The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club 17)

The young man rubbed his palms on his pant legs, then, grasping the arms of the chair, he began telling his story.

“I was crazy about Briana Hill. She was my boss at the ad agency,” Marc told the jurors. “I really liked her, and we had been going out for a couple of months when she did this horrible … when she raped me.”

Yuki asked, “You and Briana had been having sex during the two months you were dating?”

“Yes. Of course. I was very happy with our relationship. I didn’t think we were getting married, but we had a lot in common, and working together while dating was great, or at least I thought so. I felt like we were basically always on a date, and I liked getting to know her in different ways.

“But then,” Marc continued, “I got the feeling Briana was becoming uncomfortable with the attention we were getting at work. People calling us a couple. She started getting a little short with me when we were working together.

“I asked Briana out for dinner one night after work. I wanted to talk about it, but I was afraid she’d just say, ‘It’s over,’ so in the end I didn’t bring it up. We were both drinking in the restaurant bar. Panacea, it’s called. I said something like, ‘Let’s go to my place and sleep it off.’ She said, ‘Why not?’ We almost always went back to my apartment after a date. It’s only up the hill a couple of blocks from the restaurant.

“So,” Marc told the jury, “we went to my apartment. I stripped off my clothes in the living room, kept going to the bedroom, and threw myself facedown on the bed. I was falling asleep. I thought Briana had called my name, and then she said my name again, louder. So I turned over to see what she wanted.

“She had her handgun pointed at me. I laughed. I said something like, ‘My wallet is in my pants on the floor.’ She said, ‘Pay attention, Marc. Tie yourself to the bed with these.’

“She was standing at the foot of my bed. She had the gun in one hand and a bunch of my ties in the other. My ties. Good ones. I said, ‘Come on, Briana, that’s goofy. Come to bed.’

“She said, ‘I’m not joking, bitch. Do what I tell you, or I’m going to blow you away.’

“She pulled back the hammer. I suddenly believed her.”

Marc stopped speaking and lowered his eyes, and it looked to Yuki as if he might cry. Yuki asked him if he needed a minute, and he shook his head no.

But he didn’t speak.

The jurors were also in a kind of stunned silence. None coughed, shifted in their seat, or averted their eyes. Their attention was locked on Marc Christopher.

Yuki broke the silence. She said, “Marc, what did you do?”

“I tied my ankles to the footboard like she told me to do. When I was tying up one of my hands, she was checking the ties on my feet, and I hit the Record button on my clock radio camera. She didn’t know that I was doing that. I finished tying up that hand, and she tied up the other one. I did what she said to do.”

Yuki asked, “You’d had sex with Briana many times. Why, in this instance, did you think you were being assaulted?”

“Because this time she threatened to shoot me.”

Yuki thanked Marc and asked him to step down from the witness box and return to the corridor outside the courtroom.

Only fifteen minutes had passed since Yuki introduced her case to the jurors. She was ready to produce her evidence.

Yuki recalled Frank Pilotte, the police computer specialist.

Pilotte set up his laptop on the big wooden table.

“Frank,” Yuki said, “please run the recording.”

CHAPTER 17

FOR LUNCH I met Claire at MacBain’s Beers o’ the World Saloon, where we had a small table between the front window and the peanut barrel, hemmed in by the lunchtime crowd. As usual at the crack of noon, our favorite watering hole near the Hall of Justice was packed with attorneys, cops, and courthouse staff. Owing to my long-standing status as a regular customer (and pretty good tipper), Sydney MacBain, our waitress, had given us the only empty table without making us wait for our entire party of four to arrive.

Claire Washburn is my closest friend, as well as San Francisco’s chief medical examiner. Claire is black and bosomy and calls herself a “big girl.” Despite all the death she sees every day and year, she’s a compassionate woman, a loving wife, and a mom to three.

Her office and morgue are a short walk out the back door of the Hall, so we had trotted over to MacBain’s together. We were saving two chairs at our table. One was for our tenacious, effervescent friend Cindy Thomas, top crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle. She was in a cab from her office, which was ten minutes away, traffic permitting.

Our fourth was ADA Yuki Castellano, a rising-star prosecutor. Yuki had texted me to go ahead and order lunch, leaving me to assume that the grand jury hadn’t yet arrived at a verdict on her current case.

Meanwhile, I had Claire all to myself, and she was outraged about the death of a young man who had been delivered to the morgue overnight. It was the second time in a month that a customer had left a bar a short distance from where we were sitting now and had been shot dead on the street.

It wasn’t my case, but I knew the details and understood Claire’s frustration. A kid about the age of her own boys, in otherwise perfect health, was lying inside a drawer with bullet holes punched into his body. No one had claimed his body or called the police looking for him. And no witnesses to his killing had stepped forward.