Ransom River Read Free Page B

decision.
    According to the defense, Jared Smith was awakened by the sound of men climbing through his kitchen window. And Officer Jared Smith, who had an impeccable record as a Ransom River Police Department patrolman, had defended himself, his home, and his guest, Officer Lucy Elmendorf, with a legally registered handgun. He confronted Brad Mirkovic, informed him he was a police officer, and told Mirkovic he was under arrest.
    Mirkovic, according to the defense, resisted. And Jared Smith, fearing for his life and the life of Officer Elmendorf, fired his weapon.
    That story had problems. The first of which was Samuel Koh.
    Jared Smith claimed that Brad Mirkovic had brandished an object he reasonably believed to be a gun. In the urgency of the moment, confronted in the dark by thieves, outnumbered and about to be overpowered, he responded with deadly force.
    Everybody bought it. Until it turned out that Samuel Koh, Jared Smith’s neighbor, had a video surveillance camera mounted under the eaves of his house. The camera angle captured not just Koh’s backyard but Smith’s. Thecamera was motion activated. It had never caught anything more threatening than a coyote loping across Koh’s grass. Then it caught the shooting of Obrad Mirkovic.
    Koh came through the heavy wooden doors of the courtroom, neat and tired in his gray suit. He passed through the gate to the witness stand and was sworn. He waited, face pinched.
    Rory felt for him. Going up against two police officers had taken a toll. Attitudes about cops and authority were sharp undercurrents in the case. In voir dire, the most unsettling questions hadn’t been about death, but power.
    Do you have relatives in law enforcement, Ms. Mackenzie?
    No, she’d said. Thinking:
Almost, once. But not anymore.
    Could you send a police officer to prison for the rest of his life?
    Yes.
    They believed her. They didn’t even strike her for being a lawyer.
    She figured she’d been chosen for the jury because she had only cursory knowledge of the case. When Brad Mirkovic died she was six thousand miles away, trying to erase Ransom River from her memory.
    Now she was about to see the evidence. Maybe even the truth. If she glimpsed it, then no matter what the cops thought, or the victim’s father, or the media, or the other jurors, she had to call it. She wondered if that made her the court jester.
    At the prosecution table Cary Oberlin held up a DVD. He said in his mild, leaden voice, “Mr. Koh, can you identify this disc?”
    Koh leaned toward the microphone. “It’s mine. It contains a recording from the CCTV camera outside my house.”
    Koh’s pained eyes said what his testimony probably would not: He wished he had never looked at the video. He wished he had never installed a camera on his back porch. Then he would feel safe. Then nobody would have threatened his life anonymously over the phone, or set his car on fire while he was in the supermarket.
    He would not have seen Brad Mirkovic die.

    Berrigan nudged the Blazer past the courthouse at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. The sun glared off the hood. Church eyed the scene as they passed.
    “Nice and easy,” he said.
    The courthouse took up the entire block, with a back exit one street over. That door was a fire exit: It would be locked from the outside but not barred. It could be opened from the inside. And when they needed that door, they’d be inside heading out. At speed.
    Berrigan gripped the wheel like it was the only thing keeping him from blowing out an airlock into space. Though Berrigan was wearing gloves, Church bet the man’s knuckles were as white as gristle.
    Berrigan signaled and turned to head around the block. He was sweating. That worried Church.
    Church himself had showered and scrubbed his skin hard and shaved and trimmed his nails and run a clipper over his head so his hair was a quarter inch long. He didn’t want DNA left behind. As long as he didn’t bleed, he was okay.
    He was wearing new