The Lincoln lawyer - By Michael Connelly Page 0,110

from their faces that I had made a mistake. I had turned a positive cross into a negative. The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim’s face were self-inflicted. The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.

Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury’s feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.

Roulet leaned toward me and whispered, “What the fuck was that?”

Without responding I turned my back to him and took a scan around the courtroom. It was almost empty. Lankford and Sobel had not returned to the courtroom and the reporters were gone as well. That left only a few other onlookers. They appeared to be a disparate collection of retirees, law students and lawyers resting their feet until their own hearings began in other courtrooms. But I was counting on one of these onlookers being a plant from the DA’s office. Ted Minton might be flying solo but my guess was that his boss would have a means of keeping tabs on him and the case. I knew I was playing as much to the plant as I was to the jury. By the trial’s end I needed to send a note of panic down to the second floor that would then echo back to Minton. I needed to push the young prosecutor toward taking a desperate measure.

The afternoon dragged on. Minton still had a lot to learn about pacing and jury management, knowledge that comes only with courtroom experience. I kept my eyes on the jury box—where the real judges sat—and saw the jurors were growing bored as witness after witness offered testimony that filled in small details in the prosecutor’s linear presentation of the events of March 6. I asked few questions on cross and tried to keep a look on my face that mirrored those I saw in the jury box.

Minton obviously wanted to save his most powerful stuff for day two. He would have the lead investigator, Detective Martin Booker, to bring all the details together, and then the victim, Regina Campo, to bring it all home to the jury. It was a tried-and-true formula—ending with muscle and emotion—and it worked ninety percent of the time, but it was making the first day move like a glacier.

Things finally started to pop with the last witness of the day. Minton brought in Charles Talbot, the man who had picked up Regina Campo at Morgan’s and gone with her to her apartment on the night of the sixth. What Talbot had to offer to the prosecution’s case was negligible. He was basically hauled in to testify that Campo had been in good health and uninjured when he left her. That was it. But what caused his arrival to rescue the trial from the pit of boredom was that Talbot was an honest-to-God alternate lifestyle man and jurors always loved visiting the other side of the tracks.

Talbot was fifty-five years old with dyed blond hair that wasn’t fooling anyone. He had blurred Navy tattoos on both forearms. He was twenty years divorced and owned a twenty-four-hour convenience store called Kwik Kwik. The business gave him a comfortable living and lifestyle with an apartment in the Warner Center, a late-model Corvette and a nightlife that included a wide sampling of the city’s professional sex providers.

Minton established all of this in the early stages of his direct examination. You could almost feel the air go still in the courtroom as the jurors plugged into Talbot. The prosecutor then brought him quickly to the night of March 6, and Talbot described hooking up with Reggie Campo at Morgan’s on Ventura Boulevard.

“Did you know Ms. Campo before you met her in the bar that night?”

“No, I did not.”

“How did it come about that you met her there?”

“I just called her up and said I wanted to get together with her and she suggested we meet at Morgan’s. I knew the place, so I said sure.”

“And how did you call her up?”

“With the telephone.”

Several jurors laughed.

“I’m sorry. I understand that you used a telephone to call her. I meant how did you know how to contact her?”

“I saw her ad on the website and I liked what I saw and so I went ahead and called her up and we made a date. It’s