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.
Part Five
The Cat’s Meow
Chapter 106
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.