by Aaron Pogue
"Don't," she said. The word came down like a stomped boot, and stopped him dead. He raised an eyebrow in question, and she spoke a little more softly. "I haven't been pulled off a case since I was twenty-six. Don't do that to me. I can handle this."
He chuckled, but she saw a sparkle of pride in his eyes. "Dammit, girl, you've got gumption. Don't worry about it. It's the software that's the trouble, it's the tricks of the trade, and we're the only ones in the world who do what you need to learn. It's not a personal judgment."
"I know," she said, "but—"
"Reed told me you two talked yesterday. He told me how worried you are, and I should have known better than to ask it of you."
"No," she said, suddenly forceful again. "I want the case, Rick."
His eyes rested on hers for a moment, and then he smiled. "I told him you'd say that. Okay, girl. If you want it, the Little Rock case is still your baby." He raised a hand and pointed at her, mock serious. "But you do your civic responsibility. Take care of that New York case tomorrow. Maybe by the time you get back I'll have a minute to breathe." He started to turn away, then looked back at her. "You sure you don't want something for lunch?"
"No," she said. "I'm fine."
He shrugged. "Suit yourself." Half an hour later he brought her back a turkey sandwich. It sat cooling on her desk while she spent the afternoon eavesdropping on Linson's private life. She went back four days, peeking in on private calls, business conversations, Hathor requests. Nothing seemed out of place. The young woman was having money problems, but nothing exciting—just the sort of problems college girls always have. Her brother's wife was pregnant, and if it was a girl they were going to name it after her, and that tidbit had covered most of conversations for the time period. The company was doing well, but not quite well enough to keep a Junior Administrative Officer busy for eight hours a day. It was a quiet little life.
And then, all of a sudden, it was over. Nothing Katie could find made that any clearer. It all seemed surreal. Usually, once she had a murder victim, she could look in the database and find a big red arrow pointing at a suspect. Then, from there, she could follow the glowing lines between the murderer and the victim, seeing (usually from days out) the intersecting paths that would end in the victim's death. Tragic though it might be, there was an air of destiny about it all that made the crime almost mechanical.
A bug, certainly. A flaw in the system that had to be fixed. But not...random. Oh, sure, in the first moments after a murder, it always seemed random, but Hathor had cleared all that up. Almost always, the crime was set in motion long, long before it actually occurred.
She stopped the playback, freezing Ms. Linson in the middle of a call to her best friend from high school, who had just gotten a job at Disneyland and called to gloat about it. Katie shook her head. For no reason whatsoever, this girl was about to die.
Then she saw the clock on her desktop: after six already. Her day had burned up like a candle, listening to real-time audio streams. She put together a request to compile and transcribe the rest of the victim's voice audio for the previous week, then closed down her desktop and headed for the door. She could skim through that faster, anyway.
Katie stayed home Tuesday night and watched a movie, but she missed most of the details. Curled up on her loveseat, she spent the whole evening scrolling through chat transcripts on her handheld. At a quarter past ten, she glanced up and realized the TV screen was black, had been for an hour. She shook her head with a chuckle, put away her handheld, and headed to bed.
An hour passed, her mind buzzing here and there, and finally she grabbed the headset from her nightstand and hooked it over her ear. "Hathor, connect me to Dad," she said. She left him a forty-minute message, laying out her day for him, bit by bit, and as she talked it through the pieces fell into place. She had to fight a yawn when she finally said, "Goodbye," and she fell asleep with the headset still on.
Wednesday she woke up early, dressed in her most authoritative outfit, and had a bowl of dry cereal before she started her day. Then she checked her watch and checked her schedule again. "Hathor, get me travel details to the supreme court in Brooklyn, now."
The long-familiar voice of Hathor said in her ear, "From home to Supreme Court, Brooklyn, New York, now, by private car, will take two hours, twenty-one minutes. Conditions are optimal. Weather in Brooklyn, New York—"
Katie shook her head, confused, and interrupted. "Hathor, stop. Details to my handheld." The voice fell silent while Katie darted over to her loveseat and tossed aside throw pillows until she found her handheld. Her travel itinerary waited on the screen. She'd set it up last night, booking a seat on the train at eight o'clock. Now, the reservation showed as canceled, replaced by an order for a private car to pick her up at her apartment. She pulled up details on the reservation, and found it paid on the Bureau's account.
She rolled her eyes as her headset buzzed. Rick's voice boomed, "Pratt."
"Yeah," she said. "Connect him."
"Hey, kid," Rick said, and she could hear his grin. "Did you get my present?"
"You don't have to do that. The state of New York is happy to pay for my travel. The chief just wanted me to express his gratitude to you for giving me the day off—"
"Oh, forget that," Rick said. "Due diligence and all, I checked on your court date. You didn't tell me it was one of those piss-ant confidence appeals. I hate that stuff. The whole Jurisprudence Project was set up to avoid exactly that sort of wasteful motion."
"Well, yeah—"
"So I amended your credentials on the court docket. You're testifying as a Federal Specialist now. Tell your chief he can keep his gratitude. Just show the defense attorney for the clown he is, would you?"
"Umm...thank you, sir?"
"Stop that," he said, a touch of his irritation still in his voice. "Call me Rick. Besides," he said after a moment, "Craig would've blocked access to half our services from public transport. If I put you in a private car, I can keep you on the clock."
"Ah ha," she said, laying on the sarcasm thick, for his sake. "Well, thanks a lot, Rick." He chuckled, but she really was grateful for his forethought. Hours on a train with nothing to do would have killed her.
Rick said, "Gotta go. Luck in court. See you bright and early. Out." The line went dead before she could answer.
4. Brooklyn
Katie checked the itinerary again. She had another half hour before the car would arrive. She spent it all working on the Little Rock case, and she was still buried in her notes, standing curbside in a light drizzle and tapping on her touch-screen, when the car pulled up and called her name. She climbed right in and blacked the windows.
Half an hour down the road, she tore herself from her case and pulled up an old case file. Another homicide, but this one had been easy—seventy-seven percent out of Jurisprudence at the time of death, and eighty-nine percent before she'd slapped the cuffs on him the next morning. God bless him, he'd been a talker. Prints on the murder weapon had sealed the deal: ninety-two was enough, by law, to get a bench judgment against him, and the judge had handed down a sentence after twenty minutes of consideration, less than twenty-four hours after the crime.
She sat back in the seat and closed her eyes, recalling the details of the case. The appeals argument was a shallow one, a fallacious (and probably deliberately so) misstatement of the Jurisprudence numbers, and any judge with a functioning brain would understand that. Jurisprudence didn't make mistakes, after all. She grumbled, "Connecting the dots," and cleared the notes from her screen. A moment later, she pulled up the Little Rock file again. That was a mystery.
The car deposited her at the courthouse fifteen minutes before she was scheduled to take the stand. She stepped out of the car, and back into her real life.
It was like a punch to the stomach, the intense familiarity. Like any day of the week, climbing out of a cab to make a court date. She knew both of the lawyers presenting their cases upstairs. Hell, she knew most of the lawyers in the
building, and half the judges. She waved to the security guard at the door as he nodded her through. This was her town.
She got a voice memo in the elevator from Eva, the prosecutor. "Glad you could make it. We're meeting with the judge in quarters, office three-oh-two down the hall on your left. Running a couple minutes fast, but you'll be fine." She could hear Taylor making her specious case in the background, and she shook her head. Taylor knew how to sell it, but the judge on the case was still in his forties so Katie wasn't much worried.
She pushed open the door in time to hear Eva announce, "Your honor, I'd like to introduce Special Agent Katie Pratt, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and formerly of the Brooklyn PD. She's the arresting officer on the case, and came up from Washington this morning to lend her expertise."
Katie took the introduction in stride, nodded to the judge, and said, "Sorry I'm late, Your Honor. I thought this was a court hearing."
The judge was a wiry man with an academic look to him. He leaned back in his desk chair, almost lounging, and measured Katie with sharp gray eyes. After a moment he shrugged. "Seemed like a fairly routine appeal, I figured we could handle it here and leave the courtroom free for more pressing business."
Katie didn't show her frown. That was a win, right there, but they hardly needed her for that. She nodded to him, then looked uncertainly to Eva. "What can I help you with?"
The prosecutor smiled reassuringly. "Defense has argued the unfairness of a bench judgment against a criminal with a ninety-two percent confidence. Specifically, she suggests that treating a ninety-percent confidence as a guilty verdict implies one in ten of our convicts are, statistically speaking, innocent." In spite of the informal setting, Eva was addressing Katie as though she were on the witness stand, and that eased Katie's nerves. She knew how to respond to that. "Can you comment on this?"
"Of course." Katie turned to the judge. She hadn't been there for defense's speech, but she knew how it had gone. This was, as the judge had said, a routine argument. "A Jurisprudence confidence score is not a raw assessment of guilt. Despite how it might sound, a ninety percent confidence against a suspect does not mean there's a ninety percent chance he's guilty."
She clasped her hands in front of her. It was easier to make the speech from the comfort of a chair. She felt like a professor lecturing, and that role had never suited her. "Rather, the Jurisprudence Project specifically compiles and analyzes available, definitive evidence against a suspect. The necessary and relevant criteria for individual crimes are...complex, but they are set in case- and trial-law. A one hundred percent confidence represents a theoretical, perfect preponderance of evidence against a victim—a case in which every possible incriminating record is available and positively identified, usually with an unbroken history of years. In fourteen years in law enforcement, I've never seen a perfect confidence. I am assured it's a technical impossibility."
The judge nodded. "Have you ever seen a ninety that was wrong."
Katie laughed. She shook her head. "I...can't say that I have. Honestly, I've never seen anything over a seventy that I believed was wrong, but I'm not a judge."
He smiled, tight-lipped, and nodded for her to go on.
Eva led her with, "Tell us about this case."
"First, I'd like to address the 'ten percent innocent' angle." Katie said. She'd only learned this figure a few months ago, and as far as she was concerned it put the nail in the coffin on the entire appeal. "For you to find a population large enough to trigger a false positive—and by that I mean anything over a confidence of seventy, not ninety, because seventy is the general standard for an indictment. Anyway, for you to find one false positive for the most lenient of felonies, you would need more than two hundred million innocent people. Jurisprudence compiles massive quantities of relevant data, positive and negative, and weighs probative value of every element, correlated to every other element."
Eva turned to the judge. "The chance of a false positive in this system is lower than the margin of error on DNA evidence—considered one of the most accurate methods of identification prior to the Jurisprudence Project." She turned back to Katie, "As to the particulars of this case...."
Katie nodded, and pulled out her handheld more for show than anything else. She knew the details by heart, but it looked more convincing if she seemed to be reading them. "Immediately prior to his death, as recorded by Hippocrates, the victim made an aggravated outburst that triggered authority and emergency responses through Hathor." She met the judge's eyes. "Specifically, he said...well, it's rife with obscenity, but the essence of his outburst was, 'Oh, no. Oh...lord, no. You can't do this to me. Help! Help!' a string of expletives, and then the clear sound of a gunshot. This recording coincides with a spike and then rapid crash of the victim's monitored vitals. Emergency services were automatically dispatched through Hippocrates, but the victim was dead on arrival. Based on several key parameters, Jurisprudence flagged the incident for review as a probable homicide."
The judge nodded. Katie went on.
"Concerning the ninety-two percent confidence on the accused. During a window beginning seven minutes prior to the shooting and ending two minutes afterward, the accused was alone in a closed room with the victim. They carried on a conversation concerning illicit activities that was picked up in fragments and reconstructed from audio sources outside the room. Hathor has an unbroken positive identification on the accused that precedes the event by one thousand, one hundred, twenty-four days, and continues unbroken since. The victim is likewise positively identified, up to time of death." Ugh. She remembered this one. She had watched it in HaRRE like a scene in a movie. The guy was guilty as hell.
"The presence of the accused in the same room as the victim at the time of death earned him a confidence of twenty-six percent. No one else was in the room—we have video proof of it. That alone would have earned him a guilty verdict at a jury trial."
The defense attorney complained at that. "Your Honor!" But he waved her quiet. Katie continued.
"Hathor has archived seven separate incidents prior to the event in which the accused discussed the victim, always in a hostile fashion, and two of those included direct threats of violence—in one case, he assured a compatriot that he intended to murder the victim. These accusations, individually, do not even factor in Jurisprudence, but taken collectively increase his score by four percent. Following the time of death, the accused confessed the crime on three separate occasions—twice in prayer, while on public transportation away from the scene of the crime, and once in conversation with his priest, whom he spoke with by Hathor audio connection. The combined confidence from these three confessions adds up to seventeen, weighted. Hathor provided seven lines of social connections between the accused and the victim, six of which represented illicit or illegal endeavors. Jurisprudence recognized a trajectory of conflict in these relationships, and that accounted for another seven percent confidence."
The judge sighed heavily, and Katie stopped in her report. She met his eyes in a question, and he shrugged. "I know how to read a Jurisprudence confidence report."
She bit back her first sarcastic response, but the second one escaped. "Does the defense?"
Taylor bristled at that, and barked, "Your Honor!" in objection, but Katie knew it was all playacting. Taylor was here on a simple crap-shoot, and really she had lost it as soon as she'd been assigned this judge. He still pointed a finger at Katie in rebuke, though.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That was out of line." She glanced back at the confidence report on her handheld and shrugged. "The murder weapon was positively identified with ninety-nine plus confidence, and linked to the accused before, during, and after the incident. Means, motive, and opportunity, as they said in the old days." As she said it, she realized the judge was the only other person in the room old enough to remember the phrase in common use, but the lawyers had heard it often enough in their history classes. "There's other incidentals, which account for the infinitesimally small likelihoo
d of a false positive, but before Jurisprudence reaches a seventy percent confidence it has firmly established means, motive, and opportunity. We placed the accused and victim in the same location, we found a trajectory of violence based on a failed, illicit financial enterprise, and we associated the accused with the murder weapon."
She took a deep breath. "There's a reason congress authorized bench judgments above the ninety percent threshold, Your Honor. Jurisprudence has access to more information than eyewitnesses and search warrants could ever provide. The system is not wrong." She looked across at Taylor. "I understand that the system allows appeals of Confidence, for reasons of fairness. I also understand that process is under review, because confidence is not wrong. The report testifies to that, in this case."
She caught Eva's expression out of the corner of her eye, and realized she was stealing the prosecutor's lines. She'd been through it so often. She fell silent, and Eva delivered the punch line. "In this case, Your Honor, the accused is clearly guilty, and the bench judgment entirely warranted."
The judge looked at Taylor for a rebuttal, but before she could open her mouth, he shook his head. "I agree," he said Taylor sputtered, trying to voice an objection, but the judge shut her up with a look. "No, the prosecution has made its case. The court rejects this confidence appeal, with prejudice. I'll submit my remarks on the topic later today. Judge Grantham's judgment remains in force. Thank you."
Taylor didn't bother storming out or stomping off, but she didn't hang around to say hi to Katie, either. Under the circumstances, Katie supposed that was probably a good thing. Eva caught Katie's arm as they left the judge's office, though, and guided her to a quiet corner to talk. Katie watched the judge's door fall shut, then asked, "What the hell was that?"
Eva laughed. "I was going to ask you the same thing. Federal expert witness? When did that happen?"
Katie shrugged. "I made Special Agent on Monday. They didn't have any work for me to do, so my boss let me come testify here. I don't know he would have if he'd known it was just chambers—"