Page 73 of The Proving Ground

“Yes, it is,” Clarke said.

“Did it look like a real person to you when you saw it in Aaron’s room?”

“Yes. He closed the laptop as we were coming through the door, so it was pretty quick. I thought he was doing a Zoom or something with a real person.”

“What do you think now?”

“It’s close, but you can tell it’s a fake.”

“But there is a real human being who goes by the name Wren the Wrestler, is there not?”

“Yes, she’s a popular wrestling star.”

“Did you ever compare the avatar of Wren you saw to photos of the real Wren the Wrestler?”

“I did. Like I said, it’s close.”

“What exactly is an avatar, Detective Clarke?”

Marcus Mason objected, arguing that the question was beyondthe scope of the detective’s expertise. The judge agreed. I turned to check the clock on the rear wall of the courtroom. I then turned back to the judge.

“Your Honor, my questioning of Detective Clarke will move into another phase at this point,” I said. “It might be a good time to take a break.”

“Very well,” Ruhlin said. “We will take the afternoon break now. The jury is admonished not to discuss the testimony or case with each other or anyone else. Please be back in the assembly room in fifteen minutes.”

29

I SPENT THEbreak conferring with Lorna and Jack. Cisco had left court to take up the watch on Naomi Kitchens and her daughter at the two-bedroom hotel suite we had booked for them at the Huntington in Pasadena. To throw off Tidalwaiv or the defense team if they were trying to find them, they were booked under pseudonyms, and the hotel was located ten miles from the courthouse in which the case was being tried. Most witnesses appearing in trials in downtown cases were stashed in nearby hotels so they could be brought to the courtroom on short notice.

Standing at the railing of the gallery, we talked about shuffling the lineup. My pretrial plan for day one had been to start with Detective Clarke’s testimony and then go to the Coltons, Trisha first, followed by Bruce. I would end the day with Brenda Randolph touching every juror’s heart with her testimony about her daughter and what her loss had meant. But a trial is a fluid thing. I’ve never had one that went exactly according to plan. I could already see that the jury had warmed to Clarke and seemed to be hanging on every word oftestimony about his investigation. This was real life, not TV, and they were eating it up. I didn’t want to cut him short, but keeping him on would push my trial schedule back.

“The last thing we want is to end the day with Bruce Colton on the stand,” I said. “Even if I tightly control the questions, he’s not going to come off as sympathetic to the jury. I don’t want them going home thinking about him and how he taught his son to shoot a gun.”

“Well, if that’s what happens, you’ll at least be starting off tomorrow with a bang—no pun intended,” McEvoy said. “I mean, Brenda will be very sympathetic, right?”

“She will,” I said. “But it’s better to end each day with a bang. Jurors go home thinking about the last thing they heard. And they’re going to assign some blame to Bruce.”

“That’s for sure,” Lorna chimed in. “So I think you stretch out Clarke and then you go to Brenda and run with her to the bell. Tomorrow you flip the Coltons. You go with Bruce first and get it out of the way while the jury is still waking up in their seats. Then Trisha, and you start building back the sympathy.”

I nodded. Lorna was not a jury consultant by training, but she always seemed to have her finger on the pulse of the jurors, how they were viewing a trial and receiving the testimony as it progressed. Sometimes I was so deeply entrenched in keeping momentum and focusing on the witness in front of me that I didn’t take that pulse. That was why I always wanted Lorna in the courtroom when I had a jury case.

“A lot will depend on how much the Mason boys want to do with Clarke,” I said. “They can probably guess how I’m going to lay out our case. I think Marcus will take Clarke, and he might try to stall things with his cross and not let me get to Brenda.”

“How much can he do with Clarke?” Lorna asked. “It’s the investigation. He’s only objected twice so far and both were bullshit.”

“Yeah, well, that’s going to change now,” I said. “When I get to the Clair of it all, he’ll be jumping up like it’s musical chairs.”

I wasn’t far off on that prediction. When the trial reconvened after the break and Douglas Clarke returned to the witness stand, I went right to the post-arrest part of his investigation.

“Detective, did you move on to other cases after Aaron Colton was safely taken into custody?” I asked.

“No, not at all,” Clarke said.

“Do you mean there were other suspects?”

“No, from the witnesses, we knew we had a lone shooter. But we needed to gather all the evidence and understand what had happened and why.”

“And did you make a final determination on what had happened and why?”