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

She shakes her head as much as she is able, too afraid to lie out loud.

“There’s a rumor going around the courthouse,” Nic says, his voice calm and reasonable, like they are discussing a grocery list. “Do you want to know what it is?”

No, a thousand times no. But she says nothing, knowing that it won’t matter.

“The rumor,” Nic continues, “is that you went to see Dars in his chambers. That you took off all of your clothes. That you tried to blackmail him so he would get off the case.”

For a moment, Abby wonders if her heart has stopped beating. Her mind races backward. The two marshals standing outside the door when she had entered and exited. Jonathan telling her word is going to get out. “Who told you that?”

“Is it true?”

She tries to shake her head again but he tightens his grip on her jaw so she can’t move.

“Is it true?”

Abby sucks in her breath, forces herself to look Nic directly in the face. “No.”

Nic looks at her for what seems like forever. “You’re a liar.” He shakes his head, then releases her jaw, and slowly gets to his feet. Abby falls back against the tub, shaking uncontrollably.

When Nic gets to the door he turns to look at her. “Cal is asleep in his crib. Don’t go near him.”

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

9:00 a.m.

United States District Court

for the Central District of California

Shauna hits a key on her computer and up comes a picture of Travis Hollis’s torso, sliced open and pulled apart, a deep tranche that shows skin, blue beneath the dark hairs, then muscle, bone, organs.

“Zoom in.”

Up close and in sharp focus, Travis Hollis’s torn heart is suddenly everywhere: on the TV monitors set up on either side of the jury box, on both counsel tables, on Dars’s bench.

Will looks at the jurors. Several blanch, all are staring fixedly. He cuts his gaze to the witness, Dr. William Forrester Bridges. A diminutive man with a short, pointed gray beard and rimless glasses, he answers Shauna’s preliminary questions with a precise, clipped diction punctuated by short, sharp breaths through his nose.

Luz looks nearly catatonic, her only visible reaction to list slightly. In the end, she had spent the night in the hospital with Maria Elena, which is where Will had picked her up at 6:30 that morning, curled in a green plastic chair next to the bed. She had not said a word on the forty-five-minute, traffic-choked drive to court, or a word since.

Like an obedient child, Luz had allowed Abby to hustle her off to the ladies’ room. She emerged ten minutes later, hair brushed, the worst wrinkles smoothed from her dress, looking just barely presentable but remaining unresponsive to their questions. Abby looks only marginally better. Even Will can tell that she has used too much foundation—it looks caked on—but has nevertheless failed to conceal the shadows under her eyes or what is obviously a bruise on her jawline, a bizarre injury if ever there was one. I tripped and fell, she told Will when he asked her. And landed on your jaw? he had wanted to ask, but hadn’t. People in glass houses.

Dars, who had taken the bench promptly at 8:15, was unmoved by Luz’s circumstances. “The jurors are here and I will not have their time wasted,” he said. When Abby, who had begun by asking for several days off, pleaded for just one, his voice had risen dangerously. “This medical situation with the grandmother—” he had waved a dismissive hand “—could go on for weeks.”

At those words, Will felt Luz sag slightly in the chair next to him, her eyes opening and closing with the slow deliberation of a mechanical doll. She had remained that way, and was, to Will’s relief, now somehow managing not to look at the autopsy photo.

Shauna, clear-eyed and smart-looking in her houndstooth suit, is going to make sure the jurors swim in every awful detail, visual and verbal. “Dr. Bridges, are you employed as a regional medical examiner with the armed forces?”

“I am.”

“In that role, did you perform the autopsy of Sergeant Travis Hollis?”

“I did.”

“What did you rely upon in performing that autopsy?”

“I reviewed the medical records of the deceased, the notes of the emergency room physician, with whom I also consulted, and, of course, my own findings.”

“Let’s start with Sergeant Hollis’s arrival at the hospital. What happened there?”

“First he was intubated, meaning that Dr. Chowdury, the emergency room physician, inserted a breathing tube into his throat to assist with respiration.”

“What did Dr. Chowdury do next?”

“Perhaps I should begin by describing the medical problem that presented itself?”

Shauna nods encouragingly, and Bridges turns to the jury. “Sergeant Hollis had a condition called cardiac tamponade. A sharp object had penetrated his heart, causing bleeding into the protective sac that encases it.”

“That sounds extremely serious.”

“It is life-threatening.” Bridges, who has turned to look at Shauna, goes back to addressing the jury. “The buildup of blood in the sac prevents the heart from functioning. Dr. Chowdury attempted to draw out the blood with a needle.”

“Was that successful?”

“No. The blood had clotted.”

Shauna clicks to an image of the bloodied heart, glistening on a stainless steel tray. At Shauna’s instruction, Dr. Bridges uses an electrical pointer to indicate the torn lining and clots of blood. The courtroom is utterly silent except for one of Travis’s sisters, who is sobbing audibly.

“What did Dr. Chowdury do next?”

“She paged a trauma surgeon to perform a thoracotomy to open the chest and relieve the pressure around the heart.”

Another picture appears on the screens, of a medieval-looking device clamped on a bloodied organ. “Dr. Bridges, can you tell the jury what we are looking at?”

Or not looking at, Will thinks. Several of the jurors have averted their eyes.

“A Finochietto retractor. It was placed around the heart as part of the thoracotomy procedure.”

Shauna wrinkles her brow. “A what?”

“A steel crank. Dr. Chowdury used it to spread Sergeant Hollis’s ribs apart in order to search for the source of