Guilty Blood

by Rick Acker

“Huh,” Cole said. “That’s a surprise. I wonder what her angle is. You know she has one.”

  “Of course,” Billy said. “Whatever it is, she’s going on the stand in the morning. I’ll bet Daniels wants her to talk about Lan Long.”

  “What else could it be?” Cole said. “Speaking of which, what have they been up to?”

  “Nada. No word of another shipment or anything. The Blue Dragon seems to be lying low.” Billy twitched a wiry shoulder. “Maybe they’ve decided that things have gotten too hot, and they’re shutting down their California operation, at least for a while.”

  “I doubt it,” Cole said. “There’s just too much money at stake. They must be clearing well over a hundred grand per girl, probably more. They’ll be back. It’s just a question of when.”

  CHAPTER 92

  Jessica sat in her usual courtroom seat, right behind Brandon and a couple of feet from the police officers who accompanied him to every court appearance.

  Court would start any moment, and she was nervous. Jade was about to testify, and she was the last scheduled witness. After she left the witness stand, all that would be left were closing arguments and jury instructions.

  How would the jury react to Jade? Jessica had sat in on her prep session last night, acting as gofer and sounding board—anything she could do to help. She thought Jade would be a good witness—she certainly wouldn’t get pushed around on cross-examination. But how would the jury react to her hard edges? Or to the fact that she was a prostitute?

  The clerk called the court into session, the jurors filed in, and the judge told Nate to call his witness.

  “The defense calls Jade Li,” he said, looking over his shoulder toward the back of the courtroom.

  Jessica turned and saw Jade walking down the aisle. She wore a conservative black suit and burgundy nail polish and lipstick. Her hair was pulled back in a simple jade clip. She looked more like an accountant than an escort.

  The clerk swore her in and she took the stand. Jessica scanned the jurors, trying to figure out how they were reacting to Jade. So far, they weren’t, really. Most of them seemed bored and disinterested, though a couple of the men seemed to have noticed Jade’s looks.

  “Ms. Li, did you know Lincoln Thomas?” Nate asked.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “I’m a professional escort,” she said casually, as if she were announcing that she was a dentist. “Linc sometimes dated girls I knew.”

  A chorus of little creaks and rustlings came from the jury box as the jurors sat up or leaned forward.

  “Are you aware of anyone who might have had a motive to murder him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Some of the girls who had been with him said that—”

  The prosecutor popped up. “Objection, hearsay.”

  Judge Whittaker nodded. “Sustained.”

  “Please limit yourself to what you personally saw or experienced,” Nate said. “Don’t tell us what someone else told you.”

  “Okay. What I personally saw was girls who had been out with him come into all-night coffee shops or restaurants, crying. They had bruises and other injuries that . . . showed they had been abused and degraded.” Her voice remained calm, but anger flashed in her eyes. “I had to take one to the emergency room. She was—”

  “Objection,” Brown said again. “Any possible relevance of this testimony is far outweighed by its prejudicial impact. Linc Thomas is not on trial here; Brandon Ames is.”

  Nate shook his head. “Ms. Li is providing the basis for her statement that someone other than Brandon had a motive to kill Linc Thomas. Mr. Brown objected to the summary version of that evidence on the ground that it was hearsay. He cannot now complain that the nonhearsay version is too prejudicial.”

  Brown seemed about to speak again, but the judge said, “You did open the door to this. Overruled.”

  Last night, Nate had commented that he was concerned about getting in a lot of Jade’s testimony because it was only indirectly relevant to the murder case, but was likely to have an outsize emotional impact on the jury. He had said he might be able to “bait Brown into opening the door with objections.” Jessica hadn’t understood what he meant at the time, but now she did.

  Nate turned back to Jade. “Do you believe that one or more of the girls who went out with Linc Thomas had a motive to kill him?”

  She nodded. “I think some of these girls would have been happy to see him dead.”

  Jessica looked at each juror briefly, trying to read their faces. They all seemed riveted.

  “Did you ever go out with him?” Nate asked.

  “Of course not,” Jade said. “These girls were fresh from China. They didn’t know about Linc, and they didn’t have a choice about going out with him.”

  Brown stood again. “Objection, lack of foundation. And if her knowledge of these allegations is based on hearsay, objection on that ground as well.”

  “Sustained,” the judge said.

  “Please tell us how you knew these girls were fresh from China,” Nate said. “And again, please limit your answer to what you personally saw or experienced.”

  Jade nodded. “I know they were fresh from China because I personally experienced being brought here when I was young, so I recognized the signs. These girls only understood a few English words. They didn’t know how to order in American restaurants. They didn’t have any ID, not even passports. And most of all, they seemed scared.”

  “And how do you know they were forced to go out with Linc Thomas?”

  “Because I know how this system works,” she said, a trace of bitterness in her voice. “I’ve seen it from the inside. Criminal gangs in China set up fake modeling agencies, dance studios, and businesses like that. They look for pretty girls who are desperate or stupid—and who don’t have anyone looking out for them. They tell these girls that there are high-paying jobs for them overseas, and they usually promise to pay all the expenses to get the girls there. When the girls arrive, their passports are taken away and they’re told that they are now prostitutes or strippers. I was eighteen when it happened to me, but most of these girls are younger. Do you think that a girl like that has any real choice when someone orders her to go out with a man and do whatever he wants?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Nate said. He cleared his throat. “Was Linc Thomas connected with one of these criminal gangs?”

  Brown stirred and leaned forward as if he were going to get up, but seemed to think better of it. Maybe he realized that his objections were only hurting his case.

  “Yes, he worked for an organization called Lan Long,” Jade said.

  “What did he do for them?”

  “He had a job with the Port of Oakland. He used his position to help Lan Long smuggle in girls. The girls would be drugged in China and put in shipping containers. Linc made sure those containers never got inspected when they reached Oakland.”

  “Why would Lan Long want to kill him?” Nate asked.

  “Because he talked a lot, bragged about working for them,” Jade said. “And the FBI was investigating Lan Long—or, at least, a man who said he worked for the FBI interviewed me about them a few months before Linc was killed. If they were talking to me, I’m sure they were talking to Linc. Lan Long wouldn’t like that at all.”

  “Would Lan Long have had the ability to kill him?”

  “Oh, sure. Lan Long is run by Chinese army officers. They must know lots of experts at killing with a knife. They could sneak one into a container of sleeping girls headed for Oakland. No one would know he was there. Linc probably got his killer through customs without knowing it.”

  “No further questions.”

  Nate left the lectern and sat down.

  The judge looked at Brown, who was still seated and looking through his notes. “Any cross-examination, Counsel?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.” He stood and stepped to the lectern. “Ms. Li, you said you were s
ure the FBI was talking to Linc Thomas. Did you actually see an FBI agent talk to him?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear recordings of him talking with FBI agents?”

  “No.”

  “You also said Lan Long members must have known knife-wielding killers. Have you personally seen Lan Long members socializing with such individuals?”

  “No.”

  “You also said that Lan Long could have smuggled an assassin into Oakland in a shipping container. Do you know whether that in fact happened?”

  “No.”

  “No further questions.”

  “Any redirect?” Judge Whittaker asked Nate.

  Nate half rose. “No, Your Honor.” He sat down again.

  “All right,” the judge said. “We’ll take an early lunch break and be back here at one o’clock sharp for closing arguments.”

  CHAPTER 93

  Brown stood in front of the jury box, as he had during his opening statement. He didn’t have a picture of Linc up this time, which Nate thought was wise. After Jade’s testimony this morning, it probably wasn’t smart to make this case about getting justice for Linc. A number of the jurors probably thought he had already gotten it.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Brown said. “I said at the beginning of this trial that the evidence would tell a simple story. It has, despite the best efforts of the defense. At the end of the day, there is only one fact that matters: Brandon Ames’s blood was under Linc Thomas’s fingernails, and there is no innocent explanation for how it got there. That blood—that guilty blood—is the most important evidence in this case.

  “The defense tried mightily to pretend that it wasn’t Mr. Ames’s blood, but they failed. Their own expert sat on the witness stand and admitted that the odds against the crime-scene DNA randomly matching the defendant’s DNA so closely were very likely at least a billion to one.” He paused for emphasis. “A billion to one. We think they were more like one hundred and thirteen billion to one, but we’ll take a billion.

  “The defense argued that the samples didn’t match because there were some discrepancies on the alleles at four out of the thirteen loci. But then their own expert admitted that Ms. Harkin had a plausible explanation for those discrepancies. That was his word: plausible. And she should know what’s plausible, since her job is to analyze forensic DNA, and she has analyzed a thousand samples and passed all sixteen proficiency tests she has taken. Specifically, she testified that the crime-scene sample may have represented a mix of at least two people’s DNA because Linc had accidentally scratched someone over the course of the day. That certainly sounds plausible to me—a lot more plausible than the defense’s conspiracy theories.

  “I confess that I couldn’t quite follow all the twists and turns in the defense’s story, but I think it goes something like this: A nefarious group of Chinese human traffickers framed Brandon Ames by getting the Chinese army to hack into a bunch of federal-government databases. The Chinese army then hacked into the Cal-DNA database, where they altered Mr. Ames’s DNA profile—even though Ms. Harkin testified that her lab doesn’t actually use the database profiles to determine whether two samples match. But maybe the Chinese army doesn’t know that, even though they sure seem to know everything else.

  “Anyway, the traffickers then sent an assassin from China to kill Linc. This guy was good—so good that no one ever saw him and there’s no evidence that he ever existed. Except for the DNA that he managed to leave under Linc’s fingernails. But I guess that was all part of the plan. You see, this invisible master assassin had DNA that matched Brandon Ames’s almost perfectly, so leaving his DNA at the crime scene would actually help him get away because the police would blame Mr. Ames for the murder.

  “And the evidence for this remarkable theory? One witness said he saw some mysterious person—who never testified—hack into the Cal-DNA database, though the witness admitted that he didn’t know whether the hacking was faked. And just this morning, we heard an escort speculate that Linc Thomas might have been talking to the FBI and that these traffickers may have smuggled an assassin into Oakland in a shipping container. That’s it. That’s all the evidence they presented.”

  He smiled at the jurors sardonically, and several of them smiled back. “I ask you, what is more plausible—the defense’s international-espionage theory or the possibility that Linc Thomas scratched someone on the day he was killed? The answer is obvious, and therefore so is the correct verdict: guilty.

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 94

  Jessica’s spirits crumbled as Brown sat down. She had watched the jurors throughout his argument. They had smiled and nodded along with him. They had agreed with him.

  Nate stood and walked to the same spot where Brown had stood. “One of my mentors used to say, ‘When you can explain, do so forcefully and clearly. When you cannot explain, mock.’” That drew a bark of laughter from Elrond and smiles from a few other jurors. “Mr. Brown has mocked much, but he has explained very little.

  “As I predicted in my opening statement, he never explained why Brandon would have a motive to kill Linc Thomas. He provided no evidence at all on that crucial point. He never even provided evidence that the two of them knew each other. Instead, he merely mocked—but never refuted—the evidence that other individuals did, in fact, have a motive to murder Linc.

  “He also never explained why Brandon’s database profile was altered to precisely match the crime-scene DNA—thus ensuring Brandon’s arrest. All he did was ask Mr. Stichtman whether it was possible that the evidence of that alteration might have been faked. And what Mr. Stichtman actually said in response was that he had no reason to believe the evidence had been faked. He didn’t know whether it was even possible to fake that evidence.

  “Mr. Brown never explained Linc Thomas’s work for human traffickers, which may well have led to his death. And remember that those traffickers were connected to the Chinese military, which probably had the ability to hack into the Cal-DNA database and alter Brandon’s profile. After all, we know that they hacked into the federal government’s OPM database and downloaded everything they would need to get access to Cal-DNA. That was undisputed.

  “Not only could they alter a profile, they could also search both the Cal-DNA database and the federal CODIS database for profiles that were similar to the profiles of their agents. Dr. Weiss testified—and again, this was never disputed—that if they ran one hundred profiles through those databases, the odds of a match would be far better than one in a billion. In fact, out of those hundred profiles, they would probably find nine-locus matches somewhere in the databases for at least ten. If they wanted to kill someone in the United States—an FBI informant, for example—it would make perfect sense to send an agent with a nine-locus match to someone in those databases, especially if that nine-locus match could be turned into a thirteen-locus match with a little tweaking. The police would arrest the person with the matching profile, and the killer could get away scot-free. It would be a perfect crime.

  “What was the prosecution’s explanation of all that evidence? There was none. Mr. Brown simply labeled it a conspiracy theory and ignored it. But I know you won’t ignore it. You will weigh it on the scales of justice and determine the truth. And the truth is that Brandon Ames is an innocent man.”

  Jessica searched the jurors’ faces for any hint of how they were reacting. Several of them were smiling, and some of them nodded at different points during Nate’s speech—just like they had when Brown was speaking. They were frustratingly neutral when Nate declared that Brandon was innocent—but at least they weren’t shaking their heads or crossing their arms. She hoped that was a moderately positive sign.

  “The only thing the prosecution did try to explain was the fact that the crime-scene DNA did not match Brandon’s DNA. Ms. Harkin speculated that Linc Thomas might possibly have scratched someone else—but notice that there is no evidence whatsoever in support of that speculation. For instance, the prosecution didn
’t call a witness who said he or she was scratched by Linc, though they presumably searched for that person. They couldn’t even find anyone to testify that Linc scratched Brandon. They just speculated that any scratches would have healed before he was arrested. All they have is speculation about what may have happened. But speculation is not proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt—particularly not when the speculation doesn’t even address the mountain of other evidence pointing toward innocence. And in light of that evidence, the only possible verdict is not guilty.

  “Thank you.”

  CHAPTER 95

  That was great! Brandon scrawled on his notepad as Nate walked back to the table after giving his closing. He meant it. After Brown gave his closing, Brandon had been sure he was going to prison for a long time. But then Nate got up and laid out the evidence and pointed out how the prosecutor hadn’t really explained anything. It had been terrific, and Brandon was feeling more optimistic than he had in a long time.

  Brandon pushed the pad in front of Nate as he sat down. Nate mouthed Thank you and turned back toward the jury. Brandon followed his gaze and realized that Brown was getting ready to speak again.

  The prosecutor walked to the middle of the courtroom. “Since the state bears the burden of proof, I get the last word. I will make it brief.

  “There is a famous principle of logic called Occam’s razor. It’s applied in everything from philosophy to physics. There are many versions of it, but the clearest is as follows: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

  “I ask you, what is the simplest explanation for the DNA found under Linc Thomas’s fingernails? Is it that Linc scratched someone on the day of his death and then scratched Brandon Ames during a desperate fight for his life? Or is it that Mr. Ames was framed by a vast conspiracy of hackers, assassins, and human traffickers—all of whom are somehow connected to the Chinese army?” He paused and shook his head slightly. “To ask those questions is to answer them.

  “Once you apply Occam’s razor, everything else falls into place. The odds are at least a billion to one against the crime-scene DNA matching Brandon Ames’s DNA as closely as it does. And if that was Brandon Ames’s DNA under Linc’s fingernails, it’s clear—clear beyond a reasonable doubt—that he murdered Linc. It doesn’t matter whether the Chinese army fiddled with Mr. Ames’s DNA profile or smuggled assassins into Oakland in shipping containers. So I ask you to ignore all the distractions, all the smoke and mirrors, that the defense put in front of you. Use Occam’s razor to cut away the clutter. When you do, the correct verdict will be obvious: guilty.