“Objection,” Urban said. “Counsel is asking the witness to speculate.”

“I’ll withdraw it,” Kowalski said. “Ms. Pribek, did you say anything to Miss Brown that would indicate to her that her injuries were fatal?”

Genevieve, I’m so sorry. I was trying to do the right thing.

“No, I didn’t.”

Dying declarations are notoriously tricky. They rely on the understanding that someone who knows she is dying has no reason to lie. For this reason, the paramount issue in court tends to be whether the dying person in fact believed he or she was dying.

On the stand, Kowalski had made it clear to the judge that Kamareia did not see me as a criminal investigator, hence Kowalski’s insistence on calling me “Ms. Pribek,” instead of using my rank. More importantly, Kowalski established that I had led Kamareia to believe she would not die of her wounds.

Kilander had told me about dying declarations once, long before Kamareia’s death. It wasn’t as if I’d never heard about the legal aspects of point-of-death accusations; they simply had not crossed my mind, not even remotely, that day when I’d been watching a young woman die.

Jackie Kowalski was right about one thing-I had gotten into that ambulance as a friend. I had tried to be a good friend to Kamareia, to do what her mother would have done, to comfort and reassure her. All these things compromised Kamareia’s accusation, and in doing so jeopardized a case that was shaky in its other aspects.

Despite the rape, there had been no semen recovered, an occurrence more common than many people realized. Maybe Shorty wore a condom, maybe he simply didn’t ejaculate. It was an academic point to me. I considered Kamareia’s murder a hate crime in its simplest definition: the result of hatred. As far as I could see, Stewart had raped Kamareia because it was just another way of beating her.