“You are saying he voluntarily agreed to be handcuffed in the back of a patrol car?”
“Yes.”
“If he had wanted to, could he have opened the door and gotten out?”
“I don’t think so. The back doors have security locks. You can’t open them from inside.”
“But he was in there voluntarily.”
“Yes, he was.”
Even Harber didn’t look like he believed what he was saying. His face had turned a deeper shade of pink.
“Deputy Harber, when did the handcuffs finally come off of Mr. Elliot?”
“When the detectives removed him from the car, they took the cuffs off and gave them back to my partner.”
“Okay.”
I nodded like I was finished and flipped up a few pages on my pad to check for questions I missed. I kept my eyes down on the pad when I spoke.
“Oh, Deputy? One last thing. The first call to nine-one-one went out at one-oh-five according to the dispatch log. Mr. Elliot had to call again nineteen minutes later to make sure he hadn’t been forgotten about, and then you and your partner finally arrived four minutes after that. A total of twenty-three minutes to respond.”
I now looked up at Harber.
“Deputy, why did it take so long to respond to what must’ve been a priority call?”
“The Malibu district is our largest geographically. We had to come all the way over the mountain from another call.”
“Wasn’t there another patrol car that was closer and also available?”
“My partner and I were in the alpha car. It’s a rover. We handle the priority calls and we accepted this one when it came in from dispatch.”
“Okay, Deputy, I have nothing further.”
On redirect Golantz followed the misdirection I’d set up. He asked Harber several questions that revolved around whether Elliot had been under arrest or not. The prosecutor sought to diffuse this idea, as it would play into the defense’s tunnel-vision theory. That was what I wanted him to think I was doing and it had worked. Golantz spent another fifteen minutes eliciting testimony from Harber that underlined that the man he and his partner had handcuffed outside the scene of a double murder was not under arrest. It defied common sense but the prosecution was sticking with it.
When the prosecutor was finished, the judge adjourned for the afternoon break. As soon as the jury had cleared the courtroom, I heard a whispered voice call my name. I turned around and saw Lorna, who pointed her finger toward the back of the courtroom. I turned further to look back, and there were my daughter and her mother, squeezed into the back row of the gallery. My daughter surreptitiously waved to me and I smiled back.
I met them in the hallway outside the courtroom, away from the clot of reporters who surrounded the other principals of the trial as they exited. Hayley hugged me and I was overwhelmed that she had come. I saw an empty wooden bench and we sat down.
“How long were you guys in there?” I asked. “I didn’t see you.”
“Unfortunately, not that long,” Maggie said. “Her last period today was PE, so I decided to take the afternoon off, pull her out early and come on down. We saw most of your cross with the deputy.”
I looked from Maggie to our daughter, who was sitting between us. She had her mother’s looks; dark hair and eyes, skin that held a tan long into the winter.
“What did you think, Hay?”
“Um, I thought it was really interesting. You asked him a lot of questions. He looked like he was getting mad.”
“Don’t worry, he’ll get over it.”
I looked over her head and winked at my ex-wife.
“Mickey?”
I turned around and saw it was McEvoy from the
“Not now,” I said.
“I just had a quick-”
“And I just said, not now. Leave me alone.”
McEvoy turned and walked back to one of the groups circling Golantz.
“Who was that?” Hayley asked.
“A newspaper reporter. I’ll talk to him later.”
“Mom said there was a big story about you today.”
“It wasn’t really about me. It was about the case. That’s why I was hoping you could come see some of it.”
I looked at my ex-wife again and nodded my thanks. She had put aside any anger she had toward me and placed our daughter first. No matter what else, I could always count on her for that.
“Do you go back in there?” Hayley asked.
“Yes, this is just a little break so people can get something to drink or use the bathroom. We have one more session and then we’ll go home and start it all over tomorrow.”
She nodded and looked down the hall toward the courtroom door. I followed her eyes and saw that people were starting to go back in.
“Um, Daddy? Did that man in there kill somebody?”
I looked at Maggie and she shrugged as if to say,
“Well, honey, we don’t know. He is accused of that, yes. And a lot of people think he did. But nothing has been proven yet and we’re going to use this trial to decide that. That’s what the trial is for. Remember how I explained that to you?”
“I remember.”
“Mick, is this your family?”
