Women's Murder Club [04] 4th of July

by James Patterson

Her dark eyes behind her large horn-rimmed glasses darted quickly over to me, then back to Broyles again. I looked at Mickey Sherman and shrugged. To the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen this woman before.

  “And what is your position?”

  “I’m a registered nurse at San Francisco General.”

  “Were you on duty in the ER on the evening and night of May tenth?”

  “I was.”

  “Did you have occasion to take blood from the defendant, Lindsay Boxer?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why was blood drawn?”

  “We were prepping her for surgery, for extraction of the bullets and so on. It was a life-threatening situation. She was losing a lot of blood.”

  “Yeah, I know, I know,” Broyles said, batting away her comment like a housefly. “Tell us about the blood test.”

  “It’s normal procedure to take blood. We had to match her up for transfusions.”

  “Ms. D’Angelo, I’m looking at Lieutenant Boxer’s medical report from that night. It’s quite a voluminous report.” Broyles plopped a fat stack of paper on the witness stand and stabbed at it with a forefinger. “Is this your signature?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like you to look at this highlighted line right here.”

  The witness tossed her head as if she smelled something bad. Emergency room staff often felt part of the cop team and would try to protect us. I didn’t get it, but this nurse plainly wanted to duck Broyles’s questions.

  “Can you tell me what this is?” Broyles asked the witness.

  “This? You mean the ETOH?”

  “That stands for ethyl alcohol content, is that right?”

  “Yes. That’s what it stands for.”

  “What does .067 mean?”

  “Ahh . . . That means the blood alcohol level was sixty-seven milligrams per deciliter.”

  Broyles smiled and lowered his voice to a purr. “In this case it refers to the blood alcohol level in Lieutenant Boxer’s system, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes, that’s correct.”

  “Ms. D’Angelo, .067—that’s drunk, isn’t that right?”

  “We do refer to it as ‘under the influence,’ but—”

  “Yes or no?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have nothing further,” said Broyles.

  I felt like my head had been struck with a sledgehammer. My God, those fucking margaritas at Susie’s.

  I felt the blood drain from my face and I almost fainted.

  Mickey turned to me, the expression on his face demanding: Why didn’t you tell me?

  I looked at my attorney, openmouthed and absolutely sick with remorse.

  I could hardly bear Mickey’s look of incredulity as, armed with nothing but his wits, he leaped to his feet and approached the witness.

  Chapter 18

  THERE WERE ONLY TWELVE rows of seats in courtroom C in the San Francisco Civic Center Courthouse and no jury box. It would have been hard to find a courtroom more intimate than this one. I don’t think anyone breathed during Mickey’s walk to the witness stand.

  He greeted Ms. D’Angelo, who looked relieved to be off the hot seat Mason Broyles had fired up for her.

  “I only have a couple of questions,” he said. “It’s common practice to use ethyl alcohol swabs to clean the wounds, isn’t it? Couldn’t that alcohol have been confused with the blood alcohol?”

  Betty D’Angelo looked as though she wanted to cry. “Well, we use Betadine to swab the wounds. We don’t use alcohol.”

  Mickey brushed off the response and turned to the judge. He asked for a recess and it was granted. The reporters bolted for the doors, and in the relative privacy, I apologized with all my heart.

  “I feel like a real schmuck,” he said, not unkindly. “I saw that medical report and I didn’t notice the ETOH.”

  “I just completely forgot until now,” I said. “I must have blanked it out.”

  I told Mickey that I had been off duty when Jacobi called me at Susie’s. I told him what I had had to drink and that if I wasn’t flat-out straight when I got into the car, the adrenaline rush of the chase had been completely sobering.

  “You usually have a couple of drinks with dinner?” Mickey asked me.

  “Yes. A few times a week.”

  “Well, there you go. Drinks at dinner were an ordinary occurrence for you, and .067 is borderline, anyway. Then comes a major trauma. You were shot. You were in pain. You coulda died. You killed someone—and that’s what you’ve been obsessing about. Half of all shooting victims block out the incident entirely. You’ve done fine, considering what you’ve been through.”

  I let out a sigh. “What now?”

  “Well, at least we know what they have. Maybe they’ll put Sam Cabot on the stand, and if they give me a chance at that little bastard, we’ll come out on top.”

  The courtroom filled once more, and Mickey went to work. A ballistics expert testified that the slugs taken from my body matched those fired from Sara Cabot’s gun, and we had Jacobi’s videotaped deposition from his hospital bed. He was my witness on the scene.

  Although in obvious pain from his gut wound, Jacobi testified about the night of May 10. First, he described the car crash.

  “I was calling for an ambulance when I heard the shots,” he said. “I turned and saw Lieutenant Boxer go down. Sara Cabot shot her twice, and Boxer didn’t have a gun in her hand. Then the boy shot me with a revolver.” Jacobi’s hand gingerly spanned his taped torso.

  “That’s the last I remember before the lights went out.”

  Jacobi’s account was good, but it wouldn’t be enough to overturn the margaritas.

  Only one person could help me now. I was wearing her clothes, sitting in her chair. I was queasy and my wounds throbbed. I honestly didn’t know if I could save myself or if I would make everything worse.

  My lawyer turned his warm brown eyes on me.

  Steady, Lindsay.

  I wobbled to my feet as I heard my name echo through the courtroom.

  Mickey Sherman had called me to the stand.

  Chapter 19

  I’D BEEN A WITNESS dozens of times during my career, but this was the first time I’d had to defend myself. All my years of protecting the public, and now I had a bull’s-eye on my back. I was raging inside, but I couldn’t let it show.

  I got to my feet, swore to God on an old worn Bible, and placed my fate in the hands of my attorney.

  Mickey cut straight to the chase. “Lindsay, were you drunk on the night of May tenth?”

  The judge broke in: “Mr. Sherman, please don’t address your client by her first name.”

  “Okay. Lieutenant, were you drunk that night?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, let’s back up. Were you on duty that night?”

  “No. My shift was over at five p.m.”

  Mickey took me through the events of that night in excruciating detail, and I told it all. I described the drinks I’d had at Susie’s and told the court about getting the call from Jacobi. I stated that I’d told Jacobi the truth when I’d said that I was good to go along that night.

  When Mickey asked why I’d responded to the call when I was off duty, I said, “I’m a cop twenty-four hours a day. When my partner needs me, I’m there.”

  “Did you locate the car in question?” Mickey asked me.

  “We did.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “The car took off at high speed, and we chased it. Eight minutes later, the car went out of control and crashed.”

  “After the crash, when you saw that Sara and Sam Cabot were in medical distress, were you afraid of them?”

  “No. They were kids. I figured they’d stolen the car or made some other bad decision. Happens every day.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Inspector Jacobi and I put away our guns and tried to render aid.”

  “At what point did you pull out your gun again?”

 
“After Inspector Jacobi and I had both been shot and after warning the suspects to drop their weapons.”

  “Thank you, Lindsay. I have no further questions.”

  I reviewed my testimony and gave myself a passing grade. I looked across the room and saw Joe smile and nod even as Mickey turned away from me.

  “Your witness,” he said to Mason Broyles.

  Chapter 20

  A SILENCE STRETCHED BETWEEN me and Broyles, who sat staring at me for so long I wanted to scream. It was an old interrogator’s trick and he had perfected it. Voices rippled across the small gray room until the judge banged her gavel and jolted Broyles into action.

  I looked straight into his eyes as he approached.

  “Tell us, Lieutenant Boxer, what are the proper police procedures for a felony stop?”

  “Approach with guns drawn, get the suspects out of their car, disarm them, cuff them, get the situation safely under control.”

  “And is that what you did, Lieutenant?”

  “We did approach with guns drawn, but the occupants couldn’t get out of the car without assistance. We put our guns away in order to free them from the vehicle.”

  “You violated police procedures, didn’t you?”

  “We had an obligation to render aid.”

  “Yes, I know. You were trying to be kind to the ‘kids.’ But you’re admitting that you didn’t follow police procedures, correct?”

  “Look, I made a mistake,” I blurted. “But those kids were bleeding and vomiting. The car could’ve caught fire —”

  “Your Honor?”

  “Please limit your answers to the question, Lieutenant Boxer.”

  I sat back hard in the chair. I’d seen Broyles operate many times before in the courtroom and recognized his genius for finding his opponent’s pressure point.

  He’d just fingered mine.

  I was still blaming myself for not cuffing those kids, and Jacobi, with more than twenty years on the force, had been suckered, too. But Christ, you can only do what you can do.

  “I’ll rephrase that,” Broyles said offhandedly. “Do you always try to follow police procedures?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s the police policy about being intoxicated on the job?”

  “Objection,” Mickey shouted, leaping to his feet. “There’s evidence that the witness had been drinking, but there’s no evidence that she was intoxicated.”

  Broyles smirked and turned his back to me. “I have nothing further, Your Honor.”

  I felt huge wet circles under my arms. I stepped down from the witness stand, forgetting about my leg injury until the pain called it sharply to my attention. I limped back to my seat, feeling worse than I had before.

  I turned to Mickey, who smiled his encouragement, but I knew the smile was fake.

  His brow was corrugated with worry.

  Chapter 21

  I WAS SHAKEN BY the way Mason Broyles had flipped the events of May 10 and placed the blame on me. He was good at his job, that slime, and it took all my strength to park my face in neutral and sit calmly as Broyles made his closing argument.

  “Your Honor,” he said, “Sara Cabot is dead because Lindsay Boxer killed her. And Sam Cabot, age thirteen, is in a wheelchair for life. The defendant admits that she didn’t follow proper police procedures. Granted, there may have been some misdoing on the part of my clients, but we don’t expect juveniles to exercise good judgment. Police officers, however, are trained to deal with all manner of crises, and the defendant couldn’t handle a crisis, because she was drunk.

  “Simply put, if Lieutenant Boxer had properly performed the duties of her job, this tragedy wouldn’t have occurred and we wouldn’t be here today.”

  Broyles’s speech outraged me, but I had to admit he was persuasive and had I been sitting in the gallery instead of the dock, I might have seen it his way. By the time Mickey stood to mount his closing argument, my blood was pounding so hard in my ears it was as though a rock band were jamming inside my head.

  “Your Honor, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer didn’t put loaded guns into the hands of Sara and Samuel Cabot,” Mickey said, his voice ringing with indignation. “They did that themselves. They shot unarmed police officers without provocation, and my client returned fire in pure self-defense. The only thing she’s guilty of is being too kind to citizens who showed her no kindness in return.

  “In all fairness, Your Honor, this suit should be dismissed and this fine officer allowed to return to her duties without blame or blemish to her distinguished service record.”

  Mickey finished his summation sooner than I had expected. A gap opened behind his last ringing words, and my fear poured in. As he sat down beside me, the courtroom filled with slight mouselike stirrings: papers rustling, the clicking of laptop keys, bodies shifting in their chairs.

  I gripped Mickey’s hand under the table and I even prayed. Dear God, let her dismiss the charges, please.

  The judge pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose, but I couldn’t read her face. When she spoke, she did so concisely and in a weary tone.

  “I believe the defendant did everything she could to salvage a situation gone horribly wrong,” said Judge Algierri. “But the alcohol bothers me. A life has been lost. Sara Cabot is dead. There’s enough evidence here to merit sending this case to a jury.”

  Chapter 22

  I WENT RIGID WITH shock as the trial date was set for a few weeks in the future. Everyone stood as the judge left the courtroom, then the mob closed in around me. I saw blue uniforms at the edge of the throng, eyes not quite meeting mine, and then clumps of microphones were pushed up to my face. I still held Mickey’s hand.

  We should have gotten a dismissal.

  We should have won.

  Mickey helped me to my feet, and I followed him as he cut through the crowd. Joe’s hand was on the small of my back as the three of us and Yuki Castellano exited the courtroom and made for the stairs. We stopped in the ground-floor stairwell.

  “When you walk outside, hold your head up,” Mickey advised me. “When they scream, ‘Why did you kill that girl?’ just walk slowly to the car. Don’t smile, don’t smirk, and don’t let the media beat you. You did nothing wrong. Go home and don’t answer your phone. I’ll stop by your house later.”

  The rain had ended by the time we stepped out of the courthouse into the dull late afternoon. I shouldn’t have been shocked to see that hundreds of people had gathered outside the courthouse to see the cop who’d shot and killed a teenage girl.

  Mickey and Yuki split away from us to address the press, and I knew that Mickey’s thoughts were turning now to how he was going to defend the SFPD and the City of San Francisco.

  Joe and I walked through the jostling, yelling crowd toward the alley where the car was waiting. I heard a chant, “Child killer, child killer,” and questions were lobbed at me like stones.

  “What were you thinking, Lieutenant?”

  “How did you feel when you shot those kids?”

  I knew the faces of the television reporters: Carlos Vega, Sandra Dunne, Kate Morley, all of whom had interviewed me when I’d been a witness for the prosecution. I did my best to ignore them now and to look past the rolling cameras and the jouncing placards reading Guilty of Police Brutality.

  I kept my eyes focused just ahead and my steps matching Joe’s until we reached the black sedan.

  As soon as the doors thunked closed, the driver put the car into reverse and backed out fast onto Polk Street. Then he wheeled the car around and pointed it toward Potrero Hill.

  “He murdered me in there,” I said to Joe once we were under way.

  “The judge saw you, saw the kind of person you are. It’s too bad she felt she had to do what she did.”

  “Cops are watching me, Joe, cops who work for me and who expect me to do the right thing. I’m supposed to keep their respect after this?”

  “Lindsay, the right-minded people in this city are rooting for you. You’re a goo
d person, damn it, and a fine cop.”

  Joe’s words got to me in a way that Mason Broyles’s vicious barbs had not. I put my head on his nice blue shirt and let the pent-up tears come as he held and comforted me.

  “I’m okay,” I said at last. I mopped up with the hankie he offered me. “It’s my hay fever. A high pollen count always makes me weep.”

  Molinari laughed and gave me a good hug as the car climbed homeward. We crossed Twentieth Street, and the staggered rows of pastel Victorian houses came into view.

  “I’d quit my job right now,” I said, “but that would only make it look like I’m guilty.”

  “Those murdering kids, Lindsay. No jury’s going to find in their favor. There’s just no way.”

  “Promise?”

  Joe squeezed me again, but he didn’t answer. I knew that he believed in me completely, but he wouldn’t make a promise that he couldn’t keep.

  “You going back right now?” I asked at last.

  “I wish I didn’t have to. But yeah, I have to go.”

  Joe’s work for the government rarely allowed him to break away to be with me.

  “Someday I’ll have a life,” he said tenderly.

  “Yeah. Me, too.”

  True? Or a dumb fantasy? I put my head back on Joe’s shoulder. We held hands and savored what could have been our last moments together for weeks, not speaking again until we kissed and murmured good-byes at my doorstep.

  Upstairs in the quiet of my apartment, I realized how emotionally depleted I was. My muscles ached from holding myself together, and there was no relief in sight. Instead of freeing me from this assault on my reputation and my belief in myself, the hearing had only been a dress rehearsal for another trial.

  I felt like a tiring swimmer way out past the breakers. I got into my big soft bed with Martha, pulled the blankets up to my chin, and let sleep roll over me like a thick fog.

  Chapter 23

  A SHAFT OF EARLY-MORNING sunlight split the clouds as I tossed a last suitcase into the back of the car, strapped in, and backed the Explorer out of my driveway. I was hot to get out of town and so was Martha, who had her head out the passenger-side window and was already creating quite a breeze with her wagging tail.