4th of July (21 page)

Like hounds on a rabbit, the press saw me and closed in for the kill. Mickey was ready with his statement, but he never got to deliver it.

“How long do you think the jury will be out, Mr. Sherman?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure, however long it takes, the jury will find Lieutenant Boxer innocent of all charges.”

“Lieutenant Boxer, if the jury finds against you —”

“That’s unlikely to happen,” Yuki answered for me.

“Ms. Castellano, this is your first high-profile case. How do you think you did?”

Fifteen feet away, a crowd was also forming around Mason Broyles, his clients, and his deputies. Film rolled as the medical attendant moved Sam Cabot down a wooden ramp and loaded him into a van. Reporters followed, firing questions at Sam as his father did his best to shield the boy.

I picked Cindy out of the crowd. She was shouldering through the sardine can-packed bodies, trying to get closer to me. And that’s why I wasn’t paying much attention to Mickey when he answered his cell phone.

Then his hand was on my shoulder. His face was totally gray.

“I just got a heads-up from the clerk’s office,” he shouted into my ear. “The jury has a couple of questions.”

We pressed through the crowd, making our way to the street and Mickey’s waiting car. Yuki and I got into the backseat, and Mickey got in front beside his driver.

“What did they want to know?” Yuki asked as soon as the doors closed. The car moved slowly through the crowd, heading toward Redwood.

“They want to see the evidence of Lindsay’s alcohol intake,” Mickey said, turning to face us.

“Christ,” Yuki said. “How could they still be stuck on that?”

“What else?” I asked urgently. “You said there were two things.”

I saw Mickey hesitate. He didn’t want to tell me, but he had to do it.

“They wanted to know if there was a limit on how much money they could award the plaintiffs,” he said.

IT WAS A GUT shot, and the shock resonated from my solar plexus throughout my body. I felt my stomach drop and bile rise into my throat. I had envisioned losing this case in terms of a fanciful, theoretical aftermath: working at street fairs, reading books on the deck of some beach house, la-de-da. But I hadn’t taken into account the full emotional impact of the reality of losing.

Beside me, Yuki squealed, “Oh, my God, it’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have said ‘find her guilty of being a good cop, blah blah.’ It was a flourish! I thought it was good, but I was wrong.”

“You did a great job,” I said, my voice as heavy as stone. “This has nothing to do with what you said.”

I wrapped my arms around myself and lowered my head. Mickey and Yuki were talking together. I heard Mickey assure her that the fat lady hadn’t yet sung, but the voice in my mind was a needle stuck in an old-fashioned record groove.

One question kept repeating.

How could this be?

How could this be?

WHEN I TUNED BACK in to the conversation in the car, Mickey was explaining something to Yuki.

“The judge gave them the paperwork from the hospital and the transcript from the nurse. And she told them not to worry about limiting the award. That’s her job and need not concern them.”

Mickey ran his hand over his face in what I took to be exasperation. “Yuki, you did a fantastic job, I mean it. I can’t believe that the jury bought Mason Broyles’s act,” he said. “I just don’t believe it. I don’t know how we could have done better.”

And that’s when Yuki’s cell phone rang.

“The jury is back,” she said. She folded her phone, clutching it until her knuckles whitened. “They have a verdict.”

My mind spaced. I saw the word verdict in front of my eyes and tried to parse it, looking between the letters and syllables for something to hope for. I knew from past days in court that the Latin roots of the word verdict meant to speak the truth.

Would this verdict be the truth?

In the minds of the people of San Francisco, it would be.

Mickey directed his driver to turn around, which he did, and a few minutes later I was saying, “No comment, no comment, please,” and following Yuki and Mickey through the mob, up the steep stairs, and into the courthouse once again.

We took our places in courtroom B, and the opposition took theirs.

I heard my name pierce the moment as if it had come from another time and place. I turned to look behind me.

“Joe!”

“I just got in, Lindsay. I came straight from the airport.”

We reached out and for a brief moment entwined our fingers across the shoulders of the people sitting behind me. Then I had to let go and turn away.

Along the sides of the room, cameramen focused their lenses, then, only an hour since we’d left this room, the judge entered from her chambers and the jury filled the jury box.

The bailiff called the court back into session.

IT TOOK THE MEMBERS of the jury long moments to fix their skirts, put down their bags, and get comfortable in their seats. Finally, they were at attention. I noticed that only two of them had looked at me.

I listened numbly as the judge asked the jury if they’d arrived at the verdict. Then the foreman, a fifty-something African American man named Arnold Benoit, straightened the lines of his sport jacket and spoke.

“We have, Your Honor.”

“Please pass your verdict to the bailiff.”

Across the aisle, Sam Cabot’s breathing quickened, as did mine, keeping double time along with my pounding heart as the judge opened the single sheet of paper.

She scanned it and, without expression, passed it back to the bailiff, who returned it to the jury foreman.

“I caution the audience not to react to whatever the foreman says,” said the judge. “All right, Mr. Foreman. Please pronounce the verdict.”

The foreman took his glasses out of his jacket pocket, flipped them open, and set them on his nose. At last, he began to read.

“We, the jury in the above-entitled action, find the accused, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, not guilty of the charges against her.”

“So say you all?”

“We do.”

I was so numb, I wasn’t sure I’d heard correctly. And when I played the statement back in my mind, I half expected the judge to overrule what the foreman had just said.

Yuki grasped my wrist tightly, and only when I saw the smile lighting her face did I fully realize that I wasn’t imagining anything. The jury had found in my favor.

A voice shouted, “No! No! You can’t do this!”

It was Andrew Cabot, on his feet, holding on to the chair-back in front of him where Mason Broyles sat, white-faced and grim, and beaten.

Broyles’s request that the jury be polled was a demand, and the judge complied.

“As you hear your seat number called, please tell the court how you voted,” said Judge Achacoso.

One at a time the jurors spoke.

“Not guilty.”

“Not guilty.”

“Not guilty . . .”

I had heard the expression, but I’m not sure I understood it until that moment. With both my attorneys’ arms around me, I floated in a feeling of relief so complete it was a dimension of its own. Perhaps this feeling was reserved only for moments of redemption, moments like this.

I was free, and my heart took flight.

The Cat’s Meow

THERE WAS A MOODY gray sky overhead when Martha and I left my apartment and headed out of San Francisco. I turned on the car radio and caught the weather report, listening with half an ear as I negotiated the stop-and-go snarl of the usual commuter traffic.

As I bumped along Potrero Street, I was thinking about Chief Tracchio. Yesterday, when we’d met at the Hall of Justice, he’d asked me to come back to work, and I’d gotten as flustered as if he’d asked me for a date.

All I’d had to do was shake his hand on it.

If I’d done that, I would have been driving to the Hall this morning, making a speech to the troops about going forward, diving into the mountain of paperwork on my desk, unsolved cases. I would’ve taken back my command.

But, although the chief had laid it on really thick, I’d turned him down.

“I still have some vacation time, Chief. I need to take it.”

He said he understood, but how could he? I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I had a sense that I wouldn’t know until I’d gotten to the bottom of the killings in Half Moon Bay.

Those unsolved murders were a part of me now, too.

My gut told me that if I did what I was good at, if I persevered, I would find the SOB who had killed my John Doe and all those others.

Right now, that was all I really cared about.

I took 280 southbound and, once clear of the city, I rolled down the windows and changed the channel.

By 10:00 a.m., my hair was whipping across my face, and Sue Hall was spinning my favorite oldies on 99.7 FM.

“It’s not raining this morning,” she purred. “It’s the first of July, a beautiful gray San Francisco day—just floating in pearly fog. And isn’t the fog something that we love about San Francisco?”

Then, the perfect song poured through the speakers: “Fly Like an Eagle.”

I sang along in full voice, the tune pumping oxygen into my blood, sending my mood right through the ozone layer.

I was free.

The horrific trial was in my rearview mirror, and suddenly my future was as open as the highway ahead.

Eighteen miles out of the city, Martha needed a rest stop, so I pulled over into the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Pacifica. It was a wooden shack built in the sixties before the zoning commission knew what was happening. And now there stood one of the tackiest buildings in the world on one of the most beautiful spots on the coastline.

Unlike most of the highway, which streamed high above the ocean, the fast-food restaurant parking lot was at sea level. A row of rocks separated the asphalt from the beach, and beyond it the deep blue Pacific flowed over the rim of the horizon.

I bought an irresistible cinnamon-sugared churro and a container of black coffee and took a seat on the boulders. I watched tattooed, hard-bodied surfers riding the waves as Martha ran over the luminous gray sand until the sun had nearly burned off the fog.

When this great moment was sealed in my memory, I called Martha back to the car. Twenty minutes later, we entered the outskirts of Half Moon Bay.

I DROVE ACROSS THE air bell on the apron of the Man in the Moon Garage and honked a little shave-and-a-haircut until Keith came out of his office. He lifted off his baseball cap, shook out his golden hair, stuck the cap back on, smiled my way, and sauntered on over.

“Well, well. Lookit who’s here. The Woman of the Year,” Keith said, putting his hand on Martha’s head.

“Oh, that’s me, all right,” I said, laughing. “I’m just glad it’s over.”

“Yeah, I totally get it. I saw that Sam Cabot on the news. He was so pitiful. I was really scared for you, Lindsay, but it’s water over the hill now. Congratulations are in order.”

I murmured my thanks for his interest and asked Keith to fill up the tank. Meanwhile, I took the squeegee from a bucket and cleaned the windshield.

“So, what’re you up to, Lindsay? Don’t you have to go back to work in the big city?”

“Not right away. You know, I’m just not ready yet. . . .”

As the words left my mouth, a red blur breezed across the intersection. The driver slowed and looked right at me before gunning the engine and tearing down Main.

I’d been in town for less than five minutes, and Dennis Agnew was back in my face.

“I left the Bonneville at my sister’s house,” I said as I observed the Porsche’s contrail. “And I have a little unfinished business here in town.”

Keith turned and saw that I was watching Agnew’s Porsche disappear down the street.

“I’ve never understood it,” he said, jacking the gas gun into my tank, shaking his head. A bell rang as the gas meter racked up the gallons. “He’s a really bad dude. I just don’t understand why women are so attracted to trouble.”

“You’re kidding me,” I said. “You think I’m interested in that guy?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Very. But not the way you mean. My interest in Dennis Agnew is purely professional.”

AS WE HEADED TO Cat’s house, Martha jumped around from backseat to front, barking like a fool. And when I parked in the driveway, she leaped through the car’s open window and ran up to the front door, where she stood wagging her tail and singing in a high key.

“Be cool, Boo,” I said. “Show a little restraint.”

I jiggled the key in the lock and opened the front door; Martha trotted inside.

I called Joe and left him a message: “Hey, Molinari, I’m at Cat’s house. Call when you can.” Then I left a message for Carolee, telling her that she and Allison could stand down from pig-sitting detail.

I spent the day thinking about the Half Moon Bay murders while I cleaned up around the house. I cooked up some spaghetti and canned baby peas for dinner, making a mental note to do some grocery shopping in the morning.

Then I brought my laptop into my nieces’ room and set it up on their shelf of a desk. I noticed that the sweet potato vines had sent another couple inches across the windowsill, but the notes Joe and I had tacked up on the girls’ corkboard were unchanged.

Our little scribblings detailing the circumstances and the savagery done to the Whittakers, Daltrys, Sarduccis, and O’Malleys still led nowhere. And of course my lone John Doe remained pinned to the wall.

I booted up my laptop and went into the FBI’s VICAP database. The Violent Criminal Apprehension Program was a national Web site with one purpose: to help law enforcement agents link up scattered bits of intel related to serial homicides. The site had a kick-ass search engine, and new information was always being plugged in by cops around the country.