Майкл Коннелли - Law of Innocence

“It’s a safety issue, Your Honor,” she said. “Mr. Haller might be in his finest suit but he is still in custody and charged with murder. I don’t think there should be any time that he is not under the supervision and control of the Sheriff’s Department. I personally am not comfortable with the deputy outside the room.”

I shook my head.

“She still thinks I want to escape,” I said. “I’m two days away from notching a not-guilty on this case and she thinks I’m planning to flee. Shows how clueless she is.”

The judge held up her hand to stop me from going on.

“Mr. Haller, you should know by now that personal attacks will get you nowhere in my court,” she said. “And that includes my chambers. Deputy Chan has been assigned to my courtroom for four years. I trust him completely. He stays, and what you say here will not be leaked or distributed other than through the official record.”

She nodded to the court reporter, who was at her usual spot in the corner with her stool and steno machine.

“Now,” Warfield continued. “What are we doing here?”

I nodded to Maggie.

“Judge,” she said, “I just wrote and sent an order to your clerk for your signature. It’s a petition for a writ of habeas corpus ad testificandum, ordering one of the FBI agents just named in court to appear and give testimony.”

“Hold on,” Warfield said.

She picked up her desk phone, called her clerk, and told him to download and print three copies of Maggie’s order and bring them to chambers. She then hung up and told Maggie to continue.

“Judge, we want you to order FBI agent Dawn Ruth to appear in court to give testimony,” Maggie said.

“Didn’t I sign a subpoena for the FBI a month ago?” the judge asked.

“And they ignored it as the federal government can and is wont to do,” Maggie said. “Standard operating procedure at the fed. That’s why we want you to issue the writ. It will be difficult for the U.S. Attorney and Agent Ruth to ignore you, especially if the writ should go to warrant.”

This last part was a hint. Should the judge issue the writ, she could give it some teeth. The U.S. Attorney could ignore it or tell Agent Ruth not to respond to it. But if failure to comply resulted in an arrest warrant, then Agent Ruth and the U.S. Attorney would be vulnerable to being taken into custody as soon as they strayed outside the federal building and onto territory where Judge Warfield held jurisdiction. It would be a bold move, but Maggie and I had guessed that Warfield was the kind of judge who would be up for it.

“The People object,” Berg said. “This is all part of a carefully orchestrated attempt to distract the jury from the evidence. This is Haller’s specialty, Your Honor. He does it in every case, every trial. It’s not going to work here, because it’s a con. Call it the ‘bleeding the beast’ con. But it has nothing— nothing —to do with the evidence.”

“This is not a distraction, Judge,” I said, cutting in before anyone else could speak. “Agents Rick Aiello and Dawn Ruth were just named by a witness in front of the jury. Agent Ruth was in the courtroom before that, keeping tabs on this case. Every one of those jurors—”

“Wait just a second, Mr. Haller,” Warfield said. “You know Agent Ruth by sight?”

“Yes,” I said. “She and Aiello confronted me at my house when my team started digging into this. They are the agents who went to Ventura County to take Sam Scales off the hands of the Sheriff’s Department up there.”

That was just an educated guess on my part, but it seemed logical, since I was sure the leaked arrest report had come from Ruth. I pressed on.

“We now have Ruth’s and Aiello’s names on the record and out in front of the jury,” I said. “They are expecting to hear from at least one of them, and the defense is entitled to their testimony.”

“They also have the name Louis Opparizio,” Berg said. “Are we going to see him?”

I turned to look at Berg. She had a smirk on her face. It was a slip. She obviously would have known that Opparizio was on our witness list and that Warfield had signed a defense subpoena for him. But to already know that Opparizio was dead was a major tell. It meant that the prosecution had been tracking Opparizio to a greater extent than I had thought. It also meant that Berg had been lying in wait and was ready to make a move to prevent his appearance or to neutralize him if he was allowed to testify. Her slip of the tongue had allowed me a glimpse behind the curtain.

All of this apparently passed by Maggie in the heat of the moment and she pressed on with her argument.

“Your Honor,” she said, “it is your obligation to ensure that the defendant has a fair trial. That can’t happen here without the testimony of the FBI. This is the whole case. The only alternative is to dismiss the charge.”

“Yeah, right,” Berg said sarcastically. “That’s not happening. Judge, you can’t do this. This is a giant distraction. They just want to put the FBI out there to draw the jury away from the truth. You can’t—”

“You don’t speak for the court, Ms. Berg,” Warfield said. “Let me ask the obvious question here. The agents were referenced in testimony regarding a three-year-old fraud case in Nevada. Where is the relevancy to this case?”

“They told Schultz that this was happening all over the country,” Maggie said.

“The defense will show through the agent’s testimony and other evidence that the Nevada case is more than relevant to the murder of Sam Scales,” I added. “We will show that Sam Scales was involved in a copycat scheme at BioGreen at the Port of Los Angeles.”

“But Detective Drucker testified that he could not confirm that Sam Scales even worked there,” Warfield said.

“That’s exactly why we need Agent Ruth to testify,” I said. “She can confirm it, because she’s the one who sent him in there as an informant. He was working for them and that’s what got him killed.”

I noticed that Maggie had turned in her seat and was looking at me. I knew I was revealing more than I should, and promising more than I could deliver. But I instinctively felt that this was the key moment of the case. I needed to get Agent Ruth on the stand and was willing at this point to say anything to get her there.

“Your Honor,” Maggie said. “It’s a third-party-culpability case and getting Agent Ruth to testify is how we get there.”

Berg shook her head.

“You can’t be seriously considering this,” she said. “This is as thin as a spider’s web. You can see right through it. There is nothing here but conjecture. No evidence, no testimony that remotely links whatever is going on at BioGreen with the murder of Sam Scales in his garage!”

She punctuated her objection with a finger pointed at me.

There was a pause while Warfield considered all arguments, and then she ruled.

“Thank you for your arguments,” she said. “I’m going to sign the writ ordering Agent Ruth to appear at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. This time I will transmit it to the U.S. Attorney and I will remind him that he has to leave the building at the end of the day, and when he does, he’s on my turf. Additionally, I will tell him that this case has garnered a lot of media attention and I can guarantee that the reporters in the courtroom tomorrow will hear my thoughts on the FBI and the U.S. Attorney if they do not comply.”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Maggie said.

“Judge, the People still object to this,” Berg said.

“Your objection was overruled,” Warfield said. “Do you have something else?”

“Yes, a running objection,” Berg said. “With all due respect, since the start of this trial, the court has continuously ruled in a way that has been prejudicial to the People.”