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She wanted to ask why he hadn’t read the reports. Maybe he had and he wanted to hear it from her. “We thought so, until a short time later when a brick came through the window and barely missed hitting us.”
“I noticed in the reports that Ms. Patrick said she’d planned to marry Detective Green,” Offenbach said, “but he was unaware of that. Is that true?”
“That’s what Detective Green reported to me and others. He said they never once discussed marriage.”
“So then how would she have gotten the idea that they were getting married?”
Gigi stared at him, uncertain of how she should answer that.
“I object to that question,” Andy said. “There is no way Detective Dominguez could know what Jaycee Patrick thought or when she thought it.”
“I agree,” Jeannie said. “You can ask about what Detective Dominguez witnessed or heard, but you can’t ask her what Jaycee Patrick was thinking or feeling.”
“Very well,” Offenbach said with a hard look for Gigi. “Were you seeing Detective Green while he was still dating Jaycee Patrick?”
“No, I wasn’t. He’d ended his relationship with her before ours began.”
“And you know that for certain?”
“I do.”
“Is there a point to this line of questioning, Officer Offenbach?” Andy asked.
Gigi wanted to kiss him on the lips for asking the question she was thinking.
“I’m just trying to determine Ms. Patrick’s motivation for confronting the detective.”
“As the reports indicate,” Gigi said, “her motivation was to get Detective Green to return to their relationship, after he’d told her that wasn’t going to happen.”
“Because of you,” Offenbach said.
“No, because of him. He would tell you he’d realized it was over with her quite a while before he actually ended it.”
“We’ll have him come in to confirm the time line,” Offenbach said.
“I fail to see how that’s relevant to the matter before this board,” Andy said. “Whatever occurred between Detective Green and his ex-girlfriend certainly had no bearing on my client or the incident at her home, which is why we’re here. The facts of that incident are irrefutable. Jaycee Patrick entered Detective Dominguez’s home uninvited, threatened her, assaulted her and forced Detective Dominguez to defend herself in order to save her own life. Those are the facts in question here. What occurred—or didn’t occur—between Detective Green and Jaycee Patrick prior to those events is irrelevant.”
Gigi wanted to stand up and cheer for her on-point attorney.
“I’d like to know more about why you felt the need to use your weapon, Detective Dominguez,” Captain Andrews said.
“As the situation in my bedroom evolved, Ms. Patrick became somewhat unhinged. That’s the best word I can use to describe her demeanor. She dragged me upstairs, saying she wanted to see the place where I fucked her boyfriend—and those were her words, not mine. After she cut my clothes off me with a large knife, she pushed her fingers into me, saying she wanted to understand what I have that she doesn’t. She… she said she wanted to know if my pussy was tighter than hers.”
Gigi trembled as she recited the facts, feeling as if she were telling a story that’d happened to someone else. “Things went downhill from there. She got increasingly physical with me, swinging the knife around as she came toward me. I didn’t think. I just went into survival mode by backing up to the table that housed my weapon.” Her voice caught on a sob. “The last thing I wanted to do was kill her, but it was very clear to me that she would have no problem killing me.”
“Thank you for your articulate recitation of the facts, Detective Dominguez,” Jeannie said.
Gigi appreciated her kindness, knowing Jeannie had once been abducted and sexually assaulted on the job, so she understood better than most people would how difficult it was to talk about the assault, especially in a forum such as this.
“Are there any other questions for Detective Dominguez?”
“Just one,” Offenbach said. “Detective, if you had this incident to do over with the benefit of hindsight, would you have done anything differently?”
Gigi glanced at Andy, whose expression was unreadable. “I… I’ve gone over it and over it a million times in my mind since that day, always looking for a way that this could’ve ended differently than it did, but I’ve never been able to see it unfold any other way. While I can’t know for sure, it seemed to me that Ms. Patrick was very determined to kill me. If she couldn’t have Cameron, then I wasn’t going to have him either.”
“As you mentioned earlier, it’s not possible to know what Ms. Patrick was thinking,” Offenbach said.
“No, it wasn’t,” Gigi conceded, “but I saw the way she was looking at me, as if she hated me more than anyone on earth and that it would be nothing to her to kill me. While I’d give anything for an outcome that didn’t require me to fire my weapon or for her to be dead, I’m not sorry that I did what I had to do to survive. I love my life, and I’m thankful to still be here.” She paused before she added, “I also want to say that I love my job and the people I work with. It makes me very sad to think about not being able to do the job I love anymore. If it comes to that, I’ll be okay because I know in my heart that there was nothing else I could’ve done that day. That’s all I wanted to say.”
