“Courts are closed on Christmas Day, Mr. Ruiz.”
“Yes, of course, Your Honor.” I could see him deflate. He was a family man, and a trial was a twenty-four seven job. With four little kids, I knew, it would kill him to spend Christmas that way.
Chambliss said, “Monday, December 16 work for y’all?”
Ruiz nodded. “Uh, one week, Your Honor?”
“Let’s make it two. If we don’t need that much time, fine, but I’d rather schedule that so nobody ends up having to cancel holiday plans if we run long.”
Ruiz deflated even more. When I picked my files up and headed out, he barely looked at me.
After work, I met up with Terri outside Mazie’s house so we could retrace Jackson’s steps on the night of the murder. Mazie was at work. Our plan was to see how long it took to walk to the marina, and to take some photos along the way that we might use in trial exhibits. Terri took a few shots from Mazie’s porch and the sidewalk in front. The sun was starting to head down the sky and turn gold, making the neighborhood look prettier than it normally did. For trial exhibits, I liked that. Juries tended to make assumptions about people from bad-looking neighborhoods.
“You know,” I said, “I’ve only ever driven through this part of town. It feels different walking.”
“What I notice is how many windows there are. All these people, and they mostly would’ve been home at night. And the convenience store, the laundromat… The streetlights work, right?”
“We’ll see when we get back. I never thought it was dark driving through here, though.”
She paused on the sidewalk, hit the stopwatch she was using to get an accurate measure on the length of the walk, and took photos of the convenience store and a house whose front window faced the sun. You could see the whole living room through it, and several members of the family inside.
“We’ll have to blur their faces,” I said.
“Mm-hmm.”
She started her stopwatch again, and we walked on. “So, all these people,” she said, “and all the publicity about this case, but the prosecution doesn’t have anybody other than Blount who saw Jackson walking with a crowbar?”
“That’s a good point. And, I mean, it’s quite the coincidence that the lead detective just happened to see the defendant acting suspicious that night.”
She nodded. I could see her going over something in her mind. “I’m not going to get into specifics,” she said, “but one of the reasons I left the force is that I saw a couple of fellow officers manufacture some real convenient coincidences. And they didn’t get called out. The brass covered for them.”
I shook my head. “I can see that driving out good cops. Sure, you nail the perp in the case right in front of you, but big picture, you end up corrupting the force and destroying public trust.”
She laughed, a bit harshly, and hit her stopwatch again. As she snapped a photo of a crowded gas station, she said, “If you think there’s much public trust left to destroy, your definition of the public must be different than mine.”
“Oh,” I said, realizing what she meant. “Oh, right.” I had a mental image of the entire Black population of South Carolina standing on a corner several blocks ahead, looking at their watches and waiting for folks like me to catch up.
When we started walking again, I said, “Speaking of coincidences, it turns out Pete Dupree did some work for Blue Seas. Did you dig up anything on him?”
“Mm-hmm. Unless there are two truckers called Pete Dupree who spend time in Basking Rock, we’re talking about the same guy. Or the same lowlife, I should say. What’d he do at Blue Seas?”
“Waste haulage. He’s not just a trucker. He drove, but I guess the more lucrative end of his business was that his company got the contract for handling all the garbage from the yacht charters.”
“I wonder how Henry found him. I mean, did he put it out for bids? Did he run a background check on Dupree? Because it wouldn’t have come back clean.”
“Huh. I don’t know.” I wrestled for a moment with myself, wondering if there was any way to rationalize pawing through the Blue Seas files again to see if I could find that out.
As she snapped a photo of a roadside restaurant and then zoomed in on the door to get a picture of the sign—the hours of operation showed it would’ve been open during Jackson’s walk—a problem occurred to me. “Hey,” I said. “I should’ve asked when we started out, but do you need me to be taking notes about exactly where we are at each photo? And how long it took to walk from point A to point B? I mean, so we can reconstruct that in the trial presentation.”
“No. Every photo’s geotagged and date-stamped. And I checked my camera settings this afternoon to make sure it was all up to date and accurate.”
“I remember a guy I worked with up in Charleston talking about something like that.” I tried to recall what he’d said. “I think he needed an expert witness to testify about the accuracy, but the basic gist was every digital photo had all that information hidden in it somewhere.”
We turned onto the causeway. This part of the walk was going to be on the beach, because aside from one small parking area halfway along, the causeway was nothing but road.
“It’s not exactly hidden,” she said. “It’s in what’s called EXIF data. Which is, you know, searchable, viewable, depending on your software.” We stepped into the sand, and she took a long shot of the causeway with the line of palm trees and the strip of beach leading to the other side of town, then put her camera back into its bag. “I don’t want to get sand or spray in it,” she explained. “And anyway, I don’t think anyone driving
