The People vs. Alex Cross (24 page)

We were back in court with two minutes to spare. Anita was already there.

“We good?” I asked.

She leaned over to me, murmured, “Pray for a knockout.”

“And David slew Goliath,” I said before the bailiff called, “All rise.”

Judge Larch looked considerably less agitated when she retook the bench and called the court to order.

“Ms. Marley,” Larch said, “do you wish to cross-examine Mr. Watkins now, or does the defense have its own witnesses in mind?”

“Defense witness, Your Honor,” Anita said. “We call Ali Cross to the stand.”

I twisted in my seat in time to see Ali enter the courtroom holding my dad’s hand with Jannie and Nana Mama behind them. My boy was in his Sunday best: gray pants, an ironed white shirt, and a paisley bow tie. Juror eleven smiled seeing him.

At the bar, Nana Mama whispered something in her great-grandson’s ear, and he nodded. Ali did not look at me or Anita before pushing open the gate and walking confidently to the witness stand.

Wills said, “Your Honor, the defense gave us no notice of this witness.”

“Ali is Dr. Cross’s son, Your Honor,” Anita said.

Judge Larch looked skeptical. “And he has business before this court?”

“Yes, Your Honor, he has a few things to say.”

The judge peered over at Ali, who was standing in the witness box now.

“How old are you, Ali?”

“Nine, but I’m in fifth grade already.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“Washington Latin.”

Larch smiled. “Good for you. Swear him in.”

Afterward, the bailiff had to get pads for the witness chair so Ali could sit higher and be seen easier by the jury.

Once he’d settled in, Anita said, “Ali, do you normally do what your father tells you to do? By that I mean, when he gives you a direct order, do you obey it?”

“Yes, ma’am. I try.”

“But you defied one of his direct orders recently, didn’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“Objection,” Wills said. “Your Honor, where is the relevance of this?”

Anita looked at him, said, “The Court is about to find out.”

“Get to it, Ms. Marley,” Larch said.

“What did you do that your father didn’t want you to do?” Anita said.

Ali said, “My dad told me not to look at the videos of the shootings in that factory, but I secretly looked at them on YouTube.”

“Once?”

“No, like a hundred and seventy times.”

That provoked some nervous laughter, and I could tell juror five, the retired engineer with the hunched back, did not like the idea of a nine-year-old boy looking at those videos even once, let alone one hundred and seventy times.

“Why did you watch it so many times?” Anita said.

“To figure out where the guns went so Dad wouldn’t go to prison.”

Anita glanced over at Wills and then at the jury. “Did you figure out where the guns went?”

“I think so.”

“Objection,” Athena Carlisle said. “Your Honor, we’ve been through this. Real experts have looked at the videos and found nothing wrong with them. We’re expected to believe a nine-year-old discovered something that they didn’t?”

“Ms. Marley?” Judge Larch said.

“Let the boy speak, Your Honor,” Anita said in a reasonable tone. “Echoing what you said when you allowed the videos to be introduced, the prosecution is free to rebut if Ali is wrong.”

The judge adjusted her glasses and then looked over at Ali. “Did you really figure it out?”

“I think so,” he said.

“Let’s hear it.”

Naomi put the videos up on the screen and gave Ali a remote control. Stopping the three videos in strategic places in much the same way the prosecution had made its case against me, Ali was able to show the jury how the lighting changed in
the videos, how it grew slightly dimmer before each victim appeared and then brightened considerably just before I shot.

“What do you think is happening there with the lighting?” Anita said.

Ali said, “Whoever was controlling the spotlights dimmed them just before Mrs. Winslow, Mr. Watkins, and Mr. Diggs stepped into view. It’s hard to see them in that weaker light, but they’re there, and then the spotlights are boosted and you see the empty hands just as my father shoots.”

“Okay,” Anita said. “So what?”

“That’s what I kept thinking,” Ali said. “So what?”

“Until?”

“Oh, until I read the autopsy reports.”

JUDGE LARCH WHIRLED
her chair around and glared at me through those Coke-bottle lenses.

“You let a nine-year-old read autopsy reports, Dr. Cross?”

“I wasn’t supposed to, Judge,” Ali said, twisting in his chair to address her. “But I did it anyway.”

Larch looked away from me, squinted at my boy, and said, “You on the road to criminality, son?”

Ali smiled nervously. “No, ma’am. Uh, Your Honor.”

“No, I know you’re not,” Larch said, softer, and her expression eased toward amused resignation. “Go ahead.”

Ali testified that he’d defied Bree and me and dug out the autopsy reports on Virginia Winslow and Leonard Diggs, looking for something odd about the gun hands of the three victims.

“Did you find something odd?” Anita asked.

“Yes,” Ali said.

“Gunpowder residue?”

He shook his head. “They had sticky stuff on their palms.”

“Adhesive glue?”

“Yes, like from tape. And there was also, like, some silicone.”

“Is there an explanation for the glue or silicone in the report?”

“No.”

“Can you explain why it was there?”

My son sat up straighter. “I think I can explain why, but not exactly how. That’s like physics, and I haven’t studied that yet. Maybe next year.”

The jury members started laughing. Anita smiled, letting the moment last, then said, “Why was the glue and silicone there?”

“Well, if you think about it, because of this,” he said, running the videos back and stopping them. “See the three spotlights in the middle feed? And to the right at the bottom of the right spotlight there’s a pinpoint blue light? That’s where I almost had it figured out. But like I said, the rest is physics that I don’t get.”

Anita smiled. “Thank you, Ali. Your Honor, if it please the Court, I’d like to call a second witness who can explain more clearly than Ali can what the pinpoint blue light, the glue, the silicone, and the dimming and brightening mean. Mr. Wills can cross-examine them both afterwards.”

“Any objection, Mr. Wills?”

Wills and Carlisle conferred. Wills looked irritated when he turned from his assistant and said, “Be my guest, Counselor. Take us on a wild-goose chase.”

“The defense calls Keith Karl Rawlins,” Anita said.

Krazy Kat came in wearing a fine blue Italian suit, black loafers buffed to a high shine, and a coral-pink shirt open at
the collar. His Mohawk was down, dyed black, slicked over to the left side of his head, and tucked behind his ear.

As he walked past Ali, who was leaving the stand, Rawlins nodded and winked at him. Wills and Carlisle acted like someone had brought a jester into court, but they didn’t know what to do about it yet.

After he was sworn in, Anita said, “Dr. Rawlins, can you describe your academic training and current position?”

Rawlins said, “I have dual PhDs from Stanford, one in physics, the other in electrical engineering. I’m working on my doctorate in computer science at MIT, and I am currently employed as an independent contractor by the Cyber Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Wills and Carlisle jumped to their feet.

“Objection,” Wills said. “No one at the Bureau informed the prosecution this witness was testifying.”

Carlisle said, “Your Honor, agents are required to notify the U.S. Attorney’s Office that—”

“I am not a special agent, and I’m not even an employee,” Rawlins said. “As such, I am not obligated to notify the FBI or the U.S. Attorney’s Office. I came at the request of a very bright young man who sought me out at my home during my free time and presented his rather brilliant theory of the videos. I do not speak for the government, only for myself, as a citizen compelled to tell the truth.”

“Your Honor, we still object to—”

“Asked and answered, Mr. Wills,” Judge Larch said.

Both prosecutors looked like they’d swallowed worms, but they sat.

Anita said, “What kind of work do you do for the FBI, Dr. Rawlins?”

“It’s classified, so I can’t give you specifics. But you could say I help the Bureau on the techno side of things.”

“Physics involved?”

“Sometimes.”

“Is physics involved here—with the video, I mean?”

“Yes,” he said. “Basic physics. Wave theory.”

ANITA GLANCED AT
the jury. A few, including juror five, were attentive. The eyes of the rest, including juror eleven’s, the PR executive, appeared glazed over by this turn in the trial. Physics? Wave theory?

But Anita had foreseen this response. She looked to Naomi and nodded.

As my niece got up and left the courtroom, my attorney said, “Dr. Rawlins, let’s keep it very basic, shall we?”

Rawlins shrugged and looked to the jury. “All you really need to know is that light travels in waves, just like in the ocean. When the waves from different light sources collide, they’re both changed, just like waves on the ocean coming from different directions and crashing into one another.”

Naomi came back into the courtroom pushing a cart loaded with several cardboard boxes and a small spotlight.

“Keep that in mind,” Rawlins said, getting up from the witness stand. “Waves colliding on the ocean. With the Court’s permission?”

“Granted,” Larch said. “I always liked show-and-tell.”

“I was a big fan too,” Rawlins said.

He went to Naomi, took the spotlight, and set it up on a tripod.

“Judge, can I use an assistant?” Rawlins said.

Larch waved her hand, and the FBI contractor called Ali from the audience.

Rawlins got a manila envelope from the cart, drew out something he kept hidden, and put it in Ali’s palm. When my son opened his hand, you had to look closely to see what seemed to be one of those protective films people put on cell phone screens. Thin, translucent, and rectangular, it was affixed to Ali’s palm and went up to the first joints of his fingers.

“What is that, exactly?” Judge Larch asked, peering over the bench.

“A piece of medium,” Rawlins said. “A polymer that includes silicone. On the medium itself, there is an encoding of a light field captured in the form of an interference pattern. Remember the waves crashing? If you can imagine looking down at the sea crashing around rocks and then taking a three-dimensional picture of it and freezing that moment, you’re on the right track.”

“Okay?” Judge Larch said.

Rawlins had Ali stand with his left shoulder to the bench, facing the jury box. Then he positioned the spotlight at an angle to Ali.

Anita said, “Can we have the courtroom lights dimmed?”

Larch nodded, and the bailiff dimmed the lights until Rawlins, who was holding a small light meter in his hand, said, “Stop.”

You could still see Rawlins and Ali and everyone else in
the windowless courtroom, but it was like looking at them in a grainy photograph. Then Naomi hit a switch. The spotlight beam found Ali, who put on sunglasses.

Every one of the jurors was sitting forward, watching intently. Juror five rested his chin on his hands, which were folded on the curve of his cane handle.

Rawlins said, “The coding on the medium, that snapshot of light waves crashing, is done with lasers, tiny intense light beams that are of a specific high-wave frequency.”

He came over in front of the jury, brushed back his strip of lank black hair, and said, “The interesting thing about this three-dimensional coding is that we can see the snapshot of the waves crashing around the rock only if it’s lit by lasers tuned to the same exact wave frequency as the ones used to encode the image in the first place.”

“That went right over my head,” Judge Larch said.

“It’s one of those things better seen anyway,” Anita said.

She moved in front of the bench and faced Ali’s left side. Rawlins stood over by the bailiff’s desk facing Ali’s left side at a forty-five-degree angle.

Naomi killed the spotlight. We were all cast back into that dim, grainy vision of the courtroom. Three hair-thin, gray-blue laser beams flipped on, one held by Anita, one by Rawlins, and the last by Naomi. The beams were easy to see at their sources, but the farther the streams got from the lasers, the harder it was to make out the beam as it passed through the gloom.

But not so the dull blue dots at the end of each laser beam. The three dots danced over Ali’s side and arm before finding his outstretched palm.

“Get it bull’s-eye, now,” Rawlins said. “Exact spot.”

The blue dots quivered and squiggled to a meeting dead center of the encoded medium affixed to Ali’s empty hand.

Gasps went up in the courtroom.

“Son of a bitch!” Wills said, standing in disbelief.

Even I couldn’t believe it. But there it was.

My nine-year-old son’s hand looked like it was wrapped around the pale blue holographic image of a nickel-plated .357 Colt Python revolver.

NAOMI SWITCHED ON
the spotlight. The gun vanished from Ali’s hand. He was grinning wildly.

Rawlins said, “The gun disappeared because the waves of the spotlight came crashing down and drowned the waves of the laser beam so they could no longer reach the code in Ali’s hand.”

Naomi killed the spotlight. The hologram of the gun reappeared in Ali’s hand, provoking another round of murmurs, and many in the jury box shook their heads in wonder. Even juror five seemed impressed.

Rawlins then showed the court what the hologram looked like through a video camera set to black-and-white and adjusted to take in a specific amount of light. In the dimmed courtroom, you could see the hologram of the pistol clearly, but through the camera lens and on the screen, there was only a gray wash in Ali’s palm. The spotlight beam came on, and even the gray wash was gone from the image on the courtroom screen.