“Jack, before you sit, can you go out and see if Lorna has any tissues?” I asked.
McEvoy left the room. I slid my chair in closer to the table that separated me from my witness.
“Okay, Naomi, we need to talk,” I began. “Let’s start with who is Patrick May?”
She didn’t answer at first. McEvoy reentered and handed her a small packet of tissues. She finally spoke as she started to take one out.
“He was my boyfriend,” she said. “I didn’t think anybody knew about us.”
“Was?” I asked. “You’re not together?”
“We broke up last year.”
“Who broke up with whom?”
“I broke it off.”
“Is he still with Tidalwaiv?”
“I think so. Last I knew.”
“Was he upset when you broke things off?”
“At the time, I didn’t think so. He knew it was coming. It was a slow breakup. He was staying with the project and I couldn’t handle that.”
I nodded and looked at Cisco. He nodded back.
“He ratted her out,” he said.
“You need to do a full workup on him,” I said. “If Mason doesn’t call him as a witness, we want to be ready to.”
Cisco asked Kitchens if she knew May’s birthdate. She provided that, an address for him up in San Mateo, and the cell phone number she had used for her last contact with him.
“On it,” Cisco said as he stood up.
He left the room and I refocused on Kitchens.
“Naomi, I have to decide whether to bring you back tomorrow for redirect. Can you think of anything that might help us rehabilitate your testimony?”
“I told the truth. You don’t have to rehabilitate it.”
“I know you told the truth, but it’s about credibility. It’s about trust. They’ve caught you in a lie and we need to—”
“What lie? I didn’t lie. I was never asked about any relationship. Plus, I thought maybe they knew about it because Patrick was the one who recommended me to the company as an ethicist for the project. I had no idea he had left out that we were dating.”
McEvoy cleared his throat and I looked over at him.
“What?” I asked.
“She’s sort of right,” he said. “Her employment application is in the materials she gave us, and I don’t remember any question about relationships with other employees of the company.”
“Look, we’re talking about semantics here,” I said, looking back at Naomi. “It doesn’t matter if you didn’t lie on the application. You had a relationship your employer should have been told about. And the whole thing doubles down because you were supposed to be the conscience of ethical programming and behavior, and now it looks like you were hiding what many would say was an unethical relationship with a fellow employee below you in the corporate hierarchy. So, think, Naomi. Is there anything we can go back into court with tomorrow that helps us?”
Naomi wiped her cheeks and her nose with the tissue and looked at me.
“I told you not to do this,” she said. “I didn’t want to testify.”
“Well, maybe if you’d told me about Patrick May, I wouldn’t have asked you to,” I countered.
“That lawyer made it sound like I was his boss. I wasn’t. He may have been below me in the corporate hierarchy. But he was in the coding lab and I almost never even walked in there. He didn’t work for me directly and I never once told him what to do.”
“All right, that’s good. We can use that. Can you think of anybody else at work who knew about the relationship?”
“No, we never flaunted it. We never even took breaks together.”
“Well, that’s not good. It looks like you were trying to hide that you were together.”
“We weren’t. My office was in administration, he was in the lab. It was never the twain shall meet. Until after work.”
“Were you living together?”
“No. I had my daughter at home. This was before she went to USF.”
“Well, when the two of you were together and away from work, did you talk about work? Did he tell you about some of the training of Clair that was alarming you?”
“Well, yes. We did. How could we not talk about work? Is that good or bad?”
“It could be good. I don’t know yet. When was the last time you had contact with Patrick May?”
“Contact? You mean like physical contact?”
“When was the last time you met or communicated with him?”
“That would have been on his birthday, back in August. We were broken up by then but I texted him. He didn’t reply.”
“Any idea at all why he decided to tell the company about your relationship?”
“How do you know he did?”
“You said nobody knew about it. Was there somebody else?”
“No. No one.”
“Then it was him. Could they have had something on him that forced him to reveal the relationship?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, I’m going to need you to think about that tonight.”
“Am I testifying tomorrow?”
“I don’t know yet. But I want to move you and Lily from the hotel you’re in to a new one. One of us will pick you up tomorrow morning to bring you to court.”
“This is really bad, isn’t it? For the case.”
I nodded.
“Yeah, it’s bad,” I said. “I thought we won yesterday. But today, I think they got the W. And that’s on me, Naomi. Not you. I should have known what they had, and I should’ve seen it coming.”
36
This time it was me in the wave’s trough when I got home. Maggie was riding high on the crest. It had been that way with her since the fires, a rhythm of quick ups and downs. So this time it was her consoling me. We’d shared takeout from Pace down in the canyon. I told her how I had miscalculated things in court and opened the door to the defense sending the jury home with testimony indicating that my key witness could not be trusted. Now we sat in our chairs in front of the picture window, backlit from the kitchen, her with a glass of sauvignon blanc and me with a full glass of guilt over letting myself be outplayed in court.
“Mickey, you could not have seen that coming,” she told me again. “Your witness deceived you. How could you be ready for that?”
“I’m supposed to be ready for anything,” I said. “Every lawyer knows that.”
“Well, you will be tomorrow. Are you going to put her back on the stand and try to rehabilitate her?”
“I think that’s going to be a game-time decision. It might just be best to move forward rather than spend the morning doing damage control. That always looks bad to the jury.”
“Moving forward is a good idea.”
I nodded. I had not heard anything from Cisco, so I hadn’t decided how the following morning would go and wanted to change the subject.
“You sure seem chipper after last night,” I said. “What happened with the Times?”
“Supposedly they’re holding the story,” Maggie said. “It was based on unnamed sources, and an editor over there got smart and said, get somebody on the record saying she’s incapacitated or we don’t run the story.”
“Glad they still have somebody there who’s thinking right.”
“Plus I did what you suggested and held a press conference. Just not about your client.”
“I haven’t seen any news. What was it about?”
“We filed on a cold case LAPD brought in. A serial killer who’s not dead or already incarcerated. They got him on at least four kills here in L.A., but it looks like there are others up in the Bay Area. Alameda County. And we already have a name for him: the Pizza Man. He’d follow a woman home, then come back later with a pizza and act like he was delivering it but had the wrong address. It got him through the woman’s door. The Open-Unsolved Unit got him on DNA off a pizza crust.”