04 The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

Author:Michael Connelly [Connelly, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-eight

I used the last few minutes of the break to prepare the second part of my cross-examination of Kurlen. Cisco’s news was going to send a wave through the whole trial. How I handled the new information with Kurlen would impact the rest of the trial. Soon everyone was back in the courtroom and I was at the lectern and ready to go. I had one last item on my list to hit before I got to the letter.

“Detective Kurlen, let’s go back to the crime scene photo you see on the screen. Did you identify the ownership of the briefcase that was found open next to the victim’s body?”

“Yes, it had the victim’s property in it and his initials engraved on the brass locking plate. It was his.”

“And when you arrived at the crime scene and saw the open briefcase next to the body, what were your initial impressions of it?”

“None. I try to keep an open mind about everything, especially when I first come into a case.”

“Did you think the open briefcase could mean that robbery was a motive for the murder?”

“Among many possibilities, yes.”

“Did you think, Here is a banker dead and an open briefcase next to him. I wonder what the killer was after?”

“I had to think of that as a possible scenario. But as I said it was—”

“Thank you, Detective.”

Freeman objected, saying I was not giving the witness time to fully answer the question. The judge agreed and let Kurlen finish.

“I was just saying that the possibility of this being a robbery was just one scenario. Leaving the briefcase open could just as easily have been a move to make it look like a robbery when it wasn’t.”

I pushed on without losing a beat.

“Did you determine what was taken from the briefcase?”

“As far as we knew then and know now, nothing was taken from it. But there was no inventory as to what should have been in the briefcase. We had Mr. Bondurant’s secretary look at his files and work product to see if she could determine if anything was missing, like a file or something. She found nothing missing.”

“Then do you have any explanation for why it was left open?”

“As I said before, it could have been done as misdirection. But we also believe there is a good chance that the case sprung open when it was dropped on the concrete during the attack.”

I put my incredulous look on.

“And how did you come to that determination, sir?”

“The briefcase has a faulty locking mechanism. Any sort of jarring of the case could lead to its release. We conducted experiments with the case and found that when it was dropped to a hard surface from a height of three feet or more, it sprung open about one out of every three times.”

I nodded and acted like I was computing this information for the first time even though I already had it from one of the investigative reports received in discovery.

“So what you’re saying is that there was a one in three chance that the briefcase came open on its own when Mr.

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