Guilty Blood Read online

  The location for their first meeting was the first step in winning her over—or so he hoped. He had suggested that they meet at her office, and she agreed. True, he didn’t have much choice after Peggy barred him from using B&B’s facilities. But Acuña didn’t know that, and offering to come to her turf would send a good message.

  So here he was, in the public defender’s lobby. The receptionist called Acuña, and she appeared a few seconds later.

  “Thanks for making time in your schedule to meet with me,” he said as they shook hands. She had a surprisingly strong grip for such a small woman.

  “No problem,” she said. “I’m looking forward to working with you.”

  He doubted that was true, but it was a good sign that she said it. “The feeling is mutual.”

  “Right this way,” she said as she guided him through the hallways.

  They entered a windowless conference room with a poorly cleaned whiteboard on one wall and a fake-wood table surrounded by utilitarian chairs. As they sat, Nate noticed that the table was decorated with the crumbs and little smears of someone’s lunch. He kept his hands in his lap.

  Acuña sat across from him. She had boosted her seat as high as it would go, but she still looked like a child sitting at the grown-ups’ table. “You probably don’t remember me, but I’ve been at two of your Masters of the Courtroom classes,” she said. “The one on cross-examining experts was great.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “But I’m the student now, not the teacher. I’ve never stood up in a criminal courtroom before, and I’ll be looking to you for guidance.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she replied. “The procedural rules are a little different—simpler, really. Everything else is the same. And a criminal jury is twelve random people, just like a civil jury.”

  “How many jury trials have you done?”

  “Let me see.” She leaned back and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “About fifty.”

  Which was twenty more than he had. “Wow, I’m impressed. All murder cases?”

  She chuckled and shook her head. “No, no. I’ve only handled five of them. Most of the trials were misdemeanors. We all start there, and we’ll sometimes do a trial a day in misdemeanor court. Then you graduate to felonies. I’ve done twenty felony trials all told—six felony drug possessions, five assaults, three rapes, five murders, and one guy who tried to set the governor on fire. I got that client off on the attempted-murder charge, but he’s in jail for arson. We could have beaten that one too if my guy hadn’t dropped the Molotov cocktail he planned to throw at the governor and set fire to the stage instead.”

  Nate laughed. “That’s better than most of my war stories. Well, you’re the expert here, so what do you think would be the most productive use of our time? The clerk said we’re probably looking at an August or September trial date, so I’m sure we’ve got a lot to do between now and then.”

  “The best place to start is probably the disclosure file I got from the prosecution. Come on back to my office and I’ll burn you a copy.”

  They left the conference room, and he followed her through a warren of hallways and cubicles to a dingy little room with battered furniture and an outdated computer monitor fringed with Post-it notes. Boxes lined the walls and sat on the single guest chair. “Sorry, let me move those,” she said.

  He reached for the boxes, but she zipped in front of him and lifted them off the chair. “There you go.”

  He sat down while she rummaged in her desk for a blank CD. He noticed the degrees on her wall. Princeton undergrad and Yale Law School.

  She found a disk and popped it into her machine. “This’ll just take a few minutes,” she said as the disk drive on her computer began to chug. “There’s not a whole lot there—police statements, witness statements, DNA reports, some court documents. Less than a thousand pages total. Oh, and I should probably also give you the statements we took from Brandon’s girlfriend and her roommates. They’re pretty good.”

  “Good how?”

  “His girlfriend says he was with her until at least twelve on the night of the murder. She should make a good witness, too—sweet girl with an honest face.”

  It took a moment for his brain to process what she had just said. “So she gives him an alibi?”

  “Yep. Her roommates back her up too. Sort of. They weren’t there the whole time, but they saw him come in, and he was still there when they left half an hour later.”

  “Why didn’t you put any of them on the stand?”

  She gave him a surprised look. “You mean at the PX?”

  “The what?”

  “Preliminary examination.”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t put them on because I’m not a moron.”

  He felt his face flush. “It appears that I’m missing something,” he said, forcing himself to smile. “Please enlighten me.”

  “The PX was a done deal,” she said. “It almost always is with a DNA match, particularly when the defendant doesn’t have a really good explanation for how his DNA wound up on the victim. And Brandon doesn’t, by the way. All the DA had to do was show that there’s probable cause to hold Brandon for trial. Once they had the DNA match, the PX was a slam dunk for them.”

  The light bulb went on. “Ah. So there was no point in putting on defense witnesses. All you would do would be to educate the prosecution about your case.”

  She nodded. “Bingo.”

  “And that’s also why you didn’t object nearly as much as you could have, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. Objecting a lot probably would have just slowed things down and annoyed the judge. We’re going to need some good rulings out of him between now and the trial, so I didn’t want to get on his bad side if I could avoid it.”

  Her conduct at the hearing was making more sense. “Especially if the hearing was a done deal, as you put it.”

  “Exactly. My main goal was to find out as much as I could about the prosecution’s case and probe for potential weak spots.”

  “Like Janet Harkin, perhaps?”

  She paused for an instant, then said, “She’s always been a straight shooter in the past.”

  “But there seemed to be a lot of little tells during your cross,” Nate said. “The failure to make eye contact, her use of the passive voice, saying that she’d like to think something rather than that she actually did think it.” He held up his hands. “But maybe she was just nervous. It sounds like you know her better than I do.”

  She took a deep breath and blew it out. The hard drive muttered behind her. “She did seem a little squirrelly. And that whole thing about recalibrating their machines was weird. Not that they’d do it, but that they’d do it now. I thought they had a regular schedule for that sort of thing and their office planned around it.”

  “Maybe they discovered a problem and had to do an unscheduled recalibration,” he observed. “As you note, the timing is interesting.”

  She leaned back, drawing a squeal from her chair’s springs. “You think they found a problem while they were testing Brandon’s sample?”

  He shrugged. “The thought occurred to me. Have you ever had a case where the DNA testing wasn’t complete by the time of the PX?”

  She thought for a moment. “No. But the PX has to take place within ten days of the arrest, so I guess it’s reasonable that the DNA sometimes isn’t done. I’ll ask around about that and the recalibration thing.” She jotted a note on a pad of Post-its, peeled it off, and added it to the collection on her monitor.

  “Thanks. I’m guessing we’ll also want to hire our own DNA expert. What kind of budget do you have for expert consultants and witnesses?”

  She shrugged. “Whatever the court gives us. We’ll have to file a motion saying that we need to hire the expert in order to provide an effective defense. If the judge agrees, we’ll get our expert. We shouldn’t have any trouble getting someone. The DA probably won’t even oppose the motion.”

  That was a relief. Nat
e had worried that either they’d have to go without a DNA expert of their own or that he’d have to pay the expert out of his own pocket. Neither option had been particularly appealing.

  “Good. That was one of the things I thought we’d probably want to do right off the bat. The other was finding out more about Mr. Lincoln Thomas. Specifically, I’d like to know who might have wanted to kill him.”

  She nodded. “Already on it. I gave one of our investigators the list of witnesses the OPD interviewed at the Captain’s Lounge.”

  “Good. I’ll be interested to know whether he’d been there before, who he came in with, that sort of thing.”

  “The cops asked a lot of that already. Thomas came in about once a week. He often had a pretty Asian girl with him—different girl each time. And the girl always picked up the tab.”

  Nate stirred uncomfortably in his seat. “Escorts?”

  “Maybe, but why would they pay for him?”

  “He could have been a pimp.”

  “Could be. I’ll ask our investigator to see what he can find out.” She jotted a note on another Post-it and stuck it on her monitor. “Now that I think about it, Thomas worked nights at the port, so pimping might have been tough for him.”

  “Is your investigator talking to Thomas’s coworkers?”

  “Trying to. Same with the family—if he can find any of them. There’s a good chance they won’t want to talk to us, though. People who were close to murder victims don’t always want to help out the Public Defender’s Office.”

  “I suppose that could be a problem.” He thought for a moment, going through the mental agenda he had for the meeting. They had covered everything he could recall. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer. Thank you for your time.”

  He started to get up, but she said, “Hold on a sec. Don’t forget your CD.” She turned around and popped it out of her disk drive, slipped it into its case, and handed it to him.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “One more thing,” she said. She paused and licked her lips. “Um, what role do you plan to play in this case? And what role were you thinking I would play? I mean, I’m guessing you’ll want me to handle most of the routine client meetings since I’m out at Tassajara a lot anyway and it’s a long drive for you—but what are you thinking about the more, um, substantive stuff?”

  Nate had planned to say something diplomatically indicating that he was in charge, but now he wasn’t so sure. Setting his ego aside, he had to admit that she might be the better choice to take the lead—at least for now. Things might look different in a month or two, but for the present it probably made sense for her to stay in the lead-counsel chair and him to shadow her and learn the ropes.

  “I thought we could play it by ear,” he said. “For now, we can work up the case together.”

  She nodded and seemed somewhat satisfied. “Okay, sounds like fun. But what about trial? We’ll need to designate a lead trial attorney pretty soon.”

  “We can cross that bridge when we come to it.”

  “Well, whoever is going to be the trial lead is going to have another bridge to cross: deciding on a defense theory. DNA cases are very, very hard to win unless you have an innocent reason why the defendant’s DNA was at the crime scene. Brandon claims he has no idea how his DNA wound up on Thomas. So unless he changes his story or Janet Harkin changes hers, we’re going to have to come up with the world’s best defense story.”

  He nodded. “Or we’ll lose.”

  “Yep.”

  CHAPTER 20

  “This is interesting,” Billy Chen said as he walked into Cole’s office. “Check out what just happened in the Ames prosecution.” He tossed a sheet of paper on Cole’s desk.

  It was titled Appearance and said that Nathan Daniels of the firm of Bingham & Brobeck was appearing on behalf of Brandon Ames in the case of People v. Ames.

  “Bingham & Brobeck is a big firm,” Cole said. “And I’ve heard of this guy Daniels. Didn’t he represent Apple or Google in some big case?”

  “He represented both of them in big cases,” Billy said.

  “He must be expensive.”

  “Yep. Twelve hundred an hour.”

  Cole whistled. “I wonder how poor Widow Ames can afford that.”

  “Excellent question,” Billy said. “We’ve been over her finances twice and didn’t find anything.”

  “But we haven’t been over his,” Cole observed. “What if Lan Long is paying Daniels directly?”

  “Good point. I’ll get on it.”

  “And while you’re at it, see whether Daniels or his firm is tied to Lan Long. I’ll bet a place like Bingham & Brobeck has offices in China. That would make it easy to move money around without raising eyebrows.”

  Billy nodded. “We’ll look into it.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Kevin frowned. He rechecked the settlement agreement and compared it to the activity report from his bank. The numbers were wrong. He didn’t like it when numbers were wrong.

  He picked up his phone and called Nate, pacing back and forth across the kitchen as he waited for Nate to pick up.

  “Hello, Kevin,” Nate’s voice said a moment later. “Did the wire transfer come through?”

  “It did, but the numbers are wrong. The agreement says twenty-five million, but the wire transfer is for $25,061,643.84.”

  “Fortuna delayed the settlement for nine days without a good reason, so I insisted that they pay interest at ten percent. They were over a barrel because they had already talked to the SEC by that point, so they agreed. I assume the extra money is the interest.”

  Kevin paused briefly to check the math in his head. “It is, but the agreement said twenty-five million.”

  “Well, if you don’t want the extra money, I’ll be happy to take it for you,” Nate said.

  That would fix the problem, but Kevin decided he would rather have the money. “That’s okay,” he replied. “But thank you for the offer.”

  Nate chuckled. “That was a joke.”

  Nate’s sense of humor sometimes baffled Kevin, as it did now. Why was it funny to offer to help him make the numbers match? “But what should I do with the extra money?”

  “Whatever you want,” Nate said. “It’s yours, just like the other twenty-five million.”

  It suddenly occurred to Kevin that he had no idea what to do with any of the money that had just landed in his account. He had made detailed plans and budgets for funding the litigation, but he hadn’t given any thought to what would happen if he won. He already had plenty of money from Nate’s early victory, and he had added to that with consulting fees. Now he had $25,061,643.84 more. What should he do with it? He could start another company, but his last foray into the business world had been bewildering and almost disastrous. True, it had ended with him receiving $11,463,921.84 more than his conservative estimate of the value of his company, but the experience had been very unpleasant. Still, just putting all the money in a bank account or something felt wrong somehow. Maybe Nate knew what to do. “What do you think I should do with it?”

  “Your money? Do whatever makes you happy.”

  Kevin thought for a moment about what made him happy. The things that immediately came to mind were writing elegant code, hacking, organizing data, solving complex puzzles, and building things—but only one of those cost money. “I like building things,” he said.

  “There you go. Build a big house someplace nice.”

  “Why would a big house make me happy?” Kevin asked. “Do you have a big house? Does it make you happy?”

  “Now that you mention it, I do,” Nate said slowly. “And no, it doesn’t make me particularly happy—but then, I don’t need space for a Lego collection. You do.”

  That was a good point. There wasn’t space in his room for his full collection, which resided in thousands of containers, each holding a different type of piece. He had kept it in the basement for years, but his parents had told him several times that they wanted him to move
it. Further, his designs were often limited by the size of the basement, and he had to disassemble them whenever his parents wanted to use the basement for something. Having a larger house would solve both of those problems. He could even build two basements—one for his parents and one for himself.

  “Thank you, Nate!” Kevin said. “That’s an excellent idea.” Then he realized that someone else would actually build the house, so he wouldn’t have much to do once the planning phase was over. Also, building a house probably wouldn’t use up all of the $25,061,643.84. “I don’t think building a house will take up all my time. Do you have any other ideas?”

  “Not at the moment. But don’t worry, Kevin. Someone like you doesn’t stay bored for long.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Brandon was in a good mood—which kind of surprised him. The two weeks after his arrest had been packed with events, virtually all of them bad. He spent his waking hours in a mental defensive crouch, waiting for the next blow. He didn’t sleep much, and when he did, nightmares haunted him.

  But by mid-December, things had improved. The day after the Doritos fight, his mother had called to ask whether he wanted Nate Daniels to represent him. Brandon said yes, of course. Nate was a great lawyer, and he had really gone the extra mile to help them after Brandon’s father died. Brandon had nothing against Sofia, but having Nate in his corner would be huge.

  Life in jail had also gotten better. Or at least stabilized, anyway. Mo had introduced Brandon to some of the other inmates who were neither gang members nor crazy. Brandon didn’t have a whole lot in common with them, but they seemed friendly enough. One was a wiry old guy named Phil, who wore his long gray hair in a ponytail and claimed to have gotten a Purple Heart in Vietnam and been onstage at Woodstock. Another was an enormous black man who had gotten the nickname Bear. Brandon was six-two and two hundred thirty pounds, but Bear was at least two inches taller and eighty pounds heavier than him. Like many very large men, Bear had nothing to prove physically and was therefore the most laid-back man in the pod.