The judge considers this, then looks at me.
“I met with Mr. Hanson this morning, and we talked at length.” I pause and withdraw a piece of lined yellow legal paper from my breast pocket. “My client paid close attention to everything I told him. Then he asked me for a pen and something to write on. He said he wanted to make sure Your Honor heard his message in his words. What he wrote is this: ‘I did not kill Jennifer Yamura. Not deliberately. Not accidentally. Not in a fit of passion. Not by reason of insanity or whatever other loophole could lessen the sentence. I did not kill Jennifer Yamura, and I will not plead guilty to any crime that implies that I did, even if it would keep me from spending a thousand years in prison. As to the lesser charges pertaining to altering the crime scene, I ask Your Honor to understand that the murder charges wrongfully brought against me by the jump-the-gun prosecutor have destroyed my reputation, left my career in ruins, and derailed a business deal that could have benefited every man, woman, and child living in Philadelphia. Like any innocent man, I shudder at the prospect of imprisonment. But I am not going to enter into any deal, on any charge, proposed by this wrongful prosecution.’”
I fold the piece of paper, place it back into my jacket, and look at the judge.
“So,” the judge says, “even if the DA offered Man Two . . .”
“Not even jaywalking.”
At this, Walker actually snorts his contempt. The judge casts him a disapproving glance and then orders us to go back to the courtroom. I pause at the doorway while Christina Wesley and Devlin leave. Then, before I cross the threshold, I glance back. Bill Henry is staring at me, and I can see he’s gotten the message—David Hanson is innocent and will cop to nothing.
Which will play perfectly into my endgame.
I watch the jury file in and take their seats.
“The Commonwealth calls Detective John Tredesco to the stand,” Devlin announces.
Tredesco enters the well through the gate on the left of the courtroom, the prosecution side, passing between the prosecutor’s table and the jury box. His thinning black hair is freshly cut, but it still looks greasy on his small head. He has his suit jacket buttoned as he walks past the jury, so they can’t see his gut sticking over his belt. Tredesco turns to face the jury and can’t help hard-staring them as he takes the stand.
Devlin begins with the usual questioning, about Tredesco’s having been raised in Philadelphia, his time at the academy, and his fifteen-year tenure as a detective, the last eight with homicide. Those boxes all checked, Walker takes Tredesco to the night of Jennifer Yamura’s murder.
“Officers Pancetti and Kujowski handed the defendant over to Detective Cook and me, and we drove him to the station house,” Tredesco begins. “He was processed and brought to an interview room. Detective Cook offered him coffee. He said no, at first, then after a while said okay. So we brought him the coffee and some milk, too, but he said he had to have skim milk. Detective Cook went and checked the fridge and brought back two percent milk, and the defendant said, ‘No. I said skim. Not two percent.’ So Detective Cook found some skim. But by then the defendant said the coffee wasn’t hot enough and asked could we nuke it.”
This is vintage Tredesco bullshit. Fabricated details to make a defendant look bad. Tredesco has been offering this stuff up on the witness stand as long as I can remember. When I was a prosecutor, I had to tell him to knock it off more than once.
“Did you question the defendant before he asked for a lawyer?” Devlin asks.
“Before, yes. Not after.” Tredesco knows to emphasize that anything he’s going to attribute to the defendant was said before the invocation of Miranda rights. “We asked him why he killed the girl, Jennifer Yamura. Was there a fight? Did she want to break things off? Did she catch him with someone else?”
“What did he say?”
“He denied everything.”
“Did you ask him where he was when the victim was murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Did he answer?”
“He said he was at work all afternoon, which I found a little odd.”
“Why did that strike you as odd?”
“I never told him when she’d been killed. So how did he know that it was that afternoon?” Devlin lets this hang in the air for a while. I see a couple of jurors raise their eyebrows. A few look toward the defense table to see how David and I react to this.
“So, he told you he was at work all afternoon,” Devlin follows up. “Did you come to learn whether that was true or not?”
Before Tredesco can answer, I stand. “Your Honor, we’ll stipulate that Mr. Hanson wasn’t at work all day. Ms. King testified to that, and we’ve never disputed it.” The judge casts me a cold look. David’s lying is an important point for the prosecutor, and Bill Henry isn’t going to let me pretend otherwise by offering to stipulate to it.
“Overruled.”
“We found out from his secretary,” Tredesco starts in, “that it wasn’t true that he was at his office. She told us that he took off without telling her where he was going and never showed up again.”
Devlin says, “I’m not going to ask you about fingerprints and DNA found around the house. That will be for the CSU witness to describe for the jury. But did you learn anything important about the house itself?”
“Absolutely. We learned that Mr. Hanson arranged for the purchase of the house about six years ago through a subsidiary of Hanson World Industries.”
“How do you know it was the defendant who was responsible for the purchase and not someone else at HWI?”
“His name was on the agreement of sale. He signed it as general counsel.”
Devlin requests permission to approach the witness, then walks to the stand and has Tredesco identify the sales agreement.
Devlin moves the exhibit into evidence, then asks Tredesco if he learned anything else about the house at 1792 Addison Street.
“The whole place had just been remodeled,” the detective answers. “New carpets, new furniture, new TV. A brand-new bed. I figured the defendant was planning to get a new girlfriend, too.”
I object, and the judge strikes the remark from the record, tells the jury to pretend they didn’t hear it.
Devlin asks Tredesco whether he considered any potential suspects other than David.