Her tone implied the threat behind it.
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “Absolutely.”
The judge swiveled in her chair to look directly at the jury.
“Ladies and gentlemen, have a good lunch and be back in the assembly room by five minutes to one. Do not discuss the case among yourselves or with others. Do not look at any media that might be reporting on this case. Thank you.”
Ruhlin left the bench and was through the door to her chambers before juror number one even made it out of the box. When I got to the table to gather my papers and files, Brenda whispered to me.
“Mickey, Detective Clarke is here,” she said.
“Yes, I saw him in the hallway when we arrived,” Trisha added.
I nodded.
“I know that,” I said. “But the judge doesn’t.”
28
I had spent nearly half my life and my whole career defending the accused. In that time, I had squared off in court against countless numbers of detectives who had arrested my clients, tricked my clients into confessing, sometimes even framed my clients. I had a half brother who was a detective whom I would trust with my daughter’s life, but I carried only suspicions and distrust for the detectives I questioned in front of juries. The detective was the natural enemy of the defense lawyer, so the idea that a detective could actually further my case in civil court and go from nemesis to ally took some getting used to.
But that was what I was counting on when I called Detective Douglas Clarke to the stand as my first witness after lunch. He brought with him the power and might of the state, and for once it was on my side of the ledger.
Clarke came to the stand in a blue suit with an open jacket that clearly showed the badge clipped to his belt. His red hair was cropped short and he had a professional, all-business air about him as he stood in front of the judge and jury and took the oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth. He carried with him a blue binder that I knew was a murder book. I had never encountered him on a case when I was working criminal and I had spoken to him only the one day McEvoy and Lorna and I went to the Van Nuys Division, ostensibly for an informal interview, though it never took place. But I had checked him out through Cisco and my half brother, Harry Bosch. From them, I learned that he was a consummate detective who was all about the work and didn’t play LAPD politics. That was why he was happy to be relegated to working cases in the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive from headquarters downtown. He had grown up in the Valley and still lived there in Sherman Oaks. As a patrol officer and then as a detective, he had bounced around the divisions that served the sprawling north end of the city until he made it to the homicide squad in Van Nuys. He’d now been working murder cases there for almost twenty years.
I drew many of these details out in my first questions, wanting the jurors to get to know him and understand that he was a capable and thorough investigator. Then I got down to the business at hand.
“Detective Clarke, were you called to the scene of a homicide on September nineteenth, 2023?”
“I was, yes.”
“Can you tell the jury about that case and what you did that day?”
“I was already in my office at Van Nuys Division when I was notified by my captain that there had been a shooting at Grant High School. There was one victim, a female, and she had already been transported to a hospital and expired in the ER. My partner, Dailyn Rodriguez, and I initially responded to the scene and it was determined that I would stay at the scene to conduct the investigation and gather witnesses and evidence while Detective Rodriguez went to the hospital to view the victim and collect whatever evidence was there. We had been told that the victim’s mother was heading to the hospital, and Detective Rodriguez would be on hand for that as well.”
“Who was the victim?”
“Rebecca Randolph. She was sixteen years of age and had just begun her junior year of high school. She had been shot after getting out of a car with three other girls in the school parking lot.”
“Was the school on lockdown?”
“It was, yes. It was unknown initially where the shooter went after the incident in the parking lot. The school administrators locked down the school and proceeded with active-shooter protocol.”
“But the shooter had left the school, correct?”
“That was in fact the case. But it was not known at the time, so all precautions were taken.”
“Of course.”
I had been keeping an eye on the jury as Clarke answered the questions. I knew from the voir dire interrogatories that many of them had children of school age. The possibility of a school shooting had become a concern and nightmare for every parent in the country. I had to tread carefully here, but I also wanted to build outrage that I would then direct over the course of the trial toward my villain — the AI chatbot called Wren.
“Now, was the school still on lockdown when you arrived?” I asked.
“It was just opening up,” Clarke said. “It had been searched by the SWAT team and it was determined that the shooter had fled.”
“What did you do at that point?”
“Like I said, my partner and I split up. She went to the hospital, and my first responsibility was to secure the crime scene and let the crims begin their work.”
“What are ‘crims’?”
“Excuse me. Criminalists. They gather the evidence at the scene, photograph it and video it and so forth.”
“Okay, while they were doing that, what did you do?”
“I had been told by the first officers who responded to reports of gunfire that the victim had arrived at school in a carpool that included three other female students. I located them in the school and began preliminary interviews, talking to each one separately.”
“What did they tell you?”
“Each one said the same thing. They identified the victim as Rebecca Randolph — her friends called her Becca — and said that she had been shot by a boy named Aaron Colton, or AC, as they called him. They said AC walked up to them after they got out of the car and shot Becca without saying a word. He used a chrome-colored handgun. He then calmly walked away.”
I looked up at the judge and asked to introduce my first three exhibits, the three witness reports that Clarke had written and that were signed by the girls as being true and accurate. They were accepted without objection from the Masons. This way the jurors could read their statements and I would not have to call the girls as witnesses and make them relive the trauma they were all still dealing with.
“Now, Detective Clarke, did you consider this an open-and-shut case at this point?” I asked. “You had three witnesses who said Aaron Colton was the killer.”
“No, not at all,” Clarke said. “I had three witnesses but no evidence yet.”
“So what did you do then?”
“I returned to the crime scene and learned that the criminalists had found a bullet casing in the parking lot.”
“Where was that located?”
“It was under a car parked next to the car Becca had arrived at school in.”
In the hallway before I brought Clarke into court to testify, I had asked him to drop the police-speak as much as possible. I said, “Don’t call the victim ‘the victim.’ Refer to her as Becca.” He had taken heed of that and I believed his use of the victim’s first name would help humanize her with the jury. So much of this case was about what was real and what wasn’t. I wanted them to fully grasp that Rebecca Randolph was a real person and that her death was a loss to the community as well as to her loved ones and friends.
“And what did you and the criminalists determine from that bullet casing, Detective?” I asked.