Michael Connelly - The Reversal

I turned and looked back to share the moment with Bosch. After all, the silent witness maneuver had been his idea. And I caught him giving Jessup the throat slash-the internationally recognized sign that it was over.

I looked back to the front of the court.

“Mr. Royce,” the judge said. “Are you continuing with this witness?”

“A moment, Your Honor,” Royce said.

It was a valid question. Royce had few ways with which to go with Roman at this point. He could cut his losses and simply end the questioning. Or he could ask the judge to declare Roman to be a hostile witness-a move that was always professionally embarrassing when the hostile witness is one you called to the stand. But it was a move that would allow Royce more latitude in asking leading questions that explored what Roman had initially said to the defense investigator and why he was dissembling now. But this was fraught with danger, especially since this initial interview had not been recorded or documented in an effort to hide Roman during the discovery process.

“Mr. Royce!” the judge barked. “I consider the court’s time quite valuable. Please ask your next question or I will turn the witness over to Mr. Haller for cross-examination.”

Royce nodded to himself as he came to a decision.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor. But no further questions at this time.”

Royce walked dejectedly back to his seat and a waiting client who was visibly upset with the turnabout. I stood up and started moving to the lectern even before the judge turned the witness over to me.

“Mr. Roman,” I said, “your testimony has been somewhat confusing to me. So let me get this straight. Are you telling this jury that Sarah Ann Gleason did or did not tell you that her stepfather murdered her sister?”

“She didn’t. That’s just what they wanted me to say.”

“Who is ‘they,’ sir?”

“The defense. The lady investigator and Royce.”

“Besides a hotel room, were you to receive anything else if you testified to such a story today?”

“They just said they’d take care of me. That a lot of money was at-”

“Objection!” Royce yelled.

He jumped to his feet.

“Your Honor, the witness is clearly hostile and acting out a vindictive fantasy.”

“He’s your witness, Mr. Royce. He can answer the question. Go ahead, sir.”

“They said there was a lot of money at stake and they would take care of me,” Roman said.

It just kept getting better for me and worse for Jessup. But I had to make sure I didn’t come off to the jury as gleeful or vindictive myself. I recalibrated and focused on what was important.

“What was the story that Sarah told you all those years ago, Mr. Roman?”

“Like I said, that she was in the yard and she was hiding and she saw the guy who grabbed her sister.”

“Did she ever tell you she identified the wrong man?”

“No.”

“Did she ever tell you that the police told her who to identify?”

“No.”

“Did she ever once tell you that the wrong man was charged with her sister’s murder?”

“No.”

“No further questions.”

I checked the clock as I returned to my seat. We still had twenty minutes before the lunch break. Rather than break early, the judge asked Royce to call his next witness. He called his investigator, Karen Revelle. I knew what he was doing and I was going to be ready.

Revelle was a mannish-looking woman who wore slacks and a sport jacket. She had ex-cop written all over her dour expression. After she was sworn in, Royce got right to the point, probably hoping to stem the flow of blood from his case before the jurors went to lunch.

“What do you do for a living, Ms. Revelle?”

“I am an investigator for the law firm of Royce and Associates.”

“You work for me, correct?”

“That is correct.”

“On March second of this year, did you conduct a telephone interview with an individual named Edward Roman?”

“I did.”

“What did he tell you in that call?”

I stood and objected. I asked the judge if I could discuss my objection at a sidebar conference.

“Come on up,” she said.

Maggie and I followed Royce to the side of the bench. The judge told me to state my objection.

“My first objection is that anything this witness states about a conversation with Roman is clearly hearsay and not allowed. But the larger objection is to Mr. Royce trying to impeach his own witness. He’s going to use Revelle to impeach Roman, and you can’t do that, Judge. It’s damn near suborning perjury on Mr. Royce’s part, because one of these two people is lying under oath and he called them both!”

“I strongly object to Mr. Haller’s last characterization,” Royce said, leaning over the sidebar and moving in closer to the judge. “Suborning perjury? I have been practicing law for more than-”

“First of all, back up, Mr. Royce, you’re in my space,” Breitman said sternly. “And second, you can save your self-serving objection for some other time. Mr. Haller is correct on all counts. If I allow this witness to continue her testimony, you are not only going to go into hearsay but we will have a situation where one of your witnesses has lied under oath. You can’t have it both ways and you can’t put a liar on the stand. So this is what we’re going to do. You are going to get your investigator off the stand, Mr. Haller is going to make a motion to strike what little testimony she has already given and I will agree to that motion. Then we’re going to lunch. During that time, you and your client can get together and decide what to do next. But it’s looking to me like your options got really limited in the last half hour. That’s all.”

She didn’t wait for any of us to respond. She simply rolled her chair away from the sidebar.

Royce followed the judge’s advice and ended his questioning of Revelle. I moved to strike and that was that. A half hour later I was sitting with Maggie and Sarah Gleason at a table at the Water Grill, the place where the case had started for me. We had decided to go high-end because we were celebrating what appeared to be the beginning of the end for Jason Jessup’s case, and because the Water Grill was just across the street from Sarah’s hotel. The only one missing at the table was Bosch, and he was on his way after dropping our silent witness, Sonia Reyes, at the drug rehab facility at County-USC Medical Center.

“Wow,” I said after the three of us were seated. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that before in a courtroom.”

“Me, neither,” Maggie said.

“Well, I’ve been in a few courtrooms but I don’t know enough to know what it all means,” said Gleason.

“It means the end is near,” Maggie said.

“It means the entire defense imploded,” I added. “See, the defense’s case was sort of simple. Stepfather killed the girl and the family concocted a cover-up. They came up with the story about hide-and-seek and the man on the lawn to throw the authorities off of stepdad. Then sister-that’s you-made a false identification of Jessup. Just sort of randomly set him up for a murder he did not commit.”

“But what about Melissa’s hair in the tow truck?” Gleason asked.

“The defense claims it was planted,” I said. “Either in conspiracy or independent of the family’s cover-up. The police realized they didn’t have much of a case. They had a thirteen-year-old girl’s ID of a suspect and almost nothing else. So they took hair from the body or a hairbrush and planted it in the tow truck. After lunch-if Royce is foolish enough to continue this-he will present investigative chronology reports and time logs that will show Detective Kloster had enough access and time to make the plant in the tow truck before a search warrant was obtained and forensics opened the truck.”