that wasn’t the biggest problem.”
“So what was?”
“Scarborough must have been at least a little paranoid,” he says.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because everything in his computers was hidden behind a zillion passwords, and according to our technicians, he knew how to make them, the passwords, letters and numbers,” says Tuchio, “nothing simple. Our IT people had to run software day and night for almost two weeks trying to crack ’em. They’d unlock one, only to run into another. Well, there it is,” he says. “Now you have everything that we have.” He smiles and then starts to turn to leave.
“Are you sure your people got everything that was on the hard drives?” I ask.
“Um…” He turns back, thinks for a moment, then offers a slight shrug. “Why do you ask?”
“I just want to be certain.”
“Can any of us ever be sure of anything? They tell me that they were very thorough. But if you think we may have missed something, you’re free to have your experts examine the drives. We can make arrangements. Do you want them?”
“Let me look at the materials first, and then I’ll let you know. In the meantime you will preserve the drives?”
“Of course.” He shakes my hand one more time. “Good luck,” he says. “You can keep that.” He smiles and taps the affidavit in my hand, then turns and heads back to his counsel table. Tuchio knows that at this moment he has knocked me off balance. I make a mental note to send him a letter confirming our conversation regarding the computer drives, with a copy to the court.
With the affidavit showing that the prosecutor did everything in his power to produce the materials from Scarborough’s computers, any complaint by our side to the court asking for time to review the documents would be fruitless. With the jury impaneled and mobs in the street, the judge will tell me to read this mountain of paper while the state puts on its own case.
The prosecutor has done one better. He’s gone out of his way to plant a small seed of confusion in our case, hoping, no doubt, that we will be distracted, waste time, perhaps chase this thing down some dead-ended rabbit hole. He has posed a question with no answer: Why would Scarborough, who wrote books to be published so that the whole world could read them, bother to conceal everything he wrote behind an infinite array of passwords?
9
Every seat is now filled. The overflow is sent back outside the courtroom to stand in line and wait for those with weak kidneys to start giving up their seats.
“Keep it down,” comes a booming voice from a sheriff’s sergeant at the back of the room, and a quiet chill settles over the audience.
Up front, a door at our side of the room opens just a crack. Through the small mesh-wired window in the door, I can see part of the head and shoulder of a uniformed deputy. He looks out at the crowd, checking everything one last time. Finally the door opens all the way. Out come two big deputies, more beef from the guard detail at the jail. Behind them, almost lost in their shadow, walks Carl Arnsberg, his head down, arms at his sides. He is wearing a new suit, his dark hair clipped short and parted on the left, slick and clean. He looks as if he’s been polished using a high-speed buffer. Even his perennial five o’clock shadow is gone.
There are some hushed, muffled whispers in the audience as people point at Carl.
Herman, who delivered Carl’s suit to the jail, whispers out of the side of his mouth, “Think ah used too much makeup.”
I get a glimpse between the deputies. Arnsberg’s face has a kind of white, bloodless look about it, like maybe a mortician got hold of him.
As they frog-march him toward our counsel table, suddenly the silence in the room is punctured by a loud shout: “Fucking fascist!” I turn my head to see a guy standing in the third row behind Tuchio’s table, looking wild- eyed at Carl. The guy scrambles over the row of seats in front of him, stepping on people as he goes. He hurdles the next two rows. Before any of the cops can reach him, he runs over the bailiff standing at the gate and through the railing.
He is two strides from Arnsberg when I lash out with one hand. I catch just a piece of his blue T-shirt as he blasts by me. Everything after that is lost in a blur of motion. Somehow this is launched off the top of our table like a rocket out of a silo. It nails the guy in the side just above the diaphragm. You can hear the breath go out of him like a crushed bellows as he is driven into the floor by something that looks like an SUV wearing a suit. Herman bounces on him once, then comes up straddling the guy like a cowboy on a steer.
Two of the guards from Carl’s contingent pile on. They cuff the man. He’s lying facedown on the floor, dazed, probably wondering who put him in the Super Bowl without a jersey or a number. The cops don’t even bother to pick him up. They just slide him, belly down, across the floor like a hockey puck and through the door to the lockup.
The other two guards, the ones who were chaperoning Arnsberg, are busy dusting off Herman, checking to see if he’s okay.
A phalanx of deputies has now formed, strung out along the bar railing so that no one else in the audience has a chance of going upstage.
Out in the gallery, the crowd is milling. Up out of their seats like jack out of his box, their voices elevated, gestures animated. Give them a few glasses to hold and it could be a party. “Did you see that?” This is followed by the occasional instant mental playback, all with hand gestures for color. “Who is that guy?” “Must be a cop.”
If I told them that Herman was Superman’s African brother, half of them would believe me. How else could a mountain move that fast? Mixed in with the free radicals, some wearing black T-shirts as a show of solidarity, there are a good number of regular courthouse-goers here, retired folk who spend their days watching trials because it’s better than the three hundred channels on cable. Where else can you see real bullet holes in the wall? Live theater, the best ticket in town, it’s free, and getting better now that they’ve brought contact sports inside.
From the corner of my eye, I see Sandra Arnsberg, Carl’s mother, standing on her tiptoes trying to see her son through the forest of uniforms in front of her.
I motion to her that I will get him.
In the rush of adrenaline, everybody but her has forgotten about Arnsberg. He is left standing by himself off to one side like some abandoned urchin. The guards talking to Herman cast an occasional glance his way just to make sure he doesn’t walk off. Where would he go with a wall of guards at the railing?
I walk over to him. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he says. “What was that all about?” Evidently Carl hasn’t seen the action out on the street.
“Just some crazy,” I tell him.
“Yeah. Guy’s nuts.” Carl looks over his shoulder at the door to the lockup where they dragged the guy, probably wondering if he has to go out that way when we’re done.
“I thought you were supposed to come to the jail this morning?”
“I was.” I tell him about the D.A. dropping a ton of paper on us at the last minute.
This seems to unnerve him.
“Anything bad?” he says. “What? What did they send? Why so much at the last minute?” Carl doesn’t understand a lot of this. Any little wrinkle tends to send him into panic.
“It’s okay. It’s material we’ve been trying to get for some time. Printouts from Scarborough’s computers.”
“Oh.”
I take him by the arm, walk him to the counsel table, where we sit.
He smiles, then waves at his mom through a crack between the cops.
“They told me I can’t have any exercise time in the dayroom anymore. Something about not enough staff,” he says.
Carl has been doing twenty-three hours a day in solitary since they arrested him. Now he’ll be doing twenty- four. The sheriff has had to segregate him at the jail because they know they can’t protect him. With the media hype, Carl has become the ultimate symbol in the great cause of every jail and prison in the country, the war of the
