The 8th Confession Read Online Free PDF Page A

six in the morning.
    In about three hours she would be making her closing argument in the bloody awful and complex murder trial of Stacey Glenn, a twenty-five-year-old former pageant queen who'd managed to be both a beauty
and
a beast.
    What Stacey Glenn had done to her parents was revolting, unprovoked, and unforgivable, and Yuki was determined to nail that psycho-bitch and send her away for good. But for all of Yuki's determination and gifts for bringing the strongest argument to life, she was becoming famous around the DA's office—famous for
losing.
And that was killing her.
    So this was
it.
    If Stacey Glenn got off, as much as she'd hate to do it, Yuki would go back to civil law, handle rich people's divorces and contract negotiations. That's if she wasn't
fired
before she could quit.
    Yuki hunched forward in her creaky chair and shuffled a packet of index cards, each one highlighting a point she would make in summing up the People's case.
    Item: Stacey Glenn had left her apartment in Potrero Hill at two in the morning and driven her distinctive candy-apple-red Subaru Forester to her parents' house forty miles away in Marin, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.
    Item: Stacey Glenn entered her parents' house between three and three fifteen a.m., using a key that was kept hidden under a particular heart-shaped stone by the front door. She went through the kitchen to the garage, brought a crowbar upstairs to the master bedroom, and bludgeoned her parents, beating both their heads in.
    Item: A neighbor testified that around three that morning she saw a red Subaru Forester with off-road tires in the Glenns' driveway and recognized it as belonging to Stacey.
    Item: Leaving her parents for dead, Stacey Glenn drove toward her home, going through a tollbooth on her return trip at approximately four thirty-five.
    This timeline was crucial to Yuki's case because it established Stacey Glenn's movements on the night in question and
decimated
her alibi that she was home alone and asleep when her parents were attacked.
    Item: Stacey Glenn was a degenerate shopper, heavily in debt. Her parents were worth nothing to her alive. They were worth a million dollars to her dead.
    Item: Stacey Glenn had the means, the motive, and the opportunity—and there was also a
witness
to the crime itself.
    And that witness was 90 percent of Yuki's case.
    Yuki wrapped her cards with a rubber band, dropped the pack into her purse. Then she folded her hands under her chin and beamed her thoughts to her own mother, Keiko Castellano, who had died before her time and who was highly ticked off about it. Keiko had loved her only daughter fiercely, and Yuki felt her mom's comforting presence around her now.
    "Mommy, stay with me in court today and help me win, okay?" Yuki said out loud. "Sending kisses."
    With hours to kill, Yuki cleaned out her pencil drawer, emptied her trash can, deleted old files from her address book, and changed her too-sweet pink blouse to the stronger, more confident teal man-tailored shirt that was in dry cleaner's plastic behind her door.
    At eight fifteen, Yuki's second chair, Nicky Gaines, ambled down the corridor calling her name. Yuki stuck her head out of her doorway, said, "Nicky, just make sure the PowerPoint works. That's all you have to do."
    "I'm your man," said Nicky.
    "Good. Zip up your fly. Let's go."

Chapter 13
     
    Y UKI STOOD UP from her seat at the prosecutors' table as the Honorable Brendan Joseph Duffy entered the courtroom through a paneled door behind the bench and took his seat between the flags and in front of the great seal of the State of California.
    Duffy had a runner's build, graying hair, windowpane glasses worn low on the slope of his nose. He yanked out his iPod earbuds, popped the top on a can of Sprite, then, as those in attendance sat down, asked the bailiff to bring in the jury.
    Across the aisle, Yuki's opponent, the well-regarded criminal defense attorney Philip R. Hoffman, exchanged whispers with his