Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

that. What did you mean by putting ‘overkill’ in the summary?”
    “Just that it looked to me like any one of these impacts would’ve done the job. The victim was unconscious and possibly even dead before he hit the ground. The first blow did that. This would indicate that two of the impacts came after he was facedown on the ground. It was overkill. Somebody was very angry at him is the way I was looking at it.”
    Abbott probably thought he was smartly giving me the answer I most didn’t want to hear. Freeman, too. But they were wrong.
    “So you are indicating in your summary that you detected there was some sort of emotional involvement in this murder, correct?”
    “Yes, that is what I was thinking.”
    “What kind of training do you have in terms of homicide investigation?”
    “Well, I trained for six months before starting the job way back thirty years ago. And we have ongoing in-service training a couple of times a year. We’re taught the latest investigative techniques and so forth.”
    “Is this specific to homicide investigation?”
    “Not all of it but a lot of it is.”
    “Isn’t it a basic tenet of homicide that a crime of overkill usually indicates that the victim knew his or her killer? That there was a personal relationship?”
    “Uh…”
    Freeman finally got it. She stood and objected, saying that Abbott was not a homicide investigator and the question called for expertise he did not have. I didn’t have to argue. The judge held his hand up to stop me from speaking and told Freeman that I had just walked Abbott down the path without objection from the state. The investigator had testified to his experience and training in the area of homicide without a peep from Freeman.
    “You gambled, Ms. Freeman. You thought it was going to cut your way. You can’t back out now. The witness will answer the question.”
    “Go ahead, Mr. Abbott,” I said.
    Abbott stalled by asking for the question to be read to him by the court stenographer. He then had to be prompted again by the judge.
    “There is that consideration,” he finally said.
    “Consideration?” I asked. “What does that mean?”
    “When you have a crime of high violence it should be considered that the victim personally knew his attacker. His killer.”
    “When you say crime of high violence, do you mean overkill?”
    “That could be part of it, yes.”
    “Thank you, Mr. Abbott. Now, what about other observations you made at the crime scene? Did you form any opinion in regard to the kind of power it took to make these three brutal strikes on the top of Mr. Bondurant’s head?”
    Freeman objected again, stating that Abbott was not a medical examiner and did not have the expertise to answer the question. This time Perry sustained the objection, giving her a small victory.
    I decided to take what I had gotten and be happy with it.
    “No further questions,” I said.
    Next up was Paul Roberts, who was the senior criminalist in the three-member LAPD crime scene unit that processed the scene. His testimony was less eventful than Abbott’s because Freeman kept him on a short leash. He spoke only of procedures and what he collected at the scene and processed later in the SID lab. On cross I was able to use the paucity of physical evidence to my client’s advantage.
    “Can you tell the jury the locations of the fingerprints you collected from the scene that were later matched to the defendant?”
    “There were none that we found.”
    “Can you tell the jury what samples of blood collected at the scene came from the defendant?”
    “There was none that we found.”
    “Well, then what about hair and fiber evidence? Surely you connected the defendant to the crime scene through hair and fiber evidence, correct?”
    “We did not.”
    I took a few steps away from the lectern as if walking off my frustration and then came back.
    “Mr. Haller,” the judge said. “Let’s skip the playacting.”
    “Thank you, Your Honor,” Freeman said.
    “I wasn’t addressing you, Ms. Freeman.”
    I looked at the jury for a long moment before asking my next and final question.
    “In summary, sir, did you and your team gather a single shred of evidence in that garage that connects Lisa Trammel to the crime scene?”
    “In the garage? No, we didn’t.”
    “Thank you, then I have nothing further.”
    I knew that Freeman could hit back hard on redirect by asking Roberts about the hammer with Bondurant’s blood on it and the shoe with the