Maggie looked down at her hands folded on her desk. It was a move I had seen many times. She looked as if she were waiting out a storm — that storm being me. When she finally spoke, it was in an even tone that I also recognized from a thousand skirmishes before this one.
“So, what do you want, Mickey?”
“I want you to do the right thing. I want access to the kid’s computer.”
She shook her head emphatically.
“No, that’s not going to happen,” she said. “First, this is a juvenile case, and second, it’s not even close to being adjudicated. We don’t share evidence in open cases whether it involves a juvenile or not.”
“I need to show what happened and why to make my case,” I said.
“Then delay your case, and once my office is finished with Colton, we can talk about what I can share.”
“It’s not that simple. Your case is going to run on for years. You’ve got the ongoing psychological evaluation and then the competency hearing. After that, you’ll have to decide whether to kick it up to adult court, and the case will just go on and on. But time is of the essence here. That company is selling this app to people all around the world. Kids, Maggie. Victor Wendt, the company’s founder, says he sees a time when every kid has an AI companion, like they’re Barbie dolls. This will happen again, Maggie, and my case — not yours — is the best shot at stopping it.”
Maggie shook her head, a dismissive gesture I had seen too many times to count.
“Spoken like a champion of the people,” she said. “And I don’t suppose there’s going to be a fat check for damages at the end of your great public-service trial, is there?”
“It’s not about money,” I said. “If it were, we’d have settled already. The company’s offered seven figures to make this go away. But we don’t want it to go away and get swept under the rug. We want to stop this from happening again.”
“We?”
“My client. Brenda Randolph. She lost her sixteen-year-old daughter. Her only child, Mags. She doesn’t want anyone else to lose theirs. That’s what this case is about. It’s about changing the world for the better and making it safe for these kids.”
“That’s very eloquent. I seem to recall from the news that you filed this in federal court.”
“That’s right.”
“Who’s the judge?”
“Peggy Ruhlin.”
“So why aren’t you here with a subpoena from her? Either she already turned you down or — more likely — you want to get access to the kid’s computer on the sly so your opponent doesn’t know you have it.”
I had no response to that. She was a good lawyer and knew me well.
“Look, Mickey, I can’t do this,” she said. “I’m not going to get involved in one of your Lincoln Lawyer moves.”
“It’s not a move,” I said. “And by the way, I got rid of all but one of the Lincolns two years ago. The only one I kept is under a tarp in my warehouse.”
“Well, my hands are tied by the rule of law.”
“No, they’re not, Mags. You’re the district attorney for this county now. If you want to do the right thing, you can do the right thing.”
I pulled my briefcase onto my lap and opened it. I took out a black metal box about the size of a hardcover book and put it on her desk.
“What is that?” Maggie asked. “Don’t put that there.”
“I’m leaving it,” I said. “It’s an external hard drive. It holds up to twelve terabytes of data. You can download all the data from Aaron Colton’s laptop onto it and I’ll take it from there.”
I stood up.
“Mickey, don’t leave that here,” Maggie said. “It’s not going to happen.”
I headed for the office door, ignoring her command. As I opened it, I turned back and looked at her.
“It will happen if you do the right thing,” I said.
Then I walked out and closed the door behind me.
5
Judge Ruhlin delivered her rulings by email promptly at nine a.m. Monday. I was in the Arts District downtown at the warehouse where I had once stored a fleet of Lincolns and that I now used primarily for records storage and as an office. In terse rulings short on explanatory backup, the judge simply split the decision, giving both sides a win. She cleared the path for Rikki Patel to testify as a plaintiff’s witness in the case but allowed Tidalwaiv to keep its redactions to the discovery material, leaving me to decide whether or not to delay the trial by going with (and paying) a special master to review the thousands of documents and determine what should be removed from redaction. It was passing the buck. I had actually thought the opposite rulings would come, that I would lose Patel but get unredacted discovery. So I didn’t know how to react. If I had lost Patel, I would simply have sent Cisco out to find another person who’d witnessed the inner workings of the company. Going with a special master would delay the trial by months if not a year or more. And whether or not I chose to delay things, the rulings gave Tidalwaiv an opportunity to slow the case with their own appeal on the Patel decision.
McEvoy arrived at the warehouse promptly at ten a.m., as I’d instructed him in a text. I walked him back toward the office, but he stopped when he saw two people behind the mesh of a fenced-off area in one of the storage bays.
“Wait, is that a Faraday cage?” he asked.
“With this case, it’s an absolute necessity,” I said.
“That was going to be my first suggestion to you. Can I take a look?”
“Uh, be my guest.”
The cage was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cube of chain link. Across the top was a crosshatch of wires supporting copper mesh that also draped down all four sides of the cage, preventing all manner of electronic intrusion. Inside was 144 square feet of workspace. The cage was ground zero for Randolph v. Tidalwaiv.
There was one entrance, through a curtain made of the same copper mesh. I held it open for McEvoy.
Cisco Wojciechowski and Lorna Taylor were standing in front of Big Bertha, Lorna’s name for the industrial-size printer I had leased for dealing with case-discovery materials. Two ten-foot-long tables on opposite sides of the cage held printed documents that were stacked according to category — system development, architecture, testing, and so on. On one of the tables, Lorna had set up a desktop computer with twin wide-screen monitors, a twelve-terabyte external drive, and no connection to the internet. Despite the warehouse’s alarms, cameras, and other protections, that hard drive went home with one of us every night in a locking Faraday bag.
After introducing McEvoy to the team, I explained all this to him.
“You’re going completely off the grid,” he said.
“Trying to,” Lorna said. “As much as we can.”
“Why?” McEvoy said. “Has there been an intrusion?”
“We’re trying to avoid that,” Lorna said.
“We’re taking no chances,” Cisco said.
He said it in a tone that suggested that McEvoy had asked a stupid question.
I walked over to the table with the computer and tapped a finger on the hard drive. It was a duplicate of the one I had left on Maggie McPherson’s desk the Friday before.
“This is what we got in discovery,” I said. “And I think we’d be fools not to consider that a company like Tidalwaiv will take any advantage they can in terms of gathering intel about the case against them.”