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  Brandon nodded.

  She shook her head. “I’m sure they’d love to, but the jail’s not going to give them a chance if they can help it. You’re almost certainly going to ad-seg now.” She looked at Nate. “That’s administrative segregation—basically solitary confinement.” She turned back to Brandon. “But on the bright side, you get your own cell and you probably don’t have to worry about Los Reyes, at least for now. The warden and guards may not be happy with you, but the last thing they want is for Los Reyes to jump you again. Imagine how that would look in the East Bay Times.”

  Brandon nodded slowly as he absorbed her words, and his face lightened some. “That’s good news.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe,” Sofia said. She looked down at her notes. “I think we’re ready. Just tell them exactly what you told us and don’t change your story. The key points are that you never met him before, he jumped you, and it was self-defense.” She paused and reached across the table to put her hand on his thick forearm. “You’ll be fine. And don’t worry. We’ll be with you the whole time. You ready?”

  Brandon nodded.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Two hours later, Brandon was numb and a little disoriented. Too many things had happened too fast. The attack. Discovering that he had killed a man. The interrogation, which had just ended. They had asked him the same questions over and over, trying to catch him in an inconsistency. And then, just when they were finally taking him to his new cell, they changed course and took him to the visitation room to talk to his mom.

  The part of his brain that still functioned noticed that it wasn’t visiting hours. So they must have decided to make an exception. Why? Probably because they knew he was exhausted and they figured his guard might be down with his mother. He might say something to her that contradicted what he had said to them. Something they could use against him.

  She was the only visitor, increasing the illusion of privacy. He felt tired as he entered the room, tired in the very depths of his soul. But he would have to be careful what he said to her, and not just for the usual reasons.

  She was watching the door as he came in, as she always did on her weekly visits. She was dressed nicely and she’d spent time on her hair and makeup, as if she had been planning on an evening out when she got the news. Even through the thick glass of the window, he could tell that every muscle in her body was taut. She already clutched the handset tightly. Her face was a mask of tension and fear.

  He squared his shoulders, gave her a small smile, and walked across the room, trying to look as calm as possible. He picked up the handset on his side and put it to his ear.

  “Brandon, are you all right?” she asked urgently.

  “I’m fine. I pulled a muscle in my neck and I’ve got a lump on my head, but it’s no worse than anything that happened a dozen times on the wrestling mat.”

  “What happened?”

  He repeated the story for at least the half-dozenth time, careful to keep it exactly the same as what he told his interrogators. Having gone over it so many times, he was able to keep his voice even, which was good. “I was exercising in the yard when some guy I’d never met before jumped on me. He tried to cut my face, but I got the shiv—uh, knife—away and cut him to make him let me go. Then I punched him so I could get away. It all happened really fast.”

  “Is it true that he’s dead?”

  “That’s what they told me,” Brandon said. “I didn’t mean to kill him, but he didn’t give me a choice,” he said for the benefit of his unseen listeners.

  “It wasn’t your fault, Brandon,” she said, her voice shaking. “I . . . I’m sure you didn’t have a choice.”

  “I didn’t,” he assured her. “If he gave me one, I wouldn’t have killed him.”

  She nodded. “I know. It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated.

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  They were both silent for a moment, and Brandon hoped the meeting might be almost over. He was very tired.

  “Do they have any idea why he attacked you? Was it just a random thing?” she asked.

  He sighed. “They don’t know for sure, but he was a member of this gang called Los Reyes. They think it might be connected to that, but they’re still investigating.”

  “A gang?” she said, the muscles in her face tightening with fresh fear. “What will happen to you now? Will you be safe?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, relieved to give her some genuinely good news. “They’re going to give me my own cell and keep me separated from most of the other inmates, particularly Los Reyes members. I’ll be safer than I have been since I first came here.”

  “Thank God,” she said, relaxing a fraction.

  “Yeah,” he replied mechanically. Fatigue settled on his shoulders like a cement weight, and he realized he couldn’t take any more. “Speaking of my cell, I’m really tired. And you obviously have someplace better to be. You look great, by the way.”

  She tried to smile but didn’t quite succeed. “There’s no better place for me to be than with you,” she said quietly.

  His eyes were suddenly wet. He sniffed. “Thanks, Mom. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” she said, her eyes shining with unshed tears. “Now go get some sleep.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Jessica took a sip of lukewarm coffee and sat at a table in a small conference room at the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office. Her mind oscillated between two very different individuals. The first was Brandon, of course. It was a tremendous relief to know that he was as safe as the jail could make him, but she desperately wanted to hold him tight, to bring him home from that terrible place.

  The other person occupying her thoughts was the witness they were about to meet, Jade Li. Jessica had wanted to know as much as possible about Ms. Li, so she had spent the morning on Google and Dogpile. There were lots of Jade Lis, but eventually she found a website belonging to a Jade Li in the San Francisco Bay Area (no address or phone number) advertising “professional companionship” and showing several pictures of a strikingly beautiful Asian woman wearing revealing-but-stylish outfits in various settings. In one, she wore a formfitting black sheath dress and heels, and she was at what appeared to be a black-tie party. In another, she had on an athletic bra and spandex shorts and she was on a boat with Lake Tahoe’s shoreline in the background. And so on.

  Nate sat next to her, nursing his own cup. He was uncharacteristically pensive, probably for the same reason she was. This was the only witness they had found who was willing to talk to them. If she couldn’t or wouldn’t help them, they were back to square one—and he and Sofia would have a very difficult job ahead of them.

  The conference-room door opened, and Sofia came in with the woman Jessica recognized from the website. She had some lines around her eyes that had been airbrushed out of the pictures, but otherwise the photos had been remarkably honest. She wore an elegant rose-colored suit with a bright-green jade pin shaped like a flower. Jessica never would have guessed she was a prostitute if they met on the street.

  “Ms. Li, I’d like you to meet my cocounsel, Nate Daniels, and Jessica Ames, the mother of our client.”

  Jade Li nodded to both of them with a polite smile and sat down. If being in a government legal office made her nervous, she didn’t show it.

  “Thank you for coming in, Ms. Li,” Sofia said.

  “My pleasure,” she said with a light, lilting accent. “I’m happy to help. And please call me Jade.”

  “Out of curiosity, how did you know that we needed help?” Sofia asked. “We haven’t exactly been advertising.”

  “Maybe not intentionally,” Jade replied with a glance toward Jessica. “But I heard about a woman asking about Linc Thomas’s death. She said she was the mother of a young man accused of Linc’s murder.”

  Jessica nodded. “That would be me.”

  “I looked up the case and called one of the attorneys. And here I am. What can I tell you?”

&nb
sp; “You said that you knew who might want to kill Linc Thomas,” Sofia said. “Who would that be?”

  “Lan Long,” she replied.

  “And where does this Lan Long live?” Sofia asked.

  Jade shook her head, a slight smile curling her lips and making her expression difficult to read. “Lan Long is not a person. It means blue dragon in Chinese. They are a triad—Chinese mafia.”

  “I see,” Sofia said. “Why would a triad want to kill Linc Thomas?”

  Jade gave a small shrug. “He worked for them, but he was sloppy. He talked—not a lot, but they don’t let people talk at all.”

  “So why are you talking to us?” Nate put in.

  “I don’t work for Lan Long,” Jade said. “And I don’t like them. They smuggle girls and sell them.” A touch of heat came into her voice as she spoke.

  They were up against a gang of human traffickers? A chill crept into Jessica’s heart.

  “What did Linc Thomas do for Lan Long?” Sofia asked.

  “They bring in girls on ships. They need someone at the port to get the girls through security. Linc Thomas did this for them.”

  “Do you know this personally?” Sofia asked. “Or is it something you heard from someone else?”

  “It’s something I heard from girls brought in by Lan Long,” Jade admitted.

  “What are their names?” Sofia asked.

  “It doesn’t matter—they won’t talk to you.” She pointed to Jessica with her chin. “Ask her. She tried very hard, but the girl said nothing, right?”

  Jessica felt her face flush. “Yes, that’s right. But they talk to you, don’t they?”

  “Sometimes,” Jade admitted. “They . . .” She paused and another little smile passed over her face. “Some of them are very young, and they see me as an auntie. They trust me.”

  “Would you be willing to talk to them for us?” Sofia asked.

  Jade regarded her silently for a moment. “What do you want to know?”

  Sofia spread her hands. “Whatever they can tell us about Lan Long and Linc Thomas—especially if it connects Lan Long to his murder.”

  Jade nodded. “I will ask. But don’t expect much. They know little and will say less. They are scared.”

  CHAPTER 36

  “I don’t like it,” Cole said.

  Billy’s shoulders twitched in a nervous shrug. “What’s to like?” he asked, flipping Cole’s letter opener through his fingers as he spoke.

  “Why is Jade Li getting herself involved in this?” Cole mused. “What’s she going to do?”

  “Whatever benefits Jade Li the most, of course,” Billy responded.

  Cole nodded. “And what’s that likely to be?”

  The letter opener paused between the index and middle finger of Billy’s right hand. “Do you think she knows about our investigation?”

  “Yes,” Cole said. “And I’ll bet she’d like to see us shut down. She’s no friend of Lan Long, but we’re casting a net wide enough to catch a lot of fish—including her.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet she would,” Billy said, starting to fidget with the letter opener again. “Think she could use this Ames case to make that happen?”

  “Maybe.” Cole thought for a moment, then nodded. “I’ll bet she could. She could point Ames’s lawyers in our direction, for example. If they stumble onto what we’re doing, things could go downhill very fast.”

  “Is there anything we can do about her?” Billy asked.

  “Not yet,” Cole said. “But get ready. We may still be able to work this to our advantage.”

  CHAPTER 37

  “There’s a fine line between jury duty and a hostage situation,” Nate said as he tossed the DNA expert’s report onto the conference table. It landed with a thud, sending a tremor through the table and rustling the neatly organized stack of documents in front of Sofia. “Half an hour of this stuff is going to cross that line. After that, the jury will stop listening and start getting annoyed—which is the last thing we need.”

  “But Hy Byrd is good,” Sofia protested. “Our office has used him in a dozen cases. He knows his stuff.”

  “How many of those cases did you win?”

  “None, but that’s not the point—we didn’t lose because of him.”

  “Maybe not, but we’ll need to win because of him,” Nate said. “You said it yourself—this is a DNA case. If we don’t have a good answer for the prosecution’s DNA testimony, we’ll lose.”

  She nodded. “I agree, but at least give him a shot, okay? He’s really pretty good at explaining this stuff. Besides, he’ll be here any minute.”

  As if on cue, Sofia’s secretary poked her head through the conference-room doorway. “Dr. Hyram Byrd is here to see you.”

  “I’ll go get him,” Sofia said as she popped up and headed for the door.

  She probably wanted to warn Byrd, which was fine with Nate. He wanted to see the expert’s A game. While she was gone, he fortified himself with a swig of Peet’s Big Bang coffee. The Public Defender’s Office didn’t have coffee for guests, so Nate had stopped to pick some up on the way in—a decision he now congratulated himself on.

  Sofia’s voice came in through the door, followed a moment later by Sofia herself and a bulky man who appeared to be only a few years older than her. His blond hair was pulled back in a short ponytail, and he had a well-trimmed beard that was a shade darker than his hair. He carried a canvas satchel bag slung over his shoulder and wore a blazer, white oxford shirt, and jeans. No tie.

  Nate frowned internally. Juries usually expected expert witnesses to have gray hair and be at least fifty. The average juror was much more likely to trust someone who looked like a professor rather than a grad student. It didn’t help that “Hy Byrd” was pronounced exactly like a greeting for a chicken.

  “Dr. Byrd, thanks for coming in,” Nate said with a smile. “We’re looking forward to hearing more about your conclusions. I confess that I found your report a bit hard to follow in places.”

  Byrd nodded as they took seats around the table. “This is the hardest case I’ve had to evaluate. I’m not surprised that it showed in my report. There’s . . . well, there’s good news and bad news. Which would you like me to start with?”

  “Bad news first, of course,” Nate said.

  “Okay.” Byrd reached into his bag and pulled out a slightly crumpled version of his report, which was replete with Post-its. He flipped through it for a couple of seconds. “The bad news starts on page twenty. Brandon’s DNA matches the crime-scene DNA over at least nine loci. According to the FBI’s statistics, the odds against that happening by chance are one in one hundred and thirteen billion.”

  Nate turned to page twenty of the report while Byrd spoke. “I was afraid that’s what that chart meant,” he said. “All right, what’s the good news?”

  “Sorry, but we’re not done with the bad news,” Byrd said. “There’s also arguably a match over two more loci, which raises the odds against a random match.”

  “How high?” Nate asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

  “To about one in a trillion,” Byrd replied. “Which is pretty close to what the DA’s criminalist concluded.”

  “So you agree with her?” Nate asked in surprise. “What’s the good news?”

  “I’ll bet it’s in the last two loci,” Sofia said. “If there are matches on nine loci and arguable matches on two more, that means there’s no match on two of the thirteen, right?”

  Byrd smiled broadly and nodded. “Right. They don’t match—and it’s not even close.”

  That didn’t make sense to Nate. “Wait, I thought the criminalist found a match. How could that be possible if two of these loci didn’t match? Doesn’t that mean it’s not his DNA?”

  “That’s certainly one possibility,” Byrd said. “The other is that we could have what’s called allele drop out or drop in. That means that one of the alleles is missing or another allele got added at a particular locus—usually because the cri
me-scene DNA got degraded somehow or is a mix from several subjects, like in a gang rape.”

  “Remember that memo about how there were problems with the crime-scene DNA and how it must’ve gotten contaminated?” Sofia put in. “This is why she had to put that in there.”

  “Right,” Byrd said. “She says that there might be DNA from multiple individuals in the sample, but she doesn’t explain how that could have happened. Did this guy make a habit of scratching people or something?”

  Nate chuckled. “Not that I’m aware of.” He paused and frowned, thinking back to the DNA testimony at the preliminary examination. “Do you have a copy of the transcript of the PX?” he asked Sofia.

  “Sure.” She plucked it from the stack in front of her and handed it to him.

  He flipped to Janet Harkin’s testimony and skimmed until he found what he was looking for. “I thought something seemed off,” he said. “The DA asked Harkin, ‘When you say they resulted in a match, do you mean that all thirteen loci matched?’ And she responded, ‘Yes.’ But now she’s saying the DNA only matches across eleven loci. Her report therefore contradicts her testimony—or am I missing something?”

  “Huh, I’d forgotten about that,” Sofia said. “Can I see?”

  He handed the transcript back to her and she read for a moment, a little crease forming between her eyebrows. Then the crease disappeared and she looked up. “Okay, I think I know what’s going on. She was talking about Brandon’s profile in the Cal-DNA database, which did match the crime-scene DNA across all thirteen loci.”

  “Wait—so the profile they have for Brandon in the database is different from the one in her report?” Nate asked. “How is that possible?”

  “I’m not sure,” Byrd said. “They should match. Both samples presumably were taken in a police station under close-to-ideal circumstances. Then they were packaged, logged, and sent straight to a lab.” He shook his head slightly and held up his hands. “Somehow, one of the samples must have gotten degraded or there was a problem with the testing equipment. Or there was some sort of problem with the database. None of those things should have happened, but there’s no other explanation I can think of.”