“Yes, Your Honor. The People call Officer Phyllis Chase.”
The bailiff opened the heavy wooden door at the front of the room, and Officer Chase, wearing khaki pants and a blue blazer, sporting a choppy blond haircut, entered the room and strode up the aisle. She was sworn in at the witness stand, and after she’d taken her seat, Yuki approached her.
Yuki had had a good feeling about this Sex Crimes cop from the first time she met her. She was absolutely professional and confident. She was a perfect witness.
Yuki elicited preliminary information from Chase—where she worked and when she’d received Marc Christopher’s call saying that he had been sexually assaulted.
“Please go on,” Yuki said.
“My partner, Officer Phil Thompson, and I invited Mr. Christopher down to the station and took his statement.”
Yuki asked the officer a series of questions about the interview, and Chase answered that she had observed fading bruises on Mr. Christopher’s wrists and ankles that appeared to be ligature marks. Photos had been taken, and after that Chase and Martinez had accompanied Mr. Christopher to his apartment, where he showed them the clock that was also a low-tech recording device.
Yuki guided Officer Chase through her testimony that the recorder and the video had been reviewed by the techs at the SFPD, that Ms. Hill had been brought in for questioning.
Chase said, “She denied that a rape had taken place. She said the sex was consensual. We showed the recording to the DA’s office, and then we arrested Ms. Hill and logged in her S&W .38 handgun.”
Briana Hill put her folded arms down on the defense table, lowered her head, and began sobbing softly.
Yuki showed the photographs of Marc Christopher’s faded bruises to Chase, who said, “Yep, I took those photos.”
Yuki passed the photos to the jury foreman, and then, after entering them into evidence, she thanked Officer Chase for her testimony.
“Your witness,” Yuki said to James Giftos.
Giftos had his arm around his client’s shaking shoulders, and he spoke from his seat. “No questions,” he said.
Of course Giftos had no questions. Chase was unimpeachable. Yuki was thinking ahead to her next witness when Rathburn called for a lunch recess.
“We will resume at two. Don’t be late,” he said.
CHAPTER 46
JAMES GIFTOS’S ARM was still wrapped around Briana Hill’s shoulders as they left the courtroom together.
Yuki, walking not far behind them with Arthur, thought that Briana Hill looked pitiable, like her heart was breaking, and Yuki didn’t doubt that it was. When she decided to rape Marc Christopher, maybe on impulse, she couldn’t have imagined that it was going to lead to this—a trial where she would be exposed in every sense of the word, with a possibility of going to prison for as long as eight years.
Yuki shook her head as she walked with Art along the marble-lined hallway.
Arthur said, “What’s wrong?”
“I was feeling sorry for Briana. Don’t tell anyone.”
“Trust me. I won’t. And with all due respect, she doesn’t deserve it. Yuki, you’re giving voice to sexual crimes against men. Personally, I appreciate it.”
“Thanks, Art.”
Art said that he was going to head for the men’s room and would meet her in the lobby. Yuki pulled out her phone to call Parisi, when James Giftos was suddenly right in her face.
“Yuki.”
“James.”
“Your opening statement was a little wooden but not terrible.”
“Actually, the jury looked quite moved,” she said.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “I’ve watched you blow up several cases God knows you should have won. Alfred Brinkley. Mass murderer. Not guilty. Junie Moon. Killer. Not fucking guilty. Then, of course, more recently, another mass murderer, this one world class and acting as his own attorney. Hey, I was there. I saw him take your case apart like he was playing pickup sticks. He wasn’t even a lawyer. You know, most people would have gone into a different line of work after a disaster like that.”
Yuki snapped, “Don’t you get tired of yourself, James? Don’t you want to run home and take a shower? Because you really stink.”
She was ten yards from the elevator bank and on the move, having to weave through and around clumps of attorneys and court workers clogging the hallway, while trying to fend off James’s jujitsu attacks on her morale. Meanwhile, he tagged right along with her.
“I’ll be honest with you, Yuki,” Giftos said.
“I’m sure of that,” she said.
“You have a real weakness when it comes to running the sword through. You just roll over and show your own underbelly.”
Shit. How could he see through her like that?
“Say what you like. Think what you will,” she said, attempting to push past the aggressive jerk. He stuck with her all the way to the elevator.
“What more can I say? I think you’re a nice girl, but you’re a loser.”
Briana Hill came out of the ladies’ room into the corridor. She called out to Giftos and he called back, “I’m coming.” To Yuki he said, “You should really go back to that pro bono law firm. What is it called? The Defense League?”
Yuki stopped walking and Giftos stopped, too. He towered above her.
She stared up at him and said, “Sounds to me like my opening really freaked you out, James. You’re showing your own underbelly, you know. And I will run the sword through.”
“Sure you will. Be careful not to cut yourself.”
James Giftos was laughing as he turned and walked back to his client.
CHAPTER 47
ARTHUR BARON QUESTIONED the prosecution’s next witness, Frank Pilotte, the SFPD’s IT specialist who testified that the video recording had not been altered.
James Giftos had no questions for Pilotte, and he also had no challenges for the prosecution’s next witness, a seasoned psychologist and author who had well-established credentials in the emotional effects of rape on the victim.
And then Yuki called Paul Yates to the stand. From the first moment Yates twitched, sweat, and was pretty much a steaming-hot mess.
Responding to Yuki’s questions, Yates replied that he worked at the Ad Shop as a copywriter, that when his creative group shot a commercial, Briana Hill, as head of production, was in charge.
Yuki asked, “Did you ever have a social relationship with the defendant?”
“I wouldn’t call it a relationship. We went out once.”
“Please tell the court about that date, Mr. Yates.”
He sighed, then said, “I took Briana to a Chinese restaurant after work. It wasn’t a fancy place. She seemed to like me. We weren’t far from my apartment. I asked her, ‘Do you want to come back to my place and hang out for a while?’ I thought she’d say, ‘No way.’ She said, ‘Sure.’”
“Please go on.”
Yates said, “We started making out on my couch, but I felt like it was all happening too fast. I didn’t know her very well. I started thinking what it would mean to have sex with her and how I would handle that at the office. I was in my head too much. I didn’t think I could do it if I tried. So I kind of patted her back and told her, ‘Sorry, no offense or anything, I have an early morning meeting.’”
“How did she take that?”
“She got mad. She leapt off the couch in a huff, and when I looked up, she had pulled her gun out of her purse. She dropped her purse and showed me her other hand. It was clenched, like this.”
Giftos shouted, “Sidebar, Your Honor.”
“Approach,” said Rathburn, waving them in toward the bench.
When both legal teams were standing before him, Giftos said in a voice thrumming with barely controlled anger, “Judge Rathburn. Evidence of an uncharged crime is prejudicial and should not be allowed.”
“Ms. Castellano?”
“Your Honor, Mr. Yates didn’t go to the police out of fear of retribution by the defendant. But his testimony about the gun shows her pattern of abuse. The jurors have a right to hear what the witness has to say.”
Rathburn asked, “You deposed the witness, Mr. Giftos?”