4th of July (Women's Murder Club 4)

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.