A Good Marriage(86)

“Fuck, no. Blood spatter analysis is completely unreliable,” Vinnie grumbled. “In New York City, at least the people doing the analysis have some actual training. A lot of places send some regular old cops to a six-hour seminar before they get to start pretending they got the lead on CSI Fucking Fresno. Regardless, blood spatter in and of itself is more art than science, always.”

“That sounds bad,” I said. Sweat was trickling down my lower back. This was all getting to be too much.

“Look at this case—there’s so much blood spatter, in so many different variations. They can use it to prove anything they want. For sure, the DA will get some lab tech to walk the jury through every step of this crime like he watched it happen. Meanwhile, he might as well be reading his own fucking palm. In a case like this, I could find you three different blood guys who’d come to three totally different conclusions about the sequence of events on that staircase. That would say to me that they shouldn’t be using blood spatter, period, in a case like this. But I’m not the prosecutor, so fuck me.”

That sounded very, very bad. Hadn’t Millie said there was good news?

“And you heard all this from the medical examiner’s office?” I asked.

Vinnie nodded. “Apparently they’ve got the golf club with our guy’s prints on it, and rumor is the victim’s injuries are ‘consistent with’ a golf club, but there’s too much damage to get an exact match. My guess is all of that sounded a lot more definitive in front of the grand jury. That’s easy to do with no cross. For sure, they’ll spend hours crowing about their bullshit ‘airtight blood spatter’ at trial. And we’ll do the best we can to knock it down. But you ask me: we shouldn’t have to.”

We. Our guy. I tried to focus on the way Vinnie had said that, and not the rest of it. It was a relief to share the burden of Zach’s awfulness with somebody—if only for a second and somewhat begrudgingly. Vinnie was certainly right about the way grand juries worked, though. With no defense attorney present to point out the holes, testimony ended up being entirely one-sided. Witnesses weren’t encouraged to outright lie—after all, if they testified at trial, they could be confronted then by the defense—but there was an ocean of distance between a lie and a carefully asked series of questions.

“Which is why it was good that you called me over to the house,” Millie said, trying to strike a more optimistic tone. “The prints are gonna help.”

“You found something?”

“Yeah, a fuckload of prints,” Vinnie said, holding up a folder and eyeing Millie. “That we already fronted a shitload of cash to get some rushed comparison results on.”

“It’s nothing conclusive.” Millie tugged the folder out of Vinnie’s hands and handed it to me. Inside were twenty pages of item numbers, percentage ratings, and descriptive language. It was all completely indecipherable. “But we did run comparisons between some prints in key locations.”

“I’m sorry …,” I began. “I’m not sure I follow.”

“Here.” Vinnie flipped to a page toward the back of the stack. “See this? We found two sets of prints on the golf bag, Zach’s and an unknown.”

“Amanda’s?”

Vinnie shook his head. “We had a control set from Zach and the victim. The other prints on the golf bag aren’t hers.”

But there had to be countless innocuous explanations for prints on the golf bag—housekeepers, movers, caddies, valets. Any number of people could have had a legitimate reason to touch it.

“Who do they belong to?”

Vinnie scowled. “How the fuck should I know?”

“He means the unidentified print on the golf bag wasn’t in the system. We were able to pull some strings and get it run through at the NYPD.” Millie motioned for Vinnie to continue. “Get to the good part, Vin.”

“We’ve got a partial of that same hand from the bag, here.” Vinnie indicated a place on the photograph of the staircase. “In Amanda Grayson’s blood.”

My heart surged. “What?”

“That palm and single fingerprint you spotted in the blood on the metal tread,” Millie said, “that same print is also on the golf bag. Lots of people might have had a legitimate reason to have their hands on that golf bag, but they sure as hell didn’t also have a legitimate reason to have their hands in Amanda’s blood the night she died.”

“Oh my God,” I said. “Are you sure?”

Millie smiled slyly. “We’re sure. And the print definitely doesn’t belong to an EMT or anyone at the NYPD. We had those checked, too. But somebody was there the night Amanda Grayson died. Somebody other than Zach Grayson.”

Holy shit. Zach really hadn’t killed Amanda? He was just a sick fuck who was extorting me?

“Now, we can have our lab run this print against everybody who was in the victim’s life, anybody you get us a sample on. It’ll be a hell of a lot faster than whatever the NYPD does, sure as hell more comprehensive. But we’re not doing that until we get paid,” Vinnie said. “Lucky for Millie, she’s got me to be sure we don’t get kicked out of this fancy office here for nonpayment of rent.”

Millie frowned at Vinnie, then turned to me. “I pushed him as far as I could,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s right that running print comparisons can get expensive fast. It’s good for clients to be fully on board before we get too far ahead of ourselves.”