4th of July (4 page)

I had never thought of myself as an angry person, but I was angry now. It had been a good shoot. A good shoot! The DA had cleared me! And now I felt like a target again. As the rows of seats filled with spectators, I was conscious of the chatter building behind me.

That’s the cop who shot the kids. That’s her.

Suddenly there was a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I turned, and my eyes watered when I saw Joe. I put my hand over his, and at the same time my eyes caught those of my other lawyer, a young Japanese American woman with the unlikely name of Yuki Castellano. We exchanged hellos as she took her place beside Mickey.

The rumble in the courtroom cut out suddenly as the bailiff called out, “All rise.”

We stood as Her Honor Rosa Algierri took the bench. Judge Algierri could dismiss the complaint and I could walk out of the courtroom, heal my body and soul, resume my life. Or she could send the case forward and I’d be facing a trial that could cost me everything I cared about.

“You okay, Lindsay?”

“Never better,” I said to Mickey.

He caught the sarcasm and touched my hand. A minute later, my heart started hammering. Mason Broyles rose to make his case against me.

CABOT’S LAWYER SHOT HIS cuffs and stood silently for so long you could’ve twanged the tension in the room like a guitar string. Someone in the gallery coughed nervously.

“The plaintiff calls chief medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn,” said Broyles at last, and my best friend took the stand for the plaintiffs.

I wanted to wave, smile, wink—something—but of course all I could do was watch. Broyles warmed up with a few easy lobs across the plate, but from then on, it was fastballs and knuckle curves all the way.

“On the evening of May tenth did you perform an autopsy on Sara Cabot?” Broyles asked.

“I did.”

“What can you tell us about her injuries?”

All eyes were fixed on Claire as she flipped through a leather-bound notepad before speaking again.

“I found two gunshot wounds to the chest pretty close together. Gunshot wound A was a penetrating gunshot wound situated on the left upper/outer chest six inches below the left shoulder and two and a half inches left of the anterior midline.”

Claire’s testimony was crucial, but still my mind drifted out of the courtroom and into the past. I saw myself standing in a dusky patch of streetlight on Larkin Street. I watched Sara take her gun out of her jacket and shoot me. I fell, rolled into a prone position.

“Drop your gun!”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

I fired my gun twice, and Sara fell only yards from where I lay. I’d killed that girl, and although I was innocent of the charges against me, my conscience was guilty, guilty, guilty.

I listened to Claire’s testimony as she described the second shot, which had gone through Sara’s sternum.

“It’s what we call a K-five,” said Claire. “It went through the pericardial sac, continued on through the heart, and terminated in thoracic vertebra number four, where I retrieved a semijacketed copper-colored, partially deformed, medium-size projectile.”

“Is this consistent with a nine-millimeter bullet?”

“It is.”

“Thank you, Dr. Washburn. I’m finished with this witness, Your Honor.”

Mickey put his hands flat on the defense table and came to his feet.

“Dr. Washburn, did Sara Cabot die instantly?”

“I’d say so. Within a heartbeat or two. Both of those gunshot wounds perforated the heart.”

“Uh-huh. And, Doctor, had the deceased recently fired a gun?”

“Yes. I saw some darkening at the base of her index finger that would be consistent with cylinder flare.”

“How do you know that that’s gunshot residue?”

“The way you know your mother’s your mother,” Claire said, her eyes twinkling. “Because that’s what she looks like.” She paused for the laughter to subside, then she continued. “Besides which, I photographed that smudging, documented it, and did a gunshot wound residue test, which was submitted to the laboratory and came back positive.”

“Could the deceased have shot Lieutenant Boxer after she herself was shot?”

“I don’t see how a dead girl could shoot anyone, Mr. Sherman.”

Mickey nodded. “Did you also note the trajectory of those gunshot wounds, Dr. Washburn?”

“I did. They were fired upward at angles of forty-seven and forty-nine degrees.”

“So to be absolutely clear, Doctor, Sara Cabot shot Lieutenant Boxer first—and the lieutenant returned fire upward from where she lay on the ground.”

“In my opinion, yes, that’s how it happened.”

“Would you call that ‘excessive force’ or ‘wrongful death’ or ‘police misconduct’?”

The judge sustained Broyles’s outraged objection. Mickey thanked Claire and dismissed her. He was smiling as he came toward me. My muscles relaxed, and I even returned Mickey’s smile. But the hearing was just beginning.

I felt a shock of fear when I saw the look in Mason Broyles’s eyes. You could only describe it as anticipatory. He couldn’t wait to get his next witness on the stand.

“PLEASE STATE YOUR NAME,” Broyles said to a petite brunette woman in her early thirties.

“Betty D’Angelo.”

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.

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.

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.

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.”