The Gods of Guilt

by Michael Connelly

  “This is amazing,” I said. “I can’t believe we got it.”

  “What exactly is it?” Lorna asked. “Cisco wouldn’t tell me. He said it was top secret but a game changer.”

  “It is—a game changer, I mean. I’ll tell you in a minute. It’s not top secret.”

  I silently watched the rest of the video. Marco got the door open and looked back at Lankford and nodded. He then disappeared inside while Lankford waited outside, his back to the door, and kept watch.

  The video jumped inside the house to an overhead camera in the kitchen. It was a fish-eye lens, most likely housed in a smoke detector. Marco walked beneath the camera from the back door to a hallway but then turned around and came back to the kitchen. He crossed the floor and went to the refrigerator, opened the freezer, and reached in. He started checking through the various frozen food containers until he selected a package that contained two pieces of French bread pizza. Living alone, I knew the brand and the pizza well. Marco carefully opened the box without tearing the flap. He then took out one of the plastic-wrapped pizzas and secured it under his arm while he reached into the pocket of his black-leather bomber jacket and removed something. His hand moved too fast for me to identify what he held, but whatever it was, he shoved it into the pizza box and then put the pizza back in on top of it. He returned the box to the freezer under several other packages and turned to the back door.

  The video jumped outside again and I saw Marco step out of the house, lock the door, and close it. He had been inside under a minute. He nodded to Lankford and they separated, each walking down the side of the house they had come from. The video ended there.

  I looked up to see where we were. Lorna was about to turn onto the 101 from Sunset. I could see down the ramp that the freeway was the usual morning parking lot. I felt the first slight tightening in my chest that always came with thoughts of being late for court.

  “Why’d you go this way?”

  “Because I asked you and you told me to be quiet. You try so many different ways every day, I didn’t know what you wanted.”

  “Earl always took pride in beating the traffic. He always tried different ways.”

  “Well, Earl isn’t here.”

  “I know.”

  I put it aside and tried to think about what I had just seen on the video. I wasn’t sure yet how I would use it, but I knew without a doubt it was courtroom gold. We had captured on film a rogue drug agent and his accomplice planting drugs in Stratton Sterghos’s house as some sort of scheme to eliminate or control him as a witness. This took things far beyond anything I was expecting.

  I whistled low as I closed the iPad and then started putting it back into Lorna’s bag.

  “Okay, now can you tell me what that is and what you’re so excited about that it has you whistling?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, you saw that we amended our witness list yesterday, right?”

  “Yes, and the judge wants to talk about it today.”

  “Right. Well, that was part of a play.”

  “You mean like one of Legal Siegel’s moves?”

  “Yeah, but it’s my move. We’re calling it ‘Marco Polo.’ The amended list had lots of new names on it. You heard Forsythe complain about them.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, one of the names on the list was Stratton Sterghos. The list was designed to make it look like we were cloaking him, sort of hoping to slip him through with all the others. He was listed right in the middle of all the names of the tenants from Gloria’s building. But the play is that we wanted the prosecution team to think that we were up to something and to look for the name that we were hiding in plain sight.”

  “Stratton Sterghos.”

  “Right.”

  “So who is Stratton Sterghos?”

  “It’s not really who he is. It’s where he lives. This video is from his house in Glendale. It is directly across the street from a house where ten years ago two drug dealers were murdered.”

  “And what’s that have to do with Gloria Dayton?”

  “Nothing directly. But we’ve been trying to make the connection between Lankford, the DA investigator who was following Gloria before her murder, and Agent Marco with the DEA, who she snitched for. For our defense theory to work, those two have to be connected somewhere down the line. That’s what Cisco has been working on and we thought we found it in that unsolved double-murder case. The lead investigator on it was then–Glendale police detective Lee Lankford. And the two victims were connected to the Sinaloa Cartel—the same group Hector Moya is connected to. We know Marco had a hard-on for Moya back then, so it stands to reason he and his unit—the Interagency Cartel Enforcement team, ICE-T for short—were aware of and maybe even working on the two guys that got whacked in that house.”

  “Okay . . .”

  That was her way of saying she still didn’t get it.

  “We thought that the double murder was the connection, but Cisco got copies of Lankford’s old investigative files on the case and nowhere in any report is Marco or ICE-T even mentioned. So we set up a play with the witness list that we thought would draw them out if there was a connection.”

  I pointed down to her bag where the iPad was stashed.

  “The video proves it. Lankford and Marco are connected, and I’m going to turn this trial upside down with it. It’s a game changer. I just have to decide when to change the game.”

  “But what was the play? How is Sterghos connected?”

  “He isn’t connected. He just lives across the street from the house where those dealers were killed. We knew we could use him to smoke out Lankford and Marco.”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t get angry but I still don’t understand.”

  “I’m not angry. Look, Lankford now works for the DA. He got himself assigned to the La Cosse case so he could watch over it because, remember, he was following Gloria the night she was killed. So it’s his job now to work with Forsythe and help prepare for whatever moves the defense makes. As soon as court was over yesterday, you better believe he and Forsythe sat down with that new witness list and tried to figure out what I was up to. Like, who was important and who I was really going to call.”

  “And they see the name Stratton Sterghos.”

  “Exactly. They see that name, and it means absolutely nothing to them. So Lankford goes to work. He’s an investigator. He has a computer and a whole array of law enforcement access and data at his fingertips. He finds out pretty quickly that Stratton Sterghos lives on Salem Street in Glendale, and that would have rung a pretty big bell for him because he worked that two-bagger on Salem ten years ago.”

  “The double murder he never cleared.”

  “Right. So either on his own or at Forsythe’s request, he needs to check out Mr. Sterghos and see what his connection is to the Dayton case. This is what Cisco and I thought would happen. We also thought—or more like hoped—that if that double murder was the point of connection between him and Marco, Lankford might call up his buddy the DEA agent and say, ‘I gotta check this guy out. You want to back me up in case we are going to have a problem?’”

  “So you set up the cameras. I get it now. But what happened to Sterghos?”

  “A week ago we knocked on his door and said we wanted to rent his house for two weeks for a film production.”

  “You mean like location scouts or something?”

  “Exactly.”

  I smiled because the ruse we had used wasn’t actually a ruse. We had indeed produced a film. Only this film’s premiere wasn’t going to be a red-carpet affair on Hollywood Boulevard. It was going to premiere in Department 120 of the Criminal Courts Building on Temple Street downtown.

  “So Sterghos took our money and then took his wife on a little vay-cay to see their daughter in Florida. We set up cameras around his house and put the name Stratton Sterghos on the witness list as a depth charge. Now we have this.”

  I pointed to her bag on the floor between my feet.

>   “You can tell from the video that Marco was hanging back,” I continued. “Lankford went to the door by himself. If Sterghos had been home and answered, he would have started with the legit interview. You know, ‘I work for the DA, your name is on the witness list, what do you know about this,’ and so on. Marco would stay back but be ready if Lankford determined that they had a problem with Sterghos.”

  “Be ready to do what?” Lorna asked.

  “Whatever was necessary. Look at Gloria. Look at Earl. This guy doesn’t have boundaries. Look what we have on video. Sterghos wasn’t there, so Marco breaks in and plants drugs in the freezer. That was so they could come back and pop Sterghos if they needed to. It would keep him from testifying or ruin his credibility if he did.”

  “The whole thing is incredible.”

  “And it’s going to be pure gold in court. We just need to figure out when to spring it.”

  I could barely contain myself while thinking about the possibilities for use of the video.

  “You don’t have to turn it in to the police?” Lorna asked.

  “Nope. It’s our video. I’m thinking we use it to play them off against each other, see if we can get one of them to turn against the other. The weaker one. Nothing works better with a jury than an insider spilling his guts. It’s better than video. It’s better than fucking DNA.”

  “What about Sterghos? What are you going to do to protect him? You pulled him into this and he doesn’t—”

  “Don’t worry about him. First of all, I’m sure Cisco took care of the drugs Marco planted. Second, we have the video. Nobody’s going to lay anything on Stratton Sterghos. He’s lying on a beach somewhere in Florida and four grand happier.”

  “Four grand! Where did that come from?”

  “I used my own money.”

  “Mickey, you better not be tapping Hayley’s college fund. That would be all you need to have go wrong with her.”

  “I’m telling you, I didn’t.”

  She didn’t respond and she didn’t seem mollified, probably because she could tell I was lying. But I had more than a year before I needed that money to pay for college.

  I checked my watch and then looked at the slowly moving river of steel in front of me.

  “See if you can get over and get off at Alvarado,” I instructed. “We’re never going to get there at this pace.”

  “Whatever.”

  It was her annoyed tone again. She was still fuming about my being ten minutes late for pickup. Or maybe about where I had been that made me ten minutes late. Or maybe it was a holdover from our angry words the day before. Whichever didn’t matter. I missed Earl. He never added any tone to his commentary. He never got lost and he knew better than to sit in the middle of an unmoving freeway when I was due in court.

  “What if Marco Polo hadn’t worked?” Lorna asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if they hadn’t zeroed in on Stratton Sterghos? What would have happened then?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “We had other strategies,” I finally said. “And I’m not doing too bad as it is in trial. Only one day of defense and I was chipping away at the DA’s case. We’re in pretty good shape without this.”

  I nudged her bag again with my foot.

  “But now . . . everything changes.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  34

  Somehow, I made it into Department 120 at one minute before nine. Forsythe was already at his table, with Lankford sitting dutifully behind him in his seat against the rail. At the defense table Jennifer Aronson sat alone. There had been no need for the deputies to bring La Cosse out from lockup, because the jury wasn’t coming out until after the hearing on the amended witness list.

  I traded looks with Lankford before pulling out my chair and sitting down.

  “I thought you weren’t going to make it,” Jennifer whispered to me in a panicked tone.

  “You would have done fine. But listen, things have changed since last night. I need to handle this. I’m sorry, but there isn’t enough time to explain the change in strategy. Things have happened.”

  “What things?”

  Before I could answer, the court clerk noticed that all attorneys were present and told us the judge wanted to discuss the new witness list in chambers. We got up and the clerk opened the half door to her corral, which gave us access to the hallway behind the courtroom.

  Judge Leggoe had been expecting two lawyers. She saw Jennifer and told me to pull a chair over from a conference table to the arrangement in front of her desk. We sat down in front of her, Jennifer between Forsythe and me. I had smoothly grabbed the chair on the right so the judge would be looking at me on her left.

  “I thought it better to hold this hearing in chambers so maybe we can speak a little more freely,” Leggoe said. “Rosa, we can go on record now.”

  She was talking to the court reporter who sat off the rear left corner of the judge’s desk with her steno machine in front of her. I noticed that the judge didn’t go on the record until after making her comment on her desire to keep the media away from the court business at hand.

  I could have objected to the in-camera hearing but I didn’t think it would get me anything and it certainly would not score me any points with the judge. So I went along to get along, even though I felt Jennifer staring at me and waiting for me to object. As a general rule, it is better for the defendant to hold hearings in open court. It guards against public suspicions that backroom deals are being made and information is being hidden.

  The judge named all those present for the record and proceeded.

  “Mr. Forsythe, I assume you’ve had time to study the defense’s amended list of witnesses. Why don’t we start with your response?”

  “Thank you, Judge. My investigator and I have had barely enough time to review the list of names. And, Your Honor, calling it an amended list is a misnomer. Adding thirty-three names is not amending. It is reinventing and it is unreasonable. The state can’t be expected to—”

  “Your Honor,” I said. “I need to interrupt Mr. Forsythe here because I think the defense can offer a compromise that will cut through a lot of this and might even make him happy.”

  From my inside coat pocket I withdrew a copy of the list I had worked on in the car that morning after Lorna had exited onto Alvarado and started making good progress toward the courthouse. We had stopped talking about the previous night’s activities in Glendale and I had gone to work on the list and what I planned to present to the judge.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Haller,” the judge said. “What is your proposal?”

  “I have a copy of the amended list here, and I have struck all the names I think we can compromise on.”

  I handed the page to her. I did not have a duplicate to share with Forsythe. It only took the judge five seconds of study for her eyebrows to shoot up in surprise.

  “Mr. Haller, you’ve scratched off all but one, two . . . four of the names. How could twenty-nine names that were so important to you yesterday be so easily and expeditiously dismissed?”

  I nodded like I agreed with the absurdity of my actions.

  “All I can say, Judge, is that in the past twenty-four hours the defense has experienced a sea change in its thinking about how best to present the defense of Mr. La Cosse.”

  I looked at Jennifer. She knew about the Marco Polo play but had no idea what had happened the night before in Glendale. Still, she recognized her cue and nodded in full agreement with me.

  “Yes, Your Honor,” she said. “We think that we can proceed with just the four remaining names added to our original witness list.”

  The judge squinted her eyes suspiciously and handed the document across the desk to Forsythe. He scanned it quickly, obviously zeroing in on the names I wanted to keep rather than those I was willing to jettison. Soon enough he frowned and shook his head. I hadn’t expected him to just give in.

  “Judge, if counsel had made this offer yesterday
, I could have saved my investigator a night’s work and the taxpayers of this county the overtime cost associated with his efforts. That aside, the people appreciate that counsel is willing to cut down the number of additional witnesses. However, the people still have issue with the names that remain on the list and so I must object to the outstanding amendments.”

  The judge frowned and looked at her watch. She had probably thought the issue would be settled quickly and she could get the jury back into the box before nine thirty. No such luck.

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go through the names. Quickly—we’ve got a jury waiting. State your objections.”

  Forsythe checked the list and chose his first battle, ticking the paper with a finger.

  “Counsel has put my own investigator on his list, and the people plainly object. This is simply a ploy to get my investigator on the stand and attempt to learn the prosecution’s strategies.”

  I faked a laugh and shook my head.

  “Your Honor, defense stipulates that no question will be asked of Investigator Lankford that involves Mr. Forsythe’s so-called strategies. I also want to note that we have entered the defense phase of the trial and the prosecution phase has ended. Any strategy employed by the state is clearly already on record or at the very least is obvious. But I also must add that Mr. Lankford is one of the main investigators on this case and the defense is allowed to vigorously question how the state gathers and analyzes evidence and the statements of witnesses. Lankford is an important witness and there is no precedent that would preclude him from being called by the defense.”

  The judge looked from me back to Forsythe.

  “What’s your next objection, Mr. Forsythe?”

  By not making a ruling on a witness-by-witness basis, the judge was revealing that she likely would make a ruling that took all four names into account and would have something in it for both the prosecution and defense. She would attempt to split the baby in a Solomonic approach. I had anticipated this when I had scratched names off the list earlier. Lankford was the one witness I wanted. Stratton Sterghos’s name was simply a plant on the list designed to get a reaction—which I had gotten in spades on the video. I never intended to actually call him and therefore could lose him now. The other two names were a neighbor in the building where Gloria Dayton had lived and Sly Fulgoni Sr. I could lose them all as well, though Sly Sr. would be quite upset about his vacation being cancelled.