“Denied.”
Anita called Watkins back to the stand for his cross-examination, and he steadfastly maintained he’d had no holographic film on his hands at any time in his entire life.
“And yet glue and silicone were found on your hands after you were shot.”
Watkins snorted. “I’m a sculptor, and who knows what was on that factory floor to begin with.”
“But you wanted your encounter with Dr. Cross to be recorded. Were you trying to provoke him into shooting with the holograms?”
“I repeat, no holograms,” Watkins said firmly. “And, sure, I wanted to film him. I wanted to see how he’d handle himself, whether he’d revert to the mean of police behavior and go violent. But no one expected to get shot. Least of all me.”
“Do you hate Dr. Cross?”
“I hate the violence he stands for.”
“Enough to frame him?”
“Not enough to take a bullet in the guts and through the spine,” Watkins said. “That’s a fact. No one would wish this on themselves no matter how much they hated someone.”
“No further questions,” Anita said.
When Watkins had wheeled through the gate, Judge Larch said, “Ms. Marley?”
Anita glanced at me. I nodded.
She said, “The defense rests, Your Honor.”
CHAPTER
84
ANY COURT BUFF will tell you that a quick verdict favors the prosecution. So after the jury heard closing arguments, received instructions, and were sequestered for deliberations, we treated every minute without word as a minor miracle. Hours passed. Then a day.
I tried not to think about the verdict but found that impossible. My case had dominated local news and was featured on national and cable news coverage. The talking heads babbled about Ali’s holographic demonstration, the presence of ecstasy in my blood the day of the shootings, and whether together they were enough to create reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds.
A few were confident it would. But more sided with the prosecution, noting as Wills had in his closing argument that for the hologram theory to be true, the three victims had to have knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in order to frame me. He’d argued that it ran counter to self-preservation, pointed at Claude Watkins in his wheelchair, and asked if anyone could believe he’d risk paralysis to see me in prison. Other commentators continued to hammer the fact that I’d been at the center of nine other officer-involved shootings in the course of my career, and they championed the idea that I should go to jail to set an example for police conduct across the nation.
At noon on Friday, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snuck out of the house and down the alley with my laptop. Sampson picked me up on Pennsylvania Avenue and we went to Quantico. Special Agent Batra met us at the gate, and before long we were in Rawlins’s underground lab.
“I don’t know if we are bugged or not,” Rawlins said, taking my computer. “Based on the fact we both uploaded the contents of that flash drive from the man posing as Alden Lindel, I’ve been digging in our system, but I haven’t come up with anything definitive yet.”
“This is a smaller universe,” I said.
Rawlins winked. “I see that.”
He’d kept his Mohawk down and black, but he’d added dark eye shadow, which made him look somewhat demonic as he plugged my laptop into a closed network. Rawlins ran a number of tests and still didn’t find anything. He decided to search uploads my computer had made recently over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
“There you are, you bugger,” he said, highlighting a file with a nonsense name and extension.
The date stamp said the upload from my laptop had taken place from 4:33 p.m. to 5:29 p.m. the prior Monday.
I thought about that and realized the time frame coincided with my hour with Annie Cassidy. The beginning and the end of the session, when she’d been fooling around with her smartphone.
“That file was probably sent to her phone,” I said. “She must have been downloading it the entire time I was in session with her.”
“What’s in the file?” Batra said.
Rawlins clicked on the file, and it was quickly apparent that it contained a record of everything done on my computer for the previous fourteen days.