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CHAPTER 19

YUKI GREETED THE jurors, who were giving her their full attention. Her job with the opening statement was to tell the jury about slick and stealthy Dario Garza.

Yuki had spoken to potential jurors during voir dire, and despite the horror of the recent crime with which Dario was charged, these jurors had been willing to serve.

She began. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defendant, Mr. Esteban Dario Garza, has been charged with the murder of a college friend whose name was Miguel Hernandez.

“Like the defendant, Mr. Hernandez was twenty-three years old and a graduate of UC Berkeley. He had plans to become a graphic designer and art director after he finished his apprenticeship with a respected advertising agency that had offered him a job.

“But his plans were not to be.”

Yuki continued her opening statement to the court. “Come back with me in time to a mild evening last year in mid-June. Mr. Garza was in the driver’s seat of his lightly used, secondhand BMW sedan. Mr. Hernandez, a schoolmate and good friend, was in the passenger seat beside him, and a third, somewhat more recent friend sat in the back seat, smoking a cigarette. This friend, age twenty-two at that time, has told us that he was enjoying the motion of the car, the soft night air, and the conversation of his two friends in the front seat whose voices carried back to him.”

Yuki knew but could not say that shortly before the defendant started up his car that night he’d come under scrutiny by homicide investigators from all three divisions of the SFPD, who had, over the previous three years, investigated the remains of seven young women found in shallow graves. All seven had disappeared after partying in the same clubs Dario attended. Homicide investigators theorized that Dario used clubbing as an opportunity to pick up a woman he didn’t know and reduce her lifetime to the remaining hours of that night.

But a new variable entered the equation for Dario that night in June last year. Yuki had to get the presentation of the current case exactly right or have it thrown out because of her prejudicing the jury.

She put her hands into her jacket pockets and walked from one end of the jury box to the other. And then, having given the jurors time to wonder what Yuki had to tell them about the murder of his friend in the passenger seat of his car, she stood at the halfway point outside the jury box and resumed her opening remarks.

“Mr. Dario Garza, the defendant, is charged with the death of Miguel Hernandez. His brutal murder witnessed by the friend in the back seat. In pretrial proceedings, the court has determined that due to ‘special circumstances,’ the name and face of that third man who was riding in the back seat of the defendant’s car will not be revealed. He will testify over closed-circuit television wearing a facial covering so that he is not identifiable. This is for his safety.

“When law enforcement met this third man, he was wearing a cap with a feline logo on the front of it. So we will refer to him as El Gato.”