“That’s a definite idea,” Allie said. “Is there any way we can check if they did that?”
Rebecca was shaking her head. “Not at this stage of the game, Al.”
“But, I mean, really,” Greg said. “Don’t we all know, doesn’t everybody know, that the lab cheats all the time? Especially with the hurry they were in with me. They shouldn’t have gotten to my stuff for a couple of months at least, right? And you’re telling me they get a match the next day? Give me a break.”
They all knew what he was talking about. Within recent memory, the San Francisco police lab had been the subject of a huge scandal involving both the skimming of drugs from samples in narcotics cases and, more pointedly, outright mistakes and sample switching on DNA analysis in rape and homicide cases. In theory, these problems had been dealt with, but given the culture at the lab, no one believed they couldn’t reappear.
“I completely hear you,” Rebecca whispered. She’d had enough of this pointless conversation. “That’s a different can of worms and a hill we probably don’t want to die on. Unless we’ve something specific to accuse somebody of, and we don’t.”
Greg shook his head in disgust. He turned back to Allie. “If this weren’t so goddamn tragic, it would be farcical. Isn’t it obvious to both of you, especially after what Honor said? I didn’t kill Anlya. I never had sex with her. How can the judge let this keep going on?”
“I know,” Rebecca said. “Do you think this isn’t eating me up as well? The only thing I can say is we have to be patient and keep to the game plan.”
Greg drew in a breath, closed his eyes, and breathed all the way out before opening them again. He looked to each of the women in turn. “Patience,” he said. “Patience. Jesus.”
Allie squeezed his hand, which Rebecca noticed she’d never let go of during the whole impassioned discussion. “The Beck’s right, Greg,” she said. “You can do this. We can do it together.”
Suddenly, something broke in Greg. His shoulders shook. He extricated his hand from Allie’s and pounded at the table, firmly but quietly, with both fists. “I didn’t do this,” he said. “Why can’t they see that? I’m not that kind of person. I just couldn’t do it.”
On her side, Allie put an arm around him and pulled him to her, her hand over his again. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “Shh.” As though he were a baby. “It’s all right.”
She looked up when she heard the harsh male voice—one of the bailiffs, who’d come up to their table. “Is everything under control over here?”
“Fine,” Rebecca said. “We’re all fine.”
Greg regained his composure as the jurors and spectators began to file back into the courtroom. But no sooner had everyone taken their place than there was another commotion. Most everyone’s attention got diverted to the gallery, where there was a mass exodus of the thirty- or forty-member African-American caucus that had been simmering inside the courtroom since the opening of the proceedings. They arose almost as one with the same type of nearly paramilitary discipline they’d been exhibiting since they arrived, when it had seemed that they were waiting for a call to action. Apparently, it was not going to come.
By the time Rebecca heard something behind her and was turning around to look, six of the rows behind Braden’s desk were already empty and a queue had formed by the back door, nearly half the gallery waiting to file out.
• • •
THE BULLET FROM Yamashiro’s Glock went through Royce Utlee’s left side, just a little above his hips. There was a hole in his front and one in his back, and blood was all over the side of his shirt and jacket and seeping down his pants and into his shoes. He was finding it hard to breathe.
He’d made it around the corner after being hit and then down four entryways on the right side of the street. He’d gone down to one knee, wheezing, as he ducked into another filthy entryway that looked exactly like his own, around the corner—six metal mail holders with doorbell buttons under them, two doors leading inside to the right and the left. Here, out of the street’s line of sight, he turned back, stuck his head barely out, and saw the cop get to the corner and look this way and not see him. If he’d started down this way, Utlee had no doubt or hesitation, he would have waited until the cop was close and then shot him dead.
Instead, the cop had turned back.
That had been about two hours ago. Utlee’s original plan had been to keep going up the street, around a few more corners, where he’d wait and pull somebody out of his car—alive or dead, it didn’t matter. And then he’d get to his mama’s place. Somehow.
But he found standing up from his kneeling position almost impossible. And severe pain was kicking in on his side. So he leaned back against the mailboxes, bleeding and thinking, his gun hanging down in his right hand. He’d fired three times, he was pretty sure. So the gun ought to have six bullets.
He had heard sirens.
Shit.
He pushed all six of the doorbell buttons and waited.
Nothing.
He had to move. Get out of here, onto another block.
When he tried to walk, his left leg went numb on him. Still, he forced himself to break out of the entryway onto the sidewalk. He made it to the next building’s recessed entrance but had to stop again and get his breathing under control.
This was a bigger apartment building, with twelve units and twelve doorbells. He pushed all of them.
Up at the corner to his right, the opposite corner from where he’d come, a black-and-white cop car, its lights flashing, stopped in the middle of the intersection.
So that way was blocked. There was only going back the way he’d come. Or go through the building and out the back, if there were an alley or some connected backyards. Through them and out.
He looked out to his left. A cop car had parked in that intersection, too.
He’d backed all the way into the recess when the door to his right buzzed. He pushed at it and the thing opened.
Now he had barged his way into the lower-left-hand apartment, facing the street. There was no getting out the back way, even if there were one. He hadn’t been able to make it much farther than the front door to this place. Through the drawn curtains, he could see a semicircle of cop cars closed in up and down the street, having somehow figured out—maybe from the track of blood—where he must be. He could also see three snipers who had set themselves up on the roofs across the street, and somebody else was trying to talk to him through a bullhorn, but he knew if he stuck his head out to answer, one of the snipers would take him out. Or one of the guys huddled behind the cars in the middle of the street.
Somebody, anyway.
But so what? Everything felt pretty vague. The earlier pain had settled into a numbness that felt like it was spreading. He was probably going to die anyway.
The guy outside was saying that they knew he was hit, and if he just came out to the doorway, they’d get him to a hospital and he’d get a fair trial.
Really? he thought. He doubted it.
He wished he hadn’t done all that coke with Lilianne Downs, because face it, that was why he’d gone so off on Honor. He was a different person on coke. He wished he hadn’t killed Honor. She’d take care of him if she was here. Get him washed up, bandaged. She could talk to the po-po, make everything work out somehow.
A good woman, that’s for sure.
He’d been laying back in a chair and now pushed himself up. They weren’t going to give him no fair trial. He’d shot a cop. He knew what happened to brothers who shot cops. He could throw his gun out the front door and into the street and come out with his hands up—if he could even raise his hands, which he didn’t think he could—and somebody would still find a way to think he was carrying something and blow him away.
Or he could just sit here and bleed out.
He heard something outside. Not the bullhorn. Movement, somebody coming up on the building, maybe into the recess by the front doors. Charging.
He c
ould get himself to his feet.
He could, though it took him three tries.
He looked to the apartment’s door—locked and dead-bolted, but they could shoot that out without a problem.
There wasn’t anything else left to do. Dragging his left foot, he got to the drawn curtains by the front window.
He stood a minute, listening to the guys breaking in the front door, thinking he never should’ve gotten hooked up with Lilianne.
They were at the front door.
He reached up and threw the curtains back.
Raised the gun.
The window exploded in a hail of gunfire.
• • •
THEY WERE IN the Solarium, the large circular greenhouse that the firm used as a conference room. The associates and, occasionally, the partners often gathered here at the end of the working day and spent a more or less convivial half hour, sometimes with wine or spirits, sometimes not. By way of celebration after learning that his nonmonetary blackmail of Liam Goodman had apparently worked, and also because his daughter had survived her first full week of her first murder trial, tonight Hardy had broken out a pinot noir called Cherry Pie from Hundred Acre vineyard. He had been thinking lately that this was the finest wine made on the continent, if not in the world.
But Rebecca didn’t care about the wine. She’d just heard about her father and Liam Goodman. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Is that what really happened? You did that?”
“He really did,” Amy Wu said. “Abe vouched for it, and Abe would never lie.”
Hardy took a sip, sloshed it around to get all the tastes, and swallowed. “Even though Abe thinks I should have tried to shake him down a little harder. I’ve been thinking maybe he was right. It’s possible I could’ve convinced the guy to retire, and wouldn’t that have been beautiful? But I just wanted those people out of the courtroom.”
“Believe me,” Rebecca said, “they left all at once, and it was amazing, like all of a sudden you could breathe in there. Everybody felt it.”
“Well,” Hardy said, “let’s hope at least one juror doesn’t feel so intimidated anymore. Aren’t either of you going to have some of this wine? It’s really pretty adequate.”
Neither of them got to answer, because just at that moment Allie pushed open the Solarium door, surprise and shock writ large on her face. “Sorry to butt in,” she said. “You’ve got to turn on the TV in here. You’re never going to believe what just happened.”
35
SATURDAY MORNING BROKE fair, and Rebecca, caught up on her sleep, was out of bed by six-thirty and back from her run through Crissy Field an hour later. In the course of that hour, her brain went over every minute of the trial so far and ping-ponged between hope and despair, elation and gloom. She was winning; she was losing. Greg had actually done it; Greg couldn’t have done it. The DNA evidence was tainted; it was solid and incontrovertible.
When she got back to her building, she picked up the morning Chronicle on the stoop. Seconds later, when she entered her apartment, she was somewhat surprised to see Allie, not normally an early riser, dressed and apparently ready to go somewhere.
“Where are you off to so early?” Rebecca asked.
Allie, unexpectedly defensive, replied, “It’s not that early.”
“Okay. It’s not that early. So you’re not going out?”
“No, I am. I don’t want you to be mad at me.”
“I won’t be. I promise.”
“I thought I’d go down and visit Greg at the jail.”
To buy herself some time, Rebecca put the newspaper down on the kitchen counter. When she turned back around, she said, “You know when I just said I wouldn’t be mad at you? I lied.”
“I told you.”
“Yes, you did. But why in the world are you going to see Greg?”
“I think after this Royce Utlee thing, he needs a friend.”
“He’s got friends. His friends come to the courtroom and have been known to visit him in jail. He’s got more friends than I do. And what about the Royce Utlee thing?”
“You know, killed before he could confess to killing Anlya. I’ve been thinking about that all night. If they’d just gotten to talk to him, even for a minute. Utlee, I mean. The trial could be over.”
“If he did confess, and if he actually killed Anlya . . .”
“Come on, Beck, we know he did.”
“We don’t, really. We think we do, but it’s not a hundred percent certain.”
“That’s not what you thought yesterday.”
“Okay. But still, so what? I think your going to see Greg alone is a really bad idea. Weren’t you even going to tell me?”
“I am telling you.”
“Why do I think, though, that if I hadn’t happened to come home right now, you would have been gone?”
“No. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“All right, I believe you. But I think if anybody should be seeing him today, and maybe they should not, it ought to be me. Besides, they won’t let you in the attorneys’ visiting room, Al. There’s no chance you could get any time alone with him. I don’t know what you’d be trying to accomplish.”
“I wouldn’t be seeing him as his lawyer, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“That’s not it. I don’t know how you can say that. Besides which, you couldn’t see him as his lawyer, since you’re not.”
“Oh, that’s right. Rub that in.”
“I’m not rubbing anything in, Al. It’s the simple truth. I just don’t know why it’s so important that you go see him.”
“You don’t see that? Really?”
“Really.”
“Beck, it’s because this Utlee thing is so devastating. It could have been—should be—all over, and now where’s Greg going to get another chance like that? He needs to know that somebody’s with him on this.”
“What do you think I’ve been doing for the past six weeks, Allie? I’m with him on this.”
“Okay, I know you are as his attorney. But I mean personally, not as his lawyer. I think he needs somebody to hold his hand.”
Since she’d brought it up, Rebecca considered telling her that she’d noticed maybe a little too much of that between Allie and Greg yesterday in the courtroom. But that would only escalate things, and she didn’t want that. In her frustration, she let out a heavy sigh. “Look,” she said, “of course you can go and visit him. Of course I believe he’s innocent. He’s in a terrible position. But what are you going to accomplish by going in there and figuratively holding his hand? You’d just be underscoring a setback, and that’s going to make him feel like he’s snakebit, that things aren’t working out the way they should, when really I think the trial’s going pretty well. Omar Abdullah isn’t what I’d call the Platonic ideal of the great witness. And that’s essentially all Braden’s got.
“Even if they think Greg had sex with Anlya,” Rebecca continued, “that doesn’t remotely prove he killed her. Plus, with Liam Goodman’s peanut gallery pulling out . . .” She sighed again. “Given all that, Allie, the best thing for Greg—and I’m talking personally, not as his lawyer—is to try to stay optimistic. There’s no way he can construe a surprise visit from you, talking about Royce Utlee, no less, as anything but a sign that his defense team thinks that we’re screwed. And how’s that going to help him in any way? You tell me.”
Allie pulled around a kitchen chair and sat down on it. “I see what you’re saying.”
Rebecca spoke gently. “It’s really not a good idea, Al. It’s not going to help.”
Allie nodded. “It’s just that he’s such a good guy, Beck. I couldn’t sleep all of last night thinking about it. My heart’s breaking for him.”
“Mine, too. But the best thing we can do is win this trial, not visit him in jail to get him worked up over something we can’t do anything about. Don’t you think?”
Allie drew in a breath and let it out in a sigh. “I guess so. I guess you’re right.
”
Rebecca nodded. “I’m pretty sure I am.”
• • •
BY THE TIME Rebecca had finished her shower and gotten dressed, Allie had lit out for parts unknown. Rebecca could only persist in the hope that she’d taken their conversation to heart and wasn’t on her way down to Bryant Street to pay a completely inappropriate call on Greg.
She didn’t know what to do about Allie. It was more than bad luck to develop a crush on your client, and there was little doubt that this was what was happening to her roommate. It made her uneasy, to say the least.
Meanwhile, being her father’s daughter, she possessed an eight-inch but very heavy version of Hardy’s famous black cast-iron frying pan, a gift from Dismas and Frannie when she graduated from college. It permanently resided over the front burner of her stove, and now she turned the heat up high under it, poured in a few drops of olive oil, and opened her refrigerator to scrounge.
Flour tortilla, cheddar cheese, mango chipotle salsa, refried beans, a small leftover bowl of already cooked baby shrimp—done, folded over, and plated in under three minutes, the hot pan wiped dry with a paper towel and shining as though it had never been used.
She grabbed the Chronicle and brought her breakfast over to the kitchen table.
The main headline, naturally, concerned the manhunt and death of Royce Utlee at the hands of the SWAT team. Rebecca skimmed over the customary San Francisco sidebar about the overzealous police response and noticed in the lead article that the name Anlya Paulson, and Utlee’s possible connection to her murder and the trial of Greg Treadway, did not appear.
She took another bite of her burrito—the salsa was insanely great—and turned the page, glancing next as she always did at Jeff Elliott’s CityTalk column, accompanied atypically by what looked like a mug shot. Noticing right away that her uncle Abe appeared in the lead paragraph, she pulled the paper a bit closer and stopped chewing.
The Fall Page 23