Read Online Grant of Immunity by Garret Holms - Free Book Online Page A

into giving a cop a blowjob.
    Erin had asked Sean not to observe the trial. She was going to be nervous enough recounting the sexual details of what happened that night in front of complete strangers. Having her brother present as well would be too much for her. Sean understood.
    Fitz gave Erin a reassuring nod when the judge entered the room.
    “Call your first witness,” Judge Catherine Morley, a middle-aged black woman with salt-and-pepper gray hair, said.
    “The People call Erin Collins, Your Honor,” DA Eric Lundy said. Fitz had asked Lundy earlier about Morley, and the news was mixed. “If Babbage is convicted,” he said, “you can be sure that Morley will max him out. But she’ll force us to prove our case. If we don’t, it’s all over.”
    Now, in the austere fluorescent light of the courtroom, Fitz watched as Erin made her way to the witness box. Her dark hair was pulled back in a bun, and she wore a conservative, but attractive, charcoal-black pants suit with a light-blue cotton blouse. How could the jury not like her?
    But her complexion was pasty, and she had that nervous look he’d so often seen in victims who testified. Victims who were powerless during the crime and now powerless in court. At risk again of being manipulated—this time by lawyers. Before sitting in the witness box, Erin turned toward the court clerk and raised a shaking right hand.
    The clerk asked, “In the cause now pending, do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
    “I do,” Erin said.
    “Please be seated. State and spell your full name for the record.”
    Erin obeyed.
    Lundy began his direct examination from his chair. “Ms. Collins, I’d like you to remember back to June thirteen of this year, around two-thirty a.m. Do you remember the events of that evening?”
    She leaned forward, looked at Lundy. “Yes, I do.”
    “Please tell the jury what happened.” In a flat voice, Erin described how she’d been stopped by Babbage and how he’d administered field sobriety tests to her.
    “And then what happened?”
    Erin paused and took a breath before answering. “He told me”—another breath—“that if I would … if I’d give him a blow … er, I mean … if I’d orally copulate him, he’d let me go.”
    “And did you orally copulate him?”
    “Objection, Your Honor,” Anthony Giovanni interrupted. His voice was loud, irritated. “The prosecutor’s leading the witness.”
    “Sustained,” Judge Morley said.
    “What happened next, after he told you that?” Lundy asked.
    Erin straightened in her chair, cleared her throat. She folded her arms in front of her as if shielding herself from Giovanni’s anger, from Babbage’s stare and said, “I was afraid. I didn’t know what else to do. So, I … I performed oral sex on him.”
    Fitz silently sighed with relief. She’d said what she’d been dreading to say. They had gone over this again and again, looking for ways that Erin could say what happened in a way that wouldn’t embarrass her in front of a room full of strangers. She couldn’t bring herself to say “blowjob,” but “oral copulation” seemed too clinical, too foreign. But Fitz knew her real ordeal had not yet begun.
    “And then what happened?” Lundy asked.
    “He left, and I drove home.”
    Erin described how she had discovered semen on her blouse, how she’d almost trashed it, then recovered it and turned it over to the prosecutor.
    Lundy said, “Your Honor, we have a stipulation to enter into the record.”
    “Proceed,” the judge said.
    “May the following be stipulated? That the semen on Ms. Collins’s blouse was analyzed July third of this year, by the Scientific Investigation Division of the Los Angeles Police Department, that it was compared to blood taken from the defendant, Jake Babbage, that the result of this comparison revealed the semen to be the defendant’s.”
    Fitz turned to look at Babbage, who sat perfectly