Bailey was silent for a moment. “It’s pretty hard to believe that a pissed-off actor would murder a director’s kid and her boyfriend just to frame the manager.”
“Cops would make more sense…” Who else would’ve had the ability to plant blood and prints? Still, I had a feeling Terry wasn’t aiming at LAPD. “We’ll hash this out later. One thing’s for sure, I’m going to hammer them hard about discovery. I’m not buying that they don’t have anything yet. They’ve got to have witnesses lined up if they’re going to prove Ian was framed.”
“You’d think,” Bailey said.
“You have time to come over? I’m going to put together the jury questionnaire and we should talk about who we want.”
Most prosecutors don’t consult their investigating officers about pure trial work like jury selection, but most prosecutors don’t have someone as smart and experienced as Bailey.
“Give me half an hour. I’ve got to return a couple of calls, one of ’em to our witness on maternity leave.”
“Good enough. I’ll get us lunch.”
Declan and I got down to work on the questionnaire. Not all lawyers are fans of juror questionnaires. And I don’t think they should replace the gut feeling you get when you actually talk to jurors, see their body language, their reactions in the moment. But used correctly, the questionnaire can help us weed out the liars. That’s critical in big cases, because the more high profile the case, the more we risk getting groupies who’re in love with the defendant, or the spotlight, or who want to write a book-or all of the above. After half an hour, we took a break to get sandwiches and chips from the snack bar. When we got back, Bailey had pushed a flower arrangement to the side and was leaning back with her feet up on the table next to the window.
I threw her a pastrami sub and a bag of potato chips and dropped mine and Declan’s on the desk.
“In general we want people who aren’t impressed with celebrity,” I said. “So no tabloid readers-”
“Get a list of Melia’s friends. That ought to put a dent in the jury pool,” Declan joked.
“And since Hayley and Brian were just kids, I’d say we like women more than men,” Bailey said.
Her words hit me between the eyes. “You know, this is the first time in maybe a week that I’ve heard anyone mention the names Hayley and Brian,” I said. Bailey nodded grimly and Declan looked pained. Too many stupid lawyer tricks and not enough time spent remembering what’s really important. I’d make sure it didn’t happen again.
“Old or young?” Declan asked.
“That’s a tossup,” Bailey said. “Young jurors might identify with the victims, but older ones will be less likely to identify with Mr. High Life Powers and his trophy babe.”
“This all started with Brian and Hayley staging a kidnapping to extort money out of her father,” I said. “That’s more likely to turn off our usual law-and-order types, who are generally older.” Even if only subconsciously, older or more conservative jurors might wind up feeling like Brian and Hayley had brought it on themselves. “Younger jurors might be a little less judgmental about it.”
“Any exceptions you guys can see to our general preference for educated professionals and people with jobs?”
As a rule, the prosecution wants smart jurors-the smarter the better. And people who hold down jobs tend to feel more civically responsible than those who don’t. All of these stereotypes are generalizations, of course, but we get only a few minutes with each juror, so we have to rely on them to some degree. After all, clichés are clichés because they’re usually true, and jury selection is always, at bottom, a crapshoot. We just play the odds.
By three o’clock we’d settled on our prototypical best juror: female, professional, and someone who’d turn a skeptical eye on the defense conspiracy theory-which prompted Bailey to say, “God help us, we’re looking for Rachel Knight.”
“God forbid,” Declan said with a smile. “We’d start late every single morning.”
I gave him a mock glare. “What a card. I could laugh for…seconds.”
After Bailey left, Declan and I finished up the questionnaire on our own. He offered to drive me home, but I wanted to walk. I needed the air and the exercise. At seven o’clock it was still fairly light outside, but the air was a little cooler and it felt good to stretch my legs. As I reached Pershing Square, I noticed a film crew was setting up for a shoot. I was passing by, looking at the area they’d roped off for the scene, when I heard someone say, “Hey, isn’t that the prosecutor bitch?” A young white guy with blonde dreadlocks who was unloading lights from one of the equipment trucks craned his neck to look at me and replied, “Sure is. Hey, Ms. Prosecutor! What’re you gonna do when you lose? Maybe work a food truck?” That inspired a heavyset girl in Doc Martens and cutoffs. “Say, ’ho! Whyn’t you get on up here so I can show you what we think of your bullshit case-”
Shocked and a little worried, I started to back away, when a booming voice behind me cut her off. “Yo, Buckwheat, you want to talk about showing something? Get on up over here!” The girl muttered under her breath and turned away. “Yeah, I thought so,” said the voice I now recognized as Drew’s. “Come on, Rache, you’ve earned a martini on the house.” He put a protective arm around me and steered me past the crew and in through the back door of the Biltmore.
“I wouldn’t mind waiting if you want to go back there and ‘show’ her, uh…something,” I said. “I can promise you no charges will be filed.”
Drew smiled. “Finally, I find a perk in being friends with a prosecutor.”
61
I had a martini and some welcome laughs with Drew. When I got back to my room, I saw that I had a voice mail message on my cell. The crisp tones of Andrew Chatham, my supposed tabloid co-conspirator, greeted me. “Rachel, I’m so very sorry about what Ms. Fisk said. I wanted you to know that I never told her I’d spoken to you. I do admit that I have spoken to her, and I imagine that’s why she took a shot in the dark and falsely accused you that way. If there’s anything I can do to clear up this mess, I’ll gladly do so.”
Yeah, I just bet you will. No, gracias.
I poured myself a glass of pinot grigio and was lying back on the couch with the remote when my cell phone played “Janie’s Got a Gun,” Graden’s ringtone-in honor of his getting me my gun permit. I brought him up to speed but didn’t mention my encounter with the film crew. On calmer reflection, I realized they probably hadn’t intended to do me any physical harm. The only real danger lay in the possibility that someone had shot footage of my retreating derriere.
“Your turn,” I said. “What’s new?”
“I’ve made some progress on those reports Lilah talked about. They appear to be legit-”
Lilah, the murderous sociopath who’d sent me reports on my sister, Romy. “Why didn’t anyone pick up on them before?”
“A couple of reasons. Number one reason, because I wasn’t the investigating officer on the case, and number two, because the reports were from different jurisdictions, both of which were tiny and not computerized until very recently; and neither of the jurisdictions was where Romy was taken.”
They hadn’t realized the significance of what they’d seen. “Of course.”
“So I’d say so far, so good. If our kidnapper kept Romy alive for six months, it’s a lot less likely that he…”
“It’s okay, you can say it: that he killed her. I’ve been living with the possibility that he killed her for over twenty years, I can certainly handle hearing that he might not have.”
“You have the DA investigators trying to find Lilah, right?”
The DA investigators had wound up working that case with me, and in the course of the investigation, Lilah’s accomplice, Chase Erling, had killed their beloved team leader. So when Lilah ran, they’d asked to take over the search for her. No one would have thought of refusing, even though she was technically an LAPD suspect.