I rushed into Judge Varney’s rapidly filling courtroom, went to the railing, and waved Naomi over. I said, “Do you have the state’s assay report on the meth found in the vial in Stefan’s basement?”
She thought about that, nodded, and went to dig through several large, legal-size boxes to retrieve it.
“What’s going on?” Naomi asked.
“I don’t know yet,” I said. “Just a hunch at this point.”
“You’ll let me know if it gets beyond a hunch?”
“You’ll be the first to know.”
I took my seat next to Nana Mama, kissed her on the cheek, and started reading through the state’s report, a chemical assay that identified the substance found in the vial in Stefan’s basement as a very pure designer methamphetamine. They described the chemical structure, but the science went over my head. There was, however, a graphic representation of that structure on the second page.
Then I called up the report I’d just received from my FBI friends and saw the graphs matched. I reread the note attached to the Bureau’s study, which stated the substance was “a designer drug created by a gifted chemist.”
All sorts of suppositions and assumptions I’d been playing with now became concrete fact. Someone called Grandfather, probably Marvin Bell, was running a designer-meth distribution operation via the freight-rail system.
Some of that signature meth was found in Stefan’s basement. Either my cousin had access to the drug and was holding out on us, or someone involved in the designer-meth distribution system had planted it there.
I got up and gave Naomi a summary of what I’d found before the bailiff called, “All rise.”
Judge Varney came in, said, “Carry on, Ms. Cross.”
My niece approached the witness box, said, “Just to recap where we were, Detective Frost. The prosecution believes that on the night in question, Mr. Tate went into an alcohol-and-drug-fueled rage and raped and murdered Rashawn Turnbull.”
“No doubt in my mind,” Frost said.
Naomi let that slide, said, “What’s Mr. Tate’s motive? Why take his rage out on a boy? A boy who supposedly idolized him?”
“You don’t know how many nights I’ve lain awake thinking about that,” Frost said, directing his reply to the jury. “At some level, you can’t get your head around the depravity of what was done to Rashawn. The pure hatred behind it.
“But Tate had gone off the wagon in a big way. He was feeding drugs to underage girls, raping them. Sydney Fox said she saw Rashawn going into Tate’s place the same day Sharon Lawrence says he drugged and attacked her. If so, I think Rashawn saw the rape. I think Rashawn said he was going to tell the police, and Tate just snapped.”
In the silence that followed, four or five jury members stared at Stefan as if he were already heading for death row. The others were watching my niece as if wondering why she hadn’t objected to Frost’s speculation.
Naomi went to the jury box, got the jury’s attention, said, “Detective, how do you explain the fact that Sydney Fox saw Rashawn go into that apartment but Sharon Lawrence testified that she never saw the victim the day she was allegedly attacked?”
I glanced over and saw Sharon Lawrence unglue herself from her cell phone.
Frost said, “She’d been drugged with a date-rape drug.”
“Any residue of a date-rape drug in Sharon Lawrence’s blood at the time of her reporting the alleged rape?”
Frost said, “She reported the attack a week after it happened.”
Naomi went to the defense table, retrieved a file. “The defense would like to introduce sworn testimony by several expert witnesses that all say date-rape drugs can linger in the bloodstream for up to fourteen days.”
Varney squinted, took the documents, scanned them, and then handed them to the clerk. He ran his hand back over his pompadour, looking kind of anxious. Another kidney stone coming on?
Naomi said, “So that part of Sharon Lawrence’s story is not correct, is it, Detective Frost? She wasn’t drugged, was she?”
“You said the drug can linger for up to fourteen days,” Frost said. “Up to means in some people, the drug is gone in a lot less than two weeks.”
Naomi paused, seemed to shift gears.
“The semen in her underwear. It was a direct match to my client?”
“DNA doesn’t lie,” Frost said.
“There’s no disputing the DNA test,” Naomi agreed. “When Ms. Lawrence came forward with her rape story, she had my client’s DNA in her panties.”
“Correct,” Frost said.
Naomi said, “Did you also find Ms. Lawrence’s DNA in the panties?”
“Yes,” Frost said.
Sharon Lawrence was looking at the ceiling above Judge Varney. Her mother held her hand tight.
“So you’ve got Mr. Tate’s semen and Ms. Lawrence’s body fluids, and you test them for DNA. What else did you test those substances for?”
The police detective frowned. “I’m not following you.”
“Did you have your lab do other tests on the semen and Ms. Lawrence’s body fluids? Say, drug tests?”
Frost blinked, said nothing.
“Detective?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think so, no.”
“We’ve checked the record and you haven’t,” Naomi said. “So we had the FBI perform other tests on those samples.”