Майкл Коннелли - Law of Innocence

“Have you looked at the videos yet?” I asked.

“Only about ten times while we were waiting,” Cisco said.

“And?”

I looked at Jennifer with the question. She was the lawyer.

“Your recall of what was said and done was excellent,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Can you stand to watch it again? I want to take notes for the Q and A with Officer Milton.”

“Do you think that’s the best way to go?” Jennifer asked.

I looked at her.

“You mean me asking the guy who arrested me the questions?”

“Yes. Might look vindictive to the jury.”

I nodded.

“It could. But there won’t be a jury.”

“There will probably be reporters. It will get out to the pool.”

“Okay, I’m still going to write questions, and we’ll make it a game-time decision. You should write up what you would ask and we’ll compare tomorrow or Wednesday.”

I was not allowed to touch the computer. Cisco turned the screen toward me. He played the video from Milton’s body cam first. The camera was attached to his uniform at chest height. The footage began with a view of the steering wheel of his car and quickly moved to him exiting the car and moving up the shoulder of the road toward a car I recognized as my Lincoln.

“Stop it,” I said. “This is bullshit.”

Cisco hit the stop button.

“What is bullshit?” Jennifer asked.

“The video,” I said. “Berg knows what I want and she’s fucking with us even though she made the grand gesture of compliance in court today. I want you to go back to the judge tomorrow with a motion requesting the full video. I want to see where this guy was and what he was doing before I supposedly happened to cross his path. Tell the judge we want to go back half an hour minimum on the body cam. And we want the full video before we go in for the hearing Thursday.”

“Got it.”

“Okay, go ahead with what they gave us.”

Cisco hit the play button again and I watched. There was a time code in the corner of the screen and I immediately started writing down times and notes to go with them. The traffic stop and what happened afterward was pretty much how I remembered it. I saw several places where I thought I could score points questioning Milton, and a few others where I thought I might be able to lead him into a lie trap.

Where I saw new stuff on the video was when Milton opened the trunk of the Lincoln and looked down to examine Sam Scales for any sign of life. I had been in the back seat of Milton’s patrol car at that point, my view of the trunk limited and from a low angle. Now I was looking at Sam’s body on its side, knees pulled up toward the chest and arms behind his back, secured with several wraps of duct tape. He was overweight and looked as though he was crammed into the trunk.

I could see bullet wounds in the chest and shoulder areas, and what looked like an entrance wound on the left temple and an exit through the right eye. This wasn’t new to me. We had already gotten crime scene photos in the first batch of discovery from Berg but the video lent a visceral realness to the crime and the crime scene.

Sam Scales in life deserved no sympathy but in death he looked pitiful. Blood from his wounds had spread across the floor of the trunk and dripped out through a hole created by the bullet that had exited his eye.

“Oh, shit,” Milton could be heard saying.

And then he followed his exclamation with a low humming that sounded like a stifled laugh.

“Play that part again,” I said. “After Milton says ‘Oh, shit.’”

Cisco replayed the sequence and I listened again to the sound Milton had made. It was almost like he was gloating. I thought it might be useful for a jury to hear.

“Okay, freeze it,” I said.

The image on the screen froze. I looked at Sam Scales. I had represented him for several years and through different charges and had somehow liked him even as I privately joined the public in their outrage at the scams he pulled. A weekly newspaper had once labeled him “The Most Hated Man in America” and it wasn’t hyperbole. He was a disaster con artist. Without showing a scintilla of guilt or conscience, he set up websites to take donations for survivors of earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, and school shootings. Wherever there was a tragedy that caught up the rest of the world in horror, Sam Scales was there with the quickly built website, the false testimonials, and the button that said DONATE NOW!

Though truly believing in the ideal that everybody charged with a crime deserves the best defense possible, even I could not take Sam Scales for very long. It wasn’t that he had refused to pay an agreed-upon fee for the last case I handled for him. The final straw came with the case I didn’t handle—his arrest for soliciting donations to pay for coffins for children killed in a childcare-center massacre in Chicago. Donations poured into a website Scales had built, but as usual, the money went right into his pocket. He called me from jail after his arrest. When I heard the details of the scam, I told Sam our relationship was over. I got a request for his files from a lawyer with the Public Defender’s Office, and that had been the last I had heard about Sam Scales—until he ended up dead in the trunk of my car.

“Anything unique on the car cam?” I asked.

“Not really,” Cisco said. “Same stuff, different angle.”

“Okay, then let’s skip that for now. We’re running out of time. What else was in the latest discovery from Death Row Dana?”

My attempt to inject a little levity into the discussion fell on deaf ears. The stakes were too high for these two to make jokes. Cisco answered my question in the full-on professional tone that contradicted his look and demeanor.

“We also got video from the black hole,” he said. “I haven’t had time to go through it all but it will be my priority once I get out of here.”

The black hole was what regular downtown commuters called the massive underground parking garage located beneath the civic center. It spiraled down into the earth seven levels deep. I had parked there on the day of the Sam Scales murder, giving my driver the day off because I expected to be in trial all day. The prosecution’s theory was that I had abducted Sam Scales the night before, put him in the trunk, and shot him, leaving his body there overnight and the next day while I was in court. To me that theory defied common sense and I was confident I could convince a jury of that. But there was still time between now and the trial for the prosecution to change theories and come up with something better.

Time of death had been set at approximately twenty-four hours before the body’s discovery by Officer Milton. This also accounted for the leakage under the car that had supposedly alerted Milton and led to the grim discovery of the trunk’s contents. The body was beginning to break down and decompose, and fluids were leaking through the bullet hole in the floor of the trunk.

“Any theory on why the prosecution wanted those angles in the garage?” I asked.

“I think they want to be able to say that nobody tampered with your car all day,” Jennifer said. “And if the camera angles are clear enough to show the dripping of bodily fluids under the car, then they have that too.”

“We’ll know more when I can get a look,” Cisco added.

A sudden chill went through me as I thought about how someone had murdered Sam Scales in my car, most likely while it was parked in my garage, and then how I had driven around with the body for a day.

“Okay, what else?” I asked.

“This is new,” Cisco said. “We have a witness report from your next-door neighbor, who heard the voices of two men arguing at your house the night before.”