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.
“Your Honor,” Anita said.
“One second, Counselor,” Judge Larch said. She stood up behind the bench and gazed down at Ali. “How did you figure this out, young man?”
Ali took off the sunglasses and said, “Um, when I couldn’t see anything from just looking at the videos, I figured I had to think about it in another way.”
Ali explained that he’d stopped watching the videos and started thinking how a gun could be there and yet not be there. He thought for almost a day before he remembered the holograms he’d seen on some of the rides in Disney World, and he started reading about holograms on the Internet.
“There was stuff about the photographic medium being clear and silicone-based, and the wave frequency of the lasers being the key. And I remembered the glue and silicone on the victims’ hands from the autopsy report and thought maybe the glue could have been to hold the film in place. But Dr. Rawlins figured it all out for real.”
“Just the details, no more,” Rawlins said with a bow toward Ali. “The kid had it nailed before he rang my bell.”
“Where did the film go?” Larch said.
Ali said, “I think after the shootings, after my dad went out to call for backup, someone stripped the holographic film from the victims’ hands and left with the cameraman who shot the video.”
“Objection,” Wills said. “This entire exercise is a clever and, I must admit, very creative stunt, but there’s nothing here that’s concrete. No holographic film has been introduced into evidence, so no testimony about holographic film should be allowed. Move to strike this entire line of questioning.”
“There’s evidence,” Ali said hotly. “That tiny blue light I showed you. Someone had the laser on by mistake for four point seven seconds. And the silicone? And the glue? Were you even listening?”
Wills shot my son a contemptuous glance but didn’t answer.
Anita said, “Your Honor, the defense has given a plausible explanation for the apparent absence of the guns in the videos and for the glue residue and silicone found on the victims’ palms. Let the jury decide.”
For several long moments, the judge showed no reaction and made no response. She studied the top of the bench so long, I figured she was having some kind of fit. At last she said, “Overruled, Mr. Wills.”
“Judge Larch—”
“I said overruled, Mr. Wills. We’ll let the ladies and gentlemen of the jury decide which explanation they believe. Ms. Marley?”
“Move to dismiss.”
“Denied.”
“Move to suppress the testimony of Kimiko Binx and Claude Watkins.”
“Denied.”
Anita called Watkins back to the stand for his cross-examination, and he steadfastly maintained he’d had no holographic film on his hands at any time in his entire life.
“And yet glue and silicone were found on your hands after you were shot.”
Watkins snorted. “I’m a sculptor, and who knows what was on that factory floor to begin with.”
“But you wanted your encounter with Dr. Cross to be recorded. Were you trying to provoke him into shooting with the holograms?”
“I repeat, no holograms,” Watkins said firmly. “And, sure, I wanted to film him. I wanted to see how he’d handle himself, whether he’d revert to the mean of police behavior and go violent. But no one expected to get shot. Least of all me.”
“Do you hate Dr. Cross?”
“I hate the violence he stands for.”
“Enough to frame him?”
“Not enough to take a bullet in the guts and through the spine,” Watkins said. “That’s a fact. No one would wish this on themselves no matter how much they hated someone.”
“No further questions,” Anita said.
When Watkins had wheeled through the gate, Judge Larch said, “Ms. Marley?”
Anita glanced at me. I nodded.
She said, “The defense rests, Your Honor.”
Chapter 84
Any court buff will tell you that a quick verdict favors the prosecution. So after the jury heard closing arguments, received instructions, and were sequestered for deliberations, we treated every minute without word as a minor miracle. Hours passed. Then a day.
I tried not to think about the verdict but found that impossible. My case had dominated local news and was featured on national and cable news coverage. The talking heads babbled about Ali’s holographic demonstration, the presence of ecstasy in my blood the day of the shootings, and whether together they were enough to create reasonable doubt in the jurors’ minds.
A few were confident it would. But more sided with the prosecution, noting as Wills had in his closing argument that for the hologram theory to be true, the three victims had to have knowingly put themselves in harm’s way in order to frame me. He’d argued that it ran counter to self-preservation, pointed at Claude Watkins in his wheelchair, and asked if anyone could believe he’d risk paralysis to see me in prison. Other commentators continued to hammer the fact that I’d been at the center of nine other officer-involved shootings in the course of my career, and they championed the idea that I should go to jail to set an example for police conduct across the nation.
At noon on Friday, I couldn’t take it anymore. I snuck out of the house and down the alley with my laptop. Sampson picked me up on Pennsylvania Avenue and we went to Quantico. Special Agent Batra met us at the gate, and before long we were in Rawlins’s underground lab.
“I don’t know if we are bugged or not,” Rawlins said, taking my computer. “Based on the fact we both uploaded the contents of that flash drive from the man posing as Alden Lindel, I’ve been digging in our system, but I haven’t come up with anything definitive yet.”
“This is a smaller universe,” I said.
Rawlins winked. “I see that.”
He’d kept his Mohawk down and black, but he’d added dark eye shadow, which made him look somewhat demonic as he plugged my laptop into a closed network. Rawlins ran a number of tests and still didn’t find anything. He decided to search uploads my computer had made recently over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth.
“There you are, you bugger,” he said, highlighting a file with a nonsense name and extension.
The date stamp said the upload from my laptop had taken place from 4:33 p.m. to 5:29 p.m. the prior Monday.
I thought about that and realized the time frame coincided with my hour with Annie Cassidy. The beginning and the end of the session, when she’d been fooling around with her smartphone.
“That file was probably sent to her phone,” I said. “She must have been downloading it the entire time I was in session with her.”
“What’s in the file?” Batra said.
Rawlins clicked on the file, and it was quickly apparent that it contained a record of everything done on my computer for the previous fourteen days.
“Spying on us, the little roaches,” Rawlins said.
He analyzed the file further and discovered that it had been generated after an order from a piece of “elegant and ingeniously coded” malware Krazy Kat found buried deep inside my operating system and made to look like innocuous support code.
Once he had the malware identified, Rawlins searched for it on the FBI system and was shocked to find a copy sitting dormant on his own server.