Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein Page B

followed, trying to leave as little room as possible for Lem Howell to paint the pair of rookies as Keystone Kops. Bobby Jamison’s physical response to encountering the murder victim had obviously contaminated an area of the crime scene. No, neither man had worn rubber gloves or booties in the house; yes, Denton had moved the body a bit to keep clear of the problem his partner had created; and, no, they hadn’t called to report the homicide until after they had cleaned up Jamison’s mess.
    “Were there any signs of forced entry?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    Howell would argue that the killer was a street person who had pushed in after his victim unlocked the door. It was Chapman’s view — with Brendan Quillian conveniently out of town and the housekeeper on her regular day off — that the defendant had given the killer access to the home, so that he could lie in wait for Amanda as she entered alone after her luncheon date.
    Howell’s cross-examination was a well-organized punch list of activities that the most casual of television viewers had come to expect of crime-scene responders. Tim Denton had been oblivious to just about every rule as he tended his unsteady partner on that fall afternoon, and the volley of
No
’s he gave in response to the questions seemed endless.
    “I have no redirect of Officer Denton,” I said when Howell ceded the witness back to me and nodded at me with a smile.
    The entryway of the town house and the area surrounding Amanda Quillian’s lifeless body had been hopelessly compromised by the first two cops on the scene. If the killer had left any trace evidence near her, he couldn’t have asked for more than the timely arrival of Jamison and Denton.
    “You want a recess before you call your next witness?”
    “May I have ten minutes?” I didn’t need the time, but I counted on it to let the jurors stretch their legs and come back fresh to a more compelling witness.
    “Sure,” Gertz said. “Why don’t we give the jurors a short break.”
    Max signaled me from her third-row seat that Jerry Genco had arrived and was waiting in the witness room. Artie Tramm let me slip out of the courtroom to the small cubicle off the locked hallway, and I confirmed with the pathologist the points that would be covered in his testimony.
    “Dr. Genco,” I asked as the trial resumed, after he had completed the details of his medical education and training as a forensic pathologist and been qualified in his area of expertise, “for how long have you been employed at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York?”
    “Three years.”
    “I’d like to direct your attention to a date last fall, the late afternoon of October third. Do you recall that day?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    “What was your assignment at that time?”
    “I was catching cases,” he said, speaking to the jurors in the manner of a professional witness who had testified many times before, and explaining the steps that he was obligated to perform at a crime scene. “I was on call to respond to any homicides reported between eight a.m. and six p.m.”
    Jerry Genco, expecting a day in the morgue’s lab, was casually dressed in a sports jacket and chinos. He was in sore need of a haircut and a small screw to replace the Band-Aid that held one earpiece of his glasses to the edge of the frame, but his smart, studied answers were in sharp contrast to the nervous manner of Kate Meade.
    “Would you tell us, please, what time it was and who was present when you arrived at the Quillian town house?”
    “It was four thirty, and I was admitted to the home by Detective Michael Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide Squad. There were two uniformed officers from the Nineteenth Precinct there, three other homicide detectives, and Hal Sherman, from the Crime Scene Unit.”
    “Any civilians?”
    “There was a woman identified to me as the housekeeper, but we never spoke. Someone had called her and she was brought in just as I