Morris spread his arms like they were wings.
“Your Honor, really?” he said. “Mr. Haller, up there on his high horse, is conveniently forgetting the facts. The court approved the subpoena for records from AT and T more than three weeks ago. He waited until the eve of trial to execute it and gather the data. That was a planned delay, Judge, and he isn’t fooling me or you. The People stand by the complaint and the suggested remedy.”
“Your Honor, may I respond?” Haller said.
“No, I don’t think I need you to, Mr. Haller,” Coelho said. “I have a good idea of what you would say. I am not going to disqualify this material from introduction in the hearing. We are going to proceed with Mr. Bosch’s testimony. And when direct examination is completed, I will give Mr. Morris time to prepare his cross if time is indeed needed. Now, let’s take a ten-minute break, go back to our corners, and cool off, and then we will continue the hearing.”
33
Bosch spent most of the ten-minute break keeping Haller separated from Morris in the hall outside the courtroom. Haller was no doubt crestfallen by the Arslanian setback, as was Arslanian. She’d been scheduled to fly out on a red-eye that night but she insisted on delaying her return home so she could watch Bosch’s testimony and be part of a brainstorming session afterward.
No name-calling or physical scuffles broke out in the hallway and soon Bosch was back on the stand awaiting the arrival of the judge and the prisoner. Lucinda came first, and after she was placed next to Haller, he immediately leaned toward her and started whispering. Bosch could tell by his gestures that he was trying to console her and tell her that losing Arslanian’s testimony and presentation did not constitute the end of the world. The trouble was, Bosch wasn’t sure Haller believed that himself.
The judge came through the door, took her position at the bench, and went back on the record, telling Haller to proceed. Haller took his legal pad to the lectern.
“When we were interrupted,” he said to Bosch, “you were about to tell us about a collection of cell-tower data obtained with a subpoena. Why don’t you walk us through the steps you took in getting that data.”
“Well, we were interested in knowing Roberto Sanz’s movements on the day he was murdered,” Bosch said. “We knew he carried a cell phone and we got the number from Lucinda Sanz’s phone records. She had called him several times on the evening he was killed. So from there, I went to a website where you plug in a cell number and it tells you which company is the carrier.”
“For the record, what website was that?” Haller asked.
“It’s called FreeCarrierLookup-dot-com. I put in Roberto’s number and it determined that his carrier was AT and T. From there you prepared a subpoena for all data on all of AT and T’s cell towers in the Antelope Valley for the day of the murder.”
Haller whistled.
“That must have been a lot of data,” he said.
“It was,” Bosch said. “The printout was almost two thousand pages, single-spaced.”
“In layman’s terms, can you tell us what kind of data it was?”
“Well, every company has its own cell towers. Some geographic areas have more than others and that’s why you see in the TV ads for these companies how they talk about the best coverage and so forth. If you have a cell phone, it is constantly in contact with all the towers in your area, and as you move, the connections move.”
“Sort of like Tarzan swinging on vines from tree to tree, your connection moves from tower to tower?”
“Uh, I never thought about it that way, but yes, I guess it’s like that.”
“So you were able to find Roberto Sanz’s number in these two thousand pages.”
“I was. And I got a map of AT and T’s cell-tower locations throughout the AV and—”
“‘AV’?”
“Sorry, Antelope Valley.”
“And how did that help you?”
“Like I said, a cell phone is connected to many of its carrier’s towers at once, but the connection is strongest to the tower nearest the phone. And the data transmitted from the phone to the tower includes decibel strength based on proximity and GPS coordinates. That’s why when you use a mapping app like Waze or Google Maps, you see your exact location on the screen.”
“Are you saying that this data you collected with the subpoena showed exactly where Roberto Sanz was located throughout the day of his death?”
“Correct. And I was able to chart it on a map.”
“Do you have that map with you?”
“Yes.”
Haller turned his attention to the judge and asked if Bosch could step off the witness stand and display the map on a courtroom easel so that he could better explain his findings. With no objection from Morris, Coelho allowed it and the court clerk retrieved the easel from an equipment closet. Five minutes later, Bosch’s unfolded map was clipped to the easel. There were three lines — red, blue, and green — charted on the map. Bosch had carefully drawn the lines with the map spread across his dining room table. He hoped his conclusions would be clear and understandable to the judge.
“Okay, so what do we have here, Detective Bosch?” Haller asked.
Before Bosch could answer, Morris objected.
“He is no longer a police officer or a detective,” he said. “He should not be referred to as ‘Detective.’”
“Sustained,” Coelho said.
Haller threw a look at Morris that clearly said that was a chickenshit objection, then moved back to his direct examination of Bosch.
“I see three lines on your map,” he said. “Which is Roberto Sanz?”
“This one,” Bosch said. “The green.”
“I’m sure we will get to the others soon enough, but let’s stick with the green. What did you find that was significant about Roberto Sanz’s movements in the hours before his death?”
Bosch pointed to a spot on the green track.
“This place right here in Lancaster,” he said. “The data showed that he was here for nearly two hours.”
“And what is significant about that?” Haller asked.
“Well, two things. One is that this location is a hamburger place called Flip’s and this was where Roberto Sanz had gotten into a shoot-out with four gang members the year before. The second is that it was established in the original investigation that Roberto was two hours late bringing his son home to Lucinda, and he told her he had had a work meeting. But it was determined that there had been no meeting involving his sheriff’s unit. So this is new information placing him at this business during those two hours — the place where he had been in a shoot-out the year before.”
“And now, looking at your map, I see the red line intersects Roberto Sanz’s green line at that location. Am I reading that correctly?”
“Yes. Those two phones were there almost the same amount of time. The red phone was actually there first, arriving six minutes before the green. Then they both left an hour and forty-one minutes later.”
“And what did you take from that?”
Morris objected, stating that Bosch’s answer would be speculation and not fact. The judge sustained the objection and Haller started another path toward the answer he wanted.
“How did you come up with the red line?” he asked.
“I thought that the length of time that Sanz was at Flip’s seemed excessive,” Bosch said. “It’s a fast-food place and he’s there an hour and forty-one minutes. Besides that, it was where he had gotten into a shoot-out, so why would he go there unless the location was important to what was happening that day? So I concluded that he was meeting someone there. This led me to search the data for another cell phone exhibiting the same GPS coordinates at the same time.”