Free Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein

body was ransacked to create the illusion of a botched burglary. The killer had the great good fortune to be out the door and away from the town house with barely two minutes to spare before the first cops came within half a block of the scene of the crime.
    I was almost at the end of Jerry Genco’s direct exam, with just a few points to clean up. The jurors and indeed the spectators seemed sobered by his testimony, following the morning’s unexpected entertainment from Kate Meade. “Did you have an opportunity to meet Brendan Quillian?”
    Genco lifted the damaged eyeglass frame and focused his attention on the defendant, who sat upright and returned the stare. “Yes, I did. He came to my office the following day, October fourth.”
    I didn’t bother with questions about his demeanor. I would argue that it had been part of his plan to play the grieving widower. “Did he tell you where he had been on October third?”
    “Yes, he mentioned that he was in Boston. That he took the shuttle back to New York late in the evening, after Detective Chapman had notified him of the death of his wife.”
    “Did you examine any part of the defendant’s face or body?”
    “Yes, actually I did.”
    “What were you looking for?”
    Quillian’s hands were folded in front of him, resting on the counsel’s table. His fingers were long and slender, unlikely weapons in this matter, which we’d known from the outset.
    “Detective Chapman and I were convinced the killer would have been injured in this struggle as well. I expected if we found him early enough, there would be lacerations — probably numerous cuts and scratches — caused by the victim’s frenzied fight for her life, on his face and hands,” Genco said, looking squarely at the defendant. “Mr. Quillian had no such injuries.”
    I was about ready to relinquish my witness to Lem Howell, running my eyes down the checklist of facts that I had planned to cover on direct before I asked the judge to issue the grim photographs to the jury.
    The silence occasioned by Genco’s recounting of Amanda’s last minutes alive was broken by loud voices coming from the rear of the courtroom. As with all high-profile trials in Manhattan, every seat in the house was filled, and a line of onlookers queued in the hallway to fill the place of any departing spectator.
    The lone court officer in charge of the flow was pushing and shoving a tall, pale-faced man in a blue seersucker suit who was trying to break past him.
    I glanced over my shoulder again as Judge Gertz banged his gavel to restore order.
    Preston Meade, the cuckolded husband of Kate, was shouting my name as he charged toward the railing that separated the benches from where I stood.
     
6
     
    “He only wanted to publicly humiliate you, kid. Like you did to him this morning.”
    “Me? I didn’t do anything to him except—”
    “Except completely misjudge the character of your first witness,” Mike said. “Mr. Meade was probably hoping that if he made a big enough stir inside the courthouse, it would trump the news story of his wife’s infidelity.”
    Judge Gertz had quelled the commotion and allowed Lem Howell to end the session — keeping the jury later than planned — with his cross-examination of Dr. Genco. It was after six when Mike and I returned to my office to make the phone calls confirming the appearances of the next day’s witnesses.
    “You changing the batting order?”
    I was scratching out names and shifting some of the civilian witnesses to the next week. “You bet. I’m sticking with forensics at the moment. Cold, clinical facts.”
    I dialed the beepers and home numbers of the crime-scene analysts who had scoured the Quillian town house unsuccessfully for fingerprints, photographed the entryway and the parlor, and tried to give the lab techs something to work with, as well as the forensic biologist who had spent painstaking hours vainly trying to find nanograms of DNA on items that had been on or