Майкл Коннелли - The Law of Innocence

“We need to knock this train off its tracks,” I said. “She’s going to run the clock out in the afternoon session, and then those jurors go home for the weekend with my guilt in their heads.”

“It’s a filibuster,” Maggie said. “That’s what we call it in the D.A.’s Office. Keep the witness away from the defense for as long as possible.”

I knew that in the afternoon session Berg would probably move on to the part of the investigation that supported the charges against me. She would also start hitting on motive, and by the end of the day, her case would be practically complete. It would then be more than forty-eight hours before I got the chance to fight back in cross-examination.

Realistically, the afternoon session would last three hours. The lunch recess ended at 1:30 and no judge in the building would keep a jury past 4:30 on a Friday afternoon. I needed to cut a big chunk out of that three hours and somehow knock Berg’s case delivery into next week. It wouldn’t matter how much time she monopolized on Monday. I’d step up with cross-examination the minute it was over. It was the weekend I couldn’t give her — two full days with only one side of the story in a juror’s mind was an eternity.

I looked down at what was left of my sandwich. The fried shrimp was delicately wrapped in a homemade rémoulade.

“Mickey, no,” Maggie said. I looked up at her.

“What?”

“I know what you’re thinking. The judge will never buy it. She was a defense attorney and she knows all the tricks.”

“Well, if I throw up on the defense table, she’ll buy it.”

“Come on. Food poisoning — that’s really bush league.”

“Then, fine, you come up with a way to delay Death Row Dana and knock her off her game.”

“Look, almost all her questions are leading. Start objecting. And every time Drucker gives an opinion, call him on it.”

“Then I look like a nitpicker to the jury.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“Same thing — we’re a team.”

“Better looking like a nitpicker than like a murderer.”

I nodded. I knew objections would delay things but they would not be enough. They would slow Berg down but not stop her. I needed something more. I looked at Cisco.

“Okay, listen, your assignment once we get back out there is to watch the jury,” I said. “Keep your eyes on them. They were already looking tired this morning and now they just ate lunch. Anybody starts nodding off, text Maggie and we’ll put it in front of the judge. That’ll buy us some time.”

“On it,” Cisco said.

“Meantime, did you check their social media since yesterday?” I asked.

“I’ll have to check with Lorna,” Cisco said. “She was watching all of that stuff so I was freed up for whatever you needed.”

Part of his backgrounding job on the jurors was to continue to gather intel on them. Through his work in the garage, he had been able to pick up names through car registrations and other means. He then parlayed that into monitoring their social-media accounts wherever possible for any references to the trial.

“Okay, call her before we start the afternoon session,” I said. “Tell her to check. See if anybody’s bragging about being on the jury, saying anything the court should know about. If there’s something there, we can bring it up, maybe get a juror-misconduct hearing going. That would knock Berg’s plan back till Monday.”

“What if it’s one of our keepers?” Maggie asked.

She was talking about the seven jurors I had down as green on my sympathies chart. Possibly sacrificing one of them for a two-hour delay was a tough trade-off.

“We’ll see when we get there,” I said. “If we even get there.”

The discussion ended when Deputy Chan came to the holding-room door and said it was time to move me back into the courtroom to start the afternoon session.

Once court resumed, I started things off with an objection to Berg’s ongoing use of leading questions in the examination of Detective Drucker. As I had anticipated, this brought a fierce response from Berg, who called the complaint unfounded. The judge saw merit in her argument.

“Defense counsel knows that to object well after the fact is not a sustainable objection,” Warfield said.

“If it please the court,” I said. “My objection is to alert the court that this is happening as a matter of course. It is not unfounded and I thought a directive from the bench could put an end to it. However, the defense is more than fine making contemporaneous objections as we proceed.”

“Please do so, Mr. Haller.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

The dispute had taken ten minutes off the clock and knocked Berg a bit off her game as she returned Drucker to the witness stand and continued to question him. Not wanting to give me the satisfaction of a sustainable objection to the form of her questions, she took extra care and time with them. This was what I wanted and I hoped the slower pace might have the added bonus of fatiguing the freshly fed jury. If one dropped into slumber, I would be able to chew up more time by asking the judge for a directive to the jury.

But all of those efforts proved moot when, an hour into the afternoon session, Berg handed me all I needed to run the clock out myself. She had moved Drucker’s testimony into an area exploring who Sam Scales was and what he might have been up to at the time of his murder. Drucker recounted how he had learned that Scales had been using the alias Walter Lennon and had found applications for credit cards and subsequent billing statements under the name and address last used by Scales. Berg then moved to enter the documents as prosecution exhibits.

I leaned toward Maggie and whispered.

“Did we get this stuff?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “I don’t think so.”

Berg walked copies to us after dropping duplicates off with the court clerk. I placed the pages on the table between Maggie and me and we quickly studied them. A murder case generates a tremendous number of documents and sometimes keeping track of it all is a full-time job. This case was no different. Plus, Maggie had come into the case, replacing Jennifer, only two weeks earlier. Neither of us had command of all of the paperwork. That had been more Jennifer’s job than mine because I wanted to keep a minimal number of documents with me in the jail.

But I was pretty sure I had never seen these papers before.

“You have the discovery report there?” I asked.

Maggie went into her briefcase and pulled out a file. She located a printout with a one-line description of all documents received from the District Attorney’s Office as part of discovery. She ran her finger down the column and then checked a second page.

“No, they’re not here,” she said.

I immediately stood up.

“OBJECTION!” I said with a fervor I rarely used in a courtroom.

Berg stopped in mid-question to Drucker. The judge startled as if the steel door to the holding cell had been slammed with great force.

“What is your objection, Mr. Haller?” she asked.

“Judge, once again the prosecution has willfully violated the rules of discovery,” I said. “The efforts to keep the defense from evidence to which it rightfully should have access has just been staggering in—”

“Let me stop you right there,” the judge said quickly. “Let’s not get into this in front of the jury.”

Warfield then told the jurors that court was adjourning for a short afternoon break. She asked them to be back in the assembly room in ten minutes.

We waited as the jurors slowly made their way out of the box and to the courtroom’s exit. My anger grew with each second of silence. Warfield waited for the door to close behind the last juror before finally addressing the situation.