational and methodical enough to destroy evidence by washing him off, but irrational enough to think that the dead could be humiliated by being left hanging half naked in a public place.”
    Donnally tensed, ready to be annoyed when Navarro took another sarcastic swing, but he didn’t.
    â€œUnless the humiliation was directed at someone else,” Navarro said. “Maybe as a warning.”
    There was a new seriousness in Navarro’s voice, as though he worked his way past the filter of how he’d despised Hamlin in life in order to analyze the manner in which he had died and had been left to be discovered.
    â€œHis being dead ought to have been warning enough,” Haddad said. “But then again, my part in the process has less to do with the psychology of homicide and more to