Wills said, “Can you take us through the events of March twenty-ninth?”
Watkins grudgingly said he’d gotten interested in Soneji and then me by accident. But the more he read about me, the more he was convinced I was “borderline out of control” when it came to the mass murderer.
He testified that he decided to entice me into a situation that could result in an “interesting and revealing piece of performance art.” He would lure me to an abandoned factory where he’d confront me with one Soneji after another.
“So you could see his reaction?” Wills asked.
“Oh, hell no. I wanted everyone in the world to see Cross’s reaction.”
Beside me, Anita cocked her head to one side.
Wills squinted as if he’d heard something new from the witness and said, “How were you going to do that?”
“By filming it, of course,” Watkins said.
“What?” Wills said.
“What?” Naomi whispered.
Anita said, “What the hell is—”
“You had to have found them,” Watkins said. “I mean, you had to have searched the factory and found the smartphones with the add-on lenses, right?”
Anita and the prosecutor’s assistant both shot to their feet.
Anita said, “Judge, there has been no mention of any such cameras or phones in discovery.”
“Because we found no cameras or phones,” Wills said.
Watkins looked like he wanted to spit in disgust. “I put them there myself. What is this? A cover-up? I was wondering why you weren’t badgering me about them from the get-go. I’m telling you, we got the whole thing from three different angles!”
CHAPTER
55
THE COURTROOM ERUPTED. Judge Larch banged her gavel, demanding order. She told the jury to ignore Mr. Watkins’s testimony for the time being and ordered both prosecution and defense into chambers along with the U.S. marshals who worked in her courtroom.
“Judge, the government asks that it be given time to find the phones Mr. Watkins claims are in that factory,” Wills said when they were all in chambers.
“Judge, there is no way to know if these phones, if there are any, have been put there after the fact as a ploy by Mr. Watkins,” Anita said. “Whatever is on them should be excluded.”
“That factory has been sealed for months,” Wills said.
“But not guarded.”
“We don’t even know if the phones exist, Ms. Marley,” Judge Larch said. She looked at one of her marshals. “Collins, you and Avery, please go talk to Mr. Watkins. Find out where he says he hid these phones, call a forensics team, and go look. If you find them, establish a perfect chain of custody and bring them here.”
“Judge, that’s the rightful role of the government,” Wills said.
“We’re seeking swift truth and justice here, Mr. Wills,” Larch said. “If the cameras are there and they do show what happened that day, we’ll all see it together. At the same time. Here. In my chambers.”
The marshals left. The judge ordered that the jury be sequestered and given lunch. We ate down the hall, all of us wondering how the cameras could have been missed, and me worrying about the confidence with which Watkins had revealed them. What would they show?
An hour later, word came that three smartphones with extender lenses had been discovered where Watkins said they’d be: in recesses cut into the factory’s support beams, hidden with thin pieces of sheet metal.
An hour after that, Larch’s marshal entered her chambers with three evidence bags, each holding an iPhone 6s. They were dusty and their batteries were dead. Between the group of us, we had enough cords to recharge the devices.
One by one, they blinked on. Claude Watkins was asked to provide the security codes for the phones, which he did. They all used his birthday.
U.S. Marshal Avery, a thin woman with an intense bearing, wore gloves to enter the codes. Then she attached the first phone to a laptop computer, and the laptop to a screen on the wall of Judge Larch’s chambers.
Fifteen minutes later, as the last of the three videos played, there was dead silence in Judge Larch’s chambers. I felt steam-rolled and had no doubt I was heading to a federal pen for a long, long time.
“Compelling, Judge,” Wills said, triumphantly. “The government wishes to introduce these into evidence immediately.”
Anita said, “Your Honor, you cannot allow these videos to be introduced until we’ve had time to analyze them.”
“I’d say the videos speak for themselves,” Wills said. “The important parts, anyway. To ignore them would be a travesty of justice, Your Honor.”
“Allowing them into evidence without giving us the chance to examine them would be a gross miscarriage of justice, Your Honor,” Naomi said.
Judge Larch sat back in her chair, closed her eyes, and puffed on an electronic cigarette.
“Your Honor?” Wills said.
“I’m thinking,” Larch said. “You’ve heard of that, right, Counselor?”
The prosecutor was taken aback but said, “Of course, Your Honor. I’ve been known to think myself every once in a while.”
The judge opened one eye and fixed it on Wills. “I’ll allow the videos to be introduced.”
“What?” Anita cried. “Judge—”
“Ms. Marley,” Larch said curtly. “The prosecution wants the videos introduced. If you can impeach their value and credibility, you’ll be free to do so at the appropriate time.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor,” Anita began, “these will bias the—”
“For a few days, perhaps,” Larch said, putting her e-cig on her desk. “If they’re fake, you’ll know soon enough, won’t you? And maybe you’ll make Mr. Wills look like a fool for being so impetuous.”
“Your Honor?” the prosecutor said, looking as if he’d sniffed something unpleasant.
“I’ve given you lots of rope, Mr. Wills,” she said. “Try not to hang yourself with it.”
Wills blinked and said, “Yes, Your Honor.”
CHAPTER
56
NANA MAMA SAW the devastated look on my face when we returned to the courtroom. She came to the rail.
“You okay, son?”
“It’s bad, Nana.”
“The truth will out. Just stay fixed on that.”
I nodded but felt like the weight of the world was on me when Judge Larch gaveled the court back into session and announced to the jury that she was admitting the videos. She also cautioned them that the government had decided not to analyze the videos before they were shown to the jury.
“In that light, keep an open and skeptical mind,” she said. “The defense will have its say about these videos, I’m sure.”
As Marshal Avery called up the videos on a screen facing the jury, Nathan Wills was so pleased he jigged a little as he crossed to the witness box. Claude Watkins was again sitting there in his wheelchair.
“Mr. Watkins,” Wills said. “Have you seen this footage?”
“No.”
“They’re all black-and-white, three or four minutes long. We’ll watch them simultaneously. You’ll see the scene from three angles at once.”
The deputy marshal hit a key on her computer. The screen, divided into three frozen feeds, lit up.
On the left, there was an elevated, look-down perspective on the dimly lit rear of the factory where the shooting had occurred. It was a long and largely empty assembly-line space with dark storage alcoves off it on all four sides.
From the perspective, I figured the smartphone had been placed atop an alcove in the middle of the long south wall of the room. On the opposite wall, a mural was lit by soft spotlights.
The middle of the screen showed the feed from a smartphone camera that had been hidden almost directly across the room, above the opposite northern alcove, and aimed back at the floor area, though you could see the bottoms of the three spotlights.
On the far right of the screen, we were afforded a view from above the west alcoves. That angle showed the full length of the factory floor and the spotlight beams bisecting it right to left.