He sat back up and glared at me. “I’m not using. That wasn’t even mine. Jackson brought it.”
He’d always been quick with an excuse. It was always someone else’s pills or some outside circumstance.
I rooted around the cabinets looking for a strainer. “Unless you want to end up like that boat,” I said, “drifting around St. Helena Island—or floating out to sea on fire, if Jackson had his way—there has to come a time when you take responsibility. No matter who brings stuff. Or what your friends want you to do.”
“I don’t just do what they want. You think he wanted me to tell you that?”
“I know he didn’t,” I said. “So, thank you. The more I know, the more I can do to help him.”
He let his head fall back on the couch again and said, “Whatever.”
16
Monday, July 29, Morning
Terri and I headed up the courthouse steps with Mazie between us, doing what we could to shield her from the local reporters and busybodies. Aaron Ruiz trotted past without so much as a hello. We caught up with him when he got stuck at the X-ray machine, unpacking his pockets and discussing the contents of his briefcase, but he only gave me a curt nod as he picked up his bag. I couldn’t think why he’d be out of sorts. Any prosecutor knew cases hardly ever got thrown out at this stage.
As I put my bag on the conveyor belt, Mazie gave a weak smile and attempted a joke. “Should I be worried about my parking tickets? I don’t want to walk out of here in handcuffs.”
I reassured her, and we went through. She’d insisted on coming, and I thought sitting through it would be good practice for her, for whenever the trial rolled around. I had warned her, though, that Jackson wasn’t going to be there; defendants didn’t normally come to these hearings, especially not when they were in jail and their transportation cost the state money.
Terri went into the courtroom to get situated at the defense table. Court reporters weren’t present at preliminary hearings, so she was going to be taking notes. The judge’s clerk was too—that was standard procedure—but I wanted a second set of ears, and one that knew what I was looking for.
In the hallway outside the courtroom, I took Mazie aside for a quick reminder. “You’re going to hear a lot of bad things about Jackson,” I said. “More than you’d ever hear at trial, since hearsay and whatnot are allowed at this type of hearing. So this is going to sound a lot worse than the real thing.”
She nodded, but it didn’t look like she was really listening.
“Leland,” she asked, so quietly I could barely hear, “are they going to make this a death penalty case? Do they want to kill my boy?”
“Oh, Mazie, no. Mazie, put that right out of your head. That’s for kidnappers and, you know, pedophiles and whatnot. For that, it’s got to be more than just a, uh, a regular murder.”
“Really?” She looked up at me, her pale eyes wide. “Even though Karl was his father? The Bible says it’s a sin not to honor your father and mother.”
“Well, that’s not the law,” I said. “You don’t have to worry about that.”
She took a deep breath and relaxed, but she still looked haunted. The dark circles under her eyes made me wonder how long it’d been since she’d gotten a good night’s sleep.
Ruiz made his case the way I expected him to, except for one thing: he had trial-worthy exhibits already prepared. Photos of Mazie’s shabby little house with clouds of bugs darkening the air behind it. Blown-up quotes from neighbors describing the worst things they saw or heard during the fight. A bird’s-eye view of the neighborhood, with blood-red arrows to show which way Karl must’ve gone back to the marina afterward. A map of the town to show that if Jackson was spotted on the street leading to the marina, there wasn’t anyplace else along that route for him to go.
Exhibits like that cost money and time. In Charleston, none of us ever prepared them this early. You didn’t need them to convince a judge you had probable cause, and it’d usually be wasted effort, since most cases got resolved with a plea before trial. I thought about Ruiz’s boss, who hadn’t authorized him to make a plea offer, and wondered what had that man so interested in this case.
Ruiz kicked off with a map on which Jackson’s mug shot was shown in various places around town, based on cell phone location data.
I stood up and objected. “Your Honor, we’ve had no showing on how reliable that data is or what it’s based on. If it’s just pinging one tower, for instance, instead of triangulating, it could be off by twenty miles.”
Judge Chambliss looked at me like I must be confused. “I’m not sure what you’re saying there, counsel. Just by way of example, I use my phone’s GPS to get directions when I’m driving, and it knows right where I am.”
Of course, I thought. He’s a small-town judge. He’s probably never tried a murder case, and in a lot of his cases, technology probably doesn’t even come up at all. I was going to need to explain more to him than I would to a judge in Charleston.
“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “I know just what you mean. I use that myself. But that’s a different technology than what Mr. Ruiz is relying on here. GPS data comes from satellites, not cell phone towers. It’s a whole different thing.”
The judge looked at Ruiz. “Counsel, I know things are a little relaxed here, compared to at trial. But we got to have some standards. What type of data is this?”
“It’s cell-tower data, Your Honor. Triangulated, I believe, as Mr. Munroe indicated it ought to
