The 17th Suspect Read online

“You’re saying that Briana Hill is a psycho?”

  Paul Yates started shaking his head. Then, “Look, I don’t know you and this is embarrassing. I’ve never told anyone, and I don’t want to ever tell anyone else. Not for any reason.”

  “What happened, Paulie? Did she threaten you?”

  “It was … terrifying.”

  “I’m listening,” Yuki said.

  Yates reached over and pressed the Stop button on the tape recorder. Yuki had to let him do it.

  “I’ll tell you, but I am not going to testify,” he said.

  “Okay. Okay, Paulie. Just tell me.”

  CHAPTER 14

  YUKI AND MARC Christopher were taking the elevator to the fourth floor of the Civic Center Courthouse, where she would be making her case to the grand jury within the next twenty minutes.

  The grand jury hearing was a trial run for the prosecutor. Yuki would present the case against Briana Hill, her few witnesses would testify, and she would introduce her evidence. All of this would be done fairly quickly, and with absolute secrecy.

  There would be no judge, no defendant, no other attorneys. Yuki would be entirely in charge of this presentation. Unlike with a petit jury, where the jurors had to be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, here the grand jurors—or twelve of nineteen of them—had only to find probable cause that Briana Hill had raped Marc Christopher.

  If they found probable cause, they would indict and the case would go forward to trial.

  The pressure was on Yuki, and on Marc.

  While Len Parisi had always shown confidence in Yuki, she had lost big cases. But for the most part, the losses were not because of error, lack of preparation, or poor skills. Once, a star witness for the prosecution had committed suicide; another had choked on the stand and changed her testimony; and in one case the defense had sprung a surprise witness who landed a crushing blow to the prosecution’s case.

  Still, Yuki had notched several important wins. Although Parisi was skeptical about the Hill case, he had given her the green light to go to the grand jury. She was sure she was right to have fought for the case.

  The elevator lurched and stopped at the third floor. People got out, replaced by others squeezing in, and once the doors closed, the car continued its ascent.

  Standing beside Yuki, Marc Christopher was dressed in a navy-blue suit and blue-patterned tie. His hair was recently cut and he’d had a good shave. Yuki was wearing a blue suit, very much like the one Marc was wearing. No tie for her, but a strand of angel skin coral beads Brady had given her as a wedding gift. Unlike Yuki, Marc looked completely numb.

  Yuki suspected he’d popped a Xanax or two. If so, he’d made a mistake. Yuki needed him to bring the story of the sexual assault to life for the jury. He had to emote. He had to be able to describe the damaging effects of what he had been through.

  Yuki wanted to ask him again if he was feeling okay, but at this point it no longer mattered.

  Unless Marc said in the next few minutes, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to drop the charges,” the show would go on. She was ready. She could only hope that Marc would be ready, too.

  The elevator doors slid open on the fourth floor. Yuki and Marc exited the elevator and walked down the hallway toward the grand jury room.

  Her three other witnesses were waiting in the corridor outside the courtroom door.

  Phyllis Chase, the arresting officer in the case, was in uniform. Paul Yates, the copywriter who had had one date with Briana Hill, wore denim and a panicked look. And Frank Pilotte, the tech specialist who would run Marc’s homemade rape video for the jury and testify to its authenticity, had the calm presence Yuki had hoped for in an expert witness.

  Yates and Christopher acknowledged each other with nods. Pilotte held open the heavy wooden door for Yuki, and she entered the grand jury room. It was a modern courtroom: wood paneling and white-painted plaster under a drop ceiling lit with embedded fluorescent fixtures.

  The judge’s bench, at one end of the room, would not be in use. Instead a massive wooden table had been set up facing the jurors. Yuki took her place behind the table, and her four witnesses sat alongside her.

  The nineteen jurors had been impaneled for almost a month and had heard a hundred cases in that time. And still Yuki was pretty sure they hadn’t ever heard a case like this one.

  Yuki felt almost calm. She was prepared. Thirty minutes from now she would know if she would be putting Briana Hill on trial for sexual assault in the first degree.

  CHAPTER 15

  YUKI MADE HER succinct opening remarks to the jurors, each word carefully chosen.

  “It may be hard to imagine a woman forcing a strong young man into an act of sexual intercourse against his will.

  “Now imagine that this woman is his boss, that she had a gun in her hand, and that she threatened to blow him away if he didn’t perform. In a few minutes Marc Christopher, the victim, will tell you exactly what happened to him. But first I want you to hear from Inspector Chase, of Sex Crimes, who investigated this case.”

  Yuki called Inspector Phyllis Chase. The foreperson swore her in, and the forty-year-old police investigator, appearing motherly and calm, took the witness stand.

  Yuki asked her to tell the jurors how she became involved in this case. Chase explained that the victim had called to report a sexual assault and then came to the police station to make a statement.

  “He told me that he had been raped. He was very emotional, and he said that he was afraid there would be workplace ramifications if he reported this rape to the police. He showed me what looked like ligature marks, bruises that had faded to a light brown color, on his wrists and ankles. That would be consistent with bruising after two to three weeks. He told us that it took him a couple of weeks to get his mind around the fact that he had been raped.”

  Chase went on.

  “My partner and I investigated this charge. There were no eyewitnesses to this sexual assault, which is true in nearly all the rape cases I have handled in the last fifteen years. But in this case the victim had a spy cam clock radio on his night table, and soon after the beginning of this attack, he recorded the event.”

  Yuki said, “Did you ask why he had this hidden camera?”

  “He explained that he’d bought it years before when he had a roommate. He suspected the roommate of bringing women home and having sex in Mr. Christopher’s bed. The roommate denied it, and after Mr. Christopher caught him in the act, he didn’t use the camera function again until the night in question. Based on the recording, we made an arrest.”

  After Chase’s testimony Yuki called Frank Pilotte, the police tech specialist. Pilotte had been with the SFPD for ten years, had a degree in electrical engineering, and was a specialist in computer science.

  Pilotte testified that he had reviewed the digital recording, and while the lighting and sound were not the best—“think nanny cam”—he’d concluded that the recording had not been doctored.

  After Pilotte left the room, Yuki called Paul Yates, copywriter at the Ad Shop. Yates took the stand. He fidgeted, sighed, and generally looked as though he wished he were anywhere but on the witness stand in front of a jury.

  Yuki couldn’t afford to worry about Paul Yates’s nerves.

  She said, “Mr. Yates, please tell us about your experience with Briana Hill.”

  He mumbled, “I’d be more comfortable answering questions. I’m not much of an extemporaneous speaker.”

  “That’s okay, Mr. Yates. We can do it that way. Did you date Ms. Hill during June of this year?”

  “I went out with her once. We had dinner.”

  “And what happened after that dinner?”

  Yates spoke directly to Yuki, averting his eyes from the jury.

  “We were in my apartment making out. It was getting heavy, and I got very nervous. I started to worry about how going out with her would be seen at the office. And I didn’t really know her well at all. I told her I had to stop.”

  “Wh
at happened after that?”

  “She took her gun out of her purse and told me to get undressed. I was terrified. At the same time she held out a couple of blue pills and told me to take them. I guessed that the pills were Viagra.”

  At Yuki’s questioning, the reluctant Paul Yates described slapping the gun out of Hill’s hand and running downstairs to the basement, where he waited until he thought it safe to come out.

  “Did you report this incident to the police?” Yuki asked her witness. Yates was sweating profusely and no longer meeting her gaze.

  “No, I didn’t call the police or anyone. Briana called me later that night and told me that she had only been joking. That I was taking it all wrong.”

  “Did you believe her?” Yuki asked.

  “I only cared that it was over.”

  “Thanks very much for your testimony, Mr. Yates,” Yuki said. “You can step down.”

  “Can I leave the courthouse?”

  Yuki said that he could and called Marc Christopher to the stand.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE GRAND JURY foreman asked Marc Christopher to place his hand on the Bible, and after he was sworn in, Yuki said, “Marc, I realize this is hard for you, but will you please tell the jurors what happened to you on the night in question.”

  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.

  “I like the Second Amendment as much as anyone,” Claire was saying, “but seriously. Kids shooting each other outside the saloon like in an old spaghetti western? What is the point of that?”

  Syd came over with two mugs of draft, and at that moment Cindy blew in, cut through the crowd, and slid into a chair between Claire and me. She looked adorable with a sparkling headband holding back her irrepressible golden curls.

  “Hi, guys,” she said, shucking her jacket. To Syd she said, “I want what they’re having.”

  “Gotcha,” said Sydney. “If you order now, I can get you in before a party of six.”

  “Another minute,” I said. “Yuki’s on the way.”

  I looked at my phone to see if I’d missed a travel update, but no. I said to Claire and Cindy, “I hope when Yuki gets here, she’s got that true bill under her belt.”

  “Who wants to guess?” said a voice behind us.

  Claire jumped up and pulled out a chair for ADA Yuki Castellano, the woman of the hour.

  Yuki looked great as always, the streak of blue in her glossy black shoulder-length hair matching her impeccable suit of the same color. She was also wearing her courtroom face, and I couldn’t read her mood.

  We three spoke in nearly perfect unison. “Well?”


  “Sorry you had to wait,” said Yuki. “As you know, the grand jury has been known to turn in the verdict the second you’re out the door. But I had to wait out in the hallway. Ten minutes went by. Twenty.”

  “Yuki, tell us,” Cindy shouted over the barroom clamor and the sound of laughter at the next table.

  Yuki grinned.

  She said to the waitress, “Sydney, I need a drink with a little kick to it. Surprise me. And I think we can order now.”

  “The usual dietary restrictions?” Syd asked. She looked at each of us and we all nodded, affirmative.

  “Four burgers,” she said deadpan. “Medium, medium rare, medium well, well done. Extra fries for the table. Surprise drink for ADA Castellano. With a kick.”

  We all laughed, including Yuki—the joke being that she can get drunk on iced tea. Cindy, known among us as Girl Reporter, grabbed Yuki’s shoulders with both hands and shook her.

  “Talk,” she said. “And cut to the freakin’ chase.”

  Yuki’s phone rang, and despite Cindy’s grip on her, and all of us yelling, “No phones!,” she went for her bag.

  She took the call, listened, said, “Me, too, Marc. You’re very welcome.”

  As Yuki clicked off the call, Sydney placed a fruity-looking drink in front of her. Yuki thanked her, then said to us, “As I was about to tell you—Briana Hill was indicted on the charge of rape. That was the victim calling to say he was overwhelmed and very grateful.”

  She smiled broadly. Glasses clinked across the table. Yay for Yuki. And a freaking great moment for the Women’s Murder Club.

  CHAPTER 18

  JOE MOLINARI, MY huggable and exceedingly durable husband, cooked dinner for us that night. I love his cooking, but I had no appetite. I put down a little of the shrimp scampi and broccoli raab and half a glass of the Cabernet.

  “What’s wrong, Linds?” he asked me.

  “Nothing. Really. Dinner is delicious. I had a big lunch with the girls.”

  “Mrs. Rose has the flu,” he said, speaking of our neighbor and occasional nanny. “Are you getting sick?”