Looking up, she was relieved to see the courthouse doors were still closed.
And she saw Yuki standing at the edge of the crowd at the top of the steps, gripping the handle of her briefcase with both hands. Her eyes were fixed on the middle distance, seeming to see nothing.
Cindy had an anxious thought about Yuki, her weight loss, her fragility. Also, the simple fact that she hadn’t gone to work since her mother died.
The trial was consuming her, and it showed big-time.
Cindy threaded her way through the mob standing on the courthouse steps. She called out to Yuki as she climbed.
Yuki saw her at last, saying, “What happened? I was so worried about you.”
“Breakdown on BART,” Cindy told her. “I was stuck between stations for half an hour. I almost went crazy.”
The security guards opened the heavy steel doors, and Cindy and Yuki were swept along with the buzzing crowd pouring into the courthouse.
A packed elevator took them to the fourth floor, where they got separated on their way to courtroom 4A. Cindy went directly to the last bench in the room, the one against the back wall reserved for the press.
She scanned the courtroom as it filled, then booted up her laptop.
She began to type.
Maureen O’Mara wore a tomato-red Oscar de la Renta suit, Cindy wrote. This is her game suit, her fighting color, how she wants the jury to remember her summation.
Chapter 103
JUDGE CARTER BEVINS shook his wristwatch, then turned his bespectacled eyes on Maureen O’Mara. He asked her if she was ready to proceed.
“Yes, Your Honor,” O’Mara said, standing, taking her position behind the small oak lectern.
She put her notes in front of her, but she wouldn’t need them. She’d rehearsed with her partners again last night, memorized her key points, knew the tone and text of her summation inside out. She’d put everything she had into this case, and her entire future would spring from the results of this trial.
She’d done great so far, and she knew it.
Now she had to clinch it.
She took a breath, smiled at the jury, and began.
“Ladies and gentlemen, three years ago San Francisco Municipal Hospital was privatized; it was sold to a for-profit corporation.
“Since then,” O’Mara said, “the number of fatalities due to pharmaceutical errors has tripled at the hospital.
“Why? I submit that it’s because of errors caused by incompetence and overwork.
“In the last three years, nearly three quarters of the staff have been replaced with less-experienced people who work longer hours for less pay.
“The hospital makes a profit,” O’Mara said. “But at an unacceptably high cost.
“You’ve heard testimony about the twenty people who died painful, senseless deaths because they came to Municipal Hospital.
“It’s sickening and it’s outrageous. And the management of Municipal Hospital is fully to blame. Because they really don’t give a damn about their patients. They care about the bottom line.”
O’Mara paced in front of the jury box, put her hands on the railing, her eyes connecting with the jurors as she spoke only to them.
“We heard from Dr. Garza last week,” O’Mara went on. “Dr. Garza has been head of Municipal’s emergency services for the past three years, and he doesn’t deny that during that time, the fatality rate of patients admitted through the ER has gone through the roof.
“And Dr. Garza told us why that happened. He said, ‘Sometimes a bad wind blows.’
“Ladies and gentlemen, there’s no such thing as a ‘bad wind’ in a hospital. But there is bad medicine. The legal term is ‘operating below the standard of practice.’