“How did he find out where you live?”
“He said that he’d gone to a library and used a computer. Got my address off the Internet.”
“You’ve testified that you disarmed Mr. Brinkley. You took away his gun, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
“Same gun he used to do the shootings?”
“Yes.”
“And he’d brought a written confession with him to your doorstep, didn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“So to get this all perfectly straight,” Mickey said, “my client heard your appeal to the public on television and interpreted that as an appeal to him personally. He Googled your name in a library and went to your front door as if you’d ordered takeout. And he was still carrying the handgun he used to kill four people.”
“Objection, Your Honor. Argumentative,” Yuki said.
“I’ll allow it, but please get to the point, Mr. Sherman.”
“Yes, Your Honor.” Mickey walked over to me, gave me his full-bore, brown-eyed “you can trust me” look.
“Here’s what I’m getting at, Sergeant. Wouldn’t you agree that for a killer to keep the murder weapon and bring it to the home of a homicide inspector is not only unusual but off the wall?”
“It’s unusual, I’ll give you that.”
“Sergeant, did you ask Mr. Brinkley why he shot those people?”
“Yes.”
“And what did he say?”
I wanted to dig in, refuse to answer Mickey Sherman’s question, but of course I didn’t have that option. “He said he did it because voices told him to do it.”
“Voices in his head?”
“That’s how I interpreted his statement.”
Mickey smiled at me as if to say, Oh, yes. The defense is having a very good day. “That’s all I have. Thanks very much, Lindsay.”
Chapter 79
YUKI SAT ACROSS FROM ME at a table by the door at MacBain’s. She looked more than just worried. She looked as if she were beating herself up horribly.
“I should have done a redirect,” Yuki said to me after we’d ordered. The place was absolutely jammed with lawyers and their clients, cops, and Hall of Justice workers of all kinds. Yuki had to raise her voice to be heard over the din. “I should have asked you what you thought when Brinkley told you about the voices.”
“Who cares what I thought? It’s no big deal.”
“Oh, it’s a big deal, all right.” Yuki raked her hair back with her hands. “Sergeant Boxer, what did you think when Mr. Brinkley said he was hearing voices directing him to kill?”
I shrugged.
“Come on, Lindsay. You would have said that you thought he was already staging his insanity defense.”
“Yuki, you can’t nail everything down. You’re doing a first-class job. I mean, really.”
Yuki snorted. “Mickey is successfully flipping every negative into a positive. ‘My client killed people for no reason? That means he’s insane, right?’ ”