The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club #17)(11)

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.”

“What 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.”