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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.”

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.

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.

Kendall Roberts was on the other side of the glass. I had not seen her in more than a year. Not since she had told me she was leaving me.

I slid onto the stool in front of the glass and picked up the phone out of its cradle. She picked up the phone on the other side.

“Kendall,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Well,” she said, “I heard about you getting arrested and I had to come. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. It’s all bullshit and I’ll beat this in court.”

“I believe you.”

When she had left me, she had also left the city.

“Uh, when did you get here?” I asked. “Into town, I mean.”

“Last night. Late.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m at a hotel. By the airport.”

“Well, how long are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I have no plans. When is the trial?”

“Not for, like, two months. But we’re in court this Thursday.”

“Maybe I’ll come by.”

She said it as if I had invited her to a happy hour or a party. I didn’t care. She looked beautiful. I didn’t think she had cut her hair since I had last seen her. It now framed her face as it fell to her shoulders. The dimples in her cheeks when she smiled were there like always. I felt my chest constrict. I had been with my two ex-wives for a total of seven years. I had spent almost as much time with Kendall. And it was good for every one of those years until we started drifting apart and she said she wanted to leave L.A.

I couldn’t leave my daughter or my practice. I offered to make more time for travel but I wasn’t going to leave. So, in the end, it was Kendall who left. She packed everything she owned one day while I was in trial and left me a note. I had put Cisco on it just so I had the comfort of knowing where she was and that she was all right—or so I told myself. He tracked her to Hawaii but I left it at that. Never flew across the ocean to find her and beg her to return. I simply waited and hoped.

“Where did you come in from?” I asked.

“Honolulu,” she said. “I’ve been living in Hawaii.”

“Did you open a studio?”

“No, but I teach classes. It’s better for me not to be the owner. I just teach now. I get by.”

She’d had a yoga studio on Ventura Boulevard for several years but sold it when she started getting restless.

“How long are you here?”

“I told you. I don’t know yet.”

“Well, if you want, you can stay at the house. I obviously won’t be using it and you could water the plants—some of which I think are actually yours.”

“Uh, maybe. We’ll see.”

“The extra key is still under the cactus on the front deck.”

“Thanks. Why are you here, Mickey? Don’t you have bail or …?”

“Right now they have me on five-million bail, which means I could get out with a ten percent bond. But you don’t get that money back at the end, innocent or guilty, and that would be about everything I’ve got, including the equity in my house. I can’t see giving all of that away for a couple months of freedom. I’ve got them on a speedy trial clock and I’m going to win this thing and get out without having to pay a bail bondsman a dime.”

She nodded.

“Good,” she said. “I believe you.”

The interviews were fifteen minutes only and then the phones would get cut off. I knew we were almost out of time. But seeing her made me think of all that was at stake.

“It is really nice of you to come see me,” I said. “I’m sorry the visits are so short and you came so far.”

“You put me on your visitors list,” she said. “I wasn’t sure when they asked me and then they found my name. That was nice.”

“I don’t know, I just thought maybe you’d come if you heard about it. I didn’t know if it would make news in Hawaii but it was big news here.”

“You knew I was in Hawaii?”

Ugh. I had slipped up.

“Uh, sort of,” I said. “When you left like you did, I just wanted to make sure you were okay, you know? I had Cisco check things out and he told me you flew to Hawaii. I didn’t know where or anything like that, or if it was permanent. Just that you had gone.”

I watched her think through my answer.

“Okay,” she said, accepting it.

“How is it there?” I asked, trying to move past my gaffe. “You like it?”

“It’s been okay. Isolating. I’m thinking of coming back.”

“Well, I don’t know what I can do from here, but if there’s anything you need, let me know.”

“Okay, thanks. I guess I should be going. They said I only get fifteen minutes.”

“Yeah, but they just shut down the phones when your time is up. You think you’ll come back to visit? I’m here every day if I’m not in court.”

I smiled like I was some sort of comedian hawking his stand-up act. Before she could answer, there was a loud electronic buzz on the phone and the line went dead. I saw her speak but didn’t hear it. She looked at the phone and then at me and slowly put it back in its cradle. The visit was over.

I nodded at her and smiled awkwardly. She made a slight wave and then got up from her stool. I did the same and started walking down the line of visitor booths, all of them open behind the prisoner’s stool. I looked through every window as I passed and caught a few glimpses of her moving parallel to me on the other side.

Then she was gone.

The hack asked me whether I was going back to the law library and I told him I wanted to go back to the module.

While I was being led back, I worked over my final view of Kendall on the phone. I had watched her lips as she spoke into the dead phone. I came to realize that she had said, “I don’t know.”

Thursday, December 5

Officer Roy Milton was in uniform and sitting in the first row of the gallery behind the prosecution table when I was led into the courtroom. I recognized him easily from the night of my arrest. Following Sheriff’s Department protocol I was manacled by a waist chain, with my hands cuffed at my sides. I was led to the defense table, where the escort deputy unchained me, and Jennifer, who was standing and waiting, helped me put on my suit jacket. Lorna had somehow gotten two-day tailoring done and the suit fit me perfectly. I turned toward the gallery as I shot the cuffs and addressed Milton.

“Officer Milton, how are you today?” I asked.

“Don’t answer that,” Dana Berg said from the prosecution table.

I looked at her and she stared right back at me.

“Mind your own business, Haller,” she said.

I spread my hands in a gesture of surprise.

“Just being cordial,” I said.

“Be cordial with someone on your side,” Berg said.

“All right,” I said. “Whatever.”

I did a 180 sweep of the gallery and saw my daughter in her usual spot. I smiled and nodded and she gave both back to me. I didn’t see Kendall Roberts anywhere but I wasn’t expecting to. I had come to view her visit the other day as her fulfilling some sort of duty to me. But that was all there would be.

I finally pulled out my chair at the defense table and sat down next to Jennifer.

“You look good,” she said. “Lorna did a good job with that suit.”

We had spoken earlier in the holding cell along with Cisco. But Cisco was gone now, with a full plate of investigative tasks to carry out.

I heard whispers directly behind me and turned to see that two of the reporters who had been covering the case from the beginning were now in their usual spots. Both were women, one from the Los Angeles Times, the other from the Daily News, competitors who liked to sit together and chat while waiting for court to start. I had known Audrey Finnel from the Times for years, as she had covered a few of my cases. Addie Gamble was new on the criminal courts beat for the News and I knew her by her byline only.

Soon Judge Warfield appeared in the doorway behind the clerk’s corral and court was called to order. Before getting to the motion to suppress, I told the judge that I had a new motion to file with the court on an emergency basis because the prosecution was still not playing fair when it came to the rules of discovery.

“What is it this time, Mr. Haller?” the judge asked.

Her voice took on a tone of exasperation, which I found disconcerting, since the hearing had just started. As I walked to the lectern, Jennifer carried copies of the new motion to the prosecution table and the court clerk, who then handed the documents to the judge.

“Your Honor, the defense just wants what it is entitled to,” I said. “You have a discovery motion in front of you for data from my own car and cell phone, which the prosecution has not provided because it knows it is exculpatory and will show that I was in my house and that my car was in my garage when I supposedly went out and abducted Mr. Scales and then took him back to my house to murder him.”

Dana Berg immediately stood up and objected. She didn’t even have to state her grounds for the objection. The judge was on it right away.

“Mr. Haller,” she boomed. “Making your case to the media instead of the court is unacceptable and … dangerous. Do you understand me?”

“I do, Judge, and I apologize,” I said. “Defending myself has taken me to some emotional depths I don’t usually deal with.”

“That is no excuse. Consider that your one and only warning.”

“Thank you, Your Honor.”

But as I spoke my apology, I couldn’t help wondering what the judge would do to me with a contempt citation. Put me in jail? I was already there. Fine me? Good luck collecting with me earning zero income while I fought a murder rap.

“Continue,” the judge instructed. “Carefully.”

“Judge, the motion is clear,” I said. “The state obviously has this information and we have not received it. It appears that it is the practice of the District Attorney’s Office to hold discovery and not share it unless it is specifically asked for by the defense, and that is not the way it works. This is vital information about my own property that I need in order to defend myself, and I need it right now, Your Honor. Not when the prosecution feels like it.”

The judge looked at Berg for a response and the prosecutor took the lectern, lowering the stem microphone to her level.

“Your Honor, Mr. Haller’s assumptions are completely wrong,” she said. “The information he seeks was acquired by the LAPD following the issuance of a search warrant, which took time to write and execute. The material that came from that search warrant was received by my office just yesterday and has not yet been reviewed by me or anyone on my team. I believe the rules of discovery allow me to at least review evidence before passing it to the defense.”

“When will the defense have this material?” Warfield asked.

“I would think by the end of the day tomorrow,” Berg said.

“Your Honor?” I said.

“Hold your horses, Mr. Haller,” Warfield said. “Ms. Berg, if you don’t have time to review the material, then get someone else to review it or turn it over blind. I want you to give it to the defense by the end of the day. That’s today I’m talking about. And that’s the workday. Not midnight.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” a chastened Berg said.

“Your Honor, I would still like to be heard,” I said.

“Mr. Haller, I just got you what you asked for,” Warfield said impatiently. “What else is there to say?”

I went to the lectern as Berg stepped away. I glanced back into the gallery and saw Kendall sitting next to my daughter. That gave me confidence. I raised the microphone stem back up.

“Judge,” I began, “the defense is troubled by this absurd idea that discovery does not need to be completed until a review of the discoverable evidence occurs. Review is an amorphous word, Your Honor. What is a review? How long is a review? Two days? Two weeks? Two months? I would ask the court to set out clear guidelines about this. As the court knows, I have not and will not waive my right to a speedy trial, and therefore any delay in the transfer of discovery puts the defense on an unfair footing.”

“Your Honor?” Berg said. “May I be heard?”

“No, Ms. Berg, there is no need for you to be heard,” Warfield said. “Let me make clear the rules of discovery in this courtroom. Discovery is a two-way street. What comes in must go out. Forthwith. No delay, no undue review. What the state gets, the defense gets. Conversely, what the defense gets, the state gets. Without delay. The penalty for violation is the disallowance of the material at the source of the complaint. Remember that. Now, can we take up the cause that this hearing was scheduled for? The motion in limine filed by Mr. Haller to essentially disallow the body in this case. Ms. Berg, you bear the burden of justifying a warrantless search and seizure. Do you have a witness to call in this matter?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Berg said. “The People call Officer Roy Milton.”

Milton stood in the gallery and walked through the gate and to the witness stand. He raised his hand and was sworn in. After he was seated and the preliminaries of identity were completed, Berg elicited Milton’s version of my arrest.

“You are assigned to Metro Division, correct, Officer Milton?”

“Yes.”

“What is Metro’s jurisdiction?”

“Well, we have the whole city, I guess you could say.”

“But on the night in question, you were working downtown on Second Street, weren’t you?”

“That’s correct.”

“What was your assignment that night, Officer Milton?”

“I was on an SPU assignment and was posted near—”

“Let me stop you right there. What is SPU?”

“Special Problems Unit.”

“And what was the special problem that you were addressing that night?”

“We were encountering spikes in crimes in the civic center. Vandalism mostly. We had spotters in the center and I was in a support car posted just outside the zone. I was at Second and Broadway, with eyelines down both streets.”

“Eyelines for what, Officer Milton?”

“Everything, anything. I saw the defendant pull out of the parking lot on Broadway.”

“You did, didn’t you? Let’s talk about that. You were stationary, correct?”

“Yes, I was parked at the curb at the southeast corner on Second. I had a view up to the tunnel in front of me and down Broadway to my left. That was where I saw the vehicle leaving the pay lot.”

“Were you assigned that position, or did you choose it?”

“I was assigned that general location—the top corner of the box we were putting over the civic center.”

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