A Good Mother by Lara Bazelon (different ereaders txt) 📗

her dark eyes wide and unfocused. Abby looks at the jury. Several of them—men included—are moist-eyed. Even Abby, who has grown to despise Travis Hollis the more she learns about him, feels a pang. She hears sobbing behind her, turns and sees Travis’s mother and sisters, holding each others’ hands. What if it were Cal? She would murder Luz herself, with her bare hands, make what Luz did to Travis look surgical by comparison.

Shauna turns another page in her binder with a smart snap, and the moment evaporates, the regular back-and-forth of question-and-answer reestablished, and Abby can almost hear her own thoughts click immediately back into place as she returns to the notes she has jotted down on her legal pad. “You said that the police and the emergency medical technicians were en route?” Shauna asks.

“Yes. Basically, right after Sergeant Hollis stopped breathing, two EMTs came in followed by about ten military police. It was chaos, all these people packed into a narrow hallway, so I needed to take control of the situation.”

“What did you do?”

“I briefed the EMTs on the victim’s condition and sent the female one to the baby’s room. She came out very fast, handed off the baby to one of the MPs. The EMTs had a gurney with them and I directed two of my men to help lift Sergeant Hollis onto the gurney. They had him out of the house in less than a minute with the sirens going.

“While that was happening, I told two of my guys to check Mrs. Rivera Hollis for injuries, then take her to the hospital for a full exam. I did see that a lamp had been broken and there was glass on the floor and I didn’t know if she had gotten cut or maybe hurt some other way.”

“Did the defendant comply with your officers?”

“It wasn’t that she was resisting, it was just that she was so hysterical it was hard to get her to listen to anyone.” Now, Abby thinks, would be the time for Aronson to look at Luz, to make it clear to the jury that the bowed, silent wraith seated at the defense table is the same blood-drenched banshee he just described, but he doesn’t. He has not once looked at Luz during his testimony.

“What did you do then?”

“I went over to her—she was standing up at that point, but in more or less the same place that I’d moved her to—and I used her name again, real loud. Once she was focused on me and quieter, I explained what was going to happen. That she was going to the hospital to be checked. She didn’t want to go, she wanted to stay with the baby. So I explained, you know, that she couldn’t do that right now.”

Shauna says, “You couldn’t let her clean up, because her clothing and anything on her skin was evidence?”

“That’s correct. So I asked her, ‘Is there anyone, a female friend, another army wife on the base that I can call to take care of the baby while you are gone?’ And she said, ‘No, there’s no one.’”

“The defendant did not have one friend on the base that you could call?”

Luz hands the note back to Abby. Line after line of girlish cursive. Abby starts reading, half listening as Aronson answers, “That’s what she told me. I told her, ‘Okay, Sergeant Ruiz will take care of your baby.’ That was the female MP that was holding her. And I asked was there formula or something in the house that we could use and she said there was formula in the kitchen cabinet to the left of the sink. She explained the measurements, and I sent Ruiz in there to mix up a bottle.” He shakes his head. “I—Never mind.”

Shauna nods encouragingly. “Go ahead.”

“It’s just, I remember thinking how strange it was that all of a sudden, Luz was so calm and precise, down to the teaspoon, it had to be exactly right.” Aronson is still shaking his head as if this discordant fact is only now seeping into his consciousness.

“What did you do next?”

“I checked Mrs. Rivera Hollis for injuries. I didn’t find any.”

Shauna raised an eyebrow. “Any injuries at all? Bruising? Swelling? Lacerations?”

“Not that I could see. I relayed the information about her condition to the officers and directed two of them to take her to the hospital. After they left, I called OSI.”

“What is OSI?”

“It’s the Office of Special Investigations, kind of like the FBI for the military. I was put through to an agent and she advised me to secure the crime scene, that she would be there immediately.”

“Was that the end of your dealings with Mrs. Rivera Hollis?”

“Yes. I turned my attention to the hallway, to supervise the collection of the evidence by the men under my command.”

“What was collected?”

“May I consult my evidence report?”

Dars nods to allow Shauna to approach with it, and Aronson flips through a few pages. “The knife, first of all. The glass shards of a vase that had been broken. There were cardboard moving boxes full of clothes at one end of the hallway. Three of them. A search of the house was conducted, and other items were removed from the baby’s room, including a phone that had been smashed.” Shauna stops after each object is named to hold it up for Aronson to identify, then moves it into evidence. Even the ordinary items have a sinister cast: some of the jagged pieces of the broken vase are gummed together by what looks like red gelatin, and the knife, now unpackaged and on full display, is like something out of a horror movie, caked to the handle in rust-colored blood.

“What about your clothes, Captain Aronson?”

“They were burned.”

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

11:15 a.m.

United States District Court

for the Central District of California

Twenty minutes. It is all Abby is allowed. And it’s a gift from Dars, who had called a recess to take what he made clear was an important judicial phone call.

Twenty