My year of preparing paid off. As I sat there, hour after hour, I learned a lot, but not much of it was surprising. As the trial progressed, we fell into a rhythm, and much of it began to feel normal. One day was truncated by foot-deep snow—a reminder that Maine was unstoppably itself, no matter what—and when I got to the courthouse, I felt a bit like I’d been running late for work.
By day three of the trial, we were deep into detailed evidence, and my mind was starting to wander. The droning exchange between Lisa and the first forensic chemist to take the stand, combined with the dry heat of the room, had soothed me into a state of near relaxation. I was almost bored. I thought briefly of my office down south, wondered how my boss was getting on without me. Whether Mindy was enjoying her trip to England. If Evangeline had started her new job.
And then Chris Harriman stepped back behind the witness stand and went through a door to retrieve something for Lisa. He came out with a big sheet of plastic. It hung stiffly between his outstretched arms, and there was something pressed flat between two layers of the transparent material. He walked up to Lisa, coming much closer to us, and showed the object to the court, making an arcing semicircle so the judge, the jury, and those of us watching could see it.
It was Mom’s blue bathrobe. Less than twenty feet away from me.
The terry cloth robe that she’d owned for years, that she always wore in the soft early mornings, the cozy late evenings, the times when the world seemed far outside, harmless, unable to reach us. The robe she’d made me breakfast in so many times, that she wore in one of my favorite pictures of her, holding our cat Max and smiling. The robe I found her in.
It felt like a little hole had opened up in the universe, just big enough to show us this object. It was here in the room with us, but surely it came from another planet, another reality.
Seeing that bathrobe was so different from seeing pictures of her body, from sitting across from Michael Hutchinson and looking into his eyes. It was flat, the shape of her absence. The body that should have filled it no longer existed, was long ago ashes. I knew the robe was still bloody because it had been preserved in that stiff plastic just as they had found it, but suddenly I wished that someone had cleaned it all those years ago. Blood comes out if cleaned right away—Mom always got it out of my knee-skinned jeans. I imagined putting it in the washer, water on cold, plenty of soap, no other items to share that load. I’d put it in the dryer and it would come out clean and warm and fluffy. I could fold it up and put it on her bed.
* * *
That evening, I got in the shower and was gripped again by that feeling of physical disgust from long ago, the corpse feeling. I could not escape how closely my legs resembled hers, those legs that figured prominently in so many of the crime scene photos. How the curves above my ankles exactly matched that thrown-out left calf, the last place I’d touched her. I stood motionless and staring in the steaming water until Ashley knocked on the door and asked if I was all right. “I’m fine!” I called, and snapped awake, finished soaping and rinsing. She said nothing of the length of my shower, and I did not acknowledge it. But that night she lay next to me, holding my hand until I fell asleep. It was this, and only this, that saved me from becoming an island, that allowed me to let anyone touch me upon my eventual return to North Carolina.
41
* * *
When it was Walt’s turn to take the stand, Andrews gave him the tough cross-examination that he had resisted giving me. Walt was a stand-up guy, a strong and gentle person. It was his job to investigate the case, of course. But investigators have to set priorities, and he always prioritized us. When asked why this case was especially important to him, he would always say that it was because of me: the tragedy of an only child losing her single mother, the horror of my being home for it. It was difficult to see Andrews lay into him.
Andrews’s major point of argument was that Walt and others had been erroneous in assuming that whoever “had sex” with Crystal had killed her, and that they had no reason to conclude that a rape had occurred. The line he took while questioning Walt either revealed his ignorance or was meant to manipulate ignorance in the jurors.
“Just so we’re clear: she wasn’t tied down anywhere, was she?” Andrews raised his eyebrows benignly.
“No, she was not,” Walt answered.
Andrews continued. “Okay. And there weren’t any obvious signs that she had her wrists or ankles restrained?”
“No, there weren’t signs of that.”
“And there was no blunt force trauma visible to the face?”
I thought I could see Walt’s face flinch, just slightly: a small crack in his professional demeanor. “Well, she had a lot of injuries to her face. I don’t know about blunt force trauma, but I mean her face was covered in blood and stab wounds.”
“Okay. But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that there was a sexual assault, right?
“No.”
Andrews continued: “Now, it’s true that what really formed your opinion was the picture of her anus, right? When you saw the picture, you didn’t think to yourself, ‘I should talk to a doctor about this, because maybe this is evidence of consensual sex’?”
Walt paused. I could see him take a deep breath, an effort at gathering his patience. “I’ll be honest with you.” He leaned slightly forward, toward Andrews. “When I saw that picture, I didn’t believe it was consensual. The photo, in my mind, when I looked at it—I mean, it took my breath away. I mean, it was . . .” He leaned back, lifted an open palm and swept it to the side, searching. “It looked—the visual, what I saw there, I said, ‘Oh my God.’ That was awful, the damage.”
Others apparently agreed. Justice Warren himself had said he didn’t want to look at that picture if he didn’t have to. Our prosecutor, Lisa, would eventually decide not to show it, deeming it unnecessary. I had seen it with Susie the day before the trial and was glad to be spared seeing it again. Unfortunately, this was the photo that I would accidentally turn over while sifting through the records in the Gray police barracks years later.
Andrews barreled past Walt’s evocative stutters and focused instead on timing. How could Walt know that the sex was related to the killing, when the medical examiner, Dr. Kristen Sweeney, had said that the injuries in the photo—officially, fifteen lacerations, and bruising—could have been incurred at least an hour before the time of death? To me, Sweeney’s testimony meant that there could have been up to an hour of torture, not that Mom and Hutchinson were having some sort of affair. I hoped the jury would see that, too. To debate whether the sex had been consensual seemed, to me, like a complete waste of time.
But then Andrews pulled out what he thought was a trump card. “Now, when you were also reviewing the case file, you knew that Crystal didn’t necessarily mind that kind of sexual activity?”
I took a sharp, deep breath. I was so glad to hear Lara Nomani object before I could even exhale. It was like being pushed off a cliff and then caught in midair.