The Gods of Guilt(96)

“Forsythe objected all over the place and the judge gave him till tomorrow morning to respond. So I want you there, since you know the names better than me. Are you clear in the morning?”

Jennifer nodded.

“Yes. Will I be making the response or just whispering to you?”

“You respond.”

She brightened at the thought of going up against Forsythe in court.

“What about if he brings up Stratton Sterghos?”

I thought for a moment before responding. I heard someone riffing on an electric guitar somewhere in the building.

“First of all, there is no if about that. Sterghos is going to come up. When he does, you start to answer and then you sort of look at me as if to ask if you’re saying too much. I’ll step in then and take it from there.”

The new witness list I had submitted was a carefully constructed part of our defense strategy. Every person we had added had at least a tangential connection to the Gloria Dayton case. We could easily argue for his or her inclusion and testimony. However, the truth was, we would actually call few of them to testify. Most of them had been added to the list in an effort to cloak a single name: Stratton Sterghos.

Sterghos was the depth charge. He was not directly or indirectly connected to Dayton. He did, however, live for the past twenty years across the street from a house in Glendale where two drug dealers were assassinated in 2003. It was in the investigation of those murders that I believed an unholy alliance was somehow struck between then–Detective Lee Lankford and DEA agent James Marco. I needed to root that alliance out and find a way to tie it in with Gloria. It was called relevance. I had to make the Glendale case relevant to the Dayton case or I would never get it to the jury.

“So you’re hoping Lankford does the vetting and comes up with Stratton Sterghos’s connection,” Jennifer said.

I nodded.

“If we get lucky.”

“And then he makes a mistake.”

I nodded again.

“If we get luckier.”

As if on cue, Cisco entered the boardroom. I realized that the big man hadn’t made a sound as he had crossed the loft. He went to the coffeepot and started pouring a cup.

“Cisco, that’s old,” Lorna warned. “From this morning. It’s not even hot.”

“It will have to do,” Cisco said.

He put the glass pot down on the cold burner and swallowed a gulp from the cup. We all made faces. He smiled.

“What?” he said. “I need the caffeine. We’re setting up on the house and I could be up all night.”

“So everything is set?” I asked.

He nodded.

“I just checked it out. We’re ready.”

“Then let’s hope Lankford does his job.”

“And then some.”

He started pouring more of the dead coffee into his cup.

“Let me just make a fresh pot,” Lorna said.

She got up and came around the table to her husband.

“No, it’s fine,” Cisco said. “I can’t stay long anyway. Have to get up there with the crew.”

Lorna stopped. There was a pained expression on her face.

“What?” Cisco asked.

“What is this you’re doing?” she asked. “How dangerous?”

Cisco shrugged and looked at me.

“We’ve taken precautions,” I said. “But . . . they are men with guns.”

“We’re always careful,” Cisco added.

I now realized where the heated discussion between Lorna and me in the car had come from. She was worried about her husband, worried that the fate that had befallen Earl Briggs would come to her house next.





33





Cisco called me at midnight. I was in bed with Kendall, having snuck out my back door and once again taken a cab over the hill to meet her. The protection of Moya’s men was twenty-four/seven, but I left them behind whenever I met Kendall because she objected to them and didn’t want them near her. As had become our routine during the trial, we’d eaten a late dinner at the sushi bar after she closed her studio and then returned to her place. I was deeply asleep and dreaming of car crashes when Cisco called. It took me a moment to adjust to where I was and what the call meant.

“We’ve got them on tape,” Cisco said.

“Who exactly?”

“Both of them. Lankford and Marco.”

“Together, same frame?”

“Same frame.”

“Good. Did they do anything?”

“Oh, yeah. They went inside.”

“You mean they broke in?”

“Yep.”

“Holy shit. And you’ve got it?”

“We’ve got it all and then some. Marco planted drugs in the house. Heroin.”

I was almost speechless. This couldn’t be any better.