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“Correct.”
“Was the defendant under duress?”
“Objection. Calls for speculation,” Davis sang out.
“Sustained,” Judge Bendinger snapped.
“I’ll rephrase,” Yuki said. “Did you threaten the defendant? Deny her food or water or sleep?”
“No.”
“She gave you this information of her own volition?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Yuki said to me. “I have no further questions.”
And then L. Diana Davis was in my face.
Chapter 37
TO MY SURPRISE, L. Diana Davis was petite, maybe five three, and I guessed that her close-up shots on the small screen and her reputation had made her seem larger than life.
“Sergeant Boxer,” Davis said. “You’ve been a homicide inspector for over ten years. You’ve investigated countless homicides. You’ve interrogated innumerable suspects, and you knew that eventually you’d be sitting in a courtroom telling us what happened in the case against Junie Moon. Isn’t that true?”
“Yes.”
“So how did you get the defendant to confess, Sergeant? Tell her that accidents happen? That she wasn’t culpable?”
I knew damned well to keep my answers short and blunt, but looking at Davis’s expression, half kindly grandma, half bulldog, I felt a need to let my mouth do the talking.
“I may have said things like that. Interrogations aren’t one size fits all. Sometimes you’ve got to raise your voice. Sometimes you’ve got to be sympathetic. And sometimes you’ve got to lie to a subject,” I said. “There are legal boundaries for interrogations, and my partner and I stayed within those boundaries.”
Davis smiled, turned, and walked toward the jury, turned back to face me.
“Is that so?” she said. “Now, you’ve testified that the defendant asked you to turn off the tape during your interrogation at the police station.”
“That’s right.”
“So let me get this straight, Sergeant. You videotaped everything — up to the point when Ms. Moon ‘confessed.’ That confession is not on the tape.”
“The defendant seemed reluctant to talk because the camera was running. So when she asked me to turn it off, I did so. And then she told us what happened.”
“So what are we to make of the fact that you recorded everything this young woman had to say except her confession? I guess you’re suggesting that the defendant was being cagey when she asked you to shut off the camera,” Davis said, shrugging her shoulders, sending a nonverbal message to the jury that she thought I was full of crap. “You’re saying she was sophisticated enough to confess off the record.”
“There is no such thing —”
“Thank you, Sergeant. That’s all I have for this witness,” said Davis.
Yuki shot to her feet, said, “Redirect, Your Honor.”
“Proceed, Ms. Castellano,” said the judge.
“Sergeant Boxer, are you required to tape a confession?”
“Not at all. A confession’s a confession, whether it’s written or verbal, on tape or off. I’d rather have a taped confession, but it’s not required.”
Yuki nodded.
