"Yes, it's Missy D'Amiens."

"Doctor, if you never met her, how do you know that?"

"Well, I guess first because Inspector Cuneo told me it was her when he showed me the picture, and then of course I saw her picture in the papers, too."

"Please think back, Doctor. When Inspector Cuneo showed you this photo, it was a single photo, wasn't it?"

"Yes, I'm sure it was."

"And he didn't ask you if it was Missy D'Amiens. He told you it was, didn't he?"

"Yes."

"So, Doctor, you merely confirmed what the inspector already knew, correct?"

"Yes."

"Doctor, if I told you that your former associate, Dr. Lee, who actually worked on the patient, told me just last night that this was not the person whom he knew as Missy D'Amiens, would you have any reason to doubt him?"

Yamashiru paused again. "No."

Behind Hardy, an audible gasp rippled through the courtroom. He heard Catherine's restrained "Oh, God," and one of the jurors swore under his breath. Up on the bench, Braun looked for a moment almost as though she'd been struck.

But Hardy didn't savor the moment. He needed to nail it down for the record. "Dr. Yamashiru," he said, "I'd ask you to please take another moment to look at this picture. And once again I'd ask you, outside of what you've read or been told, do you know who this woman is?"

"No."

"Have you ever seen her before?" "I don't think so."

"Has she ever personally been a patient of yours?"

"No."

Suddenly, Hardy felt the strain go out ofhis shoulders. He drew a breath, let it out, and addressed the judge. "Your Honor, the defense will be adding Dr. Kevin Lee to our witness list."

Catherine gripped his hand as he came back to the defense table. "How can that be?" she asked. "What does it mean?" She brought his hand up to her mouth and kissed it. "Oh, thank you, thank you." Hardy brought both of their hands back down to the table, covered hers with both of his, firmly. "Easy," he said. "Easy. It's not over."

All around them, in the gallery as well as the jury box, pandemonium had broken loose and Braun was gaveling to get her courtroom back under control. To Hardy's left, Rosen was on his feet as though he were going to ask some questions of Dr. Yamashiru, but he hadn't yet moved from the prosecution's table. Beside him, Cuneo slumped, head in his hands. Their case was suddenly in shambles and everyone in the courtroom knew it.

Rosen threw a look over to Hardy, then brought his eyes back front. Gradually, as order was restored, Braun seemed to remember that she still had a witness on the stand. "Mr. Rosen," she intoned, almost gently, "redirect?"

Shell-shocked, Rosen opened his mouth to speak, but couldn't manage a syllable.

Hardy saw his opening and decided to take it. Normally, in a largely pro forma gesture, the defense would make an oral pitch for a directed verdict of acquittal at the close of the prosecution's case in chief. This 1118.1 motion asked the judge to rule that as a matter of law the prosecution hadn't presented a sufficient weight of evidence to satisfy its burden of proof. Therefore, without the defense even having to present its case, the defendant should be released. In practice, the release of a defendant in this manner was a rare event indeed.

But it did happen on occasion. There was ample precedent, and Hardy thought that if ever a directed verdict were called for, it would be now. After all, Catherine was charged with killing Missy D'Amiens. If she wasn't the victim in this case, if Missy wasn't in fact even dead for certain, and that now appeared to be the case, then that charge against Catherine became moot. Even more satisfyingly, the botched identification of one of the victims underscored the ineptness and even prejudice of the original police investigation. If they couldn't even get the victim right, how was the jury going to believe anything else they proposed?

So Hardy was standing now and the judge was nodding, indicating with her hand that counsel should approach the bench.

In the relative calm of Lou the Greek's, Hardy and Glitsky sat in a darkened back booth about a half hour before the lunch crowd would arrive in earnest. Hardy was dipping pita bread into the Lou's version of tsatsiki, which incorporated soy sauce and hot chili oil into the standard yogurt, garlic and cucumber mix, and somehow the resulting glop managed to work.

"I blame you," Hardy said. "If you hadn't whined so much about having to testify…"

"I wasn't whining."

Hardy put on a voice. "If I testify against a cop, the other uniforms won't like me anymore." He popped some bread. "So if I wanted to save you all the embarrassment and worse, I figured I had to come up with something."

"All right, but how did you get it?"

"The car."

"The car?"

He nodded. "I always said that was the key. Now if you'd only have found it earlier… but I guess better late than never, huh? I'm sure you did the best you could."

Glitsky wasn't going to rise to the bait. "What about the car, though?"

"It was towed from in front of Missy's apartment."

"Yes, it was. So?"

"So she drove it there."

"Right. And?"

"And if she died in the Steiner Street house, it would have still been somewhere near Alamo Square, where she had parked it, where the Willises had seen her get into it."

"No. They said it was Catherine."

"That's what they said, but they were wrong. It was Missy all right. At least I assumed it had to be. It couldn't have been anybody else, really. But I wasn't completely sure until I talked to Yamashiru, then found Dr. Lee and went by his place last night and showed him the picture. Actually, I had some more family snapshots of Missy, too, and Yamashiru didn't recognize any of them. I just wanted to pin Yamashiru down before Cuneo got him to 'remember' seeing Missy around the office."

"And if she wasn't the one in the fire," Glitsky said, "she couldn't have been the one he identified from the dental records."

"Exactly right."

"So she did it. Missy."

"That's the money bet," Hardy said. "Then she split with the money."

"You have any idea why?"

"I thought I'd leave something for you to figure out. That's police work. As you are no doubt aware, I deal only in the realm of exalted and abstract thought."

Glitsky couldn't fault him for crowing a little. He figured he'd earned the right. "So where's it at now?" he asked. "The directed verdict?"

"Braun's deciding. Technically, she shouldn't grant it. The motion only goes to the people's case, and whether that evidence alone could support a verdict. Yamashiru has only said he doesn't really know if the photo belongs with the records in his office. Those records are in the alleged victim's name and Dr. Lee hasn't testified yet. But everybody knows what's coming, and Braun's so pissed at Rosen and Cuneo she might just pull the trigger. And whether she grants the motion or not, the jury's got to believe the police investigation was totally inept if not completely contrived."

CityTalk

by Jeffrey Elliot

The big news around the Hall of Justice this week was the bombshell dropped by forensic odon-tologist (read "dentist") Toshio Yamashiru in the double-murder trial of Catherine Hanover. Dr. Yamashiru had previously testified about the identity of the female victim in the case, whose body had been discovered burned beyond recognition with that of Paul Hanover at his Alamo Square mansion last May. Hanover's girlfriend, Missy D'Amiens, had been one of the patients in Dr. Yamashiru's practice, and he compared D'Amiens's dental records with those of the deceased woman and pronounced them identical.

On Thursday morning, however, defense attorney Dismas Hardy recalled the dentist to the witness stand for cross-examination. During the questioning, Hardy showed him a Chronicle file photograph of Missy D'Amiens and inquired if Dr. Yamashiru could identify the woman in the picture. He could not, stating that he'd had no real contact with the woman. His patient, who had called herself Missy D'Amiens as well, was still clearly the deceased, but evidently she was not the person who'd been engaged to Mr. Hanover.