Page 79

CHAPTER 77

NICK GAINES PULLED out a chair for Yuki at the counsel table, which spanned the width of the small, hastily built courtroom. Yuki and Gaines sat at the end of the counsel table closest to the jury box. Defense counsel Jon Credendino and his associates sat at the opposite end, near the outer door.

There was no rail behind them, no banks of chairs, because press, family, and all spectators were barred from entering Folsom Prison and its grounds. This was especially true of the Judicial Building. As Judge Orlofsky’s murder had proven, participants in the Dario Garza trial were at risk of death if their names got out.

Yuki took a pill bottle from her computer case and swallowed an Advil with a gulp of water to tamp down a headache that she knew no pill could cure. Her stress level had hit the redline. The urgency of overseeing the completion of the Judicial Building in ten days had drawn Yuki’s attention away from the boxes of police reports and court transcripts that had been produced for the prosecution in the original case against Dario Garza. She had been so involved in the completion of this building: the construction, the design, making sure that the living quarters for the principals would be separated by job function and again by gender. If the disparate groups mixed or even spoke together, there would most certainly be a mistrial.

She couldn’t let that happen.

Now the twelve jurors and six alternates filed into the makeshift jury box. Yuki knew that there would be no excuse, no way out, if she was unable to convince these people of Dario Garza’s guilt in the killing of Miguel Hernandez.

Yuki had mentally rehearsed today’s statement again this morning while dressing, but she had not practiced it out loud. She’d rationalized that she knew the case by heart and would be able to deal with whatever Jon Credendino brought to the jurors.

But the moment had arrived.

She looked at Gaines, sitting beside her, his usual cool, calm self. He wrote on his tablet and pushed it toward her: U

OK?

Fine, she wrote back. You?

That’s when the bailiff asked the jury to stand. He swore the jurors in and then asked them to remain standing.

A door opened behind and to the right of the judge’s bench, and the Honorable Robin Walden swept through the doorway. Everyone in the courtroom got to their feet.

Yuki stared straight ahead, feeling the weight of her responsibility to the people of California and to Leonard Parisi, who had entrusted her with this case. The judge’s entrance felt to Yuki as if the curtain had gone up on the most important trial of her life.

This was her case.

And she had to win it.