Sandrine's Case (9780802193520) by Thomas H. Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Take it’ and waved his hand.”
    I looked at the jury and sensed just how odd they found all this. Had this man no feelings at all? Or even any curiosity, for that matter. Had this Professor Madison become so estranged from his wife, or so indifferent to her or so repulsed by her, that he’d not the slightest impulse to read her last note?
    They would be responding to a mood, of course, rather than to any particular piece of evidence. Officer Hill had not actually described this mood, but I feared that some element of it had wafted up from her testimony and drifted over to the jury box. It was like an odor, and this odor disturbed them. They’d felt something strange and sinister in the way I’d told Officer Hill that she could take Sandrine’s note, something even stranger and more sinister in the fact that I hadn’t read it.
    I was certain that Mr. Singleton saw this, too, though he gave no indication of it to the jury. It was way too soon for him to give the impression that they were already in his pocket. He was posing as a man who was nothing if not humble, a modestly paid civil servant who could be making much more money defending the indefensible scum who were daily sowing their malicious chaos amid our otherwise purple mountain majesties and amber waves of grain. It was important that they think of him as one of them, a man who shops where they shop and buys what they buy and takes his family to the movies and stares with childlike wonder at blue creatures in 3-D. I was to be the alien in the midst of these ordinary, hardworking folk, a reader of books whose wife had a French name and probably even read books written in that snooty language.
    Careful now, I told myself, don’t let your face show the contempt you feel for Mr. Singleton’s crude strategy, his quite obvious manipulation of this no doubt highly manipulateable (is that a word?) jury.
    â€œOfficer Hill, did you take that note?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    â€œNo,” Officer Hill answered. “I was just responding to a call. I had not been assigned any duties with regard to an investigation.”
    Perhaps so, but that very night, it had been clear to me that she’d begun investigating almost immediately after entering the bedroom. I’d seen it in her eyes, that dark sparkle of suspicion, her sense that something wasn’t right. She’d moved about the room slowly, guardedly, as if she were already playing her cards close to the vest, a behavior I’d found rather melodramatic. For that reason, I’d dismissed Officer Hill as a typical small town cop, one who’d watched plenty of episodes of Law & Order but who’d never confronted anything in sleepy little Coburn that could possibly resemble the high drama of a television police opera.
    Now, as I listened to Officer Hill’s testimony, I had to concede that she might legitimately have begun to question what she saw in the shadowy light of Sandrine’s death room, the way there’d been a plate of uneaten food on the floor beside her bed, a pair of pajamas balled up and thrown into the corner, that oddly folded tent of yellow paper. Was it possible that this woman had not died of natural causes? Was it possible that her death had been brought about by a hand other than her own? It had been Officer Hill’s duty to ask these questions, and she had done her duty, of course, and as she continued her testimony it struck me that, had she been a professor rather than a cop, she might have been a far more devoted one than I.
    â€œAnd did you have occasion, Officer Hill, to observe the bed?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    She had had such occasion, of course, and what she’d seen could not but have added an element of the macabre.
    â€œAnd Mrs. Madison in that bed?” Mr. Singleton asked.
    â€œYes. I saw Mrs. Madison.”
    I knew what was coming, because for days after Sandrine’s death it was this image that