No Way Out (24 page)

“Everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes. Andi has some one in there. Jerry Cole. You remember, you invited him over?”

“Jerry Cole?
Oh yes.
From the forensic lab in Ventura. I thought he was coming this evening.”

“His flight arrived at two thirty and he didn’t have anything else to do. So he phoned in and I put him through to Andi. She got him to come by taxi and she’s been talking to him for the last twenty minutes.”

They heard a door opening. It was the office that had been assigned to Andi – the one that Nat Anderson had once used.

“Alex, is that you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got Mr. Cole with me.”

He noted the use of the respectful title and surname and sensed that their guest had a fragile ego.

“I’m coming.”

Juanita signaled Alex over to her desk with a flip of her index finger. He leaned forward when she touched her lips conspiratorially.

“He takes his coffee weak, with plenty of milk.”

Juanita smiled and leaned back smugly, as if this was supposed to be telling Alex something. He had no doubt that it was, but couldn’t for the life of him figure out what.

Seconds later he entered the room where Jerry Cole and Andi were standing. Andi ushered him in, while Cole hovered nervously in a tense, fidgety manner by the chair opposite the desk from which he had just risen. Andi closed the door behind Alex, who found himself facing a thin man of about forty with a stooped posture who kept rubbing his hands together in an almost obsequiousness manner. He felt the same feelings towards him that Andi had felt towards Sherman that first day at Levine and Webster, only more so. The man reminded him of Uriah Heap in
David Copperfield
.

“Alex this is Jerry Cole. As you know, he works in the same lab as Victor Alvarez.”

“Oh please, sit down,” said Alex, pointing to the chair. Cole sat down, awkwardly, looking around as if another chair for Alex might materialize from nowhere if he just waited long enough.

To put him at ease about the fact that he was standing, Alex went and stood by the window, while Andi took her seat.

“Did you have a good flight?”

“Oh er, yes.”

They had paid for his two-way flight and even for him to stay overnight and return tomorrow, so it wouldn’t be so stressful, making the round trip in one day.

“Mr. Cole,” said Andi, “why don’t you tell Mr. Sedaka what you told me.”

Cole took a nervous breath and started speaking

“First of all I can tell you something about the conditions in the lab. We were hopelessly understaffed. That’s why we have a huge backlog of cases that are deemed less important. And that means there are loads of samples waiting to be tested and scanned into the system.”

“And is that relevant to the Claymore case?” asked Alex. “I mean are there samples sitting there that you think could clear my client?”

“Well I didn’t see the tests being done on the Claymore or Newton samples but it’s relevant in the sense that we work under so much pressure that it’s very easy for mistakes to be made. Sometimes we had lab assistants with no college qualifications working virtually unsupervised.”

“And what sort of things can go wrong in practice? With DNA I mean?”

“Well the most obvious danger is cross-sample contamination.”

“How can
that
happen specifically?”

“Well you know about Polymerase Chain Reaction to increase the evidence sample.”

“Yes.”

“And you know that if there’s even the slightest contamination that gets into the sample
before
they put it into the thermal cycler then the contamination gets multiplied along with the evidence sample.”

Alex nodded.

“I believe it’s called allele drop-in.”

Cole looked surprised.

“Oh you
know
about it.”

“Of course.”

Alex was by now getting irritated. He thought that this man would have some specific information that would help them. But all he had were the vague generalizations about DNA labs in general that Alex had already learned from his preparation for this case.

“Well the thing is, I remember they were very busy on the day that the Claymore sample was tested. I know because the lab assistant who tested it seemed very nervous.”

Alex picked up on this.

“What was his name?”

“Steven, I think. Yes… Steven Johnson.”

“And do you have any idea what he was nervous about?”

“No, not really. I just noticed he was nervous. You have to remember it was busy for me too.”

“Do you also do DNA analysis?”

Cole appeared not to have heard the question, almost like he was in a trance.

“Mr. Cole?”

“Oh sorry… no… no I didn’t. I worked in the Forensic Alcohol Section. Sometimes I had to cover for some one in the Toxicology or Controlled Substance sections. But not DNA.”

Alex noticed the flicker in Andi’s eyes. She had picked up on the past tense. Alex, of course, had already known this. Cole had told him. But he hadn’t been so willing to say why and Alex wasn’t ready to close in on that yet.

“Any particular reason for that?”

“No, it’s just the way it was. We all had our jobs to do and different lab assistants worked in the different departments.”

Alex decided to plump for a wild guess, based on Jerry Cole’s apparent age.

“But weren’t you the most senior of the lab assistants working there?”

Jerry smiled proudly.

“Yes I was.”

“Then surely they should have let you work in the DNA section. I mean, let’s face it, that must be the most important section there – certainly the most prestigious.”

“Yes but the head of the lab was against me because…”

He trailed off into embarrassed silence.

“Anyway, I didn’t work in the DNA section.”

Alex realized that the time had come to probe the issue of the past tense.

 “But you don’t work there any more – at the lab I mean.”

There were two possibilities and both involved Cole being pushed rather than taking a walk of his own free will. The better scenario was that Cole knew too much and was sacked to silence and discredit him. The less attractive alternative was that he was sacked for some legitimate reason and was now looking for revenge. In fact it was more complicated than that because even if it was former, the lab would probably claim the latter and if it was the latter, Jerry Cole would no doubt hide his shame behind the former.

“No, they fired me.”

“What for?”

“They said I made some mistake on a test batch. Normally, if you make a mistake like that, they send you for retraining. But in my case they decided to sack me.”

“But you
did
make a mistake, though,” Alex pressed on. “I mean it’s not like they made it up, surely?”

He left it to Andi to monitor Cole’s face. Alex just wanted to
hear
Cole’s reply.

“I don’t know. I mean they say I did, but I have no way of knowing. It’s not like they showed me the results in writing. They just told me I’d messed up, pointed out that I’d had one warning already and then gave me fifteen minutes to clear out my locker. They didn’t even let me work out the day or the week or let me say goodbye to my friend.”

Alex picked up on the singular, but ignored it.

“Did you say you already had a warning?”

“Yes, I mean I did make a mistake before that with a
live
batch. It was just an accident, using a stale solution that I thought was fresh. But that just goes to prove what I said about working under pressure.”

“Did you say anything to anyone about that Steven Johnson looking nervous?”

“What?” Again the loss of attention span, or maybe just a misunderstanding of the question.

“Did you express your concerns about Steven Johnson to anyone?”

“Oh… er… no. I didn’t even really think about…”

Alex realized that this precluded any possibility that they might have sacked him because he knew too much. Realizing this, Alex also realized that there was nothing more that they could get out of Jerry Cole – at any rate, nothing useful. Feeling only mildly sorry for the man and not wanting to waste any more of his valuable time, Alex looked at his watch.

“Yes well, thank you very much Mr. Cole. You’ve been a great help.”

Cole got up awkwardly as Alex walked to the door and opened it.

“So when are you calling me?”

“We’ll let you know,” said Alex, hustling Cole towards the door. Cole became slightly agitated at being forced to make such a rapid departure.

“Because I really want to testify,” said Cole, anxiously. “I think I can make a difference.”

Alex was nodding towards the open doorway for him.

“Well thank you again. And don’t worry. We
will
let you know.”

Cole looked like he wanted to say more, but the implacable look on Alex’s face warned him that he could only expect anger if he persisted. Alex gently but firmly hustled Cole out across the reception area and closed the door behind him. Then he turned back to Andi who was looking at him expectantly. He straightened his tie and took a deep breath, looking at first at Andi and then Juanita.

“Are you gonna tell us boss?”

It was Juanita with that taunting smile across her face.

“We can’t use him.”

“You think he’s a psycho?”

This was Andi.

“Oh no he’s legit. It’s just that the prosecution will tear him to pieces. Trust me, Cole won’t thank you for putting him through it and won’t help Claymore in the least.”

Andi nodded at Alex’s logic. But she had more to say.

“And yet I can’t help thinking that what he said was actually true.”

“I’m
sure
it’s true. Look we know what it’s like in forensic labs these days. Everything he said made perfect sense. But it’s all just a collection of cheap generalizations. It’ll take more than generalizations to save Claymore – especially if we send in a meek Christian to face a lion like Sarah Jensen.”

“No I don’t mean that Alex,” said Andi.

“Mean what?”

“About the generalizations. About the high pressure atmosphere at the lab. I think he may have been on to something when he said that the technician who handled the crime sample looked nervous. I think he may have been telling the truth. I think he may well have seen something... something specific”

“Oh come off it Andi, you don’t think they sacked him ‘cause he saw too much? I made sure to cover that one – he said he never told anyone.”

“No I’m not saying they sacked him for it. I’m sure they sacked him for a legitimate reason. I’m sure he was careless and they gave him a warning and he screwed up again and they decided that enough was enough. I accept all of that. It’s just…”

“What?”

“It’s just that I still think he may be right about the lab technician. Just because they sacked him for a legitimate reason doesn’t mean he’s lying when he says the technician was nervous. Cole may have seen it at the time and thought nothing of it – or at least not cared enough to do anything about it. But that doesn’t mean he’s lying… or even imagining. I think he may have really seen it. And he’s been thinking about it ever since they sacked him.”

“But what if he is right?” Juanita stepped in. How are we going to prove it when we haven’t got a reliable witness to put up there on the stand.

Andi thought about this for a few seconds.

“I think maybe we should subpoena the worksheets from the lab’s log book.”

“They should’ve supplied them as part of the discovery.”

“But they
didn’t
. That’s another thing that sets me thinking.”

The Friday morning session was taken up with legal arguments in the judge’s chambers. It started off pretty well for the defense, when they filed a discovery motion for the log book work sheets from the Ventura forensic lab. Sarah Jensen responded that this wouldn’t be a problem and after a quick word with Nick Sinclair, she replied that the prosecution didn’t oppose the motion and even had a copy of relevant pages in her file already. The copy was handed to the clerk who made copies for the defense and judge and it was marked as an exhibit for future reference.

The truth of the matter was that it would have been hard to impossible for Sarah Jensen to oppose the motion. But in any case, she was grateful to the defense for stipulating to the chain of custody on the DNA, which spared the jury having to hear several boring witnesses and shortened the trial by maybe a day or two. So she flagged them through on this point, confident that there was nothing in the work sheets that they could use against the prosecution. She had been through the work sheets very carefully and it all looked like routine. Everything was signed in and out. There were no gaps in the timing and no excessive handling of the evidence as far as she could see. Indeed if there had been excessive handling, it would in all probability have been in the chain of custody stage before it reached the lab. The fact that the defense had waived the right to question the chain of custody witnesses, meant that they didn’t expect to find anything in that regard. Still, she was curious as to their sudden interest in the work sheets.

However, after the relative tranquility and agreement of the parties on the work sheets, matters became somewhat acrimonious when a third party entered the picture.

That third party was
LegalSoft
, the software company that had created the jury selection software used by the Alameda County courts, as well time-management software, also used by the courts.

“Your Honor the source code to this software is clearly proprietary information and a trade secret,” argued Melvin Kenney, the lawyer for the company, a 6’5” former Notre Dame full-back. “Furthermore it is not covered by the California Public Records Act as it is private. And as to the fact that it is being used by the court, I would point out that the courts are also exempt from the CPRA. Accordingly my clients should
not
be forced to hand it over.”

Andi – who for once had been given the green light to argue the matter herself, because of her superior knowledge about such matters – pressed on with her arguments.