Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum Page A

indictment would be secured on all five homicide counts; grand juries almost always did what the prosecutor asked of them. Then they would arraign on the indictments, a judge would be selected, and the trial date would be set. The trial before a petit jury was, of course, something else again.
    He picked up the file on the murder of Jane Hughes and resumed reading. This was the crime for which Jonathan Rohbling had been arrested, and was for that reason the key to the prosecution. The other four women had not even been classed as homicides until Rohbling had confessed to killing them. Mrs. Hughes had been sixty-eight, the widow of a mechanic, the mother of five, the grandmother of seven. On Saturday, April 20 of current year, at around eleven in the evening, neighbors in her respectable St. Nicholas Avenue building had heard shouts and crashing sounds from her apartment. Shortly thereafter, witnesses had seen a young black man carrying a soft-sided dark suitcase leaving the building. He was unknown to these witnesses. The following day Mrs. Hughes’s son had arrived early to take his mother to church. There being no answer to his ring, he had the superintendent open the door, and found his mother dead on the kitchen floor, amid signs of a violent struggle. The medical examiner had declared smothering to be the cause of death. Karp read through the M.E.’s report. There had been no sexual assault. Gordon Featherstone had caught the homicide case.
    Karp read through the sheaf of DD5’s generated by the detective’s investigation. With allowances for the stilted language required by the NYPD, these were good, clear reports, a separate form for every action carried out in pursuit of the unknown killer. What was missing was the contemplation, the thinking, the instinct, that had led Featherstone along his successful path. Karp had to piece this together from hints. Son reports nothing of value missing from the apartment. Son reports mother did not own a dark soft-sided suitcase. Coffee set out for two persons on coffee table in living room of victim’s apartment. No sign of forced entry. Now the interpretation: Mrs. Hughes had known her assailant, had been entertaining him, in fact. The assailant was not a thief, nor was he a rapist. That let out the local bad boys. The family and friends all had alibis; there was no sign of murderous rancor there either. Confirmed: Featherstone’s witnesses did not find the picture of the killer in the zone book at the Two-Eight. There were fingerprints (Karp read the forensics reports), but they did not match any stored in the files of the Bureau of Criminal Investigation. A request was sent out, without much hope behind it, to the FBI. Of more immediate interest were the fibers found under Mrs. Hughes’s nails and, curiously, between her teeth and caught deep in her respiratory tract. They were navy blue cotton canvas fibers. A mystery.
    Karp loved this part. He loved reading the DD5’s and the arrest reports, the crime-scene unit reports, the forensic and M.E. reports. He loved seeing how the little tendrils of information curled into cords, and then ropes, and then stout cables, winding around a particular person, tying him tightly, dragging him with Karp’s help, of course, to justice. Ultimately, he would have to re-create Featherstone’s process for the jury, to show them that the cable had coiled itself inevitably around the throat of one man and one man alone, the D., Jonathan Rohbling.
    And as he thought this, he could not help thinking a more disconcerting thought. In general, despite the importance accorded motive in the fictive universe of films and books, Karp thought motive irrelevant. If the facts showed the guy did it, who cared why he did it? Naturally, since juries read books and saw movies, motive inevitably made an appearance. Still, you never wanted the prosecution to rest on purported mental states—did the defendant hate, or love, or fear, or desire—because it