As Yuki sat down beside me, Chief Tracchio reached across the railing to squeeze my shoulder in support. I hadn’t expected that, and I was touched. Then voices rolled across the room as the plaintiffs’ “dream team” filed in and took their seats across from us.
A moment later, Dr. and Mrs. Cabot came into the courtroom and sat behind their attorneys. The reedlike Dr. Cabot and his blond and visibly grieving wife immediately fixed their eyes on me.
Andrew Cabot was a trembling rock of contained rage and anguish. And Eva Cabot’s face was a picture of desolation that would never end. She was a mother who’d inexplicably lost her daughter because of me, and I’d crippled her son as well. When she turned her red-rimmed gray eyes on me, all I could see was her bottomless fury.
Eva Cabot hated me.
She wished me dead.
Yuki’s cool hand on my wrist broke my eye contact with Mrs. Cabot—but not before the image of our locked stares was captured on tape.
“All rise,” boomed the bailiff.
There was a deafening rustle as everyone in the courtroom stood and the small bespectacled form of Judge Achacoso ascended to the bench. I sat down in a daze.
This was it.
My trial was about to begin.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 84
JURY SELECTION TOOK ALMOST three days. After day one, because I couldn’t take the ringing phone and the media swarm outside my wee little house any longer, Martha and I packed up and moved into Yuki’s two-bedroom apartment in the Crest Royal, a mini high-rise with great security.
The media swarm got bigger and more vociferous daily. The press fed the public’s frenzy by detailing the ethnic and socioeconomic makeup of every person picked for the jury, charging us with racial profiling, of course. In fact, it made me queasy to watch both sides choose or dismiss potential jurors based on discernible or imagined prejudice against me. When we excused four black and Latino men and women in a row, I put it to Yuki during our next break.
“Weren’t you just telling me the other day about how it felt to be discriminated against because of your race?”
“This isn’t about race, Lindsay. The people we excused all had negative feelings about the police. Sometimes people aren’t aware of their own bias until we ask them. Sometimes, in a hugely public case like this, people lie so that they can have their fifteen minutes of fame.
“We’re working the voir dire process as it’s our right to do. Please trust us. If we don’t play hardball, we’re done before we start.”
Later that same day, the opposition used three peremptory challenges to excuse two middle-aged white civil servants—women who might have viewed me kindly, as if I were a daughter—as well as a fireman named McGoey who presumably wouldn’t have held even a gallon of margaritas against me.
In the end, neither side was happy but both sides accepted the twelve men and women and three alternates. At two in the afternoon of the third day, Mason Broyles got up to make his opening statement.
In my worst dreams, I couldn’t have imagined how that poor excuse for a human being would present the Cabots’ case against me.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 85
MASON BROYLES LOOKED AS if he’d slept his full eight hours the night before. His skin was dewy, his suit was classic navy blue Armani. His pale blue shirt was crisp and matched his eyes. He stood and, without using notes, addressed the court and the jury.
“Your Honor. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. In order to understand what happened on the night of May tenth, you have to go inside the minds of two kids who had a notion. Their parents weren’t home. They found the keys to their father’s new Mercedes and they decided to take a joyride.
“It wasn’t right, but they were kids. Sara was fifteen. Sam Cabot, an eighth grader, is only thirteen.”
Broyles turned away from the jury and faced his clients, as if to say, Look at these people. Look at the faces of bereavement caused by police brutality.
Broyles turned back to the jury and continued his opening statement.
“Sara Cabot was at the wheel that night. The Cabot kids were driving around in a bad neighborhood, the high-crime area we know as the Tenderloin District, and they were driving an expensive car. Out of nowhere, another car started to chase them.
“You will hear Sam Cabot tell you that he and his sister were terrified by the police car that was in pursuit. The siren was very loud. The grille lights and headlights were flashing, lighting up the street like a disco from hell.
“If Sara Cabot were here, she would testify that she was so afraid of the car that was chasing them, she fled and then she lost control of the car she was driving and crashed it. She would say that when she finally realized her pursuers were the police, she was scared out of her mind because she’d run from them, because she’d wrecked her father’s car, because she was driving without a license. And because her little brother had been hurt in the accident.
“And she was afraid because the police had guns.
“But Sara Cabot, who was two full grades ahead of other children her age, a girl with an IQ of one hundred sixty and almost endless promise, can’t tell us anything—because she’s dead. She died because the defendant, Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, made an egregious error of judgment and shot Sara twice through the heart.
“Lieutenant Boxer also shot Sam Cabot, barely a teenager, a bright, popular young boy who was captain of his soccer team, a champion swimmer, an athlete extraordinaire.
“Sam Cabot will never play soccer or swim again. Nor will he stand or walk or dress himself or bathe himself. Sam will never even hold a fork or a book in his hands.”
Muffled gasps volleyed around the courtroom as the tragic picture Broyles had painted took hold in people’s minds. Broyles stood for a long moment in the circle he’d created around himself and his bereaved clients, a kind of suspension of time, reality, and truth he’d perfected during his decades as a star litigator.
He put his hands in his pockets, exposing navy blue suspenders, and he cast his eyes down toward his shiny black wing tips as if he, too, were absorbing the horrific tragedy he’d just described.
He almost looked as though he was praying, which I was sure he never did.
All I could do was sit there, silent, my eyes fixed on the judge’s immobile face, until Broyles released us by looking toward the jury box.
Having wound up for his pitch, he delivered it, hard and fast.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you will hear testimony that Lieutenant Boxer was off duty the night of this incident and that she had been drinking. Still, she made a decision to get into a police car and to fire a gun.
“You will also hear that Sara and Sam Cabot had guns. The fact is that Lieutenant Boxer had sufficient experience to disarm two frightened children, but she broke all the rules that night. Every single one.
“That’s why Lieutenant Boxer is responsible for the death of Sara Cabot, a young woman whose remarkable promise was canceled in one shattering moment. And Lieutenant Boxer is also responsible for crippling Sam Cabot for the remainder of his life.
“We are asking that after you hear the evidence you will find Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer guilty of excessive use of force and of police misconduct resulting in the wrongful death of Sara Cabot and the crippling of Sam Cabot.
“Because of this irreparable loss, we’re asking that you give the plaintiffs fifty million dollars for Sam Cabot’s lifetime medical bills, for his pain and suffering, and for the misery of his family. We’re asking another one hundred million in punitive damages to send a message to this police community and every police community around our country that this is not acceptable behavior.