had signed in and paid for two on Friday, January 23, at eleven-twenty a.m.
It was confirmed. I almost did a dance.
I requested the page so I could make a copy, and promised to return it that same day.
Christa looked skeptical, but USC said, “I think you can count on the Sister, Christa.”
“Hey,” Christa said, “that sounds funny. Sister Christa. Think I’d make it as a nun?”
USC smiled. “You’d last an hour.”
She shot him another nine-millimeter look, then laughed.
77
“MAYBE I WOULD like to shoot,” Sister Mary said as we drove down from the hills.
“I don’t know. A nun packing heat? You do enough with a ruler.”
“I’m going to hurt you next time we play.”
“Why should next time be any different?”
There was a print shop just off the Angeles Crest Highway. We stopped to make a copy of the sign-in page, then drove the original back to the range.
We left it with USC. Christa was out “kicking some butt,” he said. I did not ask.
When we got back to St. Monica’s we went to the “war room,” which was a funny thing to call the little table in the library of St. Monica’s. But this was where we were going to do trial prep, and lay out strategy for the trial.
I had a packet of discovery from Radavich that I spread out on the table. It included a witness list, police reports and lab reports, and a CD with digital photos of the scene taken by the SI team. Attached to one of the police reports was an itemization of the contents of Carl’s apartment. I slipped this over to Sister Mary and asked her to look through it.
After an hour or so I said, “Your main job will be to watch the jury.”
Sister Mary looked up from the papers in front of her. “Watch them do what?” she said.
“Everything. From the moment the panel walks in, I want you looking at them. Do it casually. Don’t get caught. But notice what they’re reading, what their expressions convey. Get an overall impression.”
“Shouldn’t you be watching them?”
“They don’t like being studied by the lawyers. If they think a lawyer is sizing them up, they get suspicious. Even before the trial begins you’ve got a couple strikes against you. You blow your first impression, you can never get that back. You have to work harder just to get back to square one.”
“So then how do you pick the jury?”
“You don’t.”
“What?”
“You unpick a jury.”
“What’s that mean?”
“You have no control over the names that are called to sit in the box. That’s random. We can’t put people in, we can only get them out, using challenges. There are challenges for cause and peremptory challenges.”
“What’s the difference?”
“If you can show some kind of bias, then you can challenge a juror for cause. If he’s made up his mind about the case already, or has some kind of prejudice where he can’t keep an open mind. That’s hard to show. There are other challenges for cause, but they’re rare. With peremptory challenges, you don’t usually have to give a reason.”
“You can just kick off whoever you want?”
“Almost. You can’t systematically exclude jurors based on race, gender, sexual preference, or religion. I couldn’t kick all the nuns off my jury, for example.”
“And there are so many of them on juries these days.”
“Then after we have a jury and start the trial, keep watching them. Watch how they react to the evidence. And especially when I’m cross-examining a witness, watch who they look at.”
“What’s that do?”
“It makes you the Crossometer.”
She shook her head.
“That’s what I call it,” I said. “It’s a gauge of what they’re thinking. Here’s how it works. If they’re looking at the witness, that means they’re really trying to figure out if he’s telling the truth. If they’re looking at me, they’re wondering what I’m up to. If they’re looking at our client, that means they’re making up their minds he really did it.”
“That works?”
“It does. And it doesn’t cost a thing.”
Sister Mary held my eyes for a beat, then quickly looked down at the table. “Let’s talk about the inventory of Carl’s apartment.”
“What about it? Something on there catch your eye?”
“It’s what’s not on there. There’s no computer. Everybody has a computer now, don’t they?”
I shrugged, then remembered something. “Morgan Barstler said he and Carl were in touch by e-mail. There’s no PDA or anything like that listed, is there?”
Sister Mary looked at the report. “No.”
“Good catch,” I said. “I’m really getting my money’s worth here.”
“Excuse