A SHOCK OF ANGER blew all the dread and fear right out of Yuki. The defense had annihilated her damned witness, annihilated her and planted the seeds of reasonable doubt.
Yuki didn’t know if she could rehabilitate a would-be home wrecker and probable liar, but she knew that her entire case might depend on it.
Yuki barely saw Nicky’s note: “You go, girl.”
She got to her feet and walked to the witness box that wrapped around the witness. She put her hand on the arm of the box as if to communicate to Ellen that she was placing a comforting hand on her arm.
“Ms. Lafferty, did you kill Mr. Martin?”
“
“Did the Martins fight?”
“All the time.”
“Did you see a gun in Candace Martin’s hand on the night of the murder?”
“I thought so. It was so long ago. And it happened so fast. I don’t know for sure anymore.”
“Okay. Were you telling the truth to this jury when you said you thought Candace Martin shot and killed her husband?”
“Yes, that is God’s honest truth.”
“The prosecution has no more questions for Ms. Lafferty.”
Phil Hoffman watched the witness step down, wipe her eyes with a tissue, and head out to the rear of the courtroom. She was still crying as she went through the doors.
It was only eleven-fifteen.
Before the jury had a chance to even think of feeling sorry for Ellen Lafferty, Phil Hoffman would launch the next bomb.
Chapter 68
PHIL HOFFMAN SAID, “The defense calls Dr. Candace Martin.”
For a moment, Yuki thought she’d heard him wrong. But when Candace Martin edged out from behind the defense table, wearing her game face, a two-thousand-dollar Anne Klein suit, and eight-hundred-dollar Ferragamos, Yuki knew that Hoffman was running the table.
Candace wasn’t required to testify.
Judge LaVan had told the jury that the defendant was not obliged to take the stand and that the jury could not hold that against her.
So for Phil to call his client as a witness in her own defense was an act of either desperation or supreme confidence.
Hoffman didn’t seem desperate at all.
Candace Martin put her hand on the Bible, and when asked if she swore to tell the whole truth, she said, “I do.” Then she sat down in the chair facing the gallery and gave her attention to her attorney.
“Dr. Martin,” Hoffman said, “some of this has been established, but for the benefit of continuity, were you at home when your husband was killed?”
“Yes.”
“Where were Caitlin and Duncan?”
“They were each in their own rooms.”
“And so that the jury can place everyone in the house, where was Cyndi Parrish, your cook?”
“She was upstairs in her room.”
“And where was Ellen Lafferty?” Hoffman asked.
“I don’t know where she was. She said good night to me about fifteen minutes before Dennis was shot.”
“And where was Dennis just before the incident?”
“I don’t know that either. I didn’t see him. I went to the bedroom wing, passed the kids’ rooms and said hello to each of them. Then I went down that hallway to my office. That’s where I was when Ellen said that she was leaving.”
“What were you doing in your office that evening?”
“I was returning calls.”
“And were you still in your office when you heard shots?”
“Yes. I was about to call a patient’s wife. It wasn’t going to be good news. I had taken off my glasses and was massaging my temples, like this.”
Dr. Martin took off her glasses and put them down on the armrest. She rubbed her temples with her thumb and third finger of her left hand.
“I had the phone in my other hand,” she said, making a claw of her right hand as if she were clutching a receiver.
Yuki thought that this demo was a pretty ingenious way to visually put a cell phone in Candace Martin’s hand instead of a gun, and she had to admire Hoffman for coming up with it.
“Please tell the jury what happened when you heard the shots,” Hoffman said. He stepped aside so that he wouldn’t obstruct the sight line between his client and the jurors.
Candace Martin listed the timeline just as Hoffman had done in his opening statement. She said that she ran to the foyer, found her husband on the floor, blood pooling near his chest, and checked his pulse.
She went on to say that she wasn’t wearing her glasses but heard the clatter of something metallic falling to the floor. She realized it was a gun at the same time that she saw someone in the shadows moving toward the front door.
Yuki watched Candace Martin’s face for tells, facial tics or eye movements, and she listened for lies. She found Candace believable.
And she thought that the jury would believe her, too.
In a few minutes Yuki would have to discredit this heart surgeon, this good mother, and undo the work Phil Hoffman had done, polishing a halo and affixing it to the crown of Candace Martin’s pretty blond head.
Yuki knew what she had to do.
She wondered if she could do it.
Chapter 69
PHIL HOFFMAN was winding up his direct examination of Candace Martin, trying to rein in any visible sign of the rush he was feeling. The gamble was paying off. Candace was the perfect witness for herself: Concise. Clear. Consistent.
And, of course, innocent.
“When you found Dennis on the floor and realized that he had expired, what did you do?” Hoffman asked.
“I remember grasping the gun. I had never held a gun before, but I saw someone leaving the house. The front door was open. Instinctively, I wanted to stop whoever had shot my husband. I ran after the intruder. I yelled, ‘Stop!’ a couple of times,” Candace Martin told the jury. “And then I fired.”
“Did you hit anyone, Dr. Martin?”
“No. I didn’t see anyone outside. I just fired high to make sure he didn’t come back. Then I came back into the house, locked the front door, and went back to Dennis. By that time, the kids had come out of their rooms and
