Beyond A Reasonable Doubt: A David Brunelle Legal Thriller Short Story (David Brunelle Legal Thriller Series)

  BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

  A David Brunelle Short Story

  by

  Stephen Penner

  Published by

  Ring of Fire Publishing

  Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

  ©2011 Stephen Penner. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarity with real persons or events is purely coincidental. Persons, events, and locations are either the product of the author’s imagination, or used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Stephen Penner.

  DAVID BRUNELLE LEGAL THRILLERS

  Presumption of Innocence

  Tribal Court

  By Reason of Insanity

  A Prosecutor for the Defense

  Substantial Risk

  Case Theory (Short Story)

  Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Short Story)

  ALSO BY STEPHEN PENNER

  Scottish Rite

  Blood Rite

  Last Rite

  Highland Fling (Short Story)

  Mars Station Alpha

  The Godling Club

  Capital Punishment (Short Story)

  Katie Carpenter, Fourth Grade Genius

  Professor Barrister’s Dinosaur Mysteries

  BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

  Assistant district attorney David Brunelle looked down and admired his new shoes: three-inch, red leather stilettos.

  “Nice shoes, David,” laughed Kat Anderson, the county medical examiner, as she strutted past him toward the drug-den apartment they had both been called out to. “Try not to get any blood on them.”

  Brunelle admired the retreating figure of the shapely coroner. Then he sat down again in the passenger seat of Detective Chen’s cop car and popped off the stilettos.

  “Forgot to change back,” he shrugged at the gumshoe as he pulled his wingtips back on. “Those things are surprisingly comfortable.”

  “Just admit it, Brunelle,” joked Chen. “You like ‘em. They make you feel pretty.”

  Brunelle stood up and tugged exaggeratedly at his suit coat. “I am pretty. And with those babies I’m gonna win that ‘Prosecutors in Pumps’ fundraiser next month.”

  “Next month?” Chen laughed. “You got ‘em a month early? Oh yeah, you like ‘em.”

  “Just need to break them in so I don’t get blisters,” Brunelle assured as he slammed the car door. “But enough about shoes. Let’s see what we’ve got inside.”

  What they had inside was a homicide. A murder. And a messy one. It was going to be hard for anyone to keep blood off his shoes. As they stepped inside, Brunelle fought back a gag at the metallic stench of blood.

  Anderson already had it all over her gloved hands.

  “Massive sharp force trauma to the anterior neck,” she reported. When no one responded, she simplified. “Someone slit her throat. And bad.”

  Brunelle and Chen didn’t really need the medical examiner to tell them that. The victim lay face down on a ratty mattress, her head in the center of an enormous pool of thick arterial blood. Given the position of the body, the only other explanation would have been a gunshot wound to the face.

  The professionals fanned out to do their jobs. Anderson returned to examining the body. Chen rounded up officers to seal off the crime scene and begin identifying potential evidence. And Brunelle watched for all the little mistakes everyone else might make which could lead to a key piece of evidence being suppressed by some defendant-loving judge.

  It was a typical addict’s shithole. Windows blocked off by blankets and furniture. Dirty dishes everywhere. Filthy bathroom. Needles and pipes on every flat surface.

  And a framed school picture of some smiling eight-year old kid whose mom loved him almost as much as she loved the crack. Or the heroin. Or the meth. Or whatever garbage filled his mom’s veins and made her forsake everything else in the world for her next high.

  This particular mom—the one whose blood was all over her bedroom floor—had been into heroin, judging by the tracks on her arms and legs and even the bottoms of her bare feet. Not to mention the half dozen needles sitting on the bedside table like so many ballpoint pens.

  “Found the murder weapon!” one of the officers shouted from the squalid bathroom. Brunelle and Chen rushed over.

  “Where is it?” Chen asked as he approached.

  “Don’t touch it!” Brunelle ordered.

  “I know that,” the officer sneered at Brunelle. “I’m not a rookie. It’s behind the toilet.”

  He stood up and let the other men get a better view. It was a simple kitchen knife, serrated. A nicer home might have had a knife block with this one single knife missing. Not this dump. The only thing that differentiated it from all the other cutlery strewn across the apartment was the still wet blood glistening on its blade.

  Forensics rushed in, put a numbered placard next to it and started shooting photographs. Brunelle and Chen backed out of the closet-like room and stepped outside for some fresh air.

  “So whattaya think?” Chen asked, content to let his officers handle this part of the investigation.

  “Robbery?” Brunelle suggested. “Drug-rip gone bad, maybe? I’m not sure. That’s a pretty violent way to kill someone.”

  Chen nodded. “Pretty personal too. Gonna get your hands bloody.”

  “And your feet.” It was Dr. Anderson. She’d followed them outside. “The boys found a bloody footprint on the bathtub edge and another on the bathroom window sill.”

  Brunelle scanned the outside wall for the bathroom window and in a moment all three of them were leaning over a series of bloody footprints leading across the parking lot to a nearby patch of neglected grass.

  “Barefoot,” Chen observed. “And small. Probably a woman.”

  “She could’ve used those stilettos of yours, David,” Anderson joked.

  “Naw,” Brunelle shrugged. “They’re size thirteen. It takes a man to wear shoes like that.”

  *

  Thirty two hours later, Brunelle watched through the two-way mirror at the main precinct as Chen and a junior detective brought the prime suspect into the interrogation room.

  Brunelle immediately frowned. She was too small. The jury would take one look at her and start doubting, thinking she couldn’t have done it. Doubting, as in reasonable doubt. One more damn thing Brunelle would have to convince them of.

  Then he smiled.

  He’d have to call the M.E. to explain it to them. Another excuse to talk to Kat.

  “Have a seat, Ms. Flowers,” Chen said, steering her into a chair and sitting down opposite her. “We just have a few questions. This shouldn’t take long.”

  Virginia ‘Ginny’ Flowers. Tiny, frail drug addict. She had scabs all down her face, which meant meth. She’d probably been up for days, and no doubt her brain was fried. It wouldn’t take Chen long at all. As long as they remembered to Mirandize her, Brunelle would have a confession to go along with her fingerprint on the knife and the expected match on the bloody footprint. A judge had already signed the warrant to sample her footprint, but that would come after they extracted the confession. Brunelle looked at his watch. He had a court hearing in 45 minutes. He looked again at Ginny Flowers. He’d make the hearing, no trouble at all.

  “Do you understand each of these rights as I explained them to you?” Chen was asking as he finished going through the Constitutional rights form.

  Ginny nodded—a jerky, wide-eyed nod—and signed off on the form. Brunelle smiled. He’
d just won the confession suppression hearing.

  “Can I get you something to drink, Ginny?” Chen asked. “Or eat?”

  “We have some candy bars somewhere, I think,” the other detective offered. It sounded nice, but it wasn’t. Meth addicts crave sweets like fish crave water.

  “A c-candy bar would be nice,” Ginny Flowers stammered, trying not to sound too desperate. She picked anxiously at the sores on her face where the meth made her scratch till she bled.

  “We’ll be happy to get you a candy bar, Ginny,” Chen smiled, before letting the smile drain away. “Right after you answer a few questions.”

  Ginny fell back in her chair. She was crashing, Brunelle knew. This would almost be painful to watch. Almost.

  “You knew Theresa Hastings,” Chen started. It wasn’t really a question. He added her street name to be sure. “Curly.”

  Ginny’s eyes were fixed, unblinking, on the detective. “Yes,” she finally admitted.

  “You did drugs with her,” Chen went on.

  Ginny ran a hand through her dirty hair.

  “We don’t care about the drugs, Ginny,” said Chen’s partner. The good cop.

  “Curly’s dead,” Chen announced. “Murdered.”

  Ginny still didn’t say anything.

  “We know you were there, Ginny,” Good Cop went on. “Just tell us what happened.”

  “I— I wasn’t there,” Ginny tried, but it was weak. “I swear. I don’t know nothing—”

  “Your prints were on the knife, Ginny,” Chen said. “You better come clean. It’s not gonna look good if you keep lying to us.”

  Ginny’s brow creased as her meth-addled brain raced. “Okay, s-sure. Sometimes me and Curly did drugs together. She liked her heroin and I liked my crank. But that don’t mean I was there—”

  “Prints, Ginny,” Chen interrupted. “On the murder weapon.”

  “That don’t mean nothing,” Ginny snapped back. “I coulda touched that weeks ago.”

  Chen stared at her for several seconds. Good Cop leaned back and shook his head sadly. Ginny looked up, down, and all around while her hands twisted and twirled and wrung. Then Chen reached down and slammed a paper bag on the table. He stood up and pulled out the contents: a clear plastic bag, sealed with evidence tape, containing a pair of blood soaked women’s tennis shoes.

  “You left your shoes behind, Ginny,” Chen said. “The only pair of shoes in the whole damn apartment. Your shoe size, not Curly’s. And your DNA is all over them.”

  Brunelle knew that was a bluff. They hadn’t DNA typed the shoes yet. But Ginny Flowers didn’t know that.

  “We know you were there that night,” Chen barked. “And we know you killed her. This is your one chance to tell us what happened.”

  “If it was self defense, Ginny,” offered Good Cop, “please tell us. We’ll understand. But no one’s gonna believe it was self defense if you don’t tell us that now.”

  Brunelle was impressed. These two sure knew how to get a person to admit to murder. He waited to see if it would work.

  Ginny Flowers’ eyes darted around the room, a trapped animal looking for an escape. But there was none. The only question was whether she was going to realize it.

  She did. The words came in an amphetamine-fueled flood.

  “Oh my God, I don’t know what happened. There was so much blood. Blood everywhere. And the knife. And it was bloody. And oh God, she’s dead. Curly’s dead. And I did it. I didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. Or self-defense or something. I panicked and I don’t remember what happened next and I didn’t know what to do and I so I just ran and ran and ran. And oh my God, Curly’s dead. I killed Curly.”

  She dropped her head into her hands and started sobbing. Brunelle was curious about the details, but he could get that later from the transcript. He had his defendant and he had his confession. He stepped out of the observation room and headed back to the office to draw up the charging documents for Virginia Flowers’ arraignment that afternoon on charges of murder in the first degree.

  It would be several days before Brunelle regretted his decision to leave the interview early.

  *

  “Manslaughter,” was the first thing Flowers’ attorney said when Brunelle answered the phone.

  Brunelle smiled. “Well, hello to you too, Jessica. And no way. Did you see the autopsy photos? That’s not manslaughter.”

  Jessica Edwards was one of the top attorneys at the public defender’s office. Good for Flowers, but bad for Brunelle. He’d been hoping the case might get assigned to someone less talented, or at least who cared less. But Edwards was a ‘true believer’—every client was innocent and every cop was crooked. Now Brunelle was gonna have to work for the conviction.

  “Your confession sucks,” Edwards countered. “No details. Just blacked out and woke up with a bloody knife in her hand.”

  Brunelle cringed at the truth of that assessment, but he wasn’t about to give Edwards the satisfaction. “Pretty convenient,” he scoffed.

  “She didn’t do it, Dave,” Edwards pressed. “But she’ll plead to manslaughter. Save everybody the trouble of a trial.”

  Brunelle had to laugh at that. “I like trials, Jess. You know that.”

  “Yeah, I know that,” Edwards admitted. “But you know what else I know? Ginny didn’t murder her friend.”

  “Then who did?” Brunelle challenged.

  This time Edwards laughed. “Why don’t you check out the victim’s boyfriend? I think you might remember him. Goodbye, Dave.”

  Brunelle hung up after her and tapped his chin for a moment. Then he pulled the police report binder off his bookshelf and flipped through looking for the identity of Curly’s boyfriend/drug-dealer of the week.

  It took until the seventh report, some lower level officer identifying potential contacts from the victim’s cell phone.

  ‘Lawrence Carrington.’

  “Fuck,” Brunelle whispered through his fingers. “They were supposed to warn me before they let him out of prison.”

  *

  “We the jury,” the foreman had stood up and read the first verdict form aloud in the crowded courtroom, “find the defendant, Lawrence Carrington … not guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree.”

  Brunelle had managed not to flinch at the verdict, but he had squeezed his pen tighter. The victim’s mother had started to cry behind him in the gallery.

  No big deal, Brunelle had assured himself. It’s always hard to prove a murder was actually premeditated. They’ll convict him of the intentional murder two.

  “We the jury find the defendant, Lawrence Carrington … not guilty of the lesser crime of murder in the second degree.”

  Oh, fuck, Brunelle had thought. He had set his pen down. The crying had turned to sobbing, accompanied by murmurs of consolation, disbelief and rising anger.

  But the foreman hadn’t finished.

  “We the jury find the defendant, Lawrence Carrington … not guilty of the lesser crime of manslaughter in the first degree.”

  Even the judge had seemed surprised by that point.

  “We the jury find the defendant, Lawrence Carrington … guilty of the crime of manslaughter in the second degree.”

  Involuntary manslaughter. For shooting a man in the back. Sure, it had been a bar fight. Those were always hard cases. And Carrington had taken the stand and claimed self-defense. But four shots to the back? That wasn’t manslaughter. That was murder.

  The jury had disagreed, though, and Carrington had been looking at only a three year sentence instead of the twenty-five to life he’d been facing on the murder one. At the sentencing hearing Carrington had been all smiles and giggles until Brunelle asked the judge to give him an exceptional upward sentence of ten years despite the verdict. Ten years—the maximum for second degree manslaughter. And the judge had done it too. Just because the jury bought the self-defense story didn’t mean the judge did.

  Carrington had gone from smile and giggles to
yelling and threats.

  “I’m gonna get out one day, Brunelle!” he had yelled as the guards had dragged him out of the courtroom. “And when I do I’m gonna put four bullets in your back too! And another one in that fucked up head of yours!”

  Brunelle shook his head as he finished recounting the memory.

  Chen considered for a moment. “And he’s out now?”

  “Been out for about six weeks,” Brunelle answered. “Went right back into the drug culture.”

  “Got a girlfriend right away,” Chen observed. “Guy works fast.”

  Brunelle grimaced. “Great. Let’s hope ‘Kill the prosecutor’ is still a ways down his ‘to do’ list.”

  Chen grinned and stood up from his desk. “Don’t sweat it, Dave,” he said as he slapped Brunelle on the back. “I’ll go interview him. Let him know we’re watching him.”

  Brunelle thought about arguing, thought about insisting on tagging along. To confront Carrington. To show him he wasn’t afraid.

  But he knew he wouldn’t be able to show him that.

  “Sounds good,” he said instead. “That’s your job anyway. I ask people questions in the courtroom.”

  “Where there are armed guards,” Chen pointed out.

  “Yeah.” Brunelle didn’t laugh. He thought for a moment. “Do what you can to eliminate him as a suspect. I don’t want Edwards to be able to argue to the jury that Carrington did it.”

  Chen slapped his friend on the back. “And you don’t want to have to call him as a witness either, armed bailiffs or not, right?”

  Brunelle shrugged, but didn’t answer the question. “I know: find something to arrest him for. He’s probably got a gun somewhere. Arrest him for felon in possession.”

  “I bet he doesn’t let me search his apartment,” Chen laughed. “But I’ll tell you what. For you, I’ll plant one on him.”

  Brunelle finally laughed. “Thanks, pal.”

  Chen threw his hands wide. “Hey, what are friends for?”

  *

  “Here.” Kat yanked Brunelle’s hand out. “Hold this.”

  ‘This’ was heavy, reddish-brown, and gooey solid. Mercifully, it was also in a sealed plastic bag, so he didn’t actually touch whatever it was—or had been.

  She looked up from the freezer drawer she was rearranging to examine Brunelle’s face. Then she laughed in it.