Photo by Boston Public Library

Dedicated to the memory of Gordon Smith

The story comes in pieces, and you must think and weigh and assess and form your own impressions. Reserve judgment. Imagine other possibilities. Listen. You must delete from your memory that which was stricken from the record, which called for speculation, which was objected to and sustained.

***

We think it went like this:
On November 8, 2013, the Cohens awoke on tattered couches in the living room of their Santa Cruz apartment. Perhaps their first thoughts were of the smell. (The stench was mentioned repeatedly during the trial.) Or maybe they thought about Diana’s upcoming surgery. Or about getting the car. Or the gun.

***

Since the deliberation, I’ve had a hard time sleeping. I just lie there, thinking. Waiting for morning. I’m lying in wait. Remembering things. Picturing things. Finally I roll over and type notes on my phone. Sometimes we have to write things out of our skin, like a splinter, an irritant. What was it that Daniel Cohen said in his interview, when he was rubbing his back against the interrogation room wall? “Sometimes I gotta get a full scratch on.”

***

To constitute murder by lying in wait there must be an intentional infliction upon the person killed of bodily harm involving a high degree of probability that it will result in death and which shows a wanton disregard for human life (California Penal Code 189).

***

We reported for jury duty in November. A gaggle of grumpy taxpayers schlepping themselves to the Santa Cruz Courthouse, where we all check in and take numbers and ask for directions to the bathroom. I know it was a Wednesday because the coffee stand was playing funeral dirges as we crossed the atrium. (In the months that followed, I would observe that they always played harpsichord music on Wednesdays. Weird but true.) We all silently commiserate in what begins as de jure inconvenience, jockeying for bench seats and hallway positions before being herded into the courtroom.

***

“Ms. Logan, are you a mother?” asks the prosecutor. And so begins the process of voir dire—to say what is true. The attorneys ask if we’ve ever served on a jury. They ask how we feel about the law and about police and about people who don’t testify in their own trials. They ask if we rent or own. “If someone walks into a room—soaking wet—and tells you it’s raining outside, would you believe them?” We do our best to answer. A few people are excused after they break down—the woman whose grandchild was murdered, the gay man who was a victim of a hate crime, the homeschooled doula who keeps saying “operation” when she means “autopsy” and cries that she just can’t handle this. “This isn’t the case for you?” the bearded defense attorney asks her—as if she’s trying on coats at Nordstrom and this one just isn’t the right color. They also excuse the woman who earnestly boasts that she never questions the law. And the unopinionated truck driver who looks like he might fall asleep. And finally the gravedigger. An actual gravedigger, of all things. This isn’t the case for him either. Turns out it is the case for me. I’m Juror 9. The trial will begin on Monday.

***

Every jury, every trial, is probably as different as every fingerprint. We later learn that a latent fingerprint is one that’s left unintentionally, when a person just does what people do. Things like opening a door. Or picking up a key. Or killing another person.

***

Over the weekend I have abdominal distress, heart palpitations, headache, intrusive thoughts. (These are the symptoms listed on a website I find about jury duty stress.) I take a Tylenol.

***

My knowledge of courtrooms is an amalgam of Grisham movies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Hitchcock films. (Hitchcock’s greatest fear was being wrongfully convicted.) Scenes that climax to some narrative trope, a verdict-sealing revelation: “But look! He’s not right-handed!”

***

That Monday I squirm in my seat of the jury box, in the belly of the great wooden whale that is the courtroom, with its oak ribs reaching to the high ceilings. The defendants’ table is packed, with the two defendants and three attorneys, their binders and legal pads at the ready. There’s one plant on the judge’s bench, a philodendron, its leaves upturned like Jesus’s hands in one of the stations of the cross. I look out at the audience (is that the right word?) and wonder who these people are, to whom they’re related, how they’re related. Is it like a wedding, with the bride’s side and groom’s side? Guilty and not guilty? Are we forced to choose sides from the moment we walk into that room?

***

For the first time, I take a good look at the defendants, silent and plain-clothed and unimposing. Diana has long ashen hair, a wan complexion. Daniel has gray circles around his eyes that match his mother’s. He is pallid, powdery white. Like Boo Radley. They’ve both been in the Santa Cruz jail for two years, with no sunlight, I suppose. It must be nice to be out of there, to be in a courtroom. To seek light like that philodendron. They don’t look at each other during the trial. Do they want to? At this point, to us, they are tabula rasa—pale, almost transparent, waiting to be colored in.

***

“Here is the scene,” begins the prosecutor. In the first three minutes of her opening argument, I think I’m going to faint. I realize I know where the crime scene is. And that I drive by it every day. I’m overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all. Oh Jesus. This is it. Please don’t let me faint. I’ll be excused. They’ll have to start all over. I’ll ruin the case. Keep it together. Take deep breaths. This isn’t the first murder. It won’t be the last. Before we leave for the day, the judge says, “See you tomorrow. Avoid media attention. Keep an open mind. Don’t talk about the case.” My mind is splayed open in a vulnerable bloom.

***

The Cohens had a long history of tenant grievances. They’d lived in at least three different apartments where they complained that a neighbor was cooking meth. Daniel was twenty-eight and his mother, Diana, fifty-eight. Daniel had never lived apart from her, and they both suffered from medical issues—Daniel an enlarged esophagus (“It’s something only geezers get,” he explained during the police interview) and Diana an ulcerative condition requiring colostomy bags and surgery. They’d been evicted from a previous apartment before finding the one on Kinsley Street—a two-bedroom cracker-box on the second floor. But then they began to complain that their downstairs neighbors were cooking meth—complaints to the property manager, to law enforcement, to the neighbors themselves. When the beleaguered neighbors moved out, the Cohens wanted their vacant apartment (which seemed strange, if they thought it so dangerously choked in toxic fumes), but instead it went to another tenant—a single mother who taught preschool. Again came the meth-cooking complaints. Finally the property manager, Gordon Smith, decided to terminate his company’s relationship with the Cohens. He first offered them money to move, but they wouldn’t go. With their history, it would be difficult to find another place, and Gordon had been one of the few to accept their Section 8 voucher. Then the situation turned into an eviction proceeding.

***

In the beginning the whole thing is heavy. Stressful. At nights I switch out my Netflix murder mysteries and forensic dramas for The Great British Baking Show—just good-natured Brits with soothing accents and floured aprons, making puddings and piecrusts under a lovely white tent in the English countryside. It’s all quite bloodless.

***

But as the weeks roll on, the trial becomes the routine. It becomes the program we watch each day—the witnesses as the guest stars, the judge and attorneys as the regular characters. “Who will get overruled today?” we wonder. The attorneys have their own catchphrases. “Objection.” “Calls for speculation.” “Will this refresh your recollection?” Daniel’s attorney always asks witnesses to repeat themselves when it’s something he wants to emphasize for the jury.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear that,” he prompts.

“I said, the mother did the talking,” the witness says.

My favorite catchphrase is “Strike that.”

“So when Diana Cohen threatened you—”

“Strike that.”

“When Diana Cohen said what she said to you . . . ”

The phrase signals the great tension of all this. To separate what you can assume from what you can know. To unhear something you have heard. To walk the line between opinion and truth. If only all words could be revised. All actions. They can strike it from the record, but they can’t extricate it from your memory. They can tell you to disregard it, but the imprint is there.

***

There’s laughter from the live studio audience when the prosecutor puts a used car salesman on the stand:

“So, there’s kind of a reputation associated with being a used car salesman, right?” asks the prosecutor.

“I guess so,” answers the car salesman. “Kinda like being a lawyer.”

***

There’s a cliff-hanger episode when the prosecutor gets sick and almost vomits in court, when the trial gets postponed because she’s subsequently hospitalized with migraines. There’s the emotional episode when Gordon’s office mate describes finding Gordon’s body.

“To be honest,” he says, “there was blood around his head, and my first thought . . . was that it was drool—that he was just sleeping.”

I’ve never seen a man try so hard not to cry.

***

I speculate about the attorneys’ personal lives. What do they do when they get home at night? Drink a highball of scotch? Serve plates of burgers to friends in the backyard? Temper chocolate and stir meringue? Did any of them dry heave this morning from nerves? Heart palpitations? Intrusive thoughts?

***

There’s a blood spatter expert and a latent fingerprint expert and a gunshot residue expert. We hear officers from the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office, the California Department of Justice, the Capitola PD, Watsonville PD, Santa Cruz PD. There’s a recurring role for the lead detective. There’s the immigrant landscaper who needs a translator. And the woman in the wheelchair who identifies Daniel and the Toyota Highlander from the parking lot. There are witnesses who testify that Daniel made all of the phone calls and did all of the legwork. Ones who testify that Diana did all of the driving and called all the shots. Lots of witnesses talk about the smell—of Daniel, of Diana, of the apartment, of the stew of mildewed clothes they probably tried to scrub clean in the bathtub. The antagonists of the plot are not always clear. There’s a woman who runs a retirement housing facility, who describes giving the Cohens hope about renting to them even though she had no intention of actually giving them a place. “They smelled,” she said. “You have to play the game,” she said. I still worry about what game it is.

***

The evidence begins to mount. The People’s Exhibits, they’re called. Bags upon bags of documents and cigarette butts. Bags containing bullet casings. Bags containing other bags. All labeled with little red stickers. All numbered: People’s Exhibit 1, People’s Exhibit 2, and so on. I try to track the exhibits in my notes. We exceed one hundred pieces. Things—all of these random things that now hold such significance. There’s a trash can with a bullet hole in it. The charred remnants of a receipt book. The .357 Magnum found in the Cohens’ storage unit. Daniel’s shoe with blood on it. The letters the Cohens wrote to each other while in jail. Mek, he calls her. Danny Boy, she calls him. In the margins she draws hearts with D+D. Diana and Daniel. Mother and son. One of Diana’s letters says, “I think about why the fuck didn’t we toss that shit?”

***

Then we must answer the questions. What has everyone touched? What has everyone seen? What has everyone done? What story can be told in the transference between organic and inorganic, between the living and the nonliving? Prints. Hairs. Blood spatter. There’s another person’s DNA on the cigarette with Diana’s. How is that possible? Did she smoke a used butt? Did someone else? Smudges are easily erased. Stains are not. And then there are the photos. The one of Gordon’s body, his leg in such a strange position, sort of folded up against the wall, like a puppet, like a doll. The photo of the tissue spatter on the drywall, with tiny gray hairs in it—from a beard, or a scalp—God, from a person. Did Diana know what her son had planned? How involved had she been? “This is a circumstantial evidence case,” the attorneys had said from the beginning.

***

After the Cohens awoke that morning, they went down to a used car dealership in Santa Cruz and took a Toyota Highlander for a test drive. When they drove the used suv off the lot, it still had the big neon price stickers on the windshield. The Cohens told the owner they’d run a few errands and be back in an hour. But hours later they still had the vehicle. They had it when they entered the Public Storage lot. And they still had it when they drove to the office building at the corner of Forty-First and Jade. And they still had it in that office building parking lot when the sun went down.

***

There’s a lot of waiting that goes on during a trial. For every break, we’re sent out into the hall. So I begin walking laps in the courthouse, past the wooden doors of the seven courtrooms. I memorize the judges’ chambers: Salazar, Siegel, Burdick, Gallagher, Volkmann, Guy, Marigonda. I stop to use the restroom. To fill my water bottle. To talk to Juror 8 about the rain. Salazar, Siegel, Burdick, Gallagher, Volkmann, Guy, Marigonda. I stop to reply to a text. Someone has seen the news about a shooting in San Bernadino. They want to know if it’s near me. I text back: NO, I’M IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA. I’M A JUROR ON A MURDER TRIAL. IT’S SAFE HERE.

***

During that time in the parking lot, the Cohens smoked. They moved the car. They were seen by several witnesses. They waited. During that time, people were in and out of Gordon’s office. Gordon had an end-of-the-week beer at the front desk with a coworker. He watched a motivational TED talk about happiness with another. Finally, by the time it got dark, Gordon was there alone. And at some point, Daniel, and possibly his mother, got out of the Highlander and walked up the steps to Gordon’s office.

***

Daniel Cohen has his pen to paper a lot during the trial. Am I to glean something from this? “But look! He’s not right-handed!” I keep wondering what he’s doing. A crossword puzzle? Sudoku? Writing his manifesto? Scribbling like a kid on a Denny’s menu? Is it something to do with the trial? Is he circling names of people he knows on some sort of character witness list? Detailing inconsistencies in the witnesses’ statements? Or perhaps—somehow—trying to write himself out of all this?

***

To hear someone speak is everything. In the beginning of the trial, the Cohens are silent ciphers at the defense table. We were told during jury selection that they wouldn’t be testifying. But the judge admits video footage of their police interviews. Thirteen hours of it. The prosecutor plays a recording of the Cohens in the back seat of a police vehicle. We watch and we listen, with thick and heavy transcripts in our laps. The transcripts read like scripts from a Coen brothers movie. They bring out the voices. Daniel sounds like Jack Nicholson, a slow and measured gravelly drawl with a punch line cadence. He’s smart. He’s congenial. He’s funny. He has a hard time answering questions about that Friday.

“What did you do that afternoon?” the detective asks as she sits with Daniel in the interview room.

“Let me think on it,” Daniel says. Like there’s no rush. Like if he just leans back against the police station wall and scratches an itch, sooner or later something will come to him. He can’t remember his mother’s doctor’s appointment that week or the plumbing appointment that day, or when he last talked to Gordon or paid the rent. He’s an ursine presence with wild dark hair and big potential energy, though little is on display. Early in the interview he insists he’s a germophobe. It’s hard to believe. “I gotta get a full scratch on,” he says. This Daniel in the video looks quite different from the Daniel in the courthouse—the wan, white-haired Boo Radley with the pen in his hand.

Next we hear the second recording: the one when Daniel was with his mother in the back of the police vehicle, the one in which his memory is suddenly sharp. They seem careful not to incriminate themselves. They seem to suspect they’re being recorded, so they just talk about the upcoming doctor’s appointments. And suddenly Daniel remembers everything. He knows the new doctor’s name. He spells it. He knows the date and time of the appointment. He even has the doctor’s phone number memorized. Who does that? I’m strangely impressed.

Diana sounds hard and haggard, like a scratched record, her throat grated by cigarettes. “I need my seltzer, my meds, and my cigs,” she says at one point. She talks about her “split gut”—an ulcer. She burps during the interview. In the recorded conversation with her son, she calls him “dude” and “man.” Earlier in the trial a former neighbor, the preschool teacher who lived beneath them at the Kinsley apartment, testified that Diana once threatened to “go New Yorker on [her] ass.” After hearing the interview, it becomes much easier to imagine Diana saying this. And it’s becoming more difficult to imagine her defense’s narrative: that she was frail and sickly and unaware of her son’s intentions, just a dutiful mother driving her son to an office building to drop off the rent, like a carpooling soccer mom outside the piano lesson. Oh, Danny Boy.

***

As stated in California Penal Code 182 PC, a criminal conspiracy takes place when one agrees with one or more other people to commit a crime, and one of them commits an overt act in furtherance of that agreement.

***

As a jury we have become a collective. Sitting in a cluster. Listening to one another’s stomachs growl and sharing breath mints after lunch and hearing one another pee in the courthouse bathroom. We take walks around the courthouse together and eat lunches in the basement together and learn who does what and who knows whom and who’s lived where. We talk about all kinds of things, except for the case. “Don’t talk about the case.” Out of twelve jurors and six alternates, we lose two for unknown reasons during the trial. It’s oddly disturbing to lose someone. It’s unnerving to see an empty seat. We are all in this together. We must be in this together.

***

Gordon Smith was shot four times. Once across the face. Once in the torso. Twice more in the head. The bullet that grazed his face likely knocked him out of the desk chair in which he was seated and onto the ground with his legs still crossed in that strange position. He was probably dead by the time the last shot was fired. He lay there on the industrial-grade carpet of his office until his body was found at eight the next morning. There was no sign of a struggle.

***

Daniel Cohen stood on one side of the desk and shot Gordon. Then he walked around the desk, getting blood on his shoe, and fired two more shots to the head and one into the belly. He or his mother took a receipt book from the desk. They drove back to Public Storage and hid the gun in their storage locker. Then they took the receipt book to a corner of the Public Storage property and set it on fire.

***

The autopsy photo cuts off above his penis. For reasons of dignity, I’m sure. We see a naked abdomen. The bullet entry site seems quite clean. A purple hole. The rest of his body is white, veined, its texture like a lumpy potato. He was thin. And then there is his poor eye. A stained planet on the plane of his face. In the first autopsy photo, his eye looks black. It filled with blood from one of the shots fired into his skull. And then there’s a picture of his head on the coroner’s table. His hair wet like a newborn’s from the blood and perhaps the cleaning. It’s propped up on a little device, like a baby’s head in the width of your palm. One of the bullets blew out the side of his face. His skin sort of sags at the neck, and I wonder if it came off and someone gently laid it back in place—for the photo’s sake, for our sake. For reasons of dignity, I’m sure.

***

Someone saw the Cohens with their little fire at Public Storage and alerted the management. A representative found Daniel trying to extinguish the flame with a PVC traffic cone that he used like a candlesnuffer. She stopped him and sent them both from the property, then subsequently overlocked their storage area, which, unfortunately for the Cohens, meant they couldn’t retrieve the gun. This left the binding of the receipt book there for the police to find. The used car dealer had blocked in the Cohens’ own car that they’d left at the dealership, so they couldn’t return the Highlander until business hours the next day.

***

Why would you leave the price stickers on the vehicle? How would you think you wouldn’t be noticed? Why would you set fire on the property where you’ve stashed the gun? Why would you hide the gun in your own storage unit? The whole plot would have been hilarious if the outcome weren’t so horribly tragic.

***

“Chest to crotch. That’s where you do a Y incision.” The coroner begins our autopsy lesson by explaining how to cut across a person’s skull to open it up. “Make a cut like where you’d wear your headphones,” he explains. And I start to feel squeamish. So I do an odd thing without even realizing it: I picture a chicken. Yes, you cut across the chest. Okay, you crack through the ribs. You take out the soft tissue and the organs. You evacuate the brain. The horror is so strangely bearable this way. And then I realize that I’m doing the same thing Hawkeye did in the last episode of M*A*S*H, when he recalled a Korean woman killing her chicken on a bus—only it wasn’t a chicken, it was her baby.

***

The coroner is a Vietnam vet and keeps referring to this fact in his explanations of things—the closeness of the muzzle to the skin, what “execution style” means, the probability of someone surviving a shot to the abdomen. He says he’s done around ten thousand autopsies in his life. Ten thousand. That’s like a whole city of dead people. A necropolis. All with Y incisions—all with naked, wrinkled bodies, wet heads, and people who loved them. I think back to the gravedigger. Perhaps this is why he was excused. Perhaps he’s seen too much death for it all to be real anymore. Perhaps they’re all just chickens to him.

***

The police stopped and detained the Cohens on their way back from 7-Eleven, then held them overnight for questioning. They got Daniel a burrito from Taqueria Vallarta. Diana asked for a sandwich, and they brought her a doughnut. They gave them each a smoke break. And then they grilled them for almost thirteen hours. Finally they took the Cohens home in a police vehicle but not before briefly leaving them alone in the backseat for several minutes, along with a hidden recording device. The Cohens were officially arrested the next day at their apartment. Later the defense would claim that the Cohens had been detained illegally. But it didn’t stick.

***

The San Lorenzo River runs behind the Santa Cruz Courthouse. Often a mere trickle, it begins somewhere in the Santa Cruz Mountains and miles away spills into the imponderable Pacific. In the weeks during the trial, through November, December, then January, El Niño brings heavy rains. Floods. Scientists and technicians come out and measure the river and its currents. Logs of redwood and eucalyptus float by. Pieces of debris. Locals walk dangerously near the bank to get a better look, to see what has been dredged up from the ravines and what has washed down from the deep shadows of the forest.

***

It is a morning in late January when we begin deliberation. The casting of the stones.

***

That morning I have stomach pains. I go to WebMD and search “pain left abdomen.” It comes back with pancreatitis. But I’m not convinced. I need more evidence. I dry heave a few times over the toilet. Nothing comes out. The internet tells me I’m an “orange” personality. I hold my stress in my gut. I think about Diana Cohen and her ulcers. I wonder what she was holding inside herself, what was so stressful, so upsetting, that it somehow ate a hole right through her. I try to calm down by watching The Great British Baking Show—they’re creating three-dimensional scenes out of biscuits.

***

After we arrive, the bailiff escorts us through the labyrinth of the courthouse and into the deliberation room. We walk single file, as he shouts, “Jurors coming through!” I’m reminded of “Dead man walking!” We wind through the same passageways I presume the prisoners use. The deliberation room is tiny. One democratically round table. Twelve chairs that we practically have to climb over to sit down in. A whiteboard behind the table. Bathrooms so that we don’t have to leave. And motivational posters on the walls, the kind with shadowy pictures of empty canoes on pristine lakes that say things like Perseverance or Honesty. They’re not helpful. We are motivated enough. It is the first time we’ve been allowed to talk about the case since it began.

***

The People’s Exhibits are literally piled around us. Everything bagged and labeled in awkward packages. There’s so much evidence that it covers the table and lines the walls. The trash can with the bullet hole is arbitrarily placed near the door, and one of the jurors almost spits her gum into it. Daniel Cohen’s shoe is right in front of me on the table—a generic white sneaker in an evidence bag with a red People’s Exhibit sticker and some officer’s badge number inked on the side of the heel. I touch it. I look for the bloodstain. I think about Boo Radley and I remember what Atticus said: that you never really know somebody until you put on their shoes and walk around in them.

***

Our verdict must be unanimous. We must all agree.

***

Justice is collective, just as water is collective. It pulls and it pushes and it sweeps away. It cleans and it muddies and it changes what lies in its path.

We talk and vote and talk and vote again.

We go home and have trouble sleeping.

We discuss scenarios and make charts and timelines.

We role-play. We play devil’s advocate.

We send out to the judge with a question.

We go back over the evidence.

At one point we cry.

We take a moment of silence.

Finally we call for the bailiff.

We have a decision.

***

In the next hour or so we exhale. We wait for the judge to reconvene the trial. The knot inside us feels like it’s been unraveled; we have somehow made order of it. What is that feeling? I’m sure there’s some apt German word for it—something to convey the communal sharing of a burden, the passing of judgment, the release of finally speaking a decision.

***

And then we reenter the courtroom. The audience has returned. The bride’s side and the groom’s side. Everyone is standing. I look at the attorneys. At Daniel. At Diana. The court clerk reads our verdict. Then, one by one, the judge asks each of us if we agree. One by one we must say yes. One by one we wonder if anything will come out when we open our mouths. We wonder what evidence will be left of us. To hear someone speak is everything.

“Yes,” we say. And it is yes for Daniel and yes for Diana. Yes to first-degree murder. Yes to lying in wait. Yes to use of a firearm. They will both be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

***

Their act, too, was collective. Their decision communal. They both did it. And I wonder, does evil become more concentrated the more people who partake in it? And what does this mean for the death penalty, when twelve murderers are made from one? The question is a weight that sits more heavily on me now. We knew this would not be a death penalty case. But would it have made a difference?

***

After the trial, jurors may meet with the attorneys. Presumably the counsel wants to know why we voted the way we did and what they could have done better. But I assume that the meeting might have more to do with making sure there are no grounds for a mistrial, or perhaps looking for holes in the argument to shore it up for the appeal. It is a winter evening, and the first veils of darkness have dropped. Rain has ponded in the middle of the courthouse atrium. It’s cold. As we congregate, we are all still raw emotions and nerves, relieved and exhausted. The attorneys ask us questions and we answer. One of the jurors explains that it “just doesn’t make sense. What did the Cohens think they would accomplish? How could a sane person think that murdering this poor man would keep them from eventually getting evicted?” Someone else asks, “Why wasn’t there a discussion of their psychological states during the trial?”

Then the prosecutor says something that I won’t soon forget.

“No crime makes sense,” she says. “I think that with every case. Think about a member of a gang. You ask, ‘Why’d you kill him?’ The guy says, ‘Because he disrespected me.’ That’s a reason to kill someone? It doesn’t make any sense. It never makes sense.”

***

That night I try to tell my husband about the case, but the narrative comes out in a flow of disconnected debris. A piece of this bumping into a piece of that. He takes me out to dinner and I start to cry in the middle of a chicken burrito. I can’t sleep. The next morning, after several months of trial, I sit through five hours of meetings at the local community college where I teach as an adjunct. The entire time I want someone to ask me about my week. I want to talk about the case. I want to unload. But no one asks. The only person who talks to me is a woman who has introduced herself to me twice before. She introduces herself to me a third time. I feel quite unremarkable. I am one of the people. The collective. Apparently my face has not refreshed her recollection.

***

The following evening we, the jury, meet for dinner, and I can’t remember ever being so happy to see a group of people. Our collective conscience. We need community. We need to talk about what we’ve seen and heard, what we’ve done. We hug and drink wine and call ourselves family.

***

And that night, when again I can’t sleep, I finally go online to search for information about the case. I try to piece together the Cohens’ lives. I think I find a grandmother they lived with several years earlier, who has since passed away. I learn that Daniel had no criminal record but that Diana had been charged with petty theft and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I try to figure out how old Daniel must have been at the time. In his teens? I learn that when they were arrested, Daniel wrote down his occupation as “laborer” and Diana wrote “model.” I appreciate the sense of humor. I find people on Facebook who knew Gordon. I find people on Facebook who say the Cohens should burn in hell. I try to Google the happiness TED talk that Gordon watched with his coworker, but I can’t find it. I do, however, find an AP article about the trial that begins, A jury in Northern California . . . , and I wonder why I feel the need to read it. And then I look up ulcers: open sores on an external or internal surface of the body, caused by a break in the skin or membrane that fails to heal.

***

Finally I do a search for Gordon. And there he is—this man who loved books and swimming and Monterey Bay. I find obituaries of a well-loved man, a well-lived man, a man who is described as “sweet” and “enthusiastic,” “adored” and “understanding” and “kind.” May we all be worthy of such praise. I find a photo of him carving a turkey; one of him with his wife and daughter at the pier; one of him wearing a crab-shaped hat and an apron, holding a glass of wine and smiling; and one of him fishing on the ocean, his foot braced against the boat rail for stability, his line in the vast, mercurial waters. My favorite detail from his obituary is this: when he and his wife were young and poor and first married, they shared one pair of jeans. What love. Like a song.

***

The Cohens also shared genes. What love. An inseparable mother and son. The DNA they shared was also on the cigarette filters that connected them to the parking lot. And the murder scene. Simple genetic material. After all, that is what makes us human. I wonder what will happen to them in prison. At our jury family dinner, we discuss their being able to get physical help, get mental help. I’m not sure that will happen. Were their problems mainly psychological? Was it nature or nurture? Were they victims of the system or victims of their own choices? Smoking and smoking to fill themselves up. Were those the fires of hell? I wonder what they feel now. I wonder what they felt then, after the shots were fired. What must you feel? Everything? Nothing? It doesn’t make sense. It never makes sense.

***

I live just blocks from the crime scene at Forty-First and Jade, the pink stucco office building with palms and palmettos, the epitome of California suburban. Whenever I pass it, I think about Gordon. Sometimes I say hello to him. I wonder if the witnesses still work there—the woman in the wheelchair who saw the Cohens waiting in the stickered Highlander and felt fear, who identified Daniel as the man she’d seen, who’d thought to take notes after the incident, which helped to establish the timeline. Or Gordon’s office mate who saw a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot and remembered the rim of the hubcap—the rim, of all things. He was the same office mate who found Gordon dead the next morning, whose first thought was that the blood under his friend’s head was drool. Someday I may drive by that corner and not think of them at all, but for now I still wonder about things like how long the bloodstain remained on the carpet after the police tape was removed, or if Gordon’s soul waits in that building or if it set sail on the ocean after the murder and never looked back. Will I always think about these things? Will this corner always refresh my recollection?

***

The Santa Cruz County flag has a rainbow across the bottom to represent unity, an evergreen tree in the corner for hope, and a white background for optimism. Of course it does. It’s Santa Cruz—the hippie-dippie, navel-gazing, man-bun, free-spirit, Whole Foods, downward dog, love-your-neighbor, fuck-the-man Zen retreat of America. The unofficial motto is Keep Santa Cruz Weird. But it has gangs and drugs. It has floods. It had a man called Gordon Smith, but now he is dead. People from his church do mission work at the jail. They work with Daniel Cohen.

***

It’s a strange thing to call a case “closed” when you still have so many questions. Like, was Diana Cohen in the office when the shots were fired? Did she at some point hold the gun? Even pull the trigger? What evil infects us when breaks in our skin fail to heal?

***

And can you really see a wheel rim beneath the streetlight? Can a human being see that far in the darkness? Are there other signs, other markers? Must we all see something for it to be true?

***

And what was it that Daniel Cohen was writing?

For my part, I hope it was a love song.

Strike that.

I hope it was a prayer.