I was at Temple Street, waiting to cross, and I did my usual turnaround to see if anyone was behind me. Tidalwaiv had massive resources in this fight and billions at stake. The company’s founder, Victor Wendt, had promised stockholders at the last board meeting that this case would go away quietly and inexpensively. But here I was, pushing it toward trial. I constantly felt that I was being watched.
There was no one behind me. At least no one that I could see.
“That’s why I want you to check him out,” I said. “He’s got three books he said were all bestsellers.”
“You got the titles?” Cisco asked.
“I just remember the last one. Fair Warning. That’s also the name of his—”
“Oh, I know this guy. Lorna loves his stuff.”
Lorna was my office manager. She was also Cisco’s wife and my ex-wife. But somehow it worked.
“There you go,” I said. “I just want to know if I can trust him enough to bring him inside the wire. We’re drowning in technical discovery. It would help to have another pair of eyes, especially if he truly knows his shit.”
“I’m on it,” Cisco said. “Where are you headed now?”
“The CCB to see if I can get in to see Maggie.”
“You got the black box with you?”
“I have it.”
“A homecoming in criminal court. Good luck with that.”
“I’m probably going to need it.”
I disconnected and headed across Temple to the main entrance of the Criminal Courts Building. There were a lot of things I missed about the place, but the elevators were not one of them. They were just as slow and crowded as I remembered from the years I had toiled in this building’s hallways and courtrooms. Once I was through the security checkpoint and metal detector — during which I had to explain what the black box in my briefcase was — it took me almost half an hour to get up to the sixteenth floor and the office of the Los Angeles County district attorney. I went to the reception counter, identified myself, and explained that I had no appointment but wished to see the district attorney. I said I wanted to talk to her about her daughter because I knew that would get me in.
The seats in the waiting area were plastic on chrome legs, a style that had gone out of fashion a couple of decades earlier. But they had endured, like most of the furnishings of the building, and did the job. I was in one of those chairs for twenty minutes before I was invited back by the receptionist. This moved me to another waiting room outside the DA’s actual office. This time, the chair was a little more comfortable and even had a cushion, threadbare though it was. And this time the wait was only ten minutes. I was granted entrance to the inner sanctum, where my first ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, fresh from her installment as the duly elected DA, sat at a large desk with a row of flags lining the wall behind her. She had won the office in a special election. The previous DA had resigned abruptly after the Los Angeles Times unearthed and published a series of texts he had written that exposed his racial biases.
I spread my arms, holding up my briefcase.
“Wow,” I said. “Maggie McFierce on top of the world.”
“Well, on top of this world, maybe,” she said. “I was wondering when you would just pop in, although using our daughter to sleaze your way in was a little unexpected.”
“Sleaze my way in? All I said was I wanted to talk to you about her. How is she doing?”
“As far as I know, she’s doing good.”
“Well, I wish she were doing good back here at home.”
“She’s just taking a gap year. She was very helpful during the campaign and earned the break, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Good, then you can pay her bills, since you’re the only one around here with a steady paycheck.”
Our daughter, Hayley, with a very expensive law degree from USC in her back pocket, had decided — after growing up with two lawyers for parents — that she was not sure she actually wanted to practice law. She was trying to find herself while riding waves in Hawaii with the help of a boyfriend who had no discernible income but an impressive tan and an even more impressive collection of surfboards.
“Hey, I’m not the one who taught her how to surf,” Maggie said. “That’s on you. I’m also not the one who decided to give up a lucrative criminal defense practice at the height of my career.”
“Yeah, well, thanks for the reminders,” I said. “Happy new year to you too.”
“And to you. I see you’ve got your briefcase. That tells me this might be more than a social visit.”
Maggie was always perceptive when it came to me. I couldn’t ever see her without lamenting the fact that we hadn’t gone the distance. She was wearing a conservative blue business suit with the blouse buttoned to the neck. Her dark curls had a few touches of gray in them. She had aged beautifully in the thirty years I had known her.
“Never could get anything by you,” I said. “Yes, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Have a seat,” she said. “I make no promises I won’t keep.”
She smiled. That was one of her campaign slogans.
I pulled out one of the chairs in front of her desk and sat down, putting my briefcase on the floor. The flags behind her were lined up so tightly, they looked like one curtain of silken colors.
“That’s a lot of flags,” I said.
“One for every country of origin of our constituency,” she said.
“You might have to get rid of a few of those if Trump deports everybody like he’s saying.” The new president had won the election the same night Maggie had. His campaign was built on a promise to eliminate illegal immigration. As Maggie was elected as a nonpartisan candidate, she did not take the political bait.
“So, what’s your ask, Mickey?”
“Is that all I am now, an ask?”
“Well, like I said, I assume it’s why you’re here.”
“I was also a platinum-level contributor to the campaign.”
“You were, and I very much appreciate that. So, just tell me, what’s going on?”
“I suppose you are reviewing cases and getting up to speed on things.”
“I am, and I haven’t seen any with your name attached as counselor for the defense.”
“And I hope it stays that way. Besides, the conflict of interest with you being DA would certainly cause your office and mine headaches we don’t need. But there is a case being handled by your office in juvie court that cuts across one of my cases in civil.”
She nodded.
“The Aaron Colton case,” she said. “I spent an hour with Will Owensby on it before the holiday break.”
That surprised me. She had taken office immediately after the election, but that was less than two months ago. There had been holiday breaks, staffing decisions to make, and a mountain of other cases to get current on, so I had hoped she wasn’t prepped on the case yet. It would have been easier to point her in the direction I wanted her to go if she hadn’t been knowledgeable about the inner workings of the case, and I realized my path to success was going to be steep.
“Owensby is a good lawyer,” I said. “But he’s a stickler, you know what I mean?”
“You mean he wants to stick to the rules of the game?” Maggie asked.
“What I’m saying is he’s focused on his case, which is fine. But he’s not looking at the bigger picture.”
“Which is...”
“Let’s call it a fuller justice.”
“I have to say, he came in here and talked about the case for an hour, and your name never came up. I know about your civil case because I saw it on the news. But it has nothing to do with our criminal case.”
“What? No, that’s wrong. It has everything to do with your case. Aaron Colton killed my client’s daughter because of an AI chatbot that went rogue. You’re putting the kid away, but what about the company that made the app with no thought about the consequences of unleashing it on impressionable minds? That’s the bigger crime here, Mags. You have to see that.”