The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

Item: Stacey Glenn entered her parents’ house between three and three fifteen a.m., using a key that was kept hidden under a particular heart-shaped stone by the front door. She went through the kitchen to the garage, brought a crowbar upstairs to the master bedroom, and bludgeoned her parents, beating both their heads in.

Item: A neighbor testified that around three that morning she saw a red Subaru Forester with off-road tires in the Glenns’ driveway and recognized it as belonging to Stacey.

Item: Leaving her parents for dead, Stacey Glenn drove toward her home, going through a tollbooth on her return trip at approximately four thirty-five.

This timeline was crucial to Yuki’s case because it established Stacey Glenn’s movements on the night in question and decimated her alibi that she was home alone and asleep when her parents were attacked.

Item: Stacey Glenn was a degenerate shopper, heavily in debt. Her parents were worth nothing to her alive. They were worth a million dollars to her dead.

Item: Stacey Glenn had the means, the motive, and the opportunity — and there was also a witness to the crime itself.

And that witness was 90 percent of Yuki’s case.

Yuki wrapped her cards with a rubber band, dropped the pack into her purse. Then she folded her hands under her chin and beamed her thoughts to her own mother, Keiko Castellano, who had died before her time and who was highly ticked off about it. Keiko had loved her only daughter fiercely, and Yuki felt her mom’s comforting presence around her now.

“Mommy, stay with me in court today and help me win, okay?” Yuki said out loud. “Sending kisses.”

With hours to kill, Yuki cleaned out her pencil drawer, emptied her trash can, deleted old files from her address book, and changed her too-sweet pink blouse to the stronger, more confident teal man-tailored shirt that was in dry cleaner’s plastic behind her door.

At eight fifteen, Yuki’s second chair, Nicky Gaines, ambled down the corridor calling her name. Yuki stuck her head out of her doorway, said, “Nicky, just make sure the PowerPoint works. That’s all you have to do.”

“I’m your man,” said Nicky.

“Good. Zip up your fly. Let’s go.”

Chapter 13

YUKI STOOD UP from her seat at the prosecutors’ table as the Honorable Brendan Joseph Duffy entered the courtroom through a paneled door behind the bench and took his seat between the flags and in front of the great seal of the State of California.

Duffy had a runner’s build, graying hair, windowpane glasses worn low on the slope of his nose. He yanked out his iPod earbuds, popped the top on a can of Sprite, then, as those in attendance sat down, asked the bailiff to bring in the jury.

Across the aisle, Yuki’s opponent, the well-regarded criminal defense attorney Philip R. Hoffman, exchanged whispers with his client, Stacey Glenn.

Hoffman was tall, stooped, six-foot-four, forty-two years old, with unruly dark hair. He wore a midnight-blue Armani suit and a pink satin tie. His nails were manicured.

Like Yuki, Hoffman was a perfectionist.

Unlike her, Hoffman’s win-to-loss ratio put him in the all-star league. Normally, he commanded fees upwards of nine hundred bucks an hour, but he was currently representing Stacey Glenn pro bono. Hoffman was no altruist. The courtroom was packed with press, and their coverage of this case was worth millions to his firm.

Stacey Glenn was a stunning blue-eyed brunette with two spots of blush on her cheeks emphasizing her jailhouse pallor. She wore a frumpy suit in an unflattering olive-toned plaid, conveying schoolteacher or statistician rather than the calculating, murdering, moneygrubbing psychopath that she was.

Beside Yuki, Nicky Gaines, with his perpetual adenoidal wheeze, breathed noisily as the jurors entered the small courtroom from a side door and settled into their seats in the jury box.

Judge Duffy greeted the jurors, explained that today both sides would summarize their cases and that afterward, the jury could begin its deliberations.

Duffy took a long pull of soda right out of the can, then asked, “Ms. Castellano, are the People ready to proceed?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Taking her notes from the table, Yuki walked to the lectern in the center of the oak-lined courtroom. She smiled at the twelve jurors and two alternates she’d come to know by their tics, grimaces, laughter, and eye-rolling over the past six weeks, said, “Morning, everyone,” then, pointing to the defendant, spoke from her heart.

“Stacey Glenn is a depraved and unrepentant murderer.

“She killed her father, who adored her. She did her level best to kill her mother and thought she had. She bludgeoned her parents without mercy because she wanted to collect their life-insurance payout of a million dollars.

“She did it for the money.”

Yuki went over the timeline she’d established during the trial — the tollbooth attendant’s testimony and that of the Glenns’ neighbor — and she reminded them of the insurance broker Stacey had called to check on the status of her parents’ policy.