Brent Marks Legal Thriller Series: Box Set Two

by Kenneth Eade

  Hannaford went back to the counsel table and privately winked at Brent. At the end of the day, he had put on an impressive performance, as usual, but those feelings of despair and helplessness had crept back into Brent’s soul.

  The judge admonished the jurors not to talk to anyone about the case, thanked them for their service, and adjourned for the weekend, leaving Brent, despite Hannaford’s encouragement, with the feeling that everything was utterly hopeless.

  “Buck up, my boy. We’re going into the final stretch,” said Richard, as he slapped Brent on the back.

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Don’t get me wrong, Richard: you’re the best. But we need a miracle.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  Brent kissed Angela good-bye for what seemed to him to be the last time, and went home to make his last-minute preparations for the end of the trial that would mark the most important – and most infamous – turning point in his life. He avoided all news and current events, which seemed to be brimming with tidbits about the murder trial of Santa Barbara attorney Brent Marks. As he stared at the trial outlines and evidence summaries, the cat tried to help by swishing her tail across his nose and batting at the edges of the paper. His mind drew a blank, and images of living in prison for a good portion of the best part of the rest of his life began to creep in and monopolize his thoughts, turning them from grey to black. After falling into a depression for several hours, all he could think of was pickling the despair that dwelled inside with tequila – mixed with anything or nothing. So Brent Marks, the former defender of lost causes turned public figure with no right to privacy (and soon to be famous murderer) drowned his sorrows on his deck facing the Santa Barbara Harbor with all the available clear liquids from his liquor cabinet.

  The cool-headed voice of logic became dim and dull and had all but disappeared. In its place, the illogical beast with only the zest for simple pleasures and thoughts that contradicted all logic began to argue with the impaired, logical one.

  It’s not fair! I didn’t murder Flusher!

  Fair is irrelevant. This is the law – it has nothing to do with justice.

  There has to be a way – there has to!

  There’s always a way – but not all of them are always legal.

  Hmmm.

  Saturday was a blur that managed to clear itself up by the evening, when stone cold reality had set back in. Then, early on Sunday morning, Brent found himself driving north along the coast humming ‘Mrs. Robinson’ to himself. “Dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.”

  After passing Buellton, he began singing ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose’ as he kept barreling northward, driven by an unknown force inside him that refused to accept that he was a week away from being convicted of a murder he had nothing to do with.

  Do you know the way to San Jose? I’ve been away so long, I may go wrong and lose my way…

  The beautiful rolling hills with oak groves gave way to the quaint little town of San Luis Obispo – still Main Street USA and gateway to Highway One, which weaves its way through the breathtaking Pacific coastline all the way to Monterey and from Santa Cruz to San Francisco. But Brent didn’t have time for sightseeing. He paused for a bathroom break, a breakfast muffin, and a cup of coffee to go, then headed straight up the 101.

  I’m going back to find, some peace of mind in San Jose…

  Through the farmland of Salinas Valley – of Steinbeck’s grapes of wrath – Brent’s mind wandered. He knew that it was always best to have a plan, or at least a clue, when you set out to do something. But in this case, he didn’t know what that something was going to be yet.

  With a dream in your heart you’re never alone…

  Brent rolled into San Jose just as the sun was declaring afternoon, and he continued his quest northward to Milpitas, finally ending up in front of the home of Myron Talbot. He exited the car with legs of rubber from the long drive, went straight to the front door, and knocked, still without a plan except for the switch he tripped on the micro-recorder in his right jacket pocket.

  “Who’s there?” he heard from inside as the recorder rolled.

  “Delivery for Myron Talbot,” replied Brent.

  Talbot opened the door, looking like he had just rolled out of bed, dressed in a stained white T-shirt.

  “What’s the delivery?”

  “I came to deliver bad news,” said Brent.

  Talbot immediately pushed the door to close it, but Brent stopped it with his foot and pushed it back, entering Talbot’s sanctuary and almost knocking him down.

  “You – you’re the lawyer!” Talbot exclaimed.

  “That’s right, and you’re the scumbag who hired a hit man to murder Allen Bekker. This is your mess – not mine!” Brent said as he walked toward Talbot, backing him into the living room.

  “Wh – what are you going to do?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. Do you have any knives in the kitchen?”

  Talbot recoiled in horror.

  “How about we just talk first?” asked Brent, putting a strong arm on Talbot’s shoulder and forcing him down onto what must have been Talbot’s favorite chair - until now.

  “I’m not talking to you. I have the right to remain silent.”

  “Not from me you don’t. You’ll talk,” Brent said as he poked the front of the micro-recorder against his jacket pocket, pretending that he had a gun. “It’s just a matter of time. Have you ever seen a gunshot wound? It’s a pretty nasty thing. I’ve seen a lot of them in my work, over time. Nope, not a pretty sight. It depends a lot on the bullets they use. I like wad-cutters myself. They disintegrate on impact and bounce around inside, tearing up all the vital organs.”

  Talbot looked up at Brent with terrified eyes as Brent continued. “Exit wounds on a gunshot victim are particularly disgusting. Have you ever seen a gunshot to the head? I’ve seen them where they blow almost all the brains out – it’s kind of this red, bloody crap, almost like red vomit…”

  “Stop! Stop! Don’t do anything to me! What do you want?”

  Brent knew that a coerced confession was not going to be useable in the government’s case against Talbot and Williams, but he didn’t care about that case. He only cared about his own.

  “I want to know everything about you, Finegan, Williams and Marsen conspiring to murder Allen Bekker, and I want to know why I was framed for the murder of David Marsen. Tell me everything.”

  And Talbot talked – sang as they say in old movies – just like a canary. Perhaps the best thing the hired killer could have done was to get rid of Talbot, Marsen and Williams. But maybe he didn’t care.

  CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

  On Monday morning the Hannaford show continued with TJ and the Wizard of Oz.

  “I call Timothy Jones.”

  TJ was qualified as a computer and Internet expert who was adept in working with decryption software and who had invented his own which could “unmask” messages given over the TOR network from exit nodes which were saved on the computer of the recipient. The explanation of the Dark Web and the TOR network that he gave proved to be very complicated for the jury.

  “Mr. Jones, would you please describe the Deep Web?”

  “The Deep Web, which is also known as the ‘Dark Web,’ is a part of the Internet which exists on the dark net, which is composed of networks that overlay the public Internet and require specific configurations or software to access. It’s like an underground Internet that a lot of people are not aware of; not accessed by traditional search engines like Google.”

  “How does one access this underground Internet?”

  “The most popular method of access is the TOR browser, which anyone can have access to by downloading the TOR bundle of software. The content on the Dark Web is kept encrypted by what is called ‘onion routing.’”

  “Can you please explain ‘onion routing?’”

  “This is a technique for anonymous communication over the network. Mess
ages are sent encrypted in layers, which is how it got its ‘onion’ name. They travel through a series of anonymous routers. The sender remains anonymous because you only know the location of the router before and after the current layer, and the message is decrypted only on the receiver’s side using a PGP, or public key.”

  The jurors looked excited when the talk about the Dark Web began, but after TJ launched into his technical explanation, a couple of them were nodding off and the rest were staring into space, probably thinking about what they had to do and were neglecting in their real lives. Brent passed a note to Hannaford, The jurors are bored, and Richard nodded.

  “What does your decryption software do?”

  “Well, every encrypted message has an ‘exit node’ which deciphers the final layer of the encrypted message for the recipient. Any computer that is used on the Internet will always save some data, such as cookies and browser history. My software captures the information in the exit node which is then used to reconstruct the information in the message.”

  Brednick jumped up to object. “Your Honor, I object to the relevance of this testimony.” It was probably a good thing, because it startled the jury out of their stupor.

  “What is relevant about this line, Mr. Hannaford?”

  “If it please the court, given a little time, I will connect the evidence to the relevance.”

  “Overruled, subject to a motion to strike.”

  “Mr. Jones, how was your software used in this case?”

  “I used it to analyze messages sent by Myron Talbot and Jeremy Williams over the TOR network, both between themselves and David Marsen and to and from a site called Erasure.onion.

  “Calling your attention to Defense Exhibit P, can you identify this document?”

  “Yes, this is a printout from the Erasure.onion website.”

  “Please tell the jury what this website purports to be.”

  “It’s a murder-for-hire website where you can hire an anonymous killer to ‘erase’ someone.”

  All of a sudden the jury seemed to come back to life. The case was starting to get entertaining again.

  “Would you please read the first page of the site?”

  Need your problem erased? I’m your eraser. Contact us for further information.

  I don’t know anything about you and you don’t know anything about me. Your victim will simply cease to exist. And it will always look like an accident or a suicide.

  Brednick’s objection to the messages between Talbot and Williams were sustained, but the messages between Talbot and Williams and Marsen were admitted under the exception to the hearsay rule that Marsen, being dead, was an “unavailable witness.”

  “I was able to decipher these messages, sent three days before Marsen’s death,” TJ testified.

  Marks is getting closer to the truth. Our friend has asked me to help out, said Marsen to Talbot and Williams just days before his death.

  Sounds too dangerous. Keep me out of it, replied Williams.

  Marks is threatening to expose us all, said Marsen.

  Brednick grilled TJ on cross-examination, pointing out that he had no way of authenticating that the messages had actually been sent or received by Marsen, but the jurors had looked half-awake during this part of his testimony, meaning that it had probably made an impression on them.

  Richard Hannaford called Dr. Jaime Orozco to the witness stand, who presented his extensive medical credentials over 40 years, thirty of them spent as a pathologist and medical examiner. He was a licensed California physician, although his patients were never alive. He held an MD, a PhD, and a JD in law, was board certified in clinical, anatomic and forensic pathology, and had worked as a Chief Medical Examiner for the County of Los Angeles for ten years with another ten years for the FBI.

  “Dr. Orozco, you were the pathologist who performed the second autopsy on Allen Bekker; the one which determined that his death was a murder, not a suicide: is that correct?”

  “Yes, that was me. It launched the murder investigation of Mr. Bekker."

  “I understand that you also performed a second autopsy on Mr. Marsen’s body: is that correct?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And do you concur with the Medical Examiner’s opinion on the cause of death?”

  “Yes. From my examination, the victim was stabbed once in the left side of the back. The wound was approximately six inches long and pierced the kidney and renal artery, which is the cause of death.”

  “Are you also of the opinion that the wound was inflicted vertically?”

  “Yes, it appeared that the wound was vertically oriented, meaning that the assailant had thrust the knife upward during the attack, which is consistent with the work of a professional killer.”

  “How is that, doctor?”

  “Most knife wounds you see are multiple and don’t cause death unless a major organ or artery has been hit. To stab someone only one time and inflict that much damage through all that cutaneous tissue and muscle, you have to either be very lucky, or you have to know exactly where the vital organs you’re aiming for are located; especially from the back. I surmised that the perpetrator was either a professional killer who had done this before, a military expert, or someone with medical training.”

  Dr. Orozco’s report was admitted into evidence, and Hannaford then took him to the next level.

  “After the traditional examination, doctor, did you subject the body to any further examinations and, if so, for what purpose?”

  “In conjunction with Dr. Kevin Lawler, I subjected the body to a CT scan and MRI scan. The purpose of these additional scans was to make a 3D virtual composite of the body, its organs, and the wounds, so that they could be viewed from any angle and with respect to any layer of tissue.”

  Dr. Orozco explained the Computed Topography (CT) scan as a type of 3D X-ray and the MRI scan (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), the basic principles under which they operated, and the results. He then explained how the data from the two tests were combined and color used to fill in tissue imagery to give a “flesh and blood” composite model image on the computer monitor display.

  “Would you please demonstrate the composite model, doctor?”

  Doctor Orozco directed the computer technician to project the computer display on the screen as he demonstrated the results of the body scans.

  “As you can see here, as a result of the two scans, we have a 3D virtual composite of the body from which we can examine any part of it from any angle. We can actually go inside the body to examine the damage to the tissues."

  Orozco showed the jury the skin, muscle, bones and organs of the body, using the model. He exhibited the gruesome fatal wound that had made Hannaford almost gag at the morgue. The jury was alert and all but the two women were looking a little queasy.

  “With Dr. Lawler, we went one step further and used his 3D dimensional model of the murder weapon to reconstruct the actual infliction of the wound.”

  “Are you saying, doctor, that you can actually compare the knife with the wound that was made by the knife?”

  “Yes. We can show the trajectory of the knife as it entered the body and as it was withdrawn.”

  “Do you mean, doctor, that you can match the 3D images of the knife with the 3D images of the body so that we can see how the wound was actually made?”

  “Exactly. We call it the virtual corpse.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

  Hannaford next called Kevin Lawler to the witness stand and exposed his background as a criminalist specializing in the physical, chemical, and microscopic examination of physical evidence, such as trace evidence like hairs and fibers, and impression evidence, such as fingerprints, documents and tool marks. He also specialized in firearms and weaponry and incident reconstruction. He had served for 20 years as a criminalist for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and had a B.S., an M.S. and a PhD in Criminology from UCLA.

  “Dr. Lawler, you have worked with Dr. Orozco on compiling the so-
called ‘virtual corpse’ that was demonstrated in court yesterday; is that correct?”

  “Yes, that is correct.”

  “Can you please describe your part in the creation of the virtual corpse?”

  “Yes. Originally, I examined the murder weapon.”

  “This weapon – Exhibit 6?” asked Hannaford as he held up the knife.

  “That is correct.”

  “Please tell the jury the results of your examination,” said Hannaford as he moved toward the jury box, and then became a part of their group, actively listening, as if he was hearing it for the first time.