Michael Connelly - The Gods of Guilt

“Hey, I’m not the one who showed up ten minutes late,” she said. “I was the one who was on time and had to sit and wait—not to mention waiting with the two cartel goons that give everybody the creeps.”

“Okay, okay. Let’s just drop it, all right? I had a rough night.”

“Aren’t you lucky.”

“I don’t mean it that way. I had Cisco waking me up and then Sly Sr. called to chew me out and I ended up with, like, three hours total. Did Cisco put the video on your iPad for me to look at?”

“Yes, it’s in the bag in the back.”

I reached between the seats to the backseat, where her purse was on the floor. It was the size of a grocery bag and it weighed a ton.

“What the hell do you have in this thing?”

“Everything.”

I didn’t ask for further explanation. I managed to pull the bag up to the front seat, open it, and find her iPad. I put the bag on the floor between my feet, lest I pull a muscle leveraging it into the back again.

“It should be right on the screen and ready to go,” Lorna said. “Just hit the play button.”

I opened her iPad case, lit the screen, and saw the frozen image of the front door of a house I knew to be the home of Stratton Sterghos. The camera angle was from below and the quality was not great, as the only illumination came from a porch light next to the door. I assumed Cisco’s people had used a pinhole camera hidden in a potted plant or some other porch ornament. The view was from a side angle so that if anyone approached and knocked on the door the camera would capture their profile.

I hit the play button and watched for a few seconds as nothing moved or happened on the screen. Then a man stepped onto the porch, hesitated, and glanced behind him. It was Lankford. He then turned back and knocked on the door. He waited for the door to be answered. I waited, too.

Nothing happened. I knew no one would answer the door but it was a tense moment just the same.

“Which way do you want me to go today?” Lorna asked.

“Just hold on a minute,” I said. “Let me watch.”

The video was without sound. Lankford knocked again with more force. He then looked back off camera and shook his head. Seemingly at the direction of someone offscreen, he turned and knocked again, even harder.

No one answered. A second man stepped up on the porch and moved to Lankford’s right side so he could look in through the window next to the door. He cupped his eyes as he leaned against the glass. His face was hidden until he leaned back, turned to Lankford, and said something. It was James Marco.

I froze the screen so I could just look at them. It was an image I knew would cause a sea change in the case. It was perfectly reasonable and acceptable that Lankford would show up at the front door of a man listed as a defense witness on a case he was assigned to for the District Attorney’s Office. But the confluence of Lankford and DEA agent James Marco on that front porch changed things exponentially. I was looking at digital evidence that tied Marco to Lankford and the events surrounding the murder of Gloria Dayton. At minimum, I felt I was looking at reasonable doubt.

I spoke to Lorna without taking my eyes off the screen.

“Where’s Cisco now?”

“He came home, gave me that, and went to sleep. He said he’d be in court by ten.”

I nodded. He deserved the chance to sleep late.

“Well, he did good.”

“Did you watch the whole thing? He said watch it to the end.”

I pushed the play button. Lankford and Marco grew tired of waiting for the door to be answered and walked off the porch. I waited. Nothing happened. No action on the porch.

“What am I looking—”

Then I saw it. It was barely a shadow on the other side of the porch, but I saw it. One or both of the men walked down the side of the house.

The video then jumped to another view—this one from a camera in the backyard pointed toward the rear of the house. I noticed that the time count jumped backwards ten seconds. I watched and waited and then I saw two figures emerge from both side yards of the house and meet at the rear door. Under the light over the door I could make out their faces. Again it was Lankford and Marco. Lankford knocked on the door but Marco didn’t wait for an answer. He squatted down and went to work on the doorknob, obviously attempting to pick the lock.

“This is amazing,” I said. “I can’t believe we got it.”

“What exactly is it?” Lorna asked. “Cisco wouldn’t tell me. He said it was top secret but a game changer.”

“It is—a game changer, I mean. I’ll tell you in a minute. It’s not top secret.”

I silently watched the rest of the video. Marco got the door open and looked back at Lankford and nodded. He then disappeared inside while Lankford waited outside, his back to the door, and kept watch.

The video jumped inside the house to an overhead camera in the kitchen. It was a fish-eye lens, most likely housed in a smoke detector. Marco walked beneath the camera from the back door to a hallway but then turned around and came back to the kitchen. He crossed the floor and went to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, and reached in. He started checking through the various frozen food containers until he selected a package that contained two pieces of French bread pizza. Living alone, I knew the brand and the pizza well. Marco carefully opened the box without tearing the flap. He then took out one of the plastic-wrapped pizzas and secured it under his arm while he reached into the pocket of his black-leather bomber jacket and removed something. His hand moved too fast for me to identify what he held, but whatever it was, he shoved it into the pizza box and then put the pizza back in on top of it. He returned the box to the freezer under several other packages and turned to the back door.

The video jumped outside again and I saw Marco step out of the house, lock the door, and close it. He had been inside under a minute. He nodded to Lankford and they separated, each walking down the side of the house they had come from. The video ended there.

I looked up to see where we were. Lorna was about to turn onto the 101 from Sunset. I could see down the ramp that the freeway was the usual morning parking lot. I felt the first slight tightening in my chest that always came with thoughts of being late for court.

“Why’d you go this way?”

“Because I asked you and you told me to be quiet. You try so many different ways every day, I didn’t know what you wanted.”

“Earl always took pride in beating the traffic. He always tried different ways.”

“Well, Earl isn’t here.”

“I know.”

I put it aside and tried to think about what I had just seen on the video. I wasn’t sure yet how I would use it, but I knew without a doubt it was courtroom gold. We had captured on film a rogue drug agent and his accomplice planting drugs in Stratton Sterghos’s house as some sort of scheme to eliminate or control him as a witness. This took things far beyond anything I was expecting.

I whistled low as I closed the iPad and then started putting it back into Lorna’s bag.

“Okay, now can you tell me what that is and what you’re so excited about that it has you whistling?”

I nodded.

“Okay, you saw that we amended our witness list yesterday, right?”

“Yes, and the judge wants to talk about it today.”

“Right. Well, that was part of a play.”

“You mean like one of Legal Siegel’s moves?”

“Yeah, but it’s my move. We’re calling it ‘Marco Polo.’ The amended list had lots of new names on it. You heard Forsythe complain about them.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, one of the names on the list was Stratton Sterghos. The list was designed to make it look like we were cloaking him, sort of hoping to slip him through with all the others. He was listed right in the middle of all the names of the tenants from Gloria’s building. But the play is that we wanted the prosecution team to think that we were up to something and to look for the name that we were hiding in plain sight.”