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He nodded yes.
“We need to go through those, Mr. Fleet. See if she’d gotten any threats or had any admirers.”
“And if I don’t want her things tampered with?”
“You want us to find out who did this, don’t you?” I said.
He nodded, and I asked if he was ready to go now. If he refused, given the hour, it might be another day before I could get a search warrant.
“Yes. Fine,” said Fleet.
While my partners drove Brad Fleet to his empty home, I returned to my desk and made notes for the files. I was so absorbed I was startled when Brady dragged out Conklin’s chair, sat down hard, and asked me, “Do you like Fleet for the murders?”
“Too soon to say, but my sense is no. I’ll check out his alibi when his office opens tomorrow.”
“What’s bothering you the most, Boxer?”
“That it’s too familiar. And that I haven’t got a clue.”
Brady said, “I’m putting every available body on canvassing the neighborhood and 24/7 surveillance on Brad Fleet. It’s day one, Lindsay. We’re just getting started.”
I was driving home to my dog when I heard laughter inside my head. It was Evan Burke, psychopath of note, his disembodied guffaws coming to me from his solitary cell in San Quentin.
Today’s events would have been his idea of a really good time.
CHAPTER 25
YUKI AND HER associate, Nick Gaines, were well aware that District Attorney Leonard Parisi was in the gallery. A large man, nicknamed Red Dog for his hair color and pit-bull personality, Parisi had been as invested in the Sullivan case as the press were since day one.
Parisi had agreed to an interview with60 Minutesat the conclusion of this trial, and today he wanted to watch the proceedings for himself. “No pressure,” he’d said, but Nick and Yuki found it impossible to ignore his looming presence four rows back from the counsel table.
The Honorable Judge Karen Froman entered the courtroom through the door behind the bench. The jury was seated, the bailiff read the decree, and there was order in the court.
Judge Froman said, “Ms. Castellano, please call your witness.”
Yuki stood. “The People call Dr. Michael Parker.”
Dr. Parker came through the doors and down the center aisle to the witness stand. He was a fit man of fifty wearing ajacket and tie, pressed trousers, and he looked wrung-out. As if he’d been working all night and hadn’t yet slept. An emergency physician, Dr. Parker had tended to Barbara Sullivan when she was admitted to St. Vincent’s ER.
Parker was sworn in by the bailiff and took his seat on the witness stand. Yuki admitted the HIPAA release into evidence, the document signed by Barbara Sullivan, giving him permission to discuss her condition in court.
Yuki walked toward the witness and began her direct examination. She asked Parker, “How would you describe the job of emergency medicine physician?”
“In brief, we deal with trauma. Our jobs are to quickly diagnose our patient, stabilize them, resuscitate the dying, and know when to call in other experts. In short, an emergency doctor’s job is to save lives.”
“Thank you, Dr. Parker. Do you remember the afternoon when Mrs. Sullivan was brought into the ER?”
“Yes. I remember it well.”
“Can you give the court your impression of Ms. Sullivan’s condition at that time?”
Parker said, “I didn’t think I could save her. I’ve been an ER physician for twenty years, and in that time, I’ve never seen a person who’d been beaten so badly and was so close to death. She had a pulse. She was breathing. But she had internal injuries, broken bones and external injuries over her entire body.”
“Had she been beaten with fists?”
“Most certainly, but not exclusively. There was evidence that she’d been kicked with steel-toed boots, cut with a serrated blade, her head stamped on to the effect that her leftorbital socket was broken and she had a fractured skull and a concussion, as well as three broken ribs, a punctured right lung, extensive damage to one kidney, and her right leg was broken in three places. She had more than three dozen knife cuts on her arms and torso, and she’d lost more than fifteen percent of total blood volume. Some of the superficial injuries had begun to heal, giving me reason to believe that Mrs. Sullivan had been tortured over twenty-four hours.”
Gaines left his seat and went to the whiteboard set beside the witness where he posted two anatomically correct line drawings of a female body, front and back. There were X’s, straight and zigzagging lines standing for injuries. Callouts were printed beside the markings indicating the damaged areas.
