Degree of Guilt Read online

  ‘Is it true,’ Paget finally asked, ‘that James Colt junior plans to run for governor?’

  Brooks nodded. ‘So I understand.’

  Paget appraised him. ‘You certainly do have your troubles,’ he said finally. ‘Which you might do well to leave behind.’

  ‘If only we could, Christopher. If only we could.’

  Paget considered him. ‘All right,’ he finally said. ‘So the M.E. doesn’t like the powder marks.’

  Brooks’s eyes widened in mock surprise. ‘Very perceptive,’ he answered. ‘There were no powder marks. No gunshot residue of any kind. Nothing.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘So it’s a problem. The M.E. can’t always tell us what did happen, but she can pretty much always tell us what didn’t happen. And what didn’t happen here is that Miss Carelli shot Mark Ransom from two, three inches. Not even close.’

  ‘That’s surprising,’ Paget said. ‘Mary’s usually so precise. I guess she forgot her ruler.’

  Brooks’s smile was a narrowing of the eyes, quickly passing. ‘Nice jury argument. But with Ransom eight hours dead, we can’t ignore that. And it’s going to keep us thinking for a while.’

  ‘Come off it, Mac. Ransom was attacking her at the moment the gun went off. Mary could have been wrong. Ransom could have been shrinking back from the gun. Consider all the possibilities.’

  ‘And I’m sure you’ll suggest all that to her. Just as possibilities, of course.’

  Paget shrugged. ‘When she thinks about it, I doubt she’ll be able to swear to a distance.’

  ‘But then,’ Brooks went on, ‘there’s cutting off Monk’s questions. It just doesn’t sit right with some of the people you’re asking to believe her. And she did ask for a lawyer.’

  ‘Law school graduates are funny like that. And she didn’t ask for a lawyer – she asked for me. It was more like calling a friend, or a priest.’

  ‘A priest?’

  ‘Someone who would feel sympathy,’ Paget said coolly, ‘as she has every right to expect.’

  ‘She will certainly get sympathy. But just like you’re not a priest, I’m not an ostrich. One possible construction of pulling the plug on Monk is that she saw she was in trouble.’

  For the first time, Paget felt a moment of fear. ‘A far more humane construction,’ he retorted, ‘is that she was a bit under the weather.’ He turned back to Sharpe. ‘How many rape victims ever report what happened? Maybe fifteen percent, even people like Mary Carelli. They feel ashamed, they feel guilty, they feel alone, and if they report it, then they get to explain it all to some man they’ve never met, while they’re still semitraumatized. Mary Carelli got to explain herself within three or four hours of killing the man who tried to do it, sitting with Monk in an environment where she was utterly lost. So she felt disoriented, attacked, ashamed, and, yes, probably as “guilty” as any normal person would feel who has just shot someone to death. Even though she’s innocent under the law.’

  Sharpe’s face was taut; Paget realized that it was herself, not Mary, whom she saw as under attack. ‘We know about rape,’ she answered. ‘I prosecute any case that’s righteous. Even if I think we’ll lose.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that.’ Paget looked back to Brooks. ‘You have a fine record on sex crimes, Mac. The people who care know that. Don’t throw it away by coming out on the wrong side of a bad case.’

  Brooks’s gaze was cool. ‘Give me a reason to spring her, Chris. One I can explain to people.’

  Paget had a bleak, wasted feeling. ‘I have a reason,’ he finally said. ‘But not one I’d like explained to anyone.’

  Brooks looked curious. ‘What is that?’

  How little, Paget thought, he wanted to say this, with or without Sharpe in the room. ‘My son, Carlo. He’s fifteen now and lives with me.’ Paget exhaled. ‘He’s also Mary’s son.’

  Brooks stared at him. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he murmured. ‘So that’s why you’re here.’

  ‘That’s why I’m here.’

  Paget felt ashamed; he had expunged Brooks’s debt to him by cashing in his personal life, and that of his son, in the hope of a favor. ‘There are aspects of Carlo’s life which have been . . . difficult. But those things have been private. This won’t be. He’ll get to work through whatever his mother has done with the help of the media. It would help if he didn’t wake up tomorrow to find her still in jail.’

  Sharpe seemed to have removed herself. Brooks gazed at his hands. ‘What is it,’ he asked, ‘that you want us to do?’

  ‘Just listen. Give me every chance to show you this isn’t a case before you decide to bring it. And in the meanwhile let her go.’

  Brooks looked up. ‘Will she take a lie detector test?’

  ‘No. On my advice.’

  Brooks raised an eyebrow. ‘Of course,’ he finally said, ‘she could finish up with Monk.’

  ‘She could. But for the moment, I’d like to handle this.’

  ‘Because nothing you say to us can be used at trial.’

  ‘Because that’s the way any competent defense lawyer deals with your office.’

  ‘But you’re asking –’

  ‘And because,’ Paget finished evenly, ‘the prosecution has the burden of proof. I don’t think you have a case. If I’m right, then I’m doing you a favor, simply by pointing out why. Plus you get some notion of what I’m thinking.’

  Brooks looked to Sharpe, then to Paget again. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Full disclosure. We decide to bring a case, we’d have to lift our skirts anyhow.’

  ‘Better find another metaphor, Mac. At least for press conferences.’

  Brooks gave Paget a wintry smile. ‘I wish this case weren’t so unpleasant, Christopher. You and I would have such fun. . . .’ Abruptly, he picked up the telephone, dialed a number he already knew. ‘Are you about through with him?’ he asked into the telephone, and then said, ‘We’re with Ms Carelli’s lawyer – please come on up,’ and put down the phone.

  ‘The M.E.,’ he explained. ‘She’s finished making nice with Ransom.’

  A moment later, a slim blond woman came through the door and extended a cool hand. ‘I’m Elizabeth Shelton,’ she said. ‘The medical examiner.’

  ‘It seems,’ Paget said, ‘that you’ve been quite busy.’

  She gave him a quizzical smile. ‘It’s been a very long day,’ she responded, and she pulled up a chair between Paget and Sharpe.

  ‘We’ve been having a candid chat among friends.’ Brooks waved a hand at Paget. ‘Chris understands your problem with the gunshot wound. Maybe you can tell us what else you found.’

  ‘Very little. Almost nothing, in fact.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Paget asked.

  She looked quickly at Brooks and, when he nodded, back to Paget. ‘One thing I mean is that there’s an absence of the physical evidence I’d like to have. Bullet angle, for one thing. If the bullet goes through, we can trace the path from the body to where the bullet lodges and tell you not only the angle but where he got shot within a couple of feet. But here, the bullet lodged in his spine.’

  She spoke with a cool precision, clinical but not unpleasant.

  ‘What else?’ Paget asked.

  Shelton considered him. ‘The other thing,’ she said finally, ‘is there is almost nothing about Ransom’s body that confirms what Miss Carelli told us.’

  ‘Well,’ Paget said mildly, ‘he did have his pants down. That’s not standard dress for interviews.’

  ‘No.’ Her eyes and voice were cautious. ‘So I swabbed his penis and tested for traces of seminal fluid. You’d expect fluid on a man who’d recently had an erection, even without ejaculation. Nothing.’

  ‘Is that test one hundred percent reliable?’

  ‘Almost no test is. But I’d expect results.’ Her look grew more intent. ‘As it happens, I’m no fan of Mark Ransom. But I can’t tell you he’s a rapist, or even an attempted rapist.’

  ‘All right. What else did you find?’
<
br />   ‘Miss Carelli said that Ransom reached for the gun before it fired. But there aren’t any powder marks on his hands. Again, it depends on how it happened, but powder marks would tend to confirm what she told us.’ She hesitated. ‘And of course, there’s the fact that she didn’t fire from two or three inches or, in my opinion, anywhere within two or three feet.

  ‘In short, Mr Paget, there’s very little about Ransom’s body to tell me that Miss Carelli didn’t shoot him while they were strolling in the park.’

  ‘There were,’ Paget said evenly, ‘a few things about Miss Carelli.’

  Shelton nodded. ‘Scratches, for example. I took samples from both of their fingernails. There was skin under Miss Carelli’s nails, but none under Ransom’s.’

  ‘What’s the reliability there?’

  ‘Low,’ she concluded. ‘And we can’t even tell whose skin it is – in fact, we usually can’t. But one of the things we try to do is rule out possibilities. Here, I can’t rule out the possibility that Miss Carelli scratched herself and broke a nail in the process.’

  Shelton’s calm was unnerving; she knew her field, conceded what she had to, and seemed utterly dispassionate. In the right case, she would make a devastating witness.

  ‘You also looked,’ Paget prodded, ‘at that rather nasty bruise.’

  For a moment, Shelton looked puzzled. ‘Yes.’ She nodded. ‘Miss Carelli’s left cheek.’

  ‘Then did she pistol-whip herself? Or is she just allergic to champagne?’

  To the side, Brooks gave the perfunctory smile of a lawyer who appreciates a problem. ‘No,’ Shelton conceded. ‘It looks like a slap.’

  ‘With an open hand?’ Paget asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Relatively recent?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Ransom, I assume, was right-handed. So that he could have struck Miss Carelli on the left cheek.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A couple of blows like that,’ Paget said to Brooks, ‘and I’d have shot Ransom myself. And if Ransom slapped her, it makes everything she told Monk a lot more plausible and renders the notion that she later decided to scratch herself impossible to explain. Add the tape of Laura Chase and James Colt, which gives Ransom’s own sexual problems the awful ring of truth, and you’ve got no reason to doubt her.

  ‘Which gets me to the last thing – motive. Our motive is simple: the man was trying to rape her, and she shot him. The bruise on her face supports that. But if he wasn’t trying to rape her, why on earth does someone like Mary Carelli shoot a man she only knows through books?’

  Brooks nodded. ‘No motive.’

  ‘None at all,’ Paget responded crisply. ‘No motive, no witness, no case. Leaving the only possible disposition a decision by the D.A. that Mary acted in self-defense.’ Paget finished more slowly, his gaze covering Sharpe and Shelton. ‘There are a lot of people out there, a lot of them women, who will know intuitively that’s what happened once they see Mary Carelli on television. Gunshot residue won’t mean a damn to them. Because they’ll know. And because after Clarence Thomas and Willie Smith, they also know how easy it is for a man to walk away.’

  Sharpe frowned; Shelton stared at the rug. ‘The women’s movement,’ Sharpe finally said, ‘is too important to too many women for any of us not to do our job.’

  Beneath her didactic tone, Paget sensed as much pride as principle. ‘I understand,’ he said mildly. ‘But my point was that part of your job – and Mac’s – is not to waste moral or political capital on a case that you can’t win. Forgive me if I made the point inartfully.’

  Sharpe stared at him, unbending and unmollified. ‘Artfully enough,’ Brooks said finally. ‘Can we agree, for the moment, to leave Laura Chase and James Colt out of this? At least as far as the press is concerned?’

  Paget nodded. ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘All right.’ Brooks seemed to expel a short breath. ‘If you care to wait upstairs for a while, you can take Mary Carelli home.’

  Paget felt more tension easing from him than he had known was there. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Just part of my job, Christopher, as you point out. But there are other parts. I assume that what might be called the Paget family will forgive us if we finish the job before signing off on self-defense.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Shelton stood up. ‘I’ll walk you up there,’ she said. ‘Perhaps it will move things along.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’ Paget shook hands with Sharpe and then Brooks. ‘I’ll be back in touch. Perhaps in a couple of days.’

  ‘Do that,’ Brooks said, and then Shelton whisked him out the door.

  In the hallway, she said, ‘Better me than Marnie Sharpe, I thought.’

  Paget smiled. ‘Is that “M-a-r-n-i-e,” as in the Hitchcock film?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s perfect for her. Marnie has two obsessions – her job, and movies.’ She pushed the elevator button. ‘You know, I really did look for things to support Mary Carelli’s story. I just want an answer.’

  Paget nodded, and then recalled something Mary had said. ‘Didn’t you examine scratches on Ransom? On his buttocks?’

  Shelton paused. ‘I’m still working on that.’

  Her voice had a faint troubled undertone. As he waited for Mary, it was that, rather than Sharpe’s antipathy, that stayed with him.

  Chapter 5

  The guard brought Mary to a small open space at the front of a row of cells housing spaced-out hookers, chattering druggies.

  ‘Bye-bye Rosebud,’ someone jeered, ‘pretty boyfriend,’ and then the elevator door closed behind them, and they were alone.

  She slumped against the wall. ‘How,’ she asked wearily, ‘did you get me out?’

  Paget pushed the button. ‘Just reminded them of what they didn’t have. They’d have gotten there without me.’

  She was silent. The elevator creaked downward. Both of them, Paget thought, would be content to stay sealed in this space, as long as no one bothered them.

  The elevator opened.

  Through the glass doors of the entrance, a crowd of reporters was waiting, cordoned by police. Their muffled voices echoed in the lobby.

  Mary recoiled. Paget stopped walking; for all that he had said, he was not prepared for this so soon.

  ‘What do we do?’ she asked.

  Paget saw a cameraman spot them through the glass and then jostle for position. His movement spread through the crowd. Paget felt a flash of anger, at the media and at Mary.

  ‘I’ll make a brief statement,’ he said finally. ‘Then we’ll go. Just be the dazed but dignified victim.’ He turned to her, heard the bitterness in his voice. ‘This is the first time anyone will have seen you since Ransom was shot. Your face will be the lead for every news flash. All that people will remember – what Carlo will remember – is how you looked.’

  She nodded slowly, as if only his words mattered, not his tone. Then she took his arm.

  Paget looked down at her hand. ‘This is the first time anyone will have seen us,’ she said quietly, ‘since Washington. What they’ll remember is how we looked.’

  Her voice and gaze were level now. Paget had the sudden weary certainty that the separation of their lives since then had been an illusion; decisions once made, he thought, can never be unmade, and debts to the past can never be discharged.

  The night before they had testified in the Senate, Mary had called him.

  ‘I have to see you,’ she had said.

  It was almost one o’clock, and Paget had been unable to sleep. Two months before, they had shared the bed he lay on, but now that was impossible.

  ‘Why don’t we just talk,’ he said.

  ‘I need to see you, Chris. In person.’

  ‘Exactly what is it you want?’ he asked. ‘It’s all been said.’

  ‘This isn’t about Lasko.’ Her tone was cool, determined. ‘It’s personal.’

  He looked out at the darkened room, at nothing. ‘Where?’ he fina
lly asked. ‘Here?’

  ‘I don’t want people to see us together – the two key witnesses, right before we testify. Someone might think we were deciding what to say.’ Her voice held a trace of irony. ‘Meet me at the Jefferson Memorial. You told me once you liked it there.’

  The night was chill with autumn. Framed by a half circle of cherry trees, the outer shell of the dome was dark; in the pale light within, Jefferson was a solitary stone figure, gazing outward as if waiting for visitors who might never come. Paget turned, walking toward the cement plaza that faced the Tidal Basin. The water was inky black; beyond, centered within a grass rectangle perhaps a mile long, the Washington Monument was a darkened obelisk, tip disappearing into the night. At the far end of the rectangle the Lincoln Memorial was so distant that it looked like a tourist’s replica. Paget was alone.

  ‘Hello, Chris.’

  He turned. Mary wore dark wool slacks, a silk blouse, a tailored jacket over her shoulders, silver earrings. In the moonlight, her face looked tan and her hair glossy, as if newly washed. She could have been going on a date.

  ‘From what I read,’ she said, ‘you’ve had a busy two months. Since we last spoke.’

  ‘As have you, I hear.’ He paused, examining her face. ‘What’s curious is that it seems to have agreed with you.’

  ‘Oh, I’m all aglow.’

  Paget almost smiled in spite of himself, and then he took a second look at her.

  ‘I’m pregnant, Chris.’

  He paused, stunned. ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Very.’

  He turned, staring at the darkened pool. Then he looked back into her eyes. ‘Whose is it?’ he asked.

  She stiffened, almost imperceptibly, and then gave a thin smile. ‘That’s hardly flattering.’

  Paget shrugged. ‘The last two months,’ he answered, ‘have beaten the romantic clean out of me.’