John Lescroart - The Motive

Rosen threw a look over to Hardy, then brought his eyes back front. Gradually, as order was restored, Braun seemed to remember that she still had a witness on the stand. "Mr. Rosen," she intoned, almost gently, "redirect?"

Shell-shocked, Rosen opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't manage a syllable.

Hardy saw his opening and decided to take it. Normally, in a largely pro forma gesture, the defense would make an oral pitch for a directed verdict of acquittal at the close of the prosecution's case in chief. This 1118.1 motion asked the judge to rule that as a matter of law the prosecution hadn't presented a sufficient weight of evidence to satisfy its burden of proof. Therefore, without the defense even having to present its case, the defendant should be released. In practice, the release of a defendant in this manner was a rare event indeed.

But it did happen on occasion. There was ample precedent, and Hardy thought that if ever a directed verdict were called for, it would be now. After all, Catherine was charged with killing Missy D'Amiens. If she wasn't the victim in this case, if Missy wasn't in fact even dead for certain, and that now appeared to be the case, then that charge against Catherine became moot. Even more satisfyingly, the botched identification of one of the victims underscored the ineptness and even prejudice of the original police investigation. If they couldn't even get the victim right, how was the jury going to believe anything else they proposed?

So Hardy was standing now and the judge was nodding, indicating with her hand that counsel should approach the bench.

In the relative calm of Lou the Greek's, Hardy and Glitsky sat in a darkened back booth about a half hour before the lunch crowd would arrive in earnest. Hardy was dipping pita bread into the Lou's version of tsatsiki, which incorporated soy sauce and hot chili oil into the standard yogurt, garlic and cucumber mix, and somehow the resulting glop managed to work.

"I blame you," Hardy said. "If you hadn't whined so much about having to testify…"

"I wasn't whining."

Hardy put on a voice. "If I testify against a cop, the other uniforms won't like me anymore." He popped some bread. "So if I wanted to save you all the embarrassment and worse, I figured I had to come up with something."

"All right, but how did you get it?"

"The car."

"The car?"

He nodded. "I always said that was the key. Now if you'd only have found it earlier… but I guess better late than never, huh? I'm sure you did the best you could."

Glitsky wasn't going to rise to the bait. "What about the car, though?"

"It was towed from in front of Missy's apartment."

"Yes, it was. So?"

"So she drove it there."

"Right. And?"

"And if she died in the Steiner Street house, it would have still been somewhere near Alamo Square, where she had parked it, where the Willises had seen her get into it."

"No. They said it was Catherine."

"That's what they said, but they were wrong. It was Missy all right. At least I assumed it had to be. It couldn't have been anybody else, really. But I wasn't completely sure until I talked to Yamashiru, then found Dr. Lee and went by his place last night and showed him the picture. Actually, I had some more family snapshots of Missy, too, and Yamashiru didn't recognize any of them. I just wanted to pin Yamashiru down before Cuneo got him to 'remember' seeing Missy around the office."

"And if she wasn't the one in the fire," Glitsky said, "she couldn't have been the one he identified from the dental records."

"Exactly right."

"So she did it. Missy."

"That's the money bet," Hardy said. "Then she split with the money."

"You have any idea why?"

"I thought I'd leave something for you to figure out. That's police work. As you are no doubt aware, I deal only in the realm of exalted and abstract thought."

Glitsky couldn't fault him for crowing a little. He figured he'd earned the right. "So where's it at now?" he asked. "The directed verdict?"

"Braun's deciding. Technically, she shouldn't grant it. The motion only goes to the people's case, and whether that evidence alone could support a verdict. Yamashiru has only said he doesn't really know if the photo belongs with the records in his office. Those records are in the alleged victim's name and Dr. Lee hasn't testified yet. But everybody knows what's coming, and Braun's so pissed at Rosen and Cuneo she might just pull the trigger. And whether she grants the motion or not, the jury's got to believe the police investigation was totally inept if not completely contrived."

CityTalk

by Jeffrey Elliot

The big news around the Hall of Justice this week was the bombshell dropped by forensic odon-tologist (read "dentist") Toshio Yamashiru in the double-murder trial of Catherine Hanover. Dr. Yamashiru had previously testified about the identity of the female victim in the case, whose body had been discovered burned beyond recognition with that of Paul Hanover at his Alamo Square mansion last May. Hanover's girlfriend, Missy D'Amiens, had been one of the patients in Dr. Yamashiru's practice, and he compared D'Amiens's dental records with those of the deceased woman and pronounced them identical.

On Thursday morning, however, defense attorney Dismas Hardy recalled the dentist to the witness stand for cross-examination. During the questioning, Hardy showed him a Chronicle file photograph of Missy D'Amiens and inquired if Dr. Yamashiru could identify the woman in the picture. He could not, stating that he'd had no real contact with the woman. His patient, who had called herself Missy D'Amiens as well, was still clearly the deceased, but evidently she was not the person who'd been engaged to Mr. Hanover.

Dental records are often the only way to identify a body that is otherwise unidentifiable. Outside the courtroom after the stunning testimony, Dr. Yamashiru emphasized, however, that the forensic odontologist only verifies that the teeth of the victim match those of his sample dental records. "The actual identification of the individual is left to the detective in charge of the case," Yamashiru explained, "Sergeant Dan Cuneo. And he got it wrong."

Judge Marian Braun called a halt to further proceedings today while she mulls over her ruling on Mr. Hardy's motion to dismiss all charges against his client, who-because a double murder mandates the charge of special circumstances-is facing life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Which of course leaves two related questions: assuming Hardy is right and the dead woman is not Missy D'Amiens, who is the dead woman? And where is Missy D'Amiens?

In the end, the district attorney himself-Clarence Jackman-appeared before Braun could rule on the 1118.1 motion. "Your Honor," he said, "in light of the new evidence we've seen in this case, the people move…"

For Catherine, the ordeal was over.

On a fogbound, windswept and blustery Thursday in early March, six weeks to the day after Jackman dismissed the charges against Catherine Hanover and Braun ordered her released from jail, Glitsky was doing his own driving. He was not in uniform. Instead he wore a pair of dark, heavy slacks and a blue dress shirt and his new Glock.40 automatic in his shoulder holster. When he got out of the car, he'd cover the weapon with his all-weather jacket.

The night before, he'd checked out another city-issued Taurus, and this morning he'd gone against the traffic over the bridge to the East Bay and taken Interstate 80 east. Now, just beyond American Canyon Road outside of Vallejo, he encountered a blanket of some of California's Central Valley fog-he'd heard of "tule fog" but hadn't before experienced it. For his money, the stuff put its more notorious San Francisco counterpart to shame.