He’d been charged with witness tampering, but never convicted. That’s how scary he was. He was also a registered sex offender, so that made two juicy bits of information Yuki couldn’t tell the jury because the law said that she couldn’t prejudice the jury by citing his prior misdeeds.
So Yuki had been building the case against Herman based on evidence that he’d killed his wife, dismembered her body, and somehow made his young daughter disappear, arguably a harder charge to prove because the girl’s body had not been found.
Yuki had been doing nothing but work on the Herman case for the last five months and now, as the first day of the trial arrived, she was stoked and nervous at the same time. Her case was solid, but she’d been surprised by verdicts that had gone against her in cases as airtight as this one.
As she turned the corner onto Bryant, Yuki located the cause of her worry. It was Keith Herman’s defense attorney, John Kinsela, who, right after Keith Herman, was probably the sleaziest lawyer in the country. He had defended legendary high-profile killers and had rarely lost a case.
And he usually destroyed the reputations of opposing counsel with innuendo and rumors, which he leaked as truth to the press.
Yuki had never gone up against Kinsela before, but Kinsela had shredded her boss, Leonard “Red Dog” Parisi, in a murder trial about two years ago. Parisi still hadn’t gotten over it. He was pulling for Yuki, giving her his full support, but it wasn’t lost on Yuki that he wasn’t trying the case himself.
Red Dog had a bad heart.
Yuki was young, fit, and up for the challenge of her life.
Yuki walked quickly toward the Hall, head bent as she mentally rehearsed her opener. She was startled out of her thoughts by someone calling her name. She looked up, saw the good-looking young guy with the blond cowlick and the start of a mustache.
Nicky Gaines was her associate and second chair in this trial. He was carrying a paper bag.
“Damn, you look good, Yuki.”
Gaines was five years younger than she was, and Yuki didn’t care whether he really did have a crush on her or if he was just flattering her. She was in love. And not with Nicky Gaines.
“You have coffee in there?” Yuki asked.
“Hot, with cream, one sugar. And then I’ve got the double espresso for you.”
“Let’s go straight to the courtroom,” Yuki said.
“How are you feeling about this?” Gaines said, walking up the steps along with her.
“Like if I don’t get a double-barreled conviction, I may kill Keith Herman myself.”
Chapter 2
WHEN JENNIFER HERMAN’S dismembered body turned up in eight separate garbage bags, and when seven- year-old Lily Herman hadn’t been found despite the exhaustive police search conducted over a six-month period, Keith Herman was tried in the press and found guilty of murdering them both.
The intense media attention had whipped up a lot of hatred toward Keith Herman. It made it nearly impossible to find a jury who hadn’t watched the network specials, hadn’t seen the rewards offered for information about the missing child, and hadn’t formed an opinion as to the guilt of the accused.
And so jury selection had taken almost three weeks.
Now the press filled half the gallery in courtroom 202, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The other half of the room was filled with citizens who had lined up early enough that morning to have scored one of the precious seats.
At 8:23 a.m. Yuki was at the prosecution table in the blond-wood-paneled courtroom. Her laptop was open and as she went through a long e-mail from Red Dog, she hoped all her witnesses would show up to testify—that they hadn’t been silenced or intimidated (or worse) by the opposition.
Across the aisle, at the defense table, sat two ordinary-looking men who were actually two of the scariest people Yuki had ever met. Keith Herman was paunchy, bald, and had black eyes that looked like bullet holes in his unlined, babyish face. Not all psychopaths look homicidal, but Keith Herman did. Herman had never shown any remorse, not while identifying the sections of meat that had once been his wife, not while discussing his missing daughter.
Herman’s attorney, John Kinsela, was tall with thinning gray hair and a bloodless complexion that made him look as though he climbed out of a coffin at night. Unlike his client, Kinsela was smooth. He expressed sadness and regret. He listened thoughtfully and spoke well and persuasively on camera. He passed as a reasonable facsimile of a person. A little digging into his past had turned up five divorces and the ownership of a Glock semiautomatic, which he carried at all times.
Yuki had been with these ghouls through countless hours of depositions and felt that she knew them too well.
She had dressed this morning in a bright red suit because she had a slight build, could look younger than her years, and because of the fact that red made her look and feel more powerful.
You couldn’t hang back in red. You couldn’t hesitate. You really had to live up to red.
She also wore a gold star on a chain around her neck, a graduation-from-law-school gift from her mother, who had been murdered several years earlier.
Wearing the star kept Keiko Castellano present in Yuki’s mind and might even help her to win.
She had to win.
This was a tremendous opportunity to get justice for the victims, to become a hero to female victims everywhere. It was also an opportunity to be humiliated by a savage attorney and his perverted, murdering client.
It was her job to make sure that Keith Herman didn’t get out of jail—ever.
The buzz in the gallery intensified, then cut off suddenly as the door leading from the judge’s chambers opened behind the bench and Judge Arthur R. Nussbaum entered the courtroom.
Chapter 3
YUKI HALF LISTENED as Judge Nussbaum instructed the handpicked jury of six men, six women, and four alternates, who were as diverse a group as could be imagined: black, white, brown, white-collar, and blue- collar.
Nussbaum had been a clever trial lawyer, but the judge was new at his job and Yuki was sure he would play this one by the book.
When he asked her if she was ready to begin, she said she was. Gaines whispered, “Go get ’em,” and Yuki stood, greeted the jury, and walked confidently to the lectern in the well of the courtroom. Then, without warning, she blanked. She couldn’t remember the first sentence in her opener, the key that would unlock her carefully wrought statement.
Yuki looked over at Gaines. He smiled, nodded, and her mind unfroze.
She said, “The defendant, Keith Herman, is a killer, and the evidence in this case will show you that the people who depended on Mr. Herman, the ones who looked to him for protection and love, are the people who should have feared him the most.”
Yuki paused to let her words sink in, looked at every member of the jury, and began to lay out her case.
“On March first, a day like any other, Keith Herman tucked his daughter’s lifeless body into the backseat of his Lexus, and she was never seen again. Jennifer Herman, Keith Herman’s wife, never reported her daughter missing, because as her husband was driving off with their daughter, Jennifer Herman was already dead by her husband’s hand.
“You will hear testimony that before she disappeared, Jennifer Herman told a friend on several occasions that she was afraid of her husband and that if anything ever happened to her, the friend should go to the police. Which this friend did. Had Lesley Rohan not called the police, they wouldn’t have looked for Jennifer Herman and her body would have been buried under several tons of garbage in a landfill.
