Guilty Blood

by Rick Acker

  Judge Whittaker gave the jurors a series of preliminary instructions about not discussing the case with anyone, avoiding any media reports of it, not going to the scene of the crime, and so on. Most of the jurors seemed attentive but a little bored. Elrond listened intently and took notes furiously.

  When the judge finished, he turned to the assistant DA, Jason Brown, and said, “Would you like to give an opening statement, Counsel?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” The prosecutor stood and walked over to stand in front of the jury box, carrying a small remote. A projection screen, standard equipment in modern courtrooms, hung from the wall opposite the box. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is my opportunity to tell you what I think the evidence will show. You’ll hear a lot of expert testimony, some of it very complex. But when all of the evidence is in, I think you’ll conclude that this is really a very simple case.

  “On the evening of October twenty-fifth of last year, Brandon Ames went to the apartment of his girlfriend, Monica Lee. He left his cell phone there and then traveled to downtown Oakland. There he met a man named Lincoln Thomas, or Linc, as everyone called him.”

  He stepped to the side and clicked the remote. The screen came to life and showed a picture of Linc Thomas. It wasn’t a good picture, but it was the least-bad photo of Linc that Nate had seen. It was a slightly out-of-focus group shot that had been cropped to show only a smiling Linc, an unseen man’s arm draped across his shoulders. Rather than looking surly and lumpish—as he usually did—Linc appeared to be a plain, friendly everyman.

  “Linc had gone to a bar called the Captain’s Lounge to have a beer or two after a hard day of working at the docks,” Brown continued. “That’s a tough neighborhood; there are a lot of fights. But you’ll hear that Linc wasn’t a fighter. He had gone to the Captain’s Lounge regularly for years, but never once did he get into a fight with another patron or anyone else. He also never fought at work or anywhere else that anyone can remember. He did his job, had a beer a few times a week, and stayed away from trouble. But on that night, trouble came to him.

  “Linc left the Captain’s Lounge at around ten o’clock. He was alone. That was the last time anyone saw him alive—anyone other than Brandon Ames, that is. We don’t know what happened next, but we do know that at about midnight, a Captain’s Lounge employee named Frank went into the alley behind the bar to smoke a cigarette. This is what he saw.” He clicked the remote again and an image of the crime scene appeared on the screen. Linc’s body lay sprawled on the sidewalk in a pool of blood.

  “Linc had been stabbed with a long, sharp knife. He was unarmed, and his hands did not have the bruises or scrapes that can come from throwing punches. Instead, the only injuries on his hands were shallow cuts that are often called defensive wounds because they occur when someone is trying to defend themselves from a knife attack.”

  He clicked the remote again and the screen went blank. He walked to stand in front of the jury box again, bringing the jury’s focus back to him. “The defensive wounds weren’t the only evidence on Linc’s hands. It’s not uncommon for crime victims to scratch their attackers while they’re struggling, so crime-scene technicians from the Oakland Police Department checked under Linc’s fingernails. They found small amounts of skin and blood. Professional scientists tested it and found that the DNA in the blood matched Brandon Ames’s.

  “There’s no innocent explanation for how Mr. Ames’s blood wound up under Linc’s fingernails. They weren’t coworkers or acquaintances who might have fought sometime earlier in the day. Linc didn’t know Mr. Ames. As far as we can tell, they had never met before that fateful night. And yet, Mr. Ames’s skin and blood was under his fingernails.”

  He stepped back, turned the projector on, and moved to his next slide. It showed the wicked-looking knife Nate had seen at the preliminary examination. “This is the murder weapon,” Brown said. “It has Linc’s blood all over it, and it could easily have made the wound found on his body. It was discovered on the morning of October twenty-six in the trash can of a 7-Eleven located about three blocks from Mr. Ames’s apartment.”

  He clicked the remote and the picture of Linc came up again. “And that’s it, ladies and gentlemen. That’s the whole story. Like I said, it’s not complicated at all. It’s simple. But it’s a story without an ending. You will provide the ending yourselves at the conclusion of this trial. And I submit that when you have heard and seen all the evidence, the right ending will be obvious: a guilty verdict. Thank you very much.”

  CHAPTER 83

  Jessica’s heart sank steadily as the prosecutor gave his opening statement. She hated to admit it, but he did a good job. The jury seemed to think so too. They watched him raptly, hanging on his words. She wanted to jump up and argue with him, to refute his lies before they could take root in the hearts and minds of the jurors. But all she could do was clench her teeth and watch.

  The prosecutor finally sat down. The judge looked at Nate. “Would you like to make an opening statement?”

  “Very much so, Your Honor,” Nate said as he rose. He walked into the middle of the courtroom, looking relaxed and confident. He looked at home—more at home than she had ever seen him before.

  “Thank you for being here,” he said to the jurors. “I realize that jury duty is one of the last forms of involuntary servitude that is legal in the United States.” That brought a few smiles from the jurors. “But without you, the wheels of justice would grind to a halt and innocent people would have no hope of regaining their freedom. Innocent people like Brandon Ames.

  “Mr. Brown told you a simple story. But it was only simple because he left out important parts. For example, did you notice that he didn’t tell you Brandon’s motive for killing Linc Thomas? That’s because Brandon didn’t have one. Remember that: you will hear no evidence that Brandon Ames had a motive to kill Lincoln Thomas. In fact, Mr. Brown just admitted that there’s no evidence that the two of them ever met. Brandon was an engineering student at Berkeley with a bright future ahead of him.” He gestured to Brandon, drawing the jury’s attention to him.

  Brandon sat up a little straighter, and Jessica saw the muscles in his back tense suddenly. She realized that the bullet wound in his chest must have hurt him, and a wave of compassion swept over her. She wished she could reach out and comfort him, but she knew that was impossible.

  “Brandon had a good job lined up after graduation,” Nate continued. “And yet Mr. Brown would have you believe that on October twenty-five, he went to his girlfriend’s apartment, left his cell phone to make it appear that he stayed there all evening, went to Oakland, brutally murdered a man he had never met in the alley behind a bar he had never visited, went back to his girlfriend’s apartment, picked up his phone, and went home.”

  He raised his eyebrows in incredulity and spread his arms wide. “Why? Why on earth would Brandon do that? Mr. Brown can’t tell you. He has had more than ten months to find evidence that Brandon had a motive to—”

  “Objection,” the prosecutor said. “This is clearly argument.”

  Judge Whittaker nodded. “Sustained. Please stick to the facts during your opening statement, Counsel.”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Nate said. He didn’t seem at all bothered by either the objection or the judge’s ruling. Jessica wondered whether he had expected it—and possibly even used it as an opportunity to make the jury wonder what the DA didn’t want them to hear.

  “Now we come to the second piece of the story that Mr. Brown left out,” Nate said to the jury. “You just heard that Linc Thomas worked at the docks and didn’t get into fights. But you’ll notice that Mr. Brown did not say that Linc Thomas didn’t get into trouble. That would have been a lie. Mr. Thomas got into very serious trouble. He helped a Chinese human-trafficking syndicate smuggle young women through the Port of Oakland.”

  Jessica’s heart skipped a beat. How was Nate going to prove that? She had told him that Jade refused to help them, and they had no other witnesses. What was he do
ing?

  “That syndicate is called Lan Long, and the evidence will show that they’re a ruthless organization that’s closely tied to the Chinese military. We don’t know exactly why they killed Linc Thomas, but they did. And they tried to cover up their crime by framing an innocent man—Brandon Ames.

  “But what about the DNA evidence? Didn’t the police find Brandon’s skin and blood under Linc Thomas’s fingernails?” He paused for emphasis. “No, they didn’t. That’s the third piece of the story that Mr. Brown left out. The police found skin and blood from someone who had DNA that was very similar to Brandon’s, but not the same.

  “When the prosecution’s DNA expert testifies, please listen very carefully. She won’t say that the DNA found at the crime scene was a perfect match for Brandon’s. It wasn’t. Her lab tested Brandon’s DNA and compared it to the crime-scene DNA at thirteen points—called loci—along the DNA molecule. They found a match at only nine of the thirteen. It was close at two more, and on the final two it didn’t match at all. And when the defense’s DNA expert testifies, he’ll explain that nine—or even eleven—out of thirteen isn’t a match. This isn’t horseshoes—close doesn’t count.

  “Now we come to what I think is the most interesting part of the story—which Mr. Brown also left out, of course. To be fair to him, this particular part isn’t strictly necessary for you to reach a verdict. But it does make everything else fit into place.”

  He paused and went on in a lower voice. The jurors instinctively leaned closer to hear him. “I’ve wondered all along whether it’s entirely a coincidence that Linc Thomas was killed by someone who has DNA very similar to Brandon’s. I don’t believe it is, and I think you’ll agree with me by the time this trial is over. The FBI has a database that contains over fifteen million DNA profiles, including one that was collected from Brandon years ago when he was arrested for driving under the influence shortly after his father died.

  “Somebody—very likely the Chinese military—hacked into the FBI’s DNA database and altered Brandon’s profile so that it perfectly matched the crime-scene DNA. That ensured that when the police tested the DNA found on Linc Thomas’s body, they would find a match in the database and arrest Brandon—while the real killer got away.

  “They wanted someone whose DNA was close to the killer’s, and the closer the better. They knew the police would test Brandon’s DNA as soon as they brought him in to the station. If his actual DNA wasn’t at all close to the crime-scene DNA, the police would promptly release him and go back to looking for the real killer. Plus, it would be obvious that the FBI’s database had been hacked. It would be much better for the hackers if they could find someone who lived fairly near the person they wanted to kill and whose DNA was a close match to one of their agents. In a database of fifteen million, that wouldn’t be too hard. Once they found that person—Brandon, in this case—they could make a few minor changes to his database profile so that it matched the agent’s profile perfectly. Then they could proceed with the murder and know that it would be months or even years before the truth came out—if it ever did.”

  He paused and gave the jurors a slightly sheepish smile. “I admit that there’s some speculation in there, but it’s speculation that fits the facts you will hear. We know the FBI’s database and a related California-government database were hacked and that the most likely culprits were in the Chinese military. We know that whoever hacked them altered Brandon’s DNA profile to match DNA that would be found at the scene of a crime that hadn’t been committed yet. We know that Lan Long is connected to the Chinese military and may have had a motive to commit that crime. But as I said, none of this is crucial to reaching the right verdict in this case.

  “What is crucial is that Brandon had no motive to kill Linc Thomas, and Brandon’s DNA was not at the crime scene. Once you hear the full story—not just the abridged version Mr. Brown told—it will be clear that there’s only one possible verdict: not guilty. Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 84

  Brandon lay on his back, staring at the cement ceiling of his cell and fighting the urge to hope. Things seemed to have gone well today. Nate had done a great job of slicing and dicing the prosecutor’s speech, and Brandon thought the jurors had noticed. If Nate was able to prove all of that . . .

  He didn’t complete the thought. He wanted to, but he didn’t. Nothing had gone right for him for a long time, and he didn’t dare let himself think that things might change. If he did, it would all go wrong somehow. He just knew it.

  He sighed and got up, carefully rolling onto his left side first to avoid doing anything that might draw a protest from his injured chest. He walked over to the small table that stuck out from his cell wall like a shelf and sat on the matching bench/shelf below it. It took a few seconds to find the light switch in the dark, then a rectangle of dim, flickering fluorescent light appeared on the table, cast by a small bulb behind a thick and heavily scratched square of plastic in the wall of his cell. A stack of books sat on top of the table—textbooks, mostly, but he had also checked out two books on procedural rules for criminal trials from the jail library.

  Reading didn’t do any good. He had already been through the textbooks three times and he knew them by heart. The books on legal procedure kept his attention better—in fact, they kept it too well. As he reread them, he found himself obsessing over his trial, trying to puzzle out how the rules would apply. Unfortunately, the books contained just enough information to raise questions in his mind, but not enough to answer them, leaving him with nothing except maddening uncertainty.

  Nervous energy pushed him up from the little bench. He stood and paced back and forth in the narrow confines of his cell, trying to wear himself out enough to sleep. He almost dropped to the floor to do push-ups, but just in time he remembered what a terrible idea that would be. Pacing wasn’t strenuous enough to tire him, so he eventually lay back down on his bed and went back to watching the ceiling. Then he closed his eyelids and watched the insides of them.

  Brandon wished there were someone he could talk to. Aside from brief conversations with his mother and Nate during court breaks, he spent all of his time effectively alone—either locked in this cell or sitting in a van with two laconic guards while he was being transported to and from the courthouse.

  The thought of having someone to talk to reminded him of Father Vicente. Brandon had thought of him often since he woke up in a hospital bed a week and a half ago. One of the first things he did was to ask what had happened to the man who took a bullet for him. To his relief, he learned that Father Vicente had survived. But the news wasn’t all good—he was in the ICU and likely to stay there for a while.

  Brandon wished he could talk to Father Vicente. He wanted to thank him, of course, but also to . . . Brandon couldn’t quite crystallize it in his mind. Father Vicente had been behind an armored door when a prison riot broke out. Most people in that situation would stay exactly where they were, but Father Vicente hadn’t. And not only did he go outside and run into the middle of the riot, but when he found one prisoner pointing a gun at another, he deliberately put himself in the way. Why?

  It couldn’t be that Father Vicente cared particularly for Brandon. He met with dozens of prisoners, many of whom were probably more open to his evangelizing than Brandon. The two of them didn’t have much in common, and they had only talked a few times. Brandon grimaced in the dark as he remembered that he hadn’t been particularly polite during their last meeting.

  Father Vicente probably didn’t think of Brandon any differently than he did of any other accused murderer waiting for trial—except that Brandon had killed a Los Reyes member. It was self-defense, but the priest likely felt at least some empathy for the dead man. In his eyes, Brandon must be just another inmate proclaiming his innocence, but clearly all too capable of violence. Why put your own life on the line to save someone like that? And yet that’s precisely what Father Vicente had done. It made no sense.

  Brandon probably wouldn’t get a c
hance to ask Father Vicente what he had been thinking. According to one of the guards, the priest wouldn’t be coming back to the jail until long after Brandon’s trial was over and he was either released or transferred to the prison where he would serve his sentence. In any event, all prisoners had been essentially restricted to their cells ever since the riot.

  Still, he could at least thank Father Vicente.

  He rolled out of bed again, fished some paper and a pen out of the pile of random supplies he kept under his bed, and went back to the table. Writing with his left hand was slow and awkward, and he could only write in clumsy block letters. But this was something he needed to do. He wrote:

  Dear Father Vicente,

  I hope that you are doing well and on the road to a full recovery. I wish I could thank you in person for risking your own life to save mine during the riot at Tassajara Jail. I am very sorry that you were hurt, but I am deeply grateful that you were willing to take a bullet for me. That was an incredible act of self-sacrifice. I owe you an enormous debt, and I hope that someday I will be able to repay at least some of it.

  Very truly yours,

  Brandon Ames

  The note seemed inadequate when he reread it, but he couldn’t think of anything to add. He folded it one-handed and stuffed it into an envelope.

  He went back to bed again and, finally, fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 85

  Judge Whittaker had given the prosecution three days to put on their case, and Nate did his best to make them spend it boring and confusing the jury. He mostly succeeded.

  Rather than agree to allow his opponents to put on the non-DNA elements of their story in narrative form through one or two witnesses, as they had at the preliminary examination, Nate forced them to strictly follow the rules of evidence. That meant the prosecution had to put on a witness with personal knowledge of each fact they wanted to prove. Instead of having an articulate detective tell the story from beginning to end, Brown was forced to put on a dozen witnesses, each of whom testified to some fragment of the overall narrative. They often weren’t polished or well prepared, so their testimony was rambling and disjointed, and they occasionally contradicted each other on details.