Her Deadly Game, page 14
“Ah,” Harrison said. “Sort of like The Fabulous Mr. Ripley. Tom Hanks pretends to be some rich guy, but things go sideways, and he ends up killing the rich guy in a rowboat.”
“The movie was The Talented Mr. Ripley. And it was Matt Damon, not Tom Hanks, but other than getting the name of the movie and the actor wrong, I agree,” Keera said. “The two stories are similar.”
“A man pretending to be someone he is not. Vince LaRussa?” Harrison said. “I take it this Jack Worthing is eventually exposed?”
“He is,” Patsy said. “At least, that’s what I remember.”
“Maybe that’s a harbinger of things to come in our case,” Harrison said.
“A line in the play jumped out at me,” Keera said. She opened the book to where she had dog-eared the page. “‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple.’”
“Seems that quote would apply equally to the playwright, Oscar Wilde, wouldn’t it?” Harrison said. “A gay man pretending to be something he is not. The question is, what is the truth in the LaRussa case?” He shook his head. “Well, I can honestly say I have never had a case that referenced literature.”
“Nor have I,” Patsy said. “Changing subjects, I spoke to Rossi. He said we’d get the police files tomorrow, though toxicology has not yet come back.” Toxicology reports on victims could often take weeks.
“And speaking of reports,” Harrison interjected. “I got the report back from the lab on the sample of water we collected from Anne LaRussa’s kitchen floor.”
“Let me guess, it’s water,” Keera said.
“Well, it’s sort of like your Jack Worthing; it appears to be water, but it’s more interesting.”
“What’s the interesting part?” Keera asked.
“The lab detected potassium nitrate.”
“Which is . . . ?”
“An oxidizer, according to my research. I looked it up. It accelerates burning when a fire is lit.”
Interesting indeed, Keera thought. “Where is potassium nitrate found?”
“I had to look it up. It’s found in deposits crystallizing in cave walls from bat guano.”
“Bat guano?” Keera said.
“Bat guano. It’s one of several nitrogen-containing compounds collectively referred to as saltpeter,” Harrison continued.
“I meant where would someone find it here, in this country?” Keera asked.
“Fertilizers, stump remover, rocket propellants, fireworks. It’s a basic component of gunpowder. I also looked it up,” Harrison responded.
“So then it could have come from the gun on the floor,” Keera said.
“Maybe. Except that doesn’t explain the burn mark on the oven door handle, which also tested positive for potassium nitrate,” Harrison said. “And the water on the floor also had microscopic cotton fibers in addition to the potassium nitrate.”
“Could the cotton fibers have come from Anne LaRussa’s clothing?” Keera asked.
“I’m not sure how,” Harrison said. “She wasn’t shot through her clothing.”
“Could someone have fired the gun and touched the oven handle for some reason, transferring the potassium nitrate to the handle?” Patsy said.
“Could have, but that wouldn’t explain the burn mark,” Harrison said. “And my high school chemistry instructor, Mr. Cobalt—”
“Seriously? You had a chemistry teacher named Cobalt?” Keera said.
“As God is my witness,” Harrison said. “Mr. Cobalt said, ‘A theory isn’t a theory if it doesn’t explain every variable.’”
“You have a theory?” Keera asked.
“Hell no. Not yet, anyway. But I am working on it.”
After Patsy and Harrison left for Beaverton, Keera made the walk up the hill to the King County jail, filled out forms, presented proper identification, and placed her belongings in a locker. Inside the jail, the aroma of soiled clothes dominated, along with the noise—inmates shouting and the rhythmic sound of someone dribbling a basketball. A corrections officer led Keera down a narrow hall, used a key to unlock a heavy metal door, and ushered her inside a windowless room with battleship-gray walls, a table two feet square bolted to the floor, and two chairs.
“Keep the door open,” the officer said.
A few minutes after her arrival, a different corrections officer escorted LaRussa into the room in his red prison scrubs, white socks, and slippers. He was belly chained at the waist.
“Can the handcuffs be removed?” Keera asked.
“Nope,” the officer said. “I’ll be outside the door if you need anything.”
After the officer departed, Keera asked LaRussa how he was doing.
LaRussa shrugged. “Sometimes I’m okay. Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a nightmare that I can’t wake from.”
“I’m sorry about bail,” she said.
“You told me it would be a long shot, given the charge.”
“I’ll raise the issue again with the trial judge.”
“Do we have a judge?”
“I’m told it will be Maxine Hung. I’m going to be honest with you. She wouldn’t have been my first choice. She’s a former prosecutor who earned the nickname ‘Maximum Maxine’ when she tried murder cases. That moniker has followed her to the bench.”
“So bail isn’t likely,” LaRussa said with a waning smile.
“She’s tough but she’s fair,” Keera said, repeating what Patsy had told her.
“But she won’t grant bail.”
“In a first-degree murder trial, given your considerable wealth and resources, it’s unlikely.”
“So where do we go from here?”
“The case-scheduling hearing is Thursday. I’m told we’ll get some of the prosecution’s evidence this afternoon, and I’ll evaluate it. I also have JP Harrison putting together the evidence he independently obtained when we went to your home, to determine if anything doesn’t match up. We’re hoping to come up with evidence to support our own theory of what happened.”
“Such as?”
Keera shook her head. “I’m not going to lie, Vince. We just don’t know yet. Harrison did obtain the Seattle street-camera footage, and the video footage from the Four Seasons for that Sunday night, and he’s driven the route confirming your timing getting home. And we found the private investigator hired to take the pictures of you and Lisa.”
“What did he have to say?” LaRussa said, clearly interested.
“She. The PI is a she. I’ll get to what she had to say in a minute. Have you given any more thought to the jury consultant’s advice about my defending you?”
LaRussa sat back. “It makes sense, and I was impressed by you in court. I’ve never seen your father in action, but from what I’ve heard, you’re cut from the same cloth.”
“I won’t let you down, Vince. I can’t promise you anything except that I’ll give you my very best and fight every step of the way.”
LaRussa smiled, but again it faded. “I can’t ask for anything more than that; can I? Okay. Let’s move forward.”
Keera felt relief, and she knew Ella would also. She couldn’t predict Patsy’s reaction, but given what Ella and their mother had said about his recent court appearances, she suspected he, too, would be relieved.
Keera filled in LaRussa on what Michelle Batista had told them. Then she said, “The email wasn’t sent by Anne.”
“Who sent it?”
“Someone named Jack Worthing.” Keera had been trained from her youth to evaluate her chess opponents’ body language—how they sat, their facial expressions, whether they had any tells like licking their lips when nervous, a tug on an ear when bluffing, a false smile. She studied LaRussa.
His brow furrowed and his eyes narrowed. “Who?”
“You’ve never heard that name?”
“No. Who is Jack Worthing?”
“We believe it’s an alias. One hypothesis was that it was a way for your wife to keep her identity secret.”
“She made it up?”
“Not exactly.” Keera told LaRussa about the play The Importance of Being Earnest and its main character. “What was Anne’s major in college?”
“She was a literature major.”
“Do you know what era of study?”
“No.”
“So she could have read and studied the play in college.”
“I suppose,” he said.
Keera nodded. Something about LaRussa’s physicality struck her as less than genuine, though she didn’t know why. “There’s something else,” she said. “I also received an email at work from a Jack Worthing.”
“How can that be? Anne’s dead.”
“We’re trying to figure that out,” she said. “He directed me to speak to someone in Beaverton, Oregon.”
“I grew up there,” LaRussa said. “Who’s the person?”
“A grammar school teacher named Mary Bell.”
“Mary Bell? What the hell could she have to do with any of this?”
“You know her?”
“She was my fifth- or sixth-grade teacher,” LaRussa said, clearly perplexed.
“I sent JP Harrison and Patsy to talk with her and someone named Eric Fields.”
“I knew Eric in grammar school and high school.”
Keera told LaRussa that Worthing had asked Bell about others who might have known him. “It could be nothing, but I didn’t want to ignore it and find out at trial that the prosecution spoke to them for some reason. You have no idea why someone would want me to talk to Bell?”
“None,” LaRussa said. “If Anne used the name Jack Worthing to hire the investigator, who’s using that name now?”
“Good question,” Keera said. “We don’t know.”
Chapter 19
Frank Rossi paced the glistening linoleum floor in the King County medical examiner’s waiting room. The offices were located in a fourteen-story, tinted-glass and natural-light building of the Harborview Medical Center at Ninth and Jefferson Street. Rossi had driven to the office upon email receipt of Arthur Litchfield’s autopsy report on Anne LaRussa. He could have walked the four blocks up the hill and got outside and enjoyed some exercise, which was rare during a full-blown investigation heading to trial.
But not this morning.
Not after he’d read Litchfield’s report.
This morning he was more interested in answers, and he wanted them quickly. He’d tried calling Litchfield but got his voice mail. That was not unusual. The ME’s office was usually under siege. Returning phone calls and responding to emails was often put off to the end of the day—not that Rossi would have put anything in writing. Emails were paper trails, and Rossi knew not to leave one, or a phone message for that matter.
Rossi had not expected to find anything of particular interest in Litchfield’s report, given Anne LaRussa’s obvious cause of death—gunshot wound to the back of the head. He expected the report to confirm the caliber of bullet, checking one more thing off his list of things to do. Upon receipt of Litchfield’s report, Rossi had put his feet up on the corner of his desk and skimmed the sections noting rigor mortis and lividity, the body’s rectal temperature, and Litchfield’s conclusion that Anne LaRussa had died between six o’clock and nine thirty at night. Rossi knew Ambrose wanted something more specific, but he wasn’t going to get it. He’d have to deal with it at trial, get Litchfield to discuss how the room temperature impacted how quickly a victim lost body temperature, make him look smart before the jury.
Rossi confirmed Litchfield had complied with law enforcement requirements in the processing room, noted the appearance of Anne LaRussa’s clothing, jewelry worn, and any markings on her body, including surgical scars to her cervical spine, her throat—a tracheotomy—and her right arm, incurred at the time of her horseback-riding accident. He found no puncture wounds indicating any injections. No tattoos. He noted no scratches or bruising of her skin, no missing fingernails, no skin under her nails to indicate a struggle or a fight. In other words, no evidence of domestic violence, which would seem to rule out that Anne became a recluse because Vince had abused her. Litchfield had also performed X-rays and a CT scan.
Rossi skimmed the case summary until he arrived at the cause of death. Litchfield described the damage the bullet caused upon entering the skull and the more considerable damage caused upon its exit above the right eye socket. He concluded from the wound location, the bullet trajectory—depicted with a dotted line—and from the lack of GSR on the victim’s scalp that she had been shot at a distance of between three to five feet.
He ruled her death a homicide.
That was all well and good . . .
The door to the processing room swung open. Litchfield stepped out, pulling the light-blue surgery cap from his bald head, then removing his gown, throwing both in a laundry bin. The two men had never met. Rossi introduced himself and said, “Need a moment of your time to discuss the Anne LaRussa autopsy.”
Litchfield scratched the back of his neck, looking chagrined. He adjusted round glasses and, with a nod, turned and led Rossi down the hall to an office that looked unused. No photographs or paintings hung on the walls or adorned the desk or the shelving, which did, however, contain thick medical textbooks on anatomy, biology, chemistry, and other subjects. No plants or knickknacks decorated the room or revealed anything personal about the man. Litchfield either hadn’t yet had time to decorate, or he didn’t see the point. Stuart Funk, the King County chief medical examiner, kept an office just as spartan. Rossi wondered if that was because nothing could beautify their job, or maybe it was because their office was not within these four vacant walls, but within the cold and sterile processing room where they hunched over stainless-steel tables with drains and traps, removing and weighing organs.
Rossi held up Litchfield’s multipage report before Litchfield’s ass had hit the seat of his ergonomic chair. “Anne LaRussa had stage-four pancreatic cancer?”
“That’s what Anne LaRussa’s remains told me,” Litchfield said with little emotion.
“Explain it to me,” Rossi said.
Litchfield exhaled a long sigh, as if perturbed by the interruption, and again rubbed the back of his neck. “I found multiple tumors that I believe metastasized from her pancreas to her lymph nodes, to her other organs including her lungs, and her bones.”
“Any indication she had received treatment?”
“None that I could determine.”
“Could she have not known?”
“Possible, but given the progression noted, the fact that it had invaded her bones, I would be surprised. She would have been in significant pain, which is likely the reason the toxicology report indicated the presence of opioid analgesics.”
Rossi thought of Anne LaRussa’s stocked medicine cabinet and wondered if she had mistaken the pain associated with her cancer for the pain from her continuing disability injuries. “How long did she have to live?”
“Not really my bullfight,” Litchfield said.
“Wave a red cape at the bull and give me an educated guess, Doc,” Rossi said, not liking the attitude.
“Educated guess, I’d say not long.”
“And the translation of the medical term ‘not long’ is what? A month, six months?” Rossi asked.
Litchfield looked to be doing math in his head. “An educated guess would be a month, perhaps six weeks, assuming no treatment. If treated, maybe three months. She would have gone very quickly, regardless.”
“She was dying. Treatment or not. She was dying.”
“Yes.”
The information rattled in Rossi’s brain. He thought of Lisa Bennet, an oncologist and Anne LaRussa’s friend—at least she had been a friend at one time. Had she known?
He knew one thing for certain. Keera Duggan would pounce upon the information. She’d argue that Anne LaRussa, knowing she was dying, took her own life. She’d have an uphill battle, given Anne LaRussa’s physical impairment. It made the argument seemingly far-fetched, but Rossi had witnessed jurors respond to all kinds of crazy arguments.
“My suggestion,” Litchfield said, “would be to subpoena her medical records. Find out who, if anyone, diagnosed her cancer and what steps were taken, if any. She had a world-class facility at Seattle Cancer Care. Perhaps she sought treatment there?”
“But treatment would not have made any difference?”
“In my opinion, the chances of her surviving were minimal; no more than three to five percent. Could treatment have prolonged her life? Again, perhaps. But we’re talking weeks. Not months. And she would have suffered.”
“Either way, Anne LaRussa was going to die,” Rossi said, trying to get his head around this unexpected turn of events.
“Either way,” Litchfield said.
An hour later, Rossi hung up his desk phone and swiveled his chair to face Billy Ford, who had his back to him, seated at his desk in their bull pen. The television mounted overhead spewed some late-afternoon news, and Rossi could hear a smattering of telephone conversations, punctuated by bursts of profanity.
“Hey,” he said, gaining Ford’s attention. “Ambrose wants to talk.”
“You tell him about the ME’s report?”
“I told him. He said he was out and would come here.”
Ford made a face like he didn’t believe it. Ambrose never made it easy on the detectives he worked with. “What was his response to the news?”
“Just asked if we’d sent over the police file to defense counsel.”
“Did we?”
Rossi shook his head. “I was about to until I read the ME’s report. Decided not to send anything before Ambrose took a look,” he said. The file also did not yet contain the final toxicology or DNA reports. “Had to come as a surprise to Ambrose. Sure as shit came as a surprise to me.”
“But Litchfield concluded homicide,” Ford said.
“Ambrose isn’t likely worried about what the ME concluded. He’s worried about how Keera Duggan might use this information in her arguments to the jury. At least he should be.”
“Meaning what?” Ford asked.
“Why would Anne LaRussa’s husband kill her if she was already dying?”
