by Marcia Clark
Dale seemed to be aging backward since the murder charges got dismissed two years ago. It even looked like there was more pepper than salt in his regulation cop haircut. He was smiling into his cell phone when we walked up to his cubicle and perched on a table across from his desk. Dale looked up, then sighed as he said, “I’ve gotta go. Eight o’clock still good?” He listened for a moment, then said, “Great, I’ll pick you up,” and ended the call.
I folded my arms and smirked. “The crime-scene tech again? What was her name, Susan?” Every time I checked, Dale seemed to have a new babe.
Dale gave me a deadpan look. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. It’s a woman I met at the fund-raiser for the children’s hospital.” He sat back. “And the crime-scene tech was Janet, not Susan.” He nodded to Alex. “How you doing?” They’d bonded over the dirty-cop case we’d been involved in last year.
“Good.” Alex tilted his head at the phone. “Sounds like you are, too.”
Dale smiled. “Not bad for an old man.” He hit a key on his computer. “So your client . . . Graham Hutchins. If all goes well, he should be fine. But even if it turns out to be a homicide, for a change, I don’t mind helping you. If I was in his shoes, I’d shoot the bastard and burn his house down.”
Alex and I both knew that wasn’t just hyperbole. He’d actually killed a prostitute who’d threatened my younger half sister, Lisa. He’d gotten away with it so far, but there was a very dicey junkie out there who could nail him to the wall if he ever sobered up and realized what he’d seen.
I told Dale what we’d learned about the crew cut guy but played it close to the vest about the stalker story. We didn’t know yet whether we could even link him to Alicia’s murder, let alone Roan’s death. But my job was to keep all options open. And I didn’t want the cops to dig into my potential fall guy and muck things up. So the less they knew about him, the better. “I need the witness statements from the people who lived in Alicia’s building.”
Dale pulled up a folder on his computer and scrolled for a moment. “We did work that up.” He turned around and leaned back in his chair. “Okay, I know what I can do for you. What can you do for me?”
This was Alex’s bailiwick. He said, “I assume you’ve seized Alicia’s and Roan’s phones and computers?” Dale nodded. “I can tell you whether someone besides Roan could have posted the photos on that porn website.”
Dale drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair for a moment, then he turned back to the computer and hit a key. The printer whirred to life. “I don’t have to tell you to keep this quiet, do I?”
I pulled the pages of the police reports from the printer. “We were never here.”
EIGHT
As I scanned the witness statements, Dale said, “The detective in charge had a couple of unis talk to the neighbors about the guy Gayle described.”
“Unis? Why?” Don’t get me wrong—some unis are great, but since they’re usually newbies, they don’t have a lot of interviewing experience, and the first crack at a witness can be a make-or-break situation. Ask the right questions and a memory is sparked; ask the wrong ones—or fail to ask the right follow-ups—and a memory is buried or, worse, distorted. Bottom line: no decent detective delegates the door knocking on a tip as important as Gayle’s. “Who’s the detective?”
Dale’s expression was cynical. “Rusty Templeton.”
Of course, who else? “Pure genius putting him on the case.” I’d locked horns with Rusty last year when I’d handled the Cassie Sonnenberg case. He was the stereotypical burnout case riding out his last few years until retirement. “Is he still on it?”
Dale made a face and nodded. “For now.”
I scanned the reports. At first glance it looked like only one of the neighbors corroborated Gayle’s sighting of Mr. Crew Cut, and that neighbor didn’t know whether the guy had made contact with Alicia. “Any chance you might wind up with the case?”
“No clue. As of now, I’m just helping out.” He turned to Alex. “You can check out Alicia’s phone and laptop. But I’m afraid Roan’s were wiped clean.”
Alex looked skeptical. “I’ll need to see that for myself. It might seem like everything’s been erased when it’s really only ‘lost.’ You just have to know where to look, and your guy probably doesn’t. No offense, but he’s a cop, right?”
Dale shot him a look. “Right.” His tone was sarcastic. “And cops can’t possibly know anything about tech.”
Alex shrugged. “Not saying he doesn’t know anything. It’s just unlikely he knows as much as I do.”
Dale glanced at me, and I gave him a little smile. “You know he’s right. No offense.”
Dale stood up. “It’ll take some doing to get you access to Roan’s phone and laptop. I can’t promise anything. But I can bring you Alicia’s. Wait here.”
When Dale left, I spoke to Alex in a low voice. The news that Roan’s laptop and phone were wiped worried me. “Why does someone who’s about to commit suicide scrub his shit like that?” Even if Alex managed to figure out that it was only “lost” and not permanently erased, the fact that the effort was made worried me.
Alex shook his head. “It is weird. But . . . the whole theory about his suicide was that he felt guilty about killing Alicia. Maybe that’s why he tried to wipe everything, too?”
That actually made sense. And then another reason occurred to me. “Remember, he’d been dragged in for questioning more than once before he died.”
Alex tapped his forehead. “Of course. Duh. He was probably afraid of getting busted for posting Alicia’s selfies.”
And rightly so. That didn’t necessarily prove he’d posted Alicia’s selfies. He might’ve had other things on his computer to worry about, like bootlegged T-Pain albums. But the wiped computer certainly added to the likelihood that Roan was the one who’d posted her photos.
A few minutes later, Dale returned with Alicia’s cell phone and laptop. He handed the phone to Alex and set the laptop on the table across from his desk. “I’m trusting you not to alter anything.” He gave Alex a stern look.
Alex returned his gaze. “I would never do a thing like that.” His tone sounded a little offended.
Dale raised an eyebrow. “No, but she would.” He tilted his head toward me.
Alex thought about that for a moment, then nodded. “That’s fair.”
I looked from one to the other and folded my arms. “Would you both like to kiss my ass now? Or later?”
Alex sat down at the table and turned on the power for Alicia’s laptop. While he waited for it to boot up, he turned on Alicia’s phone. Within minutes, he began to shake his head. “First of all, this is an iPhone, and it’s not jailbroken—so it wouldn’t have been so easy to hack.”
I’m a tech Luddite, so that meant nothing to me. “What’s jailbroken mean? And why does someone do that?”
“People hack their phones to get rid of built-in restrictions that limit the software they can download.” Alex saw my confused expression. “For example, if an iPhone is jailbroken, the user isn’t limited to downloading apps from the Apple store. But the point is, it’s easier to hack into a jailbroken phone. Since Alicia’s isn’t jailbroken, it’s a little less likely that a third party could’ve hacked into her phone to get the photos and post them to the porn website.”
It would’ve been nice to have a reason to point to a mysterious third party who could’ve posted Alicia’s photos. I didn’t know how I’d link that person to Roan’s murder, but still. It’s always good to have another theory—or more accurately, a red herring or two . . . or three. “You said it’s unlikely, but it’s not impossible for someone else to have hacked into her phone, right?”
Alex pulled out his iPad. “No, it’s definitely not impossible. There’s spyware you can load into a phone that isn’t jailbroken. And Alicia didn’t delete the photos from her phone.” He held up the phone. Sure enough, there they were—all her nude photos. “I can definitely confirm that
she sent them to Roan. But she didn’t send them to anyone else. So unless someone besides Roan had managed to load spyware on her phone and knew about the photos—which seems pretty unlikely, since there’s no spyware on her phone now—I’d say Roan had to have posted the photos to that website.”
Not great news, but I’d take “unlikely” over “impossible” any day. It meant I got to keep my third-party mystery guy. Or girl. I didn’t want to limit my options. “What else could someone find out by hacking her phone?”
He scrolled through the phone. “A shit ton. If someone installed spyware on it, he or she could’ve monitored every phone call, text, and e-mail and tracked her movements.”
I was loving this. The beauty of being a defense lawyer is that I don’t have to prove anything. All I have to do is poke enough holes in the People’s case to give the jury reasonable doubt. This new information presented exactly the kind of juicy scenario likely to distract and confuse a jury.
Dale was less enthused. “But who else besides Roan would want to hack her phone?”
Of course, there was that. The question hung in the air, along with its corollary: Who else had motive to kill Alicia besides Roan? The answer to both was “no one.” And that led to the obvious conclusion: if Roan hadn’t committed suicide, the best—and only logical—suspect for his murder was Graham.
Dale gave me a meaningful look but spared me the verbal “told you so” as Alex moved to Alicia’s laptop.
I wasn’t ready to let it go. “Alex, you said there’s no spyware on her phone right now?”
“No, right. I checked. But that doesn’t mean it was never there.”
Dale saw where I was going. “Is there a way to find out whether it had been there before?”
Alex nodded. “There might be. I’d need more time to do that.”
A few minutes later, Alex turned his chair around to face us. “She never stored the photos on her laptop, so the phone is the only way someone besides Roan could’ve gotten them. Someone also posted her selfies to her Facebook page after they were posted to the porn website, so I was trying to see if I could trace that person, but the link is broken. I might be able to find a back door, but that would take a lot more time than we have right now, and it might not be worth it. Once those photos, with her Facebook link and physical address, hit the porn website, anyone with a little hacking experience could’ve posted those photos to her Facebook page.”
So the person who’d posted her photos to the porn website wasn’t necessarily the person who’d posted them to her Facebook page. Meaning someone who’d never even met Alicia could’ve posted the photos to her Facebook page. “Why would someone do that? Just for the lulz?”
“Yeah, just a prank—a sick joke.” Alex closed Alicia’s laptop, his mouth twisted with disdain. “It’s pathetic.”
I asked Dale when they expected to get the official coroner’s report on Roan, but he didn’t know. He did, however, have some new information for me. “I just wanted to give you a heads up: Roan’s parents are insisting there’s no way he committed suicide.”
This did not surprise me. “Because there’s no way he killed Alicia.”
He stood up. “Right. And they’re putting pressure on everyone to hold the coroner’s feet to the fire. The captain said they’ve contacted the city councilman and the county Board of Supervisors.”
I guess it made sense. If Roan were my kid, I’d probably go apeshit, too. “So this is going to get hot.”
Dale gave me a grim smile. “Familiar territory for you. But I thought you should know, just to be prepared.”
I’d been right in the center of a searingly hot bull’s-eye in Dale’s case. I thanked him for the warning. “Guess we’ll take it as it comes. We’d better get back to the office.”
As we turned to go, Dale said, “I trust you’ll keep me up to speed if you find anything.”
I stopped and smiled. “Of course. Goes without saying. And you’ll do likewise, right?”
He gave me a flat smile. “Like you said, goes without saying.”
Alex and I headed for the elevator. As we stepped inside, he gave me a sidelong glance. “No way we’re telling him diddly, right?”
“Of course not.” And Dale didn’t plan on giving us diddly, either. I knew that smile.
It was after seven o’clock when we got back to the office. Just in time to make my seven thirty dinner date at Barney’s Beanery with Michy. She asked Alex if he’d like to join us.
He rolled his eyes. “So you two can grill me about Paul all night long? No, gracias.”
I tsked him. “Don’t be such a Debbie Downer. If I had a new bae, I’d spill.”
Michelle threw a glance over her shoulder as she pulled on her coat. “You sure you want to go down that road?”
I spread my hands. “What? I told you guys about Niko.” The super-hot Krav Maga teacher I’d met when I enrolled—then bailed—out of his class. I just couldn’t make the weekly afternoon commitment. The nights were a different matter.
Alex flashed his eyes at me. “Last I heard, you two had dinner at the Tower Bar. That was six months ago. Either he was a one and done, or you somehow forgot to give us any updates.”
I wasn’t the best sharer in the world. “Fine, I’ll catch you up over dinner.”
Which would be easy, since Niko had been on tour giving master classes for the past six months.
NINE
It was a fun dinner—once they got over the fact that my “share” about Niko amounted to about three calls, none of which involved hot phone sex. And after what I’d just learned about the nonexistent nature of cell phone privacy, there’d be no “hot” anything on my calls. From now on, I planned to keep my cell phone conversations limited to the basics of where to meet and when.
The next morning, I was listening to the news, standing in front of my closet and trying to decide what to wear, when I heard a raw-sounding female voice say, “My name is Audrey Sutton.”
I turned to the television and saw a rail-thin woman in her fifties with short, windblown hair and red-rimmed eyes holding a small sheet of paper in shaking hands. She continued. “My son, Roan Sutton, was found dead in his house last week. The coroner has issued a preliminary finding that he committed suicide. I am here to tell you that is not true. I know my son. He was not depressed; he was not suicidal. He was murdered. And he did not kill Alicia Hutchins!” Her voice broke, and she paused for a moment before continuing. “I’m calling on our city councilman, Lonnie Forrester, and our county supervisor, Shirley Carmichael, to make the medical examiner do his job. And then make sure the police do theirs and catch the animal who killed my son!”
My first thought was, Dale wasn’t kidding. My second thought was, Get moving on Roan. Fast. I had to find witnesses who’d say Roan was acting dicey after Alicia’s death—like someone who’d commit suicide. Because if the autopsy left room for doubt, Audrey Sutton’s plea might tip the scale in favor of homicide. I had to do whatever I could to keep that from happening.
I wasn’t worried so much about Audrey’s opinion. She wouldn’t be the first mother to be in denial about a child’s mental state or what he was capable of doing. But I was plenty worried about the statements Roan had given to the cops. Since they’d surely targeted Roan as the one who’d posted the revenge porn and killed Alicia, they weren’t about to help set him up with a mental defense. As far as they were concerned, the saner he came off, the better. So I was betting those statements would only give Audrey Sutton more proof that he was sane and balanced, not the least bit suicidal.
The decision to find out what I could about Roan made my wardrobe choice easy. I’d be spending the day at USC, hunting down every source I could find that would paint a picture of Roan’s behavior and state of mind—both before and after Alicia’s death. And that meant the dress code of the day was jeans and a sweater. I need people to relax and spill their guts, and they tend to get nervous when they know they’re talking to a lawyer. So I do my be
st to help them forget what I am. I dress down and try to fit in with the crowd.
While I put on my makeup, I called Alex and told him what our plans were for the day. “So you need to wear student-y clothes.”
He has no problem with casual, but he does it with taste, and he hates it when we really have to go down-market.
He huffed. “I’m fine with jeans. And I’ll even wear a hoodie. But I absolutely refuse to do those tacky friggin’ sandals.”
“I’d refuse to be seen with you if you did. Especially in November.”
“Not in June, July, or August, either. I’m not kidding, those fugly, clunky things should be illegal. Unless you’re a monk.”
I had to laugh. “I’ll pick you up at the office.”
He paused. “Ah, how about I pick you up at your place, give you a break from driving?”
It sounded generous and thoughtful. It wasn’t. “Your mistrust of Beulah is hurtful . . . and unfair.”
Alex sighed. “Hurtful, maybe. Unfair? Girl, be serious. I want to make it to the campus sometime today. God forbid this case winds up in trial, but if it does, you’ll have the money to buy a real car. And you’d better, because if you don’t, I’ll have someone torch it. I swear.”
Since I couldn’t deny that Beulah had crapped out on me repeatedly, and I hate being on the losing end of an argument, I capitulated. “Fine, be here in fifteen.”
I finished my makeup, pounded three cups of coffee, and threw on a sweatshirt. Twenty minutes later, Alex and I were rolling toward the freeway. We talked about Audrey Sutton’s television appearance, and I told him what I wanted to do. “We need to find out everything we can about Roan’s state of mind. So we need to dig into his history as much as possible. In particular, I’d like to know whether he’d ever revenge porned any other girls before Alicia.”
Alex glanced at me. “To see if she made him more nutso than usual?”
“Yeah. But even if he has done it before, I think we can argue that shows some mental issues, too.”
