“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.”
I shook my head.
“Didn’t happen,” I said. “Who was it, Mrs. Shogren or that idiot Chasen who lives downhill from me?”
Cisco looked at the report.
“Millicent Shogren,” he read. “Couldn’t make out the words. Just angry voices.”
“Okay, you need to interview her—and don’t scare her,” I said. “Then you talk to Gary Chasen on the other side of the house. He’s always picking up strays in West Hollywood and then they get into arguments. If Millie heard an argument, it was coming from Chasen’s. Since it’s a stepped neighborhood and she’s at the top of the hill, she hears everything.”
“What about you?” Jennifer asked. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I told you about that night. I went to bed early and didn’t hear a thing.”
“And you went to bed alone,” Jennifer confirmed.
“Unfortunately,” I said. “If I knew I was going to be tagged with a murder, maybe I would have picked up a stray myself.”
Again, stakes too high. Nobody cracked a smile. But the discussion of what Millie Shogren heard and from where she heard it prompted a question.
“Millie didn’t tell them she heard the shots, right?” I asked.
“Doesn’t say it here,” Cisco said.
“Then make sure you ask her,” I said. “We might be able to turn their witness into ours.”
Cisco shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“No go, boss,” he said. “We also got the ballistics report in the discovery package, and it doesn’t look good.”
Now I realized why they had been so somber, with me trying to cheer them up instead of the other way around. They had buried the lede and now I was about to hear it.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Okay, well, the one shot that went through the victim’s head and that punctured the floor of the trunk was found on the floor of your garage,” Cisco said. “Along with blood. The slug hit the concrete and flattened, so matching of the rifling was no good. But they did metal-alloy tests and matched it to the other bullets that were in the body. According to what we got in the package, the DNA is still out on the blood but we can assume that will be matched to Sam Scales as well.”
I nodded. This meant that the state could prove that Sam Scales was murdered in my home’s garage at a time I had confirmed that I was at home. I thought about the legal conclusion I had offered Edgar Quesada the night before. I was now in the same sinking boat. Legally speaking, I was fucked.
“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.
7
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.