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“She was lying on the floor in shadow,” said Claire, “but I could see from her contorted position that she was in bad shape. An ambulance was already on the way, so I gave Ms. Hayes the best examination I could do without instruments.”
“And what did you find?”
“Ms. Hayes showed signs of trauma from a beating. She was bruised all over her body and there were handprintsaround her neck. Clearly someone had manually strangled her and stopped just short of killing her.”
Yuki prompted Claire to go on and Claire commented that “Ms. Hayes seemed disoriented.”
Yuki asked for details and Claire explained that along with giving a different name than the one on her ID, Ms. Hayes was suffering from acute disorientation.
“I asked her to follow my finger with her eyes and she couldn’t track it. That lack of eye motility can indicate a concussion or other brain injury. It can also indicate trauma or some form of mental disorder.”
“Is the person you found in the locker room inside this courtroom?”
Claire swung her eyes to the prosecution table and said, “Ms. Hayes is sitting right there, wearing a brown suit.”
Yuki thanked Claire, and Judge St. John asked the defense if they’d like to cross. Schneider replied in the negative.
The judge asked Claire to step down.
Claire looked up to the judge and said, “Your Honor, okay if the bailiff gives me a hand? I’ve got arthritis in my knee …”
“Of course, of course.”
Bailiff Riley Boone came over to the witness box, offering Claire his arm and a nice smile. Claire leaned on the court officer and got to her feet, thanking him.
“Anytime, doctor.”
When Claire had left the courtroom, Yuki called her next witness.
CHAPTER 38
YUKI HAD CHOSEN Dr. Laurie Birney carefully. She was a well-known and highly respected psychologist in her fifties, a top expert in the field of dissociative identity disorders as a practitioner and an educator, and often called as an expert witness in cases like this.
After Dr. Birney was sworn in, Yuki asked questions that elicited her credentials and accomplishments. Then Yuki turned her head to see how Mary Elena was doing. She couldn’t read her client’s expression—which she thought was a good thing. Yuki also saw Red Dog standing at the back of the gallery. She caught his eye before turning back to her witness.
“Dr. Birney, have you ever treated or even met Ms. Hayes?”
“No, I have not.”
“Have you had patients with dissociative identity disorder?”
“Oh, yes. I wrote my first thesis on DID when it was still called ‘split personality’ or ‘multiple personality disorder.’”
“And you’re an expert on other dissociative disorders?”
“It seems immodest to say so.”
“That would be a yes?”
Dr. Birney smiled and said, “Yes.”
Yuki still felt the burn of Schneider’s smug opening statement, in which he claimed that psychology was bull. Yuki was damned sure he would use that same argument in his closing statement, too. And it would only take one holdout on the jury to crash her case against Tyler Cates into a wall.
But Schneider hadn’t yet gone up against the authority of Laurie Birney. Her soft ways might fool him into taking a chance.
As Yuki turned back to her witness, she noticed peripherally that DA Parisi had moved from the courtroom entrance to the prosecution table and had taken her seat next to Nick Gaines. Parisi was watching. Not signaling. So Yuki walked closer to her witness.
“Dr. Birney, please tell the jury about DID, what was once called multiple personality disorder.”