The Brass Verdict

executive assistant.
    “Mrs. Albrecht, how are you today?”
    “Very well. I just got here and thought maybe I had missed you.”
    “Nope. I just got here too.”
    “Come in, please.”
    The house had a two-story entry area below the tower. I looked up and saw a wrought-iron chandelier hanging in the atrium. There were cobwebs on it, and I wondered if they had formed because the house had gone unused since the murders or because the chandelier was too high up and too hard to get to with a duster.
    “This way,” Mrs. Albrecht said.
    I followed her into the great room, which was larger than my entire home. It was a complete entertainment area with a glass wall on the western exposure that brought the Pacific right into the house.
    “Beautiful,” I said.
    “It is indeed. Do you want to see the bedroom?”
    Ignoring the question, I turned the camera on and took a few shots of the living room and its view.
    “Do you know who has been in here since the Sheriff’s Department relinquished control of it?” I asked.
    Mrs. Albrecht thought for a moment before answering.
    “Very few people. I do not believe that Mr. Elliot has been out here. But, of course, Mr. Vincent came out once and his investigator came out a couple of times, I believe. And the Sheriff’s Department has come back twice since turning the property back over to Mr. Elliot. They had search warrants.”
    Copies of the search warrants were in the case file. Both times they were looking for only one thing – the murder weapon. The case against Elliot was all circumstantial, even with the gunshot residue on his hands. They needed the murder weapon to ice the case but they didn’t have it. The notes in the file said that divers had searched the waters behind the house for two days after the murders but had also failed to come up with the gun.
    “What about cleaners?” I asked. “Did someone come in and clean the place up?”
    “No, no one like that. We were told by Mr. Vincent to leave things as they were in case he needed to use the place during the trial.”
    There was no mention in the case files of Vincent possibly using the house in any way during the trial. I wasn’t sure what the thinking would have been there. My instinctive response upon seeing the place was that I wouldn’t want a jury anywhere near it. The view and sheer opulence of the property would underline Elliot’s wealth and serve to disconnect him from the jurors. They would understand that they weren’t really a jury of his peers. They would know that he was from a completely different planet.
    “Where’s the master suite?” I asked.
    “It comprises the entire top floor.”
    “Then, let’s go up.”
    As we went up a winding white staircase with an ocean-blue banister, I asked Mrs. Albrecht what her first name was. I told her I felt uncomfortable being so formal with her, especially when her boss and I were on a first-name basis.
    “My name is Nina. You can call me that if you want.”
    “Good. And you can call me Mickey.”
    The stairs led to a door that opened into a bedroom suite the size of some courtrooms I had been in. It was so big it had twin fireplaces on the north and south walls. There was a sitting area, a sleeping area and his-and-her bathrooms. Nina Albrecht pushed a button near the door, and the curtains covering the west view silently began to split and reveal a wall of glass that looked out over the sea.
    The custom-made bed was double the size of a regular king. It had been stripped of the top mattress and all linens and pillows and I assumed these had been taken for forensic analysis. In two locations in the room, six-foot-square segments of carpet had been cut out, again, I believed, for the collection and analysis of blood evidence.
    On the wall next to the door, there were blood-spatter marks that had been circled and marked with letter codes by investigators. There were no other signs of the violence that had occurred in the room.
    I walked to the corner by the glass wall and looked back into the room. I raised the camera and took a few shots from different angles. Nina walked into the shot a couple times but it didn’t matter. The photos weren’t for court. I would use them to refresh my memory of the place while I was working out the trial strategy.
    A murder scene is a map. If you know how to read it, you can sometimes find your way. The lay of the land, the repose of victims in death, the angle of views and light and blood. The spatial