Where I saw new stuff on the video was when Milton opened the trunk of the Lincoln and looked down to examine Sam Scales for any sign of life. I had been in the back seat of Milton’s patrol car at that point, my view of the trunk limited and from a low angle. Now I was looking at Sam’s body on its side, knees pulled up toward the chest and arms behind his back, secured with several wraps of duct tape. He was overweight and looked as though he was crammed into the trunk.
I could see bullet wounds in the chest and shoulder areas, and what looked like an entrance wound on the left temple and an exit through the right eye. This wasn’t new to me. We had already gotten crime scene photos in the first batch of discovery from Berg but the video lent a visceral realness to the crime and the crime scene.
Sam Scales in life deserved no sympathy but in death he looked pitiful. Blood from his wounds had spread across the floor of the trunk and dripped out through a hole created by the bullet that had exited his eye.
“Oh, shit,” Milton could be heard saying.
And then he followed his exclamation with a low humming that sounded like a stifled laugh.
“Play that part again,” I said. “After Milton says ‘Oh, shit.’”
Cisco replayed the sequence and I listened again to the sound Milton had made. It was almost like he was gloating. I thought it might be useful for a jury to hear.
“Okay, freeze it,” I said.
The image on the screen froze. I looked at Sam Scales. I had represented him for several years and through different charges and had somehow liked him even as I privately joined the public in their outrage at the scams he pulled. A weekly newspaper had once labeled him “The Most Hated Man in America” and it wasn’t hyperbole. He was a disaster con artist. Without showing a scintilla of guilt or conscience, he set up websites to take donations for survivors of earthquakes, tsunamis, mudslides, and school shootings. Wherever there was a tragedy that caught up the rest of the world in horror, Sam Scales was there with the quickly built website, the false testimonials, and the button that said DONATE NOW!
Though truly believing in the ideal that everybody charged with a crime deserves the best defense possible, even I could not take Sam Scales for very long. It wasn’t that he had refused to pay an agreed-upon fee for the last case I handled for him. The final straw came with the case I didn’t handle — his arrest for soliciting donations to pay for coffins for children killed in a childcare-center massacre in Chicago. Donations poured into a website Scales had built, but as usual, the money went right into his pocket. He called me from jail after his arrest. When I heard the details of the scam, I told Sam our relationship was over. I got a request for his files from a lawyer with the Public Defender’s Office, and that had been the last I had heard about Sam Scales — until he ended up dead in the trunk of my car.
“Anything unique on the car cam?” I asked.
“Not really,” Cisco said. “Same stuff, different angle.”
“Okay, then let’s skip that for now. We’re running out of time. What else was in the latest discovery from Death Row Dana?”
My attempt to inject a little levity into the discussion fell on deaf ears. The stakes were too high for these two to make jokes. Cisco answered my question in the full-on professional tone that contradicted his look and demeanor.
“We also got video from the black hole,” he said. “I haven’t had time to go through it all but it will be my priority once I get out of here.”
The black hole was what regular downtown commuters called the massive underground parking garage located beneath the civic center. It spiraled down into the earth seven levels deep. I had parked there on the day of the Sam Scales murder, giving my driver the day off because I expected to be in trial all day. The prosecution’s theory was that I had abducted Sam Scales the night before, put him in the trunk, and shot him, leaving his body there overnight and the next day while I was in court. To me that theory defied common sense and I was confident I could convince a jury of that. But there was still time between now and the trial for the prosecution to change theories and come up with something better.
Time of death had been set at approximately twenty-four hours before the body’s discovery by Officer Milton. This also accounted for the leakage under the car that had supposedly alerted Milton and led to the grim discovery of the trunk’s contents. The body was beginning to break down and decompose, and fluids were leaking through the bullet hole in the floor of the trunk.
“Any theory on why the prosecution wanted those angles in the garage?” I asked.
“I think they want to be able to say that nobody tampered with your car all day,” Jennifer said. “And if the camera angles are clear enough to show the dripping of bodily fluids under the car, then they have that too.”
“We’ll know more when I can get a look,” Cisco added.
A sudden chill went through me as I thought about how someone had murdered Sam Scales in my car, most likely while it was parked in my garage, and then how I had driven around with the body for a day.
“Okay, what else?” I asked.
“This is new,” Cisco said. “We have a witness report from your next-door neighbor, who heard the voices of two men arguing at your house the night before.”
I shook my head.
“Didn’t happen,” I said. “Who was it, Mrs. Shogren or that idiot Chasen who lives downhill from me?”
Cisco looked at the report.
“Millicent Shogren,” he read. “Couldn’t make out the words. Just angry voices.”
“Okay, you need to interview her — and don’t scare her,” I said. “Then you talk to Gary Chasen on the other side of the house. He’s always picking up strays in West Hollywood and then they get into arguments. If Millie heard an argument, it was coming from Chasen’s. Since it’s a stepped neighborhood and she’s at the top of the hill, she hears everything.”
“What about you?” Jennifer asked. “What did you hear?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I told you about that night. I went to bed early and didn’t hear a thing.”
“And you went to bed alone,” Jennifer confirmed.
“Unfortunately,” I said. “If I knew I was going to be tagged with a murder, maybe I would have picked up a stray myself.”
Again, stakes too high. Nobody cracked a smile. But the discussion of what Millie Shogren heard and from where she heard it prompted a question.
“Millie didn’t tell them she heard the shots, right?” I asked.
“Doesn’t say it here,” Cisco said.
“Then make sure you ask her,” I said. “We might be able to turn their witness into ours.”
Cisco shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
“No go, boss,” he said. “We also got the ballistics report in the discovery package, and it doesn’t look good.”
Now I realized why they had been so somber, with me trying to cheer them up instead of the other way around. They had buried the lede and now I was about to hear it.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Okay, well, the one shot that went through the victim’s head and that punctured the floor of the trunk was found on the floor of your garage,” Cisco said. “Along with blood. The slug hit the concrete and flattened, so matching of the rifling was no good. But they did metal-alloy tests and matched it to the other bullets that were in the body. According to what we got in the package, the DNA is still out on the blood but we can assume that will be matched to Sam Scales as well.”