Key Witness (77 page)

Wyatt handed him a single sheet of paper with the city police emblem on the top. Green glanced at it and began typing a series of letters and numbers into the computer.

“This paper has badge and case numbers of the detectives who have worked on these cases, is that true?” Wyatt asked his witness. He handed the sheet to the jury for their perusal. “You are using their IDs and case numbers to access information?”

Green nodded without a break in his typing.

“What are you doing now?” Grant asked, unable to control his curiosity.

“Watch and learn,” Green said. “This will only take a few moments and it won’t hurt at all.”

Judge Grant, Wyatt, the prosecution team, Green, and the jury watched the television screen as a document came up.

“Very interesting,” Wyatt commented dryly. He walked to the bench and gave Judge Grant a file. “If you’ll notice, judge, the material on that screen matches the material I’m handing you.”

“Which is what?” Grant asked, peering intently at the television set.

“The official police files from the Alley Slasher murders, of course.” Turning to his witness, he requested of him, “Go to page one thousand and seventeen, please.”

Green moved his cursor. Page 1017 came up on the screen.

The courtroom was deathly silent.

Wyatt turned to the jury. “We have just accessed the entire computer record of the Alley Slasher murders,” he told them. “The very files the state’s police witness told you couldn’t be accessed. That were secure.” He pointed to the screen. “Here’s your proof that they aren’t.” He waited until the severity of the information and what it meant had sunk in deep. Then he turned away from the jury and back to Green. “I think we’ve seen enough.”

Green closed the file and exited the program. The screen went blank.

Wyatt looked at the dark screen. “Was that hard to do?” he asked Green.

“Piece of cake.”

“You’ve reviewed Dwayne Thompson’s computer abilities? His degree from college, his work in the state penitentiary system, and so forth?”

The hacker nodded. “You gave me that information and I checked it out.”

“In your opinion, could someone of Dwayne Thompson’s capabilities as a computer hacker have gotten into these files as easily as you just did?”

“Absolutamundo. It’s not brain surgery. With your handy-dandy computer, modem, and phone hookup, you’re on your way. If you know how, of course,” he added immodestly.

“So if Dwayne Thompson had been able to get his hands on a computer with that setup, he could have hacked in easily to these so-called confidential police files?”

“I just did, didn’t I?”

“That you did, Mr. Green. That you did.”

T
HEY WERE THE LEAD
story on all the local television stations that night (and the front page of the next morning’s newspaper). Wyatt was featured in his courthouse-steps mode, decrying the lack of security in the police department and emphasizing how easy it was to transport information that had a direct bearing on this case. Pagano and the chief of police, grim-faced and determined, vowed to plug any leaks in the system, but were vehement in their assertions that no one had given any files to Dwayne Thompson, and that he had never had access to a computer. Wyatt’s work was a clever smoke screen sent up by an accomplished lawyer. Pagano was gushing in his tribute to Wyatt, calling him “the preeminent corporate attorney in America.” But when the smoke clears, Pagano continued, one basic fact remains: Dwayne Thompson had no way to get his hands on a computer. The evidence clearly shows that, and Marvin White did confess his crimes, and all the rest is a desperate attempt—stunning and brilliant, but still desperate—to derail the facts:

1) Marvin White raped and murdered seven women.

2) Marvin White confessed to Dwayne Thompson, a cagey jailhouse informant whose credibility was just enhanced in another trial in this very city.

3) Marvin White has to pay the price.

The spin by the local political observers who were analyzing the case on a daily basis was that although Wyatt had blasted a hole in the prosecution’s case, he hadn’t driven his truck through it—yet. Unless the defense could prove that Dwayne Thompson had access to a computer while he was in the county jail during the tiny, crucial window between when Marvin was arrested and when Dwayne went to the district attorney with his information—only a few days—their demonstration was meaningless. Innocent until proven guilty was a nice abstraction, but the burden of proof was still on the defense.

Despite that yet-unsolved problem, Wyatt felt as good and strong as at any time since the day the case had taken its monstrous, unexpected turn. For the first time since the curtain had lifted he’d raised real doubts in the jury members’ minds about the prosecution’s case. Now he needed to keep building his momentum; the more he could discredit Dwayne Thompson, the better Marvin’s chances were. That’s what was happening—Garrett Green had been a giant step forward. And he still had his two aces, the alibi witnesses.

He resisted partaking in a minicelebratory dinner with Josephine and Walcott. Instead, he talked to his wife and daughter, filling them in on the day’s good news (which they took more casually than he’d hoped for—they had their own lives going, and being physically distant insulated them from his excitement), went for a run though the city’s canyons in the early evening heat, ate dinner in his room, and worked.

He slept the night through, awakening at the crack of dawn, standing at the window as the sunrise, pale rose-yellow, come up over the river into his twenty-first-story room. He couldn’t wait to get to court, couldn’t wait for the new day’s work to begin.

N
URSE HOPKINS, THE JAIL-INFIRMARY
guardian, one arm taped to his side, fidgeted on the stand, twisting and turning, crossing one leg over the other, then recrossing them. He was awash with nervous tics: a hand going to his nostril with a vigorous scratch; a finger harshly rotor-rooting into an ear, the residue, wax or otherwise, wiped across his trousers; a constant blinking of the eyes and wrinkling of the forehead.

He broke his collarbone falling off a table? Wyatt thought cynically. With Dwayne Thompson as the only witness? What a likely story.

That wasn’t the issue here, however. Hopkins’s condition, and how he’d been injured, wasn’t the concern. All he cared about were the facts the nurse could provide.

Hopkins recounted his story of coming in early, hearing the sounds of male/female lovemaking, retreating out of the infirmary but with a clear view of the entrance, and seeing Blake coming out.

“What did she look like?” Wyatt asked her.

“Objection. Calls for conjecture,” Abramowitz protested.

“Overruled,” Grant said summarily. A prison guard having a relationship with a prisoner, although not unique, was nevertheless shocking.

Wyatt had checked Abramowitz out when she stood up to make her objection—she had lines etched in her face that hadn’t been there when the trial had started. It was getting to her, to everyone on her team. She wasn’t sleeping—she had developed raccoon rings around her eyes and her well-cut dresses now hung loosely on her slim frame—she had lost weight from worrying. The horse they were riding, Dwayne Thompson, was a runaway mustang, not easily controlled.

“What did Deputy Sheriff Blake look like when she came out of the infirmary that morning?” Wyatt repeated.

“She was flushed,” Hopkins said. “She was smiling, like a grinning kid. I’ve seen that woman almost daily for four years, and I’d never seen her smile like that before. She almost never smiles.”

“So to sum it up,” Wyatt said, “there is absolutely no question that Lieutenant Doris Blake of the county sheriff’s office, and Dwayne Thompson, a prisoner in custody in the jail, were meeting secretly and having a sexual relationship.”

“I heard it, I saw her come out,” Hopkins replied, pulling on his earlobe and scratching his oily, flaking scalp. “There was no one else there. What other conclusion could anyone draw?”

Abramowitz shied away from whether or not Blake had physically been in the infirmary. “You claim you
heard
a man and a woman laughing?” she aggressively questioned Hopkins.

“I
did
hear it,” he said with conviction.

“You
heard
them having sexual intercourse?”

“Yes.”

“How can someone
hear
the sound of sexual intercourse?” she demanded, as if he was a fool.

“I’m an adult,” he said with prim hauteur. “I know what sexual foreplay sounds like.”

“What does it sound like?” she asked maliciously.

“I’m not going to make the kinds of noises she was making.” He literally recoiled at such a thought.

“Was Lieutenant Blake laughing? Was that one of the sounds?”

“Yes.”

“Well, couldn’t he have been telling her a joke? Couldn’t that have been the cause of her laughter?”

“It wasn’t that kind of laughter,” he said with disgust.

Wyatt looked at the jury to see how they were taking this. They seemed to be repelled, both by what Hopkins was saying and by his personal tics and unhygienic behavior. He prayed the nurse would last through the cross-examination without falling apart and damaging his credibility.

“You didn’t see them together, you hear some laughter, and from that you infer they were having sexual intercourse? As a corrections officer, Lieutenant Blake has the right, the duty, to be anywhere in me jail, doesn’t she? For all we know she was merely checking to make sure things were all right down there with the prisoner, who we concede knew her from an earlier posting. So what? He told her a joke, and she laughed at it. Prisoners and guards banter all the time. They have to get along with each other, or the system would be chaos.”

“Objection! This is editorializing, not cross-examining,” Wyatt complained.

“Agreed,” Grant said. “The jury will disregard Ms. Abramowitz’s extemporaneous remarks. Save your subjectivity for your summation,” he cautioned her.

“Yes sir.” She turned to Hopkins again. “Besides hearing what may well have been innocent laughter, what other sounds did you hear?”

“Moaning and such.”

“Oh, come on, sir. You heard
moaning
? Give us an example of this
moaning
.”

He stared hatefully at her. “I’m not going to stoop to their animal level,” he said prissily.

Judge Grant admonished Abramowitz to move on; but suddenly, unexpectedly responding to her hectoring, Hopkins lunged up in his chair. “ ‘Oh, Dwayne,’ ” he mimicked in a hoarse falsetto, “ ‘Oh, Dwayne! Yes! Yes! More! Yes, yes, yes!’ ” He sat back down, flushed and out of breath. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” he asked her with delicious salaciousness.

The courtroom dropped its collective jaw. For the umpteenth time Judge Grant was forced to use his gavel to silence the discord. Abramowitz, standing at the lectern, looked like she’d been poleaxed.

Grant looked at her. “Are you finished with this witness?” he asked sympathetically, although his hand went to his face to cover the smile he couldn’t suppress.

She shook her head gamely. Trying to salvage this disaster, she asked Hopkins, “When Lieutenant Blake came out of the infirmary, did she have a computer with her?”

He thought back for a moment. “I didn’t see one.”

“Later on, when you did enter, was there any evidence of a computer there, in the infirmary?”

“Just the one I use, and that’s locked up when I’m not there.”

“So Dwayne Thompson did not have use of a computer during the morning in question.”

“No.”

Warden Jonas was not a man Abramowitz could fuck with. Not only was he on her side, a peace officer; he was one of the most highly respected law-enforcement officials in the state, who was known to be incorruptible. She wouldn’t dream of baiting him as she had done so disastrously with Hopkins.

Wyatt went first. “Is it true that Dwayne Thompson is barred from using a computer in your prison because of illegal hacking?”

Jonas framed his answers in terse institutionese. “He was using our computers for other than legitimate purposes, yes.”

“Is he considered by people in the know up there to be a genius at computers and hacking?”

“Yes.”

“Was it common knowledge that Dwayne Thompson and Doris Blake were having a sexual relationship during the time both were at Durban Penitentiary, he as a prisoner and she as a guard?”

“It was rumored,” Jonas answered cautiously. “There was never any proof, to my knowledge.”

“But it was commonly accepted that they were lovers. By the staff.”

“That’s what people thought. I don’t make judgments based on innuendo.”

“Did the rumors concern you?”

Jonas nodded gravely. “They concerned me a great deal.”

“Enough to warrant your requesting Ms. Blake to seek employment elsewhere?”

“I was going to,” Jonas admitted, “but she beat me to the punch. She resigned.”

“Did she give a reason?”

“She said she wanted to go to law school, and had to be where there was a law school she could go to when she wasn’t working.”

“And you approved of that?”

“Very much.”

“Because she was going to law school, or because she was saving you an unpleasant confrontation?”

“Both. I was pleased for her, and relieved for myself.”

“When Ms. Blake applied for her job in the sheriff’s department here, did she give you as a reference? Did she ask for a recommendation?”

“Yes.”

“And you gave her one?”

“Yes. She was a good corrections officer. I assume she still is, since she’s achieved the rank of lieutenant.”

“Did you mention these rumors of her relationship, sexual or otherwise, with Dwayne Thompson in your recommendation?”

“No. If I had, she wouldn’t have gotten the post.”

“Why didn’t you, if it bothered you enough that you were going to ask her to quit working as a guard at Durban?”

Jonas steepled his fingertips. “She was leaving an unhealthy situation. I assumed it was a onetime thing. I didn’t want to ruin her life because of one possible indiscretion.”

“If Lieutenant Blake has, in fact, resumed her close personal relationship with Dwayne Thompson down here, would that give you cause for concern?”