Crooked Halos by Charlie Cottrell

Author:Charlie Cottrell [Cottrell, Charlie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-08-09T22:00:00+00:00

III.

The trial continued going badly for me. The majority of my defense could be summed up as, “I didn’t do it, honest,” and that just didn’t carry much weight in a court of law. My only hope was to cast as much doubt on the prosecution’s case as I could manage.

Not that it was going to be easy. They had plenty of experts and lots of physical evidence. Crowder had done a pretty solid job of framing me.

But there were holes to exploit, even if they were tiny and far too few.

First was all the DNA evidence. I pointed out that most of my blood was sitting on the curb outside the Zimmerman, not inside one of the rooms. The prosecution countered that there was plenty of my blood inside, and while they couldn’t explain the pool of it outside, it didn’t change anything as far as they were concerned.

“But what about the Denton Method?” I asked. The Denton Method was a way of synthesizing blood from a small original sample. It would’ve been easy for Crowder and his goons to take a small amount of my blood—as I said, there was plenty of it all over the curb outside—and create massive quantities quickly.

But not quickly enough. “The Denton Method takes 24 to 48 hours to produce the amount of blood we saw at the crime scene,” the prosecution’s expert forensics guy said from the stand. “There is no way that much synthetic blood could have been produced between the time you were shot and the time the police arrived.”

“Hey, I’ve bled in lots of places over the years,” I said. “They could’ve grabbed a sample ages ago for something just like this.” The prosecution objected to my conjecture and the judge agreed with them. He did that way too often. I was starting to think this whole “be your own attorney” thing was a bad idea.

That plan having failed, I attacked their other big problem: motive.

“Why would I kill Genevieve Pratt?” I asked. “The prosecution has given us a lot of facts, but they haven’t been able to answer this question. The woman was a client of mine. I’d been hired to stop her murder.” Okay, that was a bit inaccurate in the particulars, but the specifics of the case were probably too unbelievable for the jury. “Why would I want to kill her?”

The prosecution’s response was that I clearly had something against the late Ms. Pratt. “The nature and brutality of the murder are evidence that Mr. Hazzard has some strong, preexisting connection to the victim. Just because he has not disclosed this prior connection does not mean there is not motive.” Then, they dropped a couple of bombshells.

“We would like to enter into evidence this collection of emails between the deceased and Mr. Hazzard,” the prosecutor said. A large vid window popped up on the wall beside the judge, a half-dozen emails between myself and Ms. Pratt scrolling slowly up it.

They were all dated from months ago.

“Hey, hold on a sec,” I said, staring in confusion.

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