The 37th Hour Read Online Free PDF

deposition.
    “Yes.”
    “So you never asked her a question.”
    “No.”
    “Did you come to the scene as an officer of the law?”
    “I’m always an officer of the law.”
    “I recognize that,” Kowalski said. “But you were at your partner’s home socially, weren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “The two of you see a lot of each other outside of work, and consider yourselves friends?”
    “Yes.”
    “And you saw a lot of Kamareia Brown in this capacity, as a friend of her mother?”
    “Yes.”
    “And so, when Genevieve Brown was too distraught to go along to the hospital with her daughter, you went in her place because you were ‘composed.’ That indicates to me that your purpose was to keep Kamareia Brown calm, to comfort her. Would you agree?”
    “My primary purpose was to make sure Kamareia was not alone at that time.”
    I wasn’t going to make it easy for her.
    “Did you ever remind her of your status as an officer of the law?”
    “Kamareia grew up around—“
    “Please answer the questions I put to you.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    Kowalski paused, signaling a change in direction. “Ms. Pribek, the ambulance attendant who was in the back with you and Miss Brown has said in her deposition that you made efforts to comfort Miss Brown. In fact, she said that she heard you say ‘You’ll be all right’ twice. Is that true?”
    This was the question all the others had been leading up to.
    “I don’t remember if I said it twice.”
    “But you know that you said, at least once, ‘You’ll be all right.’ ”
    I met Kilander’s eyes and saw him seeing the case fall apart. He knew what the question meant.
    “Yes.”
    Genevieve, a potential witness, had been barred from attending this hearing, and at the moment I was grateful my partner was not among the spectators.
    “And in general you made comforting statements to Miss Brown, leading her to believe she would survive her injuries.”
    “I don’t feel I was leading her to believe anything.”
    Kowalski raised her eyebrows. “Could you explain, then, what other understanding she could have taken from the statement ‘You’ll be all right’?”
    “Objection,” Urban said. “Counsel is asking the witness to speculate.”
    “I’ll withdraw it,” Kowalski said. “Ms. Pribek, did you say anything to Miss Brown that would indicate to her that her injuries were fatal?”
    Genevieve, I’m so sorry. I was trying to do the right thing.
    “No, I didn’t.”
    Dying declarations are notoriously tricky. They rely on the understanding that someone who knows she is dying has no reason to lie. For this reason, the paramount issue in court tends to be whether the dying person in fact believed he or she was dying.
    On the stand, Kowalski had made it clear to the judge that Kamareia did not see me as a criminal investigator, hence Kowalski’s insistence on calling me “Ms. Pribek,” instead of using my rank. More importantly, Kowalski established that I had led Kamareia to believe she would not die of her wounds.
    Kilander had told me about dying declarations once, long before Kamareia’s death. It wasn’t as if I’d never heard about the legal aspects of point-of-death accusations; they simply had not crossed my mind, not even remotely, that day when I’d been watching a young woman die.
    Jackie Kowalski was right about one thing—I had gotten into that ambulance as a friend. I had tried to be a good friend to Kamareia, to do what her mother would have done, to comfort and reassure her. All these things compromised Kamareia’s accusation, and in doing so jeopardized a case that was shaky in its other aspects.
    Despite the rape, there had been no semen recovered, an occurrence more common than many people realized. Maybe Shorty wore a condom, maybe he simply didn’t ejaculate. It was an academic point to me. I considered Kamareia’s murder a hate crime in its simplest definition: the result of hatred. As far as I could see, Stewart had raped