Chapter 16

CABOT’S LAWYER SHOT HIS cuffs and stood silently for so long you could’ve twanged the tension in the room like a guitar string. Someone in the gallery coughed nervously.

“The plaintiff calls chief medical examiner Dr. Claire Washburn,” said Broyles at last, and my best friend took the stand for the plaintiffs.

I wanted to wave, smile, wink—something—but of course all I could do was watch. Broyles warmed up with a few easy lobs across the plate, but from then on, it was fastballs and knuckle curves all the way.

“On the evening of May tenth did you perform an autopsy on Sara Cabot?” Broyles asked.

“I did.”

“What can you tell us about her injuries?”

All eyes were fixed on Claire as she flipped through a leather-bound notepad before speaking again.

“I found two gunshot wounds to the chest pretty close together. Gunshot wound A was a penetrating gunshot wound situated on the left upper/outer chest six inches below the left shoulder and two and a half inches left of the anterior midline.”

Claire’s testimony was crucial, but still my mind drifted out of the courtroom and into the past. I saw myself standing in a dusky patch of streetlight on Larkin Street. I watched Sara take her gun out of her jacket and shoot me. I fell, rolled into a prone position.

“Drop your gun!”

“Fuck you, bitch.”

I fired my gun twice, and Sara fell only yards from where I lay. I’d killed that girl, and although I was innocent of the charges against me, my conscience was guilty, guilty, guilty.

I listened to Claire’s testimony as she described the second shot, which had gone through Sara’s sternum.

“It’s what we call a K-five,” said Claire. “It went through the pericardial sac, continued on through the heart, and terminated in thoracic vertebra number four, where I retrieved a semijacketed copper-colored, partially deformed, medium-size projectile.”