The Holdout, page 8
“Indeed.” He took a moment.
This was going to get worse.
“There is good news,” he continued, “and there is bad news.”
“I want the bad news, please.”
“You would, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head. “I’m going to give you the good news first, because we could use some. In 2010, Bobby Nock was convicted for disseminating child pornography. After eighteen months in Chino, he was paroled.”
That wasn’t news. “The child porn was a bullshit charge.”
“How so?”
“The DA failed on murder, so he argued that he could separately prosecute Bobby Nock for the nude photos that Jessica Silver had texted him. She was underage….”
“Dissemination?”
“He had a cellphone and a laptop. He sent the photos from one device to another.”
“You need a second person for dissemination.”
“The cellphone was technically registered to his mother.”
Craig looked up at the ceiling, as if genuinely impressed by the prosecutorial gall. “You weren’t kidding about the bullshit.”
“The DA was hell-bent on putting Bobby Nock in jail for something. The judge allowed a bench trial, citing the publicity from the murder case—the gears of justice turned as efficiently as possible.”
This was the kind of thing that really got Craig going. His disgust, nurtured over years of watching the justice system get away with wanton displays of power, was always close to the surface.
“Where does the good news come in?”
He nodded. “Bobby Nock has disappeared.”
“What do you mean, ‘disappeared’?”
“I mean that some months ago—let me be more precise…” He picked up one of his iPhones and scrolled to the relevant information. “Five months ago, Bobby Nock broke his parole. As a registered sex offender, he was required to check in weekly with his DOC officer. Five months ago, he didn’t show up. Cops went around to his place—nothing. Vanished.”
“How does someone like Bobby Nock just vanish?”
“I once represented a man—a middle school girls’ soccer coach—who did his three years for…well, you can guess….But the whole act of going around knocking on doors every time he moved, telling his neighbors he was a child rapist, he couldn’t take it anymore. Left the state, got a new name—there isn’t much of a mechanism to track these guys down. Sex offender registries are state-by-state.”
“Bobby Nock is famous.”
Craig shrugged. “Where does Robert Blake live?”
Maya frowned. “The actor who killed his wife? I don’t know.”
“Exactly. What about George Zimmerman? Amanda Knox?”
“She didn’t do it.”
“My point being, if you saw one of them on the street, new haircut, would you recognize them? Once the trial fades…People still talk about it, they still recognize the names.” She couldn’t tell if he was referring to her. “But the only people still digging are family members and conspiracy theorists and bloggers.”
“And jurors, apparently,” Maya added.
“And the occasional podcaster. Like, for example, your new friends at Murder Town. They were trying to find Bobby for the show. To no avail. Like I said: good news.”
“You talked to them already?”
“Who?”
“The producers.”
“Mike and Mike did.” Craig currently had two associate attorneys named Mike. They were fresh out of UCLA and USC law schools, respectively, and were both beefy, blond, work-hard, play-hard types. One wore glasses, one wore contacts, but other than that it had been difficult, at first, to tell them apart. Rather than assigning them to separate tasks, Craig seemed to take a perverse pleasure in teaming them up. He’d seen to it that they were bound at the hip.
Maya was pretty sure that Mike and Mike loathed each other.
If Mike and Mike were already involved, then so were a half dozen others at the firm. Their investigators would be reinterviewing everyone the cops interviewed. The paralegals would be rummaging through transcripts. If Maya had tried to distance her professional life from the world of the Bobby Nock trial, well, so much for that. By now every one of her fellow jurors would have their own file in Craig’s office. Soon, her co-workers would know things about these people that Maya never did. And they’d know about her too.
Craig seemed to read her thoughts. “Did you think I wasn’t going to ask everyone to drop whatever else they were doing to focus on this?”
Maya knew that she should say thank you. But she was humiliated by the thought of so many people she worked with combing through her life.
Craig appeared to have more important things on his mind than her feelings. “Putting on layperson glasses, there were two people who might have wanted to kill Rick Leonard: the juror he’d spent months attacking in the press…”
“That would be me.”
“…and the convicted child pornographer and accused murderer of Jessica Silver who was terrified that Rick had found new evidence that could finally prove his guilt.”
Maya grimaced. This theory was tenuous.
“You don’t like it?” he said. “That was my good news.”
“First of all,” Maya said, “Bobby Nock isn’t a murderer.”
“Respectfully, you are the only person in America who thinks that.”
“Second, you want to argue that Bobby Nock came out of hiding to sneak into our hotel—one of the few places in the world in which there were literally dozens of people sure to recognize him—in order to murder Rick before he could broadcast whatever evidence he had?”
Craig looked as if there was nothing implausible at all about this. “I don’t need to prove it happened. I just need them to fail to prove that it didn’t.”
Maya ran her hands through her hair. If that was the best they had, then this was not going to go well.
Maybe “he tripped and fell” really was their best theory.
“You said there was also bad news?”
Craig folded his hands over his lap. “One of your fellow jurors has given the police a statement to the effect that you and the deceased engaged in a sexual relationship ten years ago.”
Maya did her best not to react. “Who said that?”
“Mike and Mike are asking around.”
The thought of Mike and Mike asking after the details of her sex life was horrifying. She imagined the silent looks they’d give each other as they duly committed the rumors to the case file. She imagined the paralegals correcting any typos in the reports, the assistants scanning copies of every sordid page. It was mortifying.
But it was the least of her problems.
Craig continued, “The story that our team has put together is that you and Rick Leonard were romantically linked during the Bobby Nock trial. And that this was a secret you kept from everyone—family, friends, the other jurors. And certainly the court, which would have kicked you both off that trial in a heartbeat.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, but his look was expectant. He clearly wanted as much detail as he could get. But how could she make him understand what it had been like?
“It’s complicated,” she said lamely.
Craig took this as an affirmation that the story was true. He accepted it without judgment. “This is bad news because, one, now the prosecution’s theory won’t be that Rick Leonard’s former fellow juror killed him in a fit of revenge. Now it’ll be that Rick Leonard’s former lover killed him in a fit of passion.” He paused. “Which will play better…to a jury.” The irony was unavoidable.
Maya felt dumb repeating herself, but she didn’t know what else to say: “I’m telling you. I—” She measured her words carefully. “Someone else must have come into my room after I left.”
“I’m not yet convinced that that’s our best version of events.”
“What?”
“The former-lovers bit could work to our advantage.”
“How?”
“If we argue self-defense.”
Maya stared. “You want me to argue that I killed Rick Leonard in self-defense?”
“I’m not sure yet. But look at you—a woman your size—you’ve got an angry ex-boyfriend in your hotel room. Maybe you broke his heart all those years ago. He’s never gotten over it. He’s yelling, he’s calling you foul names, he’s banging his fists against the walls—maybe this ex-boyfriend has a history of domestic violence—so you’re in fear for your life, no one comes running to the sound of your screams, you push this violent ex-boyfriend against the table….” Craig looked like he was picturing himself describing this scene in a courtroom. Like he was listening for the way the words would sound to a jury.
He pursed his lips. “It’s not bad.”
She rubbed her palms together. To claim responsibility for killing someone she hadn’t in order to avoid punishment for that very killing would be to reach a dizzying new height of crazy. But Rick wasn’t the man that Craig had described.
“Rick Leonard does not have a history of domestic abuse,” she said.
Craig sank back into the couch. “All right, let’s talk about history.”
CHAPTER 6
MAYA
FEBRUARY 1, 2009
Maya Seale moved from Brooklyn to L.A. on the first day of February, 2009, just two weeks after she’d frozen half to death in the ebullient crowd at the inauguration in Washington, DC. She’d flown across the country with her boyfriend, Hunter, whose new job at a Century City financial firm had spurred the move. They’d flown into San Francisco, bought an old Honda from Hunter’s brother, who lived there, and then loaded their possessions into the trunk. They made jokes about manifest destiny as they drove down the coast.
Highway 1 wound its fractal curves along the edge of the endless ocean. About halfway down the coast, they hit a nasty crunch of traffic. Cars and trucks were backed up for nearly a mile. Maya joined the throngs who’d left their vehicles and were ambling down the road. No one seemed to know what had happened, but neither did anyone seem particularly surprised by the holdup.
Then she saw the helicopter. It had just lifted off from beyond a bend in the road ahead, and below it hung white straps leading to a medical stretcher. On the stretcher, a man’s body lay prone on a long board. The body was wrapped in some kind of orange bandage.
One of the other motorists said that he heard that the man on the stretcher was a rock climber who’d fallen on the cliffs ahead and was being medevaced out. But there wasn’t much chance of survival.
Maya hadn’t even made it to L.A. yet and she’d already seen someone dying.
* * *
—
IN THOSE EARLY months, she had felt as buoyant with promise as had the country around her. She and Hunter rented a California Craftsman bungalow in Los Feliz with a sloping hillside yard. Hunter’s co-workers all said the house was “cozy,” but to Maya it felt gargantuan. She’d been in New York for so long she’d forgotten that in other places, people her age could afford to live in such luxury. Every morning she’d juice a fresh grapefruit from the tree in the backyard. Then Hunter would head to work and Maya would stare at the blank screen that she could only hope, by the force of will, would fill with the novel she told her friends back in New York that she was writing.
Writing had only been the most recent of her unfulfilling pursuits. After college, she’d reasoned that since she liked to cook, she should take a job in a hotel kitchen. But she’d found that she didn’t like cooking on a line, and that she really didn’t like being castigated for over-buttering someone’s scrambled eggs at six-thirty in the morning. Next she’d ventured out to Argentina with a friend, to explore, hike, and drink too much. She found assorted translating jobs to pay for it all, but hadn’t put much of a dent in her student loans. So after enough backpacking to last her a while, she’d gone to New York, where footloose people were supposed to find callings.
Maya hadn’t. Instead, she’d found a series of underpaying jobs at bitchy websites and unproductive production companies and stifling Wall Street firms. Pushing around paperwork in the HR office at one of those firms, she’d met Hunter. He was an associate in the wealth management department. She would never have imagined herself with a banker—what a bland, interchangeable bunch—but Hunter had style. He was so sure of who he was, what he wanted, and how he was going to get it. When he got an offer to transfer to Los Angeles, she was ready for another change.
Hunter, for his part, had seemed thrilled about arriving in California with a girlfriend in tow. If they’d contemplated a coming engagement, it had probably been because that was what people in their position did. Hunter’s career was on track. It was time for him to get his personal life locked down. And living in that new house, with an actual white picket fence—a term she’d heard before, without knowing what exactly it referred to until she had one—gave them both a chance to play at a life that felt splendidly natural.
She’d walk to nearby coffee shops with a laptop poking out of her canvas tote and strangers would smile at her on the street. People really did that in L.A. She made new friends at the dance studio in Atwater Village. She was even writing, or at least filling pages, with her impressions of what it was like to be young and buzzed on educated opinions that just maybe people might want to read.
When the jury summons arrived in the mail, Maya wasn’t sure how they’d even found her so fast at her new address. She’d adamantly refused to change her voter registration from New Mexico, where she’d grown up, so as not to waste her vote in either New York or California. Beyond that, she didn’t think much about the summons. Jury duty might be interesting—one of the many new and informative experiences to which she should keep herself open. It might even provide some fodder for her writing. Who knew what sorts of oddballs she’d meet in the jury pool?
She called the number as requested, and was informed by a recorded voice to appear at 8:45 A.M. on May 29 at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center. She brought her laptop for what she believed would be a mini-adventure. She figured they’d have Wi-Fi.
That very first day, she sat down next to Rick Leonard.
* * *
—
RIGHT AWAY, JURY service isolated her from Hunter. It was tricky to go home every night and keep silent about the case. What could she say to him? The trial itself had barely begun and, perversely, he had access to more information than she did. He could google everything about Bobby Nock and Jessica Silver, while Maya was under strict instructions to remain in the dark. Ironically, Hunter was the one largely keeping information from her.
Their dinner table conversations were reduced to the idle chatter of acquaintances. In New York, it had seemed like they had so much in common. But now she was having trouble remembering what those things had been. Hunter began to feel like more of a stranger than the other jurors. At least they laughed at her dumb stories about South America.
And then came the sequester. She’d never heard of a jury being sequestered in the middle of a trial before.
It was hard to describe the lonely crowding of the trial’s next weeks. They spent more time in the jury room than in the courtroom, while the lawyers debated points of law to which the jurors weren’t privy. It seemed as if more attention was paid to what they would not hear than to what they would.
More and more, Maya grew curious about those closed-door debates among the lawyers. What were those all-important matters that were being kept from her? She found herself clutching at every bit of legal jargon she’d hear before Bailiff Steve removed her from the courtroom. What exactly was the “catchall” exception to the ban on hearsay evidence? Why did California apparently treat it differently than other states? Why did that mean that they wouldn’t be hearing testimony from Jessica Silver’s family housekeeper?
Pamela Gibson, the defense attorney, seemed super bad-ass every time she’d interrupt the prosecutor’s questioning. “Objection, Your Honor. Leading.” Or “Objection, Your Honor. Facts not in evidence.” Maya didn’t understand all the legal reasoning, but she knew how to count: The judge sustained almost all of the defense’s objections, and only about a third of the prosecutor’s. Gibson projected a compelling air of hyper-competence.
Maya had never before been fascinated by the law. But she also realized that she hadn’t been exposed to it before, not up close. As she sat there every day, staring at the face of Bobby Nock, trying to follow along as his fate hung on the ins and outs of impenetrable procedural detail, all she knew was that she needed to know so much more.
JUNE 18, 2009
“It’s about one-way streets,” Rick Leonard told her one morning over breakfast. They were in the hotel restaurant, at their own table. The others ate nearby in groups of three or four. It was amazing, Maya thought, how quickly they had divided themselves into factions. Fran, Yasmine, and Lila were at one table. Peter, Cal, Kellan, and Arnold were at another. Trisha, Carolina, and Jae sat together at a third. Kathy and Enrique stood by the buffet counter.
Only Wayne sipped his coffee at a table all his own.
The lines had formed first by gender and then by ethnicity. Maya hoped that this was not the work of some terrible, vestigial instinct and was instead simply coincidence.
“Your thesis?” she said.
“Yeah,” Rick said. “The effect of one-way streets on poverty and segregation in American cities.”
“Your doctoral thesis at USC is on one-way streets?”
“One-way streets are one of the most effective tools local governments use to preserve racial segregation.”
“One-way streets are racist?” She raised an eyebrow.
“I’m being serious.” But he laughed, so he wasn’t being that serious. “The point isn’t that one-way streets are racist. The point is that one-way streets can be a powerful force in urban planning. Which streets funnel traffic into which other streets defines the contours of neighborhoods. This is what I study. Historically, when cities like Chicago, Detroit, or L.A. have wanted to act like nothing racist is happening but still subtly encourage all the black people, or all the Latin people, or all the Japanese people, or what have you, to stay in the same space, they’ve turned two-way streets into one-way streets to do it.”
