Jaime Berger stands before me. I am in the witness stand facing a jury of three women and five men. Two are white, five are African-American, one is Asian. The races of all of Chan-donne’s victims are represented, even though that was not deliberate on anybody’s part, I am sure. But it seems just, and I am glad. Brown paper has been taped over the courtroom’s glass door to ensure that the curious, the media, can’t look in. Jurors and witnesses and I entered the courthouse by an underground ramp the same way prisoners are escorted to their trials. Secrecy chills the air and the jurors stare at me as if I am a ghost. My face is greenish yellow from old bruises, my left arm is in a cast again and I still have rope burns around my wrists. I am alive only because Lucy happened to wear body armor. I had no idea. When she picked me up in the helicopter, she had on a bulletproof vest underneath her down-filled jacket.
Berger is asking me about the night Diane Bray was murdered. It is as if I am a house where different music is playing in every room. I am answering her questions, and yet I am thinking other thoughts and other images are coming to me and I hear other sounds in different areas of my psyche. Somehow I am able to concentrate on my testimony. The cash register tape for the chipping hammer I purchased is mentioned. Then Berger reads from the actual lab report that was turned over to the court as a matter of record, just as the autopsy protocol, the toxicology and all other reports have been. Berger describes the chipping hammer to the jurors and asks me to explain how the hammer’s surfaces correlate with Bray’s horrendous injuries.
This goes on for a while, and I look at the faces of those here to judge me. Expressions range from passive to intrigued to horrified. One woman gets visibly queasy when I describe punched-out areas of skull and an eyeball that was virtually avulsed, or hanging out of the socket. Berger points out that according to the lab report, the chipping hammer recovered from my house had rust on it. She asks me if the hammer I bought from the hardware store after Bray’s murder was rusty. I say it wasn’t. “Could a tool like this rust in a matter of a few weeks?” she asks me. “In your opinion, Dr. Scarpetta, could blood on the chipping hammer have caused it to be in this conditionin the condition of the one recovered from your house, the one you say Chandonne brought with him when he attacked you?”
“Not in my opinion,” I reply, knowing that it is in my best interest to answer such. But it doesn’t matter. I would tell the truth even if it were not in my best interest. “For one thing, the police should as a matter of routine make sure the hammer is dry when it is placed in an evidence bag,” I add.
“And the scientists who received the chipping hammer for examination say it was rusty, is this not right? I mean, I am reading this lab report correctly, aren’t I?” She smiles slightly. She is dressed in a black suit with pale blue pinstripes, and paces in little steps as she works through the case.
“I don’t know what the labs have said,” I answer. “I haven’t seen those reports.”
“Of course not. You’ve not been in the office for ten days or so. And, ummm, this report was just turned in day before yesterday.” She glances at the date typed on it. “But it does say the chipping hammer that has Bray’s blood on it was rusty. It looked old, and I believe the clerk at Pleasants Hardware Store claims the hammer you bought on the night of December seventeenalmost twenty-four hours after Bray’s murdercertainly didn’t look old. It was brand new. Correct?”
Again, I can’t say what the hardware store clerk claimed, I remind Berger from the stand as jurors take in every word, every gesture. I have been excluded from all witness testimony. Berger is simply asking me questions I can’t answer so she can tell the jurors what she wants them to know. What is treacherous and wonderful about any grand jury proceeding is that defense counsel is not present and there is no judgeno one to object to Berger’s questions. She can ask me anything, and she does, because in one of the rare instances on this planet, a prosecutor is trying to show the defendant is innocent.