“Your Honor, it is approaching noon,” Morris said. “The State asks for a recess now so that we have the lunch hour to digest the witness’s presentation and opinions and decide whether to conduct a cross-examination.”
“Very well, we will break,” Coelho said. “All parties will return at one o’clock to continue with the witness. And Mr. Morris, please check your sarcasm at the door. We are adjourned.”
The judge left the bench. Morris was left chin to chest at his table. I didn’t know if it was the judge’s final rebuke or the weight of Arslanian’s testimony, but he looked like a man on a sinking ship that hadn’t come with a life raft.
I turned to Lucinda and saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were rimmed in red and there were smear marks on her cheeks from wiped-away tears. I realized that I had forgotten to warn her about the re-creations, which showed the man she had once loved and had started a family with being shot down in her front yard.
“I’m sorry you had to see that, Lucinda,” I said. “I should have prepared you for it.”
“No, it’s okay,” she said. “I just got emotional.”
“But you have to know Dr. Arslanian did us a lot of good with it. I don’t know if you were watching the judge, but she was all in. I think she’s convinced.”
“Then it’s good.”
The marshal came to take her back into holding. He paused to let us finish our conversation, a nicety he had not shown previously. I took it as an indicator that he too had been swayed by what he had seen on the big screen.
“I’ll see you in a little while,” I said. “And we’re going to go from this to another strong witness in Harry Bosch.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Marshal Nate released her from the ring under the table and then cuffed her wrists together for the short walk to the courtroom lockup, where she would spend the lunch hour. She walked toward the door, not needing to be led by Nate. I watched her go. Her head was down and I thought maybe more tears were coming.
Nate opened the steel door and then she was gone.
Part Seven
Case Killer
31
Haller was buoyant as he and Arslanian climbed into the Navigator by the Spring Street exit from the federal courthouse.
“Harry, you should have seen it,” he said. “Shami nailed it. The judge couldn’t take her eyes off the screen the whole damn time.”
Bosch didn’t like hearing such talk. He knew anything could happen in a courtroom and didn’t want Haller to jinx what sounded like a good morning for the team.
“Where are we going?” Bosch asked.
“Someplace good,” Haller said. “We earned it. This woman is a giant slayer.”
“I’m not sure,” Arslanian said, “that we should celebrate until the judge rules on the petition.”
“I agree, but I think she’s going to walk,” Haller said. “You nailed it, and after lunch, Harry will deliver the knockout punch.”
“Don’t forget, Morris still gets to take his shot at me,” Arslanian said.
“There’s no way,” Haller said. “He just asked for the lunch break because he knows he’s fucked. And it’s only gonna get worse for him when Harry gets up on the stand with the cell data.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Bosch said.
“Oh, come on,” Haller said. “Grumpy old Harry. Let’s go over to Water Grill. We’ll get some good food for lunch and hold off on the celebration till this thing is over.”
“I’ll take you over there,” Bosch said. “But I’m going to wait in the car. I need to go over everything again before I testify. Maybe you should think about going through it with me, get our ducks in a row.”
“I’m not worried about it,” Haller said. “Your testimony will be the frosting on the cake that Shami baked for us. I’m telling you, Harry, she clearly demonstrated that Lucinda could not have fired those shots.”
“You give me too much credit,” Arslanian said. “And you still have to finish presenting your case. You need to be ready for anything. You told me that a long time ago.”
A few minutes later Bosch dropped them off in front of the restaurant on Grand Avenue. He then drove down the block until he found a parking space and pulled in. He reached back to the floor behind his seat and grabbed the file containing the printouts from AT&T that Haller would offer as exhibits to the court.
He started reviewing the printouts and checking the numbers against the map he’d unfolded on the passenger seat. He was rehearsing because he was nervous. He had taken new digital technology and reduced it to a distinctly analog presentation. He hoped it would be defining evidence in the case for Lucinda Sanz’s innocence.
32
Bosch sat in the last row of the gallery, waiting to see whether Hayden Morris was going to cross-examine Shami Arslanian or if it would be his turn on the witness stand. When the assistant AG called Arslanian back, no one seemed to notice that Bosch was in the courtroom, so he stayed put. Haller had been so enamored with Arslanian’s direct examination that Bosch wanted to see how well she did under cross. As it turned out, he witnessed the case for Lucinda Sanz’s innocence begin to crumble like a sandcastle.
And it took Morris no more than five minutes to do it.
It began when Morris asked Arslanian to put her re-creation program’s table of contents back up on the big screen. She quickly complied with a few taps on her keyboard.
“Now, I want to draw your attention to the bottom right corner of the screen,” Morris said. “That’s a copyright protection notice, correct?”
“Yes,” she said. “Technically, it’s been applied for, but we are confident we will get it.”
“Project AImy is the name of the re-creation software?”
“Yes.”
“Am I saying that right? Like the woman’s name Amy?”
“Yes.”
“So that is A, capital I, not A, lowercase l?”
“Correct.”
“Why is it spelled that way?”
“The program is built on a machine-learning platform I developed with my partner Professor Edward Taaffe at MIT.”
“By machine learning, you mean artificial intelligence, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you. No further questions.”
Coelho excused Arslanian. Bosch looked at Haller and saw the lawyer drop his head. Something was going wrong. Before Arslanian was even through the gate to the gallery, Morris addressed the judge.
“Your Honor,” he said, “the State moves to have the testimony and presentation of the witness struck from the record under Federal Rules of Evidence section seven-oh-two C.”
Haller stood up to be heard. Arslanian quickly slipped into the bench where most of the members of the media were sitting.
“Your Honor?” he said.
“Not yet, Mr. Haller,” the judge said. “You’ll get your turn.
Mr. Morris, do you wish to elaborate?”
“Thank you, Judge,” Morris said. “In regard to expert testimony, section seven-oh-two C states that the testimony and presentation of an expert witness must be the product of reliable principles and methods. The use of artificial intelligence has not been approved in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California. Therefore, the witness’s presentation as well as any testimony derived from her presentation must be rejected.”
The judge was silent for a long moment and then turned her attention to Haller.
“Mr. Haller, I’m afraid he’s right,” she said. “This district is looking for a test case for the use of artificial intelligence... but it has not yet come to pass.”