Майкл Коннелли: The Law of Innocence

“Okay,” I finally said. “I need to sit with this and think. If you two have no more surprises, then you can get out of this place and I’ll do some strategizing. This doesn’t change anything. It’s still a setup. It’s just a fucking good one and I need to close my eyes and figure things out.”

“You sure, boss?” Cisco asked.

“We can work it with you,” Jennifer offered.

“No, I need to be alone with this,” I said. “You two go.”

Cisco got up and went to the door, where he knocked hard on the metal with the side of his meaty fist.

“Same time tomorrow?” Jennifer asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Same time. At some point we have to stop trying to figure out their case and start building ours.”

The door opened and a deputy collected my colleagues for exit processing. The door was closed and I was left alone. I closed my eyes and waited for them to come get me next. I heard the banging of steel doors and the echoing shouts of caged men. Echoes and iron were the inescapable sounds of my life at Twin Towers.

Tuesday, December 3

In the morning I notified the dayroom deputy that I needed to go to the law library to do research on my case. It was ninety minutes before another deputy came to escort me there. The library was just a small room on B level where there were four desks and a wall of shelves containing two copies of the California Penal Code and several volumes containing case law and reported decisions of the state’s supreme court and lower appellate courts. I had checked a handful of the books on my first visit to the library and found them seriously out of date and useless. Everything was on computer these days and updated immediately upon the change of a law or the setting of a precedent. Books on shelves were for show.

But that was not why I needed the library. I needed to write down my sleepless night’s thoughts on the case and I was allowed to check out and use a pen at the library. Of course, Bishop had long ago offered to rent me a pencil stub that I could surreptitiously use in my cell, but I declined because I knew that before it got to me it would have come into the jail and been passed module to module in a series of visitor and inmate rectums. When not actually using the pencil, I would also be expected to hide it from the hacks in such a manner.

I chose the law library instead and set to work, writing on the back of the pages of a motion that had already been filed and dismissed.

What I put together was essentially a to-do list for my investigator and co-counsel. We’d had some setbacks in the early going — no cameras in the lot where I had parked the night of the Redwood party; no cameras that worked, at least, at my across-the-street neighbors’. My own camera on the front deck of my house did not pick up a view of the garage or street below. But I felt that there was still much that could be done to shift things and get momentum going in our favor. First and foremost, we needed to get full-data downloads off my cell phone and car, both of which were currently in police custody. We needed to file motions to examine these and retrieve the data. I knew that a cell phone was the best personal tracker on the planet. In my case, it would show that on the night in question, mine was in my home the entire night. Data off the Lincoln’s navigation system would show that the car was parked in the garage all evening and night and through the estimated time of death of Sam Scales. This, of course, didn’t mean I could not have slipped out in a borrowed car or with a co-conspirator to abduct Sam Scales, but then logic and common sense starts undercutting the state’s case. If I had planned the crime so carefully, why did I then drive around for a day with the body in the trunk?

The car and phone data would be two powerful points to put in front of a jury and they would also serve to corner the prosecution in regard to opportunity, a key building block of guilt. The prosecution carried the burden of proof and therefore would have to explain how I committed this crime in my own garage when it could not be proven that either my car or I had ever left the property.

Had I lured Sam Scales to the house and then killed him? Prove it.

Had I used a different vehicle to secretly leave the house to abduct Sam and then bring him back to place him in the trunk of my own car and then kill him? Prove it.

These were motions I would need Jennifer to research and write. For Cisco I had a different task. I had initially put him on a survey of my prior cases in search of someone who might want to do me harm: an unhappy client, a snitch, someone I had thrown under the bus at trial. Framing me for a murder was a bit extreme as far as revenge plots go, but I knew that I was being set up by somebody and had to leave no possibility unchecked. Now I would shift Cisco away from that angle of investigation and turn it over to Lorna Taylor. She knew my cases and my files better than anyone and would know what to look for. She could handle the paper chase while I put Cisco full-time on Sam Scales. I had not represented Scales in years and knew very little about him. I needed Cisco to background him and figure out how and why he was chosen as the victim in the plot to get to me. I needed to know everything Sam had his fingers in. I had no doubt that at the time of his murder, he was either scheming his next con or in the middle of it. Either way, I needed to know the details.

Part of vetting Sam Scales’s life was to also vet him in death. We had gotten the autopsy report in the very first but thin wave of discovery from the prosecution. It confirmed the obvious, that Scales had died of multiple gunshot wounds. But we had received only the initial autopsy report put together after the examination of the body. It did not include a toxicology report. That usually took two to four weeks to complete following the autopsy. That meant the toxicology results should be in by now and the fact that they had not been included in the latest batch of discovery was suspicious to me. The prosecution might be hiding something and I needed to find out what it was. I also wanted to know what level of mental function Sam Scales was at when he was put into the trunk of my car, presumably alive, and shot.

This could be handled two ways. Jennifer could simply file a motion seeking the report as part of discovery, or Cisco could go down to the coroner’s office and try to cadge a copy of it on his own. It was, after all, a public record.

On my to-do list, I assigned the job to Cisco for the simple reason that if he got a copy of the tox report, there was a good chance the prosecution would not be aware that we got it. This was the better strategy. Don’t let the prosecution know what you have and where you are going with it — unless it is required.

That was it for the list. For now. But I didn’t want to go back to the module. Too much noise, too many distractions. I liked the quiet of the library and decided that while I had a pen in hand, I might as well sketch out the brief on the motion to examine the cell phone and car. I wanted to hit Judge Warfield with it at Thursday’s hearing so we could move expeditiously. If I outlined it for Jennifer now, she could easily have it ready to submit.

But just as I began, the deputy assigned to the library got a call on his radio and told me I had a visitor. This was a bit of a surprise because I could be visited only by people I had put on the visitation list I filled out at booking. The list was short and primarily contained the names of the people on my defense team. I was already scheduled to have a team meeting in the afternoon.

I guessed the visitor would be Lorna Taylor. Though she managed my practice, she was neither a lawyer nor a licensed investigator, and that precluded her from being able to join the afternoon sessions with Jennifer and Cisco. But when I was escorted into the visitor booth and looked through the glass, I was pleasantly surprised to see the woman whose name I had written last on my list as a long-shot hope.