“I’d say so. Within a heartbeat or two. Both of those gunsh
ot wounds perforated the heart.”
“Uh-huh. And, Doctor, had the deceased recently fired a gun?”
“Yes. I saw some darkening at the base of her index finger that would be consistent with cylinder flare.”
“How do you know that that’s gunshot residue?”
“The way you know your mother’s your mother,” Claire said, her eyes twinkling. “Because that’s what she looks like.” She paused for the laughter to subside, then she continued. “Besides which, I photographed that smudging, documented it, and did a gunshot wound residue test, which was submitted to the laboratory and came back positive.”
“Could the deceased have shot Lieutenant Boxer after she herself was shot?”
“I don’t see how a dead girl could shoot anyone, Mr. Sherman.”
Mickey nodded. “Did you also note the trajectory of those gunshot wounds, Dr. Washburn?”
“I did. They were fired upward at angles of forty-seven and forty-nine degrees.”
“So to be absolutely clear, Doctor, Sara Cabot shot Lieutenant Boxer first—and the lieutenant returned fire upward from where she lay on the ground.”
“In my opinion, yes, that’s how it happened.”
“Would you call that ‘excessive force’ or ‘wrongful death’ or ‘police misconduct’?”
The judge sustained Broyles’s outraged objection. Mickey thanked Claire and dismissed her. He was smiling as he came toward me. My muscles relaxed, and I even returned Mickey’s smile. But the hearing was just beginning.
I felt a shock of fear when I saw the look in Mason Broyles’s eyes. You could only describe it as anticipatory. He couldn’t wait to get his next witness on the stand.
Chapter 17
“PLEASE STATE YOUR NAME,” Broyles said to a petite brunette woman in her early thirties.
“Betty D’Angelo.”
Her dark eyes behind her large horn-rimmed glasses darted quickly over to me, then back to Broyles again. I looked at Mickey Sherman and shrugged. To the best of my knowledge, I’d never seen this woman before.
“And what is your position?”
“I’m a registered nurse at San Francisco General.”
“Were you on duty in the ER on the evening and night of May tenth?”
“I was.”
“Did you have occasion to take blood from the defendant, Lindsay Boxer?”
“Yes.”
“And why was blood drawn?”
“We were prepping her for surgery, for extraction of the bullets and so on. It was a life-threatening situation. She was losing a lot of blood.”
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Broyles said, batting away her comment like a housefly. “Tell us about the blood test.”
“It’s normal procedure to take blood. We had to match her up for transfusions.”
“Ms. D’Angelo, I’m looking at Lieutenant Boxer’s medical report from that night. It’s quite a voluminous report.” Broyles plopped a fat stack of paper on the witness stand and stabbed at it with a forefinger. “Is this your signature?”