Next up was the police detective who’d found Jackson’s pothead podcast. At trial, I was going to object the hell out of that, and I expected the judge would exclude it. Ruiz had to know that. I didn’t appreciate his taking advantage of a preliminary hearing, where the rules of evidence didn’t strictly apply, to parade this junk before the assembled crowd.
Next, Ruiz tried to call Mazie. I objected.
“Your Honor,” Ruiz said, “the defendant and the victim were involved in a physical fight on the night of the murder. She was a witness to that.”
“She was inside,” I said. “The fight was mainly outside, on the porch. We’ll stipulate that a fight occurred.” I doubted it would help Jackson’s case to let Ruiz grill his weeping mother. Testimony from emotionally distraught witnesses could go haywire fast.
Judge Chambliss said, “I think that’s sufficient. Or do we need specifics, Mr. Ruiz? A time of day?”
Ruiz said, “About six in the evening, Your Honor. And afterward, the victim left.”
“We’ll stip to that,” I said.
The last witness was Detective Blount. As he took the stand, in uniform, I wished their witness could’ve been almost any other cop. Blount was square-jawed, with ramrod posture and blond hair in a crew cut. He could’ve played an experienced cop who took his job seriously on any TV crime show.
On direct, he told his story well, with the right amount of detail and zero fluff. Ruiz didn’t ask what time he’d seen Jackson, which to me meant that must be a weak point for them, but he did have Blount point out on the map where on the marina road he’d been. Beside me, on her laptop, Terri was clicking through her photos to find the spot. Ruiz’s map didn’t show any trees, but from the bend in the road, it looked like the spot was either right before the clump of oaks or under them.
Then Ruiz asked him about the day Jackson was arrested. I stood and said, “Objection, Your Honor. What’s the relevance of this to a probable cause hearing?”
“I’ll allow it,” the judge said, “but make it brief, Mr. Ruiz. And Mr. Blount.”
Blount said, “We located the defendant in a shed on Dexter Street.”
“And what did you do then?”
“We proceeded to arrest him.”
“And what did the defendant do?”
“He used foul language and didn’t cooperate. In other words, he resisted arrest. At one point, as we were attempting to place him in the police cruiser, he attempted to run, but he was in handcuffs at that point and didn’t get far.”
That wasn’t in the arrest report. I made a note to think about either moving to exclude any testimony on that at trial or letting Blount say it and then using the arrest report to make the jury wonder if he was lying.
My turn came to cross him.
“Morning, Detective Blount.”
“Morning, Leland. I mean, Mr. Munroe.”
Judge Chambliss laughed and said, “It’s a small town, ain’t it.”
Jurors would probably react the same way. Stumbling over my name made Blount more personable. I was glad trial was several months away, because I was going to need time to think through all the ways I could handle him as a witness and how each might play to the jury.
There were no holes to poke in his work experience, so I didn’t try. I kicked off with, “Detective Blount, could you tell the court about any encounters you’ve had with Jackson Warton in the past?”
He looked at Ruiz, who shrugged.
“I’m not sure what you mean by encounters,” Blount said.
“Meetings. Interactions of any kind. Let’s start with encounters in your professional capacity.” I was leaving it open-ended so they wouldn’t get a sense of what we knew and what we didn’t.
“Uh, well, I’ve been present on, I believe, three occasions when Jackson was arrested.”
“So, all the occasions? All of his arrests?”
“Yes.”
That was a point in Jackson’s favor, to me at least. He’d told me Blount was there, but I hadn’t been able to check his memory or his honesty because the arrest reports only named the arresting officer.
“And isn’t it true, Detective Blount, that until this last time, when you arrested Jackson in connection with this case, none of his arrests were for any type of violence or assault?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
“They were for possession of a single marijuana cigarette, and for spray-painting a local bar? That’s Jackson’s entire criminal history?”
“That’s correct.”
“Your Honor,” said Ruiz, “we’ve stipulated to this.”
“I’ll move on,” I said. “Now, in your position as a police detective, did you ever have occasion to learn that Karl Warton had a criminal history?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said. I leveled an Oh, come on look at him, and he shifted in his seat. If he was going to waffle on something as basic as this, I could use that. Juries didn’t like witnesses who tried to weasel out of questions.
“Your Honor,” said Ruiz, “we’ll stipulate to Karl Warton’s record, although I don’t see how it’s relevant at this stage.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Some parts of his record are certainly relevant, but right now I’m not trying to establish that Karl had a record. I’m just trying to get a sense of what Detective Blount knew.”
To Blount, Judge Chambliss said, “You can go ahead and answer.”
“Uh, I was not the arresting officer on anything involving him, but yes, I was aware he’d been arrested.”
“Multiple times?”
“Yes.”
“For violent crimes?” I said. “Child abuse, for instance?”
“That’s correct.”
“Beating the mother of his child?”
“Yes.”
“Bar fights? Plural?”
“I was aware of that, yes.”
“Were you aware he’d broken his son’s arm?”
“He was arrested for that, yes. And there was a plea.”
“Okay. And you knew that at the time?”
“I think we all did,” he said. “It’s a small town.”
“I’ll stipulate to that,” I said. Ruiz and the judge chuckled. “So, knowing as you did that Karl was abusing his son and beating the boy’s mother, did you at any point intervene to protect them?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
I gave him another look and let the silence sink in. In my experience, most people didn’t like silence. They rushed to fill it. He was no exception.
“I was never called to the scene of any of that,” he said. “If I had been, I would’ve followed procedures.”
I cocked my head like I had my doubts. “Detective Blount, you knew Karl from high school, right?”
“I did.”
“And you dock your own boat at the same marina he did, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“So you had occasion to see him around? Not just in your professional capacity?”
“At times, yes.”
He was getting nervous. I didn’t know why, and I wasn’t about to derail my cross by asking questions whose answers I didn’t know, but I made a mental note to look harder at whatever relationship he and Karl may have had.
“Okay. And isn’t it true that you have intervened personally in domestic violence cases before? By which I mean, you’ve warned perpetrators to cut it out?”
He glanced at Terri. He knew where I’d gotten that information. I enjoyed the thought that to him, that little Oprah at her laptop might look like a ticking time bomb. They’d worked on the same police force for years, and if he had secrets, he had no way of knowing whether she’d uncovered them.
“I have done that, yes.”
“You’ve warned violent men to stop beating their kids more than once, am I right?”
“Yes.”
“And why’d you do that?”
He hesit
ated. It seemed he wanted to choose his words carefully. Finally he said, “The law is the law. On or off duty, I’m sworn to it.”
“Okay. But not when it comes to Jackson Warton?”
“That’s not what I said.” He was getting irritated. I’d found one of his triggers.
“My apologies,” I said. “Why don’t you explain in your own words, then, why you left this particular abused child at the mercy of his violent daddy?”
“I did not—”
“Objection,” Ruiz said. “Badgering the witness.”
“Sustained.”
“I’ll rephrase. You knew Karl. You saw him around, in town and at the marina. You knew what he was doing. Why didn’t you ever tell him not to beat his son?”
He paused, like he needed a second to calm down, and then said, “I can’t answer that.” He glanced at Ruiz and amended it to, “I just don’t know.”
“Okay.” I looked at my notes and scribbled “Annoyed, says doesn’t know” in the margin next to the questions on this topic. “Uh, moving on, Detective Blount, you’ve said on the night Karl disappeared, you were driving down the marina road?”
“I was, yes.”
“Were you on duty?”
“No.”
“What type of vehicle were you driving?”
“My personal vehicle. A 2011 Ford F-150.”
“Okay. Were you heading to the marina yourself?”
He knew there was nowhere else to go on that road, and he was ready. “That was my intent, but I ended up turning around.”
“Why was that?”
We were looking each other in the eye. I got the sense he was trying to intimidate me.
“I realized I forgot my cell phone,” he said. “I’m supposed to have it at all times, even off duty. So I had to go back home.”
That seemed awfully convenient. In about fifteen seconds of testimony, he’d explained why nobody had seen him at the marina. And he’d let me know that, even if I got my hands on accurate cell phone data for him, I couldn’t use it to show he was lying, because at that critical moment in the case he just happened to leave his phone at home.
“Okay,” I said. “About what time was that?”
He shifted and glanced sideways, at the judge perhaps. “I didn’t look at my watch,” he said. “At the time, I didn’t know the importance of what I was seeing.”
“About when did you get home?”
“Well, again,” he said, “I didn’t check. I didn’t realize that night’s timeline was going to be important.”
“Was it dark?”
“Depends what you mean by dark. To me, yes.”
“Okay,” I said. On my notes, I drew a star next to that line of questions. I’d typed up plenty more along those lines, but I didn’t want to play those cards yet. I knew we weren’t going to get the charges dismissed here. I just wanted to kick the tires to confirm their timeline was weak.
“So, Detective, you’ve said you were driving east on the marina road that night when you saw somebody walking?”
“I saw Jackson Warton.”
“Okay. And about how far away was he?”
“Off to the side, where you’d walk. Maybe thirty feet when I first saw him, ten feet when I passed him.”
I wrote those distances on my notes. “And at what point did you actually recognize him?”
“Well, he turned his head when I passed, so I saw his face. But I already thought it might be him from behind, when my headlights hit him. Tall, skinny kid, dark hair, always wearing those band T-shirts with the flames or skulls and whatnot.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. In my poker voice, I asked, “And how close were you when you noticed that?”
“Oh, maybe twenty feet.”
I wrote that on my notes. I didn’t really care about the distance. The detail that mattered, which I didn’t want him to know mattered, was in the other note I made: “Wrong shirt?”
In the photo Noah had shown me, Jackson wasn’t wearing any of the heavy metal band T-shirts he always wore. I didn’t know why—maybe to make himself harder to identify when he burned the ice cream stand, or to avoid getting a shirt he liked dirty—but he’d been wearing a plain white one with nothing on it but soot marks. Nothing on the front, anyway.
I was going to need to get my hands on that T-shirt. Maybe Jackson was right to call Blount a liar. What I needed to figure out was how to prove it.
17
Monday, July 29, Afternoon
Mazie, Terri, and I all met up at my house after the hearing. I’d texted Noah we were coming, and as I opened the door, I saw him on the couch.
“Can you grab hold of Squatter?” I said. “Don’t want any of us to step on him.”
He scooped him off the floor and asked, “How’d it go? Can he get bail?”
I tossed my keys on a table and my briefcase on the floor, took the pizza and drinks Mazie’d been holding while I unlocked, and waved the two of them in.
“We brought a late lunch,” I said. “Or an early dinner. But no, we didn’t get him bail. That was not in the cards.”
I was pretty sure I’d been clear with Noah that we weren’t going to get the charges reduced, but he still had the ultraresilient hope that kids his age usually did. It didn’t feel great to shove that hope back down in the mud.
The light went out of his face for a second, but then he seemed to realize who else was here.
“Oh, Ms. Grant,” he said to Mazie. “I’m so sorry we couldn’t get him out for you.” His hangdog look of self-pity had vanished; he was focused on her. My kid was acting, for the first time I’d ever seen, like a grown man.
“Oh, thank you,” Mazie said. “Well, it’s just going to take a while.”
When I turned to bring our paper cups of Coke into the kitchen, I saw Terri smiling. She raised her eyebrows and gave me a little nod that seemed to say, “Not bad!”
I felt proud but also a little unnerved. I kept getting whiplash from watching my kid grow up before my eyes.
While I got plates out and poured our Cokes into proper glasses, the women told Noah how it had gone.
“Your dad fought hard,” Mazie said. “He got Tim Warton to admit right in front of everybody that Jackson couldn’t have wanted Karl dead, because last Christmas he saved Karl’s life.”
“Oh, that’s great,” Noah said. “Yeah, I remember him telling me about that.”
“And the judge said something—what was it, Leland? You’ll explain it better.”
I sat down and handed out plates. “Yeah, Judge Chambliss said he had to let the case go forward, because with evidence that’s consistent with either manslaughter or murder, he couldn’t just toss the murder charges. But he told the prosecution that if the evidence still looked like it could go either way at trial, then he’d instruct the jury on manslaughter if I asked him to.”
Noah said, “What’s that mean?”
“Just that he’d let the jury consider manslaughter too. Which only has a two-year minimum sentence, instead of thirty to life.”
“Dang,” said Noah. “I mean, that’s a lot better, but I can’t believe he really might not get out of this.”
Mazie slumped back in the armchair, eyes closed. I gestured to Noah to fix her a plate and pass it over.
Terri said, “We got a lot of good information too.”
“Well, Ruiz gave me an envelope of stuff,” I said, “but I don’t know how useful it’s going to be.” As we were leaving, he’d held it out with a perfunctory “Here you go.” I hadn’t had a chance to look at it.
“I didn’t mean that,” Terri said. “I mean on cross.” To Noah, she said, “You ever seen your dad do a cross-examination?”
“No, ma’am. He said I was too young.”
“Leland, no! If he’s interested, you’ve got to take him.”
“It’s a deal,” I said. “Long as you can survive without your phone. They won’t let spectators bring them in.”
He shrugged like I was an idiot for
even thinking that might be a problem. Then he seemed to realize that, even as he was sliding a piece of pizza onto a plate for our guest, his phone was still in his hand. It had been in his hand ever since we got home. He put it down.
Terri told him, “You’ve got to watch sometime. It’s like martial arts. Or, no, here’s what it’s like: Picture a couple ballroom dancing, you know? So smooth, so nice, and then suddenly the guy flips his partner over his shoulder and you realize he was doing judo the whole time.”
I said, “I can’t say I’d ever choose Detective Blount as my dance partner. Or Tim Warton.”
“Blount?” said Noah. “Is that the tall one? That cop who looks like Thor, but with a crew cut?”
Terri laughed.
I said, “Yeah. You know him?”
“Yeah, he’s always patrolling the beach. He’s, uh…” He paused—I thought he was adjusting his language for our guests—and then said, “He’s not a nice dude. Unless you’re the right kind of person, which I guess I’m not.”
“Yeah,” said Terri, “he picks and chooses.”
Noah said, “Jackson told me Blount hated Karl. And him. Both of them.”
“Huh,” I said. I was going to have to ask Jackson about that.
Mazie sat forward and picked up her plate of pizza. “Blount had a thing for me in high school,” she said. “For a little while. But I was with you at the time, Leland, and one day he called me a whore, and that was that.”
Terri said, “He sure knows how to sweet-talk the ladies.”
We laughed.
She shook her head, thinking about it, and added, “Sometimes I think it’d take a whole filing cabinet to keep track of all Blount’s grievances. He doesn’t lose his temper all that often, but he is an angry man.”
That night, I asked Noah to show me the photo of him and Jackson again. Just as I recalled, Jackson was wearing a blank white T-shirt, not a skull or flame in sight.
“Okay,” I said, “can you make sure that’s backed up? And in a way that’s time-stamped?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I texted it to Jackson that night, after making him swear on his mom’s life that he wouldn’t post it on Instagram.”
Defending Innocence (Small Town Lawyer Book 1) Page 12