I need to know everything cold, so that when something comes up at trial my mind will be like a file cabinet from which I can retrieve all relevant information. I have to avoid what often happened when I would call a girl in high school, which means that I can’t reflect back on a cross-examination and say, “Damn, I wish I had thought to say that.”
Before I go to sleep I decide to go on the computer and do my own research on some of the issues at trial. I’ll have an expert witness on botulism, but my own sources of knowledge can’t hurt.
After I do that unproductively for a while, I check my e-mails and discover something simultaneously shocking yet pleasing. I obviously underestimate my fame and, to be brutally honest, my sex appeal, and this is a perfect example of that.
I’ve received a number of e-mails from women I don’t know but who obviously know me. What they all have in common is a desire to either know me better or, in some cases, marry me. Some even send me pictures. One of Natasha, who describes herself as a Russian farm girl, is particularly fetching.
It’s hard to understand. Natasha is obviously sensitive and caring; she tells me that she is lonely and her only goal is to please a man, in this case, me. You would think a woman like that wouldn’t have to search for love on the Internet. It’s flattering, but also sad, in a way.
“What are you doing?” Laurie asks, having come into the den behind me without my realizing it.
“Reading my fan mail. I’ve got quite the following in Russia.”
“Natasha?” she asks.
“How did you know?”
“I got the same e-mail.”
I give her my most lascivious grin. “Well, that Natasha is really something.”
“You should call her,” she says. “I’m going to bed.”
“Me, too,” I say. It’s an instinctive reaction; I would respond the same way if Laurie said that to me in court, during my closing argument.
“Aren’t you researching the case?”
I nod. “Yes, but not getting anywhere. I’m just gathering information on how to acquire and administer botulinum toxin.”
“I hope you never get charged with a crime,” she says.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because they always go into the accused person’s computer and find out he looked up stuff like ‘how to strangle’ and ‘how to make a homemade hand grenade.’ They’d find that you look up some very incriminating stuff.”
“Fortunately they didn’t find anything like that on Denise’s computer,” I say, and then a thought hits me. It’s a rare feeling; these days I get hit by thoughts about as often as Muhammad Ali throws left hooks. I get up to look through the files.
“What are you looking for?” Laurie asks.
Before I answer, I quickly scan the table of contents to confirm that I’m right. “They looked through Denise’s computer because they were trying to find evidence of guilt.”
She nods. “Which they didn’t find.”
“Right, but they never did the same kind of examination of Barry’s computer. They searched his e-mails, probably to see if there were threats from Denise, something like that. But they never searched the history.”
“History of what?”
“Where he went online the last couple of weeks. I’m pretty sure you can do that. Sam once told me that every time you move around online, you leave a footprint.”
“You do.”
“So maybe if we get Barry’s computer, we can find out what led him to Susser in the first place.”
“Where is that computer now?”
“I’m sure the prosecutor has it. We didn’t request it; I just never thought to use it to follow his cyber trail.”
I call Hike and ask him to request the computer; then I call Sam to tell him to then get the computer from Hike and get to work on tracing Barry’s steps.
Sam answers on the first ring, as he always does. I think he keeps his phone Krazy Glued to his ear. But this time he’s whispering, and when I ask why, he says, “Crash is asleep.”
“Sam, he sleeps all day.”
“He’s been through a lot, Andy. I hit him with my car.”
“I remember,” I say and then tell Sam about the computer and what I want him to do. I think he says it’s a great idea, but it’s really hard to hear him.
I hang up and ask Laurie if she thinks I should e-mail Natasha back and let her down gently.
“You do that,” she says. “I’m still going to bed.”
I close my computer. “The hell with Natasha,” I say. “Commie bitch.”
Everyone was in place, well ahead of schedule. In fact, had Carter realized it was going to go so smoothly and quickly, he might likely have delayed the beginning of the process.
The longer the men were in the field, the more chance there was for detection, for something to go wrong. They were well trained and had performed flawlessly to that point, but anything was possible.
Certainly Carter knew that his superior would never change the operation date. It was chosen for maximum psychological effectiveness, and Carter considered it a brilliant stroke. If 9/11 proved anything, and Carter believed it proved a great deal, it was that the American psyche was fragile.
Carter was a micromanager, and it had served him well to this point. He was earning a stunning amount of money for his role in this undertaking, but money was not what it was about for him. This was his chance to change the world for the better, and he was not about to see it achieve less than total success.
So he insisted on knowing everything that was happening at every moment, and the men in the field were instructed to communicate daily, even when there was nothing of consequence to report.
There was another reason for this documentation: Carter’s superior had insisted on it. He believed that when the operation was concluded, when total success was achieved, it could become a template, or at least a helpful guide, to future operations, in countries around the world.
So for now the men were where they needed to be, doing nothing to attract undue attention. None knew any details about the operation in other cities, so in the unlikely event of exposure, the damage would be unwanted, but limited.
The target list had been chosen long ago, though it was somewhat arbitrary. It relied on knowing where each target would be on the day in question. In the event that the target changed his or her plan, it would not necessitate a change in the operation. The collateral damage alone would make it more than worthwhile.
But any such change in plans was unlikely. The chosen targets were people who loved the spotlight, who needed it to thrive. They wanted to show how genuinely and deeply they mourned those who had given their lives for their country.
Never mind the lives they had taken in the process.
No, these targets would be where they were supposed to be.
And soon Americans would have another reason to observe Memorial Day.
Jury selection is my second least favorite part of a trial. The only part I hate more is waiting for the verdict; that is the absolute worst.
Both of those times are tension filled, but in the case of the verdict, everyone involved in the trial, even those watching from the gallery, are aware of the importance of the moment.
Jury selection seems to everyone except the lawyers to be a tedious ritual, something to be gotten through before the real action can begin. Most people don’t see it as having much drama.
But to me, and to the lawyers I am up against, it is a frustratingly crucial time. It’s crucial because if the wrong person gets on the jury, the trial can be lost, or at least the possibility of winning can be pretty much eliminated, before it even begins.
The frustrating part is that, for all the reliance on sophisticated jury selection techniques, lawyers are mostly flying blind. That is because potential jurors are basically full of shit. They come in with an agenda, and during voir dire questioning their goal is to further that agenda.
They might lie to get on the
jury or lie to get off it. Or they might have read everything about the crime, decided the defendant is guilty, and come in with the goal of sending him or her to prison. Of course they don’t say that in court. Instead they say they know nothing about the case and vow to be open-minded.
That’s not to say it’s not tedious, because it is. The process of selecting Denise Price’s jury is no different from every other one. We ask the questions, hear the answers, don’t believe a thing they say, make our best guess, and hope.
Thomas Bader does a competent job questioning the candidates, but there aren’t many lawyers who don’t. What worries me about him is the way he carries himself. He’s confident and relaxed, with an easy manner that will tend to ingratiate him with the twelve people we pick.
As the trial date has approached, Bader has gotten progressively less cooperative, as if he were putting his game face on. A good example of this was our request for Barry Price’s computer. It seemed to take Bader by surprise, and he delayed turning it over to us.
My guess is that he was worried about why we were asking and realized that his people had not gone over the computer thoroughly enough. They probably took the time to do that before giving it to us.
Other than the annoying delay, that doesn’t worry me much. They would be concerned with what is on the computer, e-mails, Web sites, etc. They would be less interested in where Barry had been in the weeks before his death, but even if they did look at that, it wouldn’t have helped them much.
They wouldn’t see the significance in financial searches Barry made online; they would just attribute that to normal business dealings. And they also would have no way of knowing that anything concerning Donald Susser would be meaningful to our case.
When Hike finally got the computer and gave it to Sam, his eyes lit up at the prospect of digging into it, since Barry seems to have been something of his computer idol. It’s been three days since then and not a word from Sam.
We’ve seated eight of the twelve jurors so far today, and as the session winds down, I’m feeling pretty good about it, or maybe pretty bad about it. I’m not really sure. The only thing I know for a fact is that the last juror to be questioned is someone Bader obviously wants, which means it’s someone I therefore don’t want.
The prospective juror’s name is Doug Millman, and I don’t like him. He’s got a smug smile that silently claims to know it all, and I’m afraid that future fellow jurors might believe him. He’s also a vice president at a midsize bank, and that background might make him sympathetic to Barry Price and therefore more likely to convict his accused killer.
Under Bader’s questioning, Millman says that he knows absolutely nothing about the case, hasn’t seen TV coverage, and hasn’t read anything in the newspapers. He’s obviously been living in a plastic bubble.
I’m not going to accept him on the jury, so I could just ask him a question or two and then send him on his way. But he gets on my nerves, so I take it a step further. In case you haven’t already figured this out, I’m not the most mature guy in the room.
“Mr. Millman, did you vote in the recent election?”
He nods. “I did.”
“First time?”
“No, I vote every time. Always have.”
“Without telling us who you voted for, how did you make your decision?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, how did you learn about the candidates? Newspaper articles? TV? Did you see any of their speeches?”
He’s already trapped, but he searches for a way out. “Mostly talking with friends.”
“So, word of mouth?”
“Right.”
“Your friends monitor the news, and then they tell you the facts so you can decide? Sort of like your own private researchers?”
“We just talk about what’s going on in the world. My friends are smart people.”
“But it’s all one way, right? You’re cut off from traditional sources of information, so you rely on them?”
“Mostly, but not completely. I’ll read some about it also, just not the crime pages.”
“Financial pages? Because of your job?”
Barry Price’s murder was all over the financial pages, so Millman says, “I sometimes skim them.”
“You wrote on your information sheet that you live alone. Do you have a television?”
“Yes.”
“Cable?”
“Yes.”
“Internet?”
“Yes.”
“But you avoid the news at all costs in all of these media?”
“Mostly, as much as I can.”
“Your smart friends, are some of them your coworkers? Friends in your industry?”
“Yes.”
“So you work in the financial world, one of the leaders of that world is murdered, but your smart friends, the ones who keep you informed about current events, never even mentioned it?”
“Not that I remember.”
“Mr. Millman, have your smart friends ever had occasion to tell you what ‘perjury’ means?”
“I know what it means.”
“So if you were to get on this jury, and a lawyer, maybe someone like me, decided to have his investigators check out some of your statements today, you wouldn’t worry?”
“No,” he says, though he is obviously very worried. He keeps stealing glances at Bader, as if he’s going to get help there. Bader, of course, knows by now that Millman is getting nowhere near the jury, so he just lets him twist in the wind.
“If investigators were to interview your smart friends, or perhaps subpoena your TV watching records, or your personal computer to check your Internet searches, you’d be fine?”
Millman is desperately trying to get out of this. “I don’t remember seeing or hearing anything about Mr. Price’s murder. It’s possible that I did and I just forgot.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Millman. You’re excused.”
I dread going through another day of this tomorrow, and to give myself a break, I change my plans for the evening. Rather than go home and plow through more of the case documents, I’m going to head to Charlie’s to spend some time drinking beers and eating burgers with Vince and Pete.
It is a measure of how much I hate jury selection that I am viewing Vince as a more pleasant alternative.
But it doesn’t matter, because as it turns out, I’m not going to Charlie’s at all. As I approach my car, Sam calls on my cell phone. He sounds excited.
“Andy, I’ve got big news.”
“Crash lost his first tooth? He barked ‘dada’?”
“It’s Barry’s computer.”
“What about it?”
“I hit the mother lode.”
“He went to places I couldn’t get near,” Sam says. “I mean, I knew he was good, better than me, but I didn’t see how he could be that good.”
“What kind of places are we talking about?”
“Online. He was breaking into sites that I couldn’t get into. That I doubted anyone could get into.”
“How did he do it?” I ask.
“He got the passwords.”
“How did he do that?”
“He had a password-crashing program with 25 AMD Radeon GPUs.”
“I always wanted one of those,” I say, “but my parents bought me a G.I. Joe instead.”
“Let me explain,” he says, and though I know I won’t understand it, he seems so excited that I let him continue.
“Passwords are starting to become obsolete,” he says.
“Really? I hardly use my computer, and I must have twenty passwords.”
He nods. “Right, and they’ve got to be a certain number of characters, and some of them make you include cap letters and numbers and even symbols.”
“Yup.”
“Well, each letter, or whatever, is called a hash. So let’s say your password has fifteen hashes, of all types, okay? This program can figure it out in less than ten minutes. And it doesn’t have to know your
dog’s name or birthday or anything like that.”
“How does it do it?”
“It bombards the target with combinations. This program can try a hundred billion hashes per second, and there are programs faster than that. Eventually it hits on the password, sooner rather than later.”
“So it keeps getting them wrong until it gets them right?”
“Exactly,” he says. “You should see how this thing works. Hilda and Morris are like kids in a candy store with it.”
“I don’t understand. If I type my password wrong twice on one of my sites, they lock the account and make me spend the next twelve hours on the phone with customer service telling them my mother’s maiden name.”
“But Barry wasn’t breaking into individual accounts. He wasn’t technically even breaking into the sites. He was breaking into the place where they store the passwords. Once he did that, he had free rein to go wherever he wanted.”
“So where did he go?” I ask.
“We don’t know yet. But we will.”
“So if passwords are obsolete, what’s going to replace them?”
“Nobody’s figured that out yet.”
I ask Sam to devote as much time as he can to tracing Barry Price’s cyber steps, and he promises that he will. Then I head home to Laurie and Tara.
Any potential witnesses that I don’t have time to interview I turn over to Laurie. Any competent person can get the information from them about what they’re going to say and why they’re going to say it. But Laurie has the ability to tell me more about each of them, to know what makes them tick, and to figure out their strengths and weaknesses.
Hike is a great lawyer, but when he interviews a witness, I ask him to give me a written report about it. That’s because all I’m going to get from him are the facts; talking to Laurie supplies the nuance. And nuance in a cross-examination is everything.
I’m as ready for the trial as I can be, given the weapons at my disposal. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t describe myself as heavily armed.
“Barry Price died in a plane that crashed, but he didn’t die in a plane crash,” is how Thomas Bader begins his opening argument to the jury. The final constitution of the jury is one I think I’m happy with; I’ll know for sure a few seconds after the verdict is read.
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