Page 42 of Fish in a Barrel
“Well, then the man with the knife, the one who’d been pressured by Officer Goslar, he said—and I’m very serious, I remember this very well—he said, ‘I’m so sorry’ in my ear, and then he cut me, on purpose across the arm and chest, before shoving me at the police officers and running away.”
There was a murmur through the courtroom, because this directly contradicted what the four officers had testified to, which was that they had tackled the perpetrator and he had resisted arrest.
“Do you know why he might have done that?” Ellery asked. “Apologized to you before he wounded you?”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Arizona said promptly. “Calls for conjecture!”
“Speaks to intent, Your Honor,” Ellery responded. “Ms. Frazier is in a unique position to be able to surmise what her captor was thinking. We don’t know if he intended to kill her or simply make a mess. This is important.”
“Overruled,” said Brentwood, sounding legitimately curious, and Jackson frowned. Brentwood had been irritatingly correct almost all the way through the trial. This… this was new.
“I don’t think he wanted to be in that position at all,” she said, her face softening. “I’m pretty sure—in fact, I’m certain—that the only reason he cut me was to keep Officer McMurphy from shooting the dog and old Paul, the dog’s owner. He was between a rock and a hard place. If he used me as a distraction, he could get out of there, and the police officers would put away their guns.”
“That’s an interesting take,” Ellery said, smiling at her to let her knowhebelieved her, but he couldn’t tell the masses she was speaking Gospel—yet. “Now, you identified the person talking to your assailant before the incident began. Can you identify your assailant?”
“Oh yes!” she said, and she scanned the audience behind the table set aside for the defendant. Her eyes fell on Jackson and then on Cody Gabriel. She blinked several times, eyes filling with tears. “He’s sitting in the row behind Ezekiel Halliday,” she said. “He’s shaved his head and his beard, but I’d know him anywhere. Such big brown eyes.”
And then she smiled sympathetically at Cody Gabriel. “You look so tired, son. I hope you get to come in from the cold.”
The entire courthouse took a collective breath, and Ellery said, “Let the record show the witness has singled out Cody Gabriel, an undercover police officer who was on the list of witnesses for the prosecution, but whom I will call as a witness for the defense as soon as Ms. Frazier is allowed to be seated.”
Across the aisle, Arizona Brooks began to laugh.
“Ms. Brooks,” Judge Brentwood thundered. “Aren’t you going to object?”
“On what grounds?” she asked.
Brentwood gaped, and he was obviously racking his brains, trying to think of something.
Ellery stepped smoothly into the silence, keeping everybody’s eye on the ball. “So, Ms. Frazier, you are saying that the man who held a knife to your throat and then assaulted you with a deadly weapon is most definitelynotthe defendant, Ezekiel Halliday?”
“No, sir,” she said, sounding as certain as Jackson had ever heardanybodysound. “You’d have to be a stone-cold moron to think Zeke was the man who assaulted me with a knife.”
“Understood,” Ellery responded, making a manful effort not to even let his lips twitch. “Thank you, Your Honor. I’m done questioning this witness.”
Arizona Brooks gave her four witnesses a look full of fire, brimstone, and contempt for a moment.
“ADA Brooks, do you have any questions?” Judge Brentwood asked.
The four policemen, dressed in full uniform, glared stonily back, not one of them willing to concede that they’d been pushing her to prosecute the wrong suspect for three damned weeks.
“Yes, Your Honor,” Arizona said after a long, angry pause. She stood, holding one of the thick-barreled, expensive pens she favored and rolling it between her fingers. “Ms. Frazier, may I ask—how many stitches did you receive after the attack?”
“Twenty-seven,” she replied. “Fifteen across my chest and twelve across the meat of my arm.”
“So, twenty-seven stitches, and you think your attacker was just ‘using you as a distraction’?”
Annette Frazier thought carefully and then nodded. “The doctor who stitched me up said repeatedly how much worse it could have been. She said the cuts were clean and precise and well placed. The edges were very clean, and the cuts were superficial. I remember her musing that it was almost as though the person cutting me had done that on purpose, and I thought about how he’d apologized before he’d done it. I was convinced that day that his whole reason for hurting me had been to get the policeman’s attention away from the dog and his owner.”
Arizona nodded, her fingers toying with her pen. “Your Honor, we should remind the jury that this is all supposition and not proof.”
“Sustained,” Brentwood said, before turning to the jury and instructing them to keep that in mind.
Arizona shook her head, as though talking to herself, and tried again. “When you identified Ezekiel Halliday for the police—”
“I never did that,” Annette Frazier said.
Arizona dropped her pen. “I beg your pardon?”
