Chapter 14
RANDOLPH V. TIDALWAIV LLC was pushed back on the federal court docket after Marcus Mason revealed that he had lost his Malibu home in the firestorm and asked for time to take care of his family as they worked through the trauma.
The court was sympathetic, and Judge Ruhlin gave him half of the sixty-day delay he had requested.
Then Cisco learned through searches of property and VRBO records that Mason had lost a house, not a home.
The destroyed structure had been an investment property that Mason rented out during the summer for twenty-five thousand dollars a month.
His actual home was in Beverly Hills and it had not been touched by the flames.
I did not bring this information to the attention of the court.
I bided my time, knowing I could use it down the line if I needed to.
Though I had opposed the delay, it worked in my favor, as the extra time allowed me to better choreograph the trial, shore up the weaknesses in my case, and take a final run at Naomi Kitchens.
Two witnesses who were already locked in were the parents of the shooter, Aaron Colton.
They had avoided me until I got a subpoena from Judge Ruhlin requiring them to sit for depositions.
Cisco traced them to a hideaway actually called the Hideaway in Palm Springs, followed them from the gated community to a restaurant, and delivered the subpoena.
I scheduled their depositions on separate days in Los Angeles, choosing to go with the father first, as I assumed he would be most difficult—he had bought the gun that his son used.
I rented an office in a building near the courthouse, since the warehouse was not conducive to interviewing reluctant witnesses.
But both Bruce and Trisha Colton showed up at the appointed time for Bruce’s depo. I told them that was not necessary, and that’s when they told me something that pivoted the case in a new direction.
“We want to sue Tidalwaiv for what they did to our son,” Bruce said. “We want you to handle our case.”
“We know our son did something terrible,” Trisha added. “But Clair was like a drug. He was under the influence and did a horrible thing. But it wasn’t him, Mr. Haller. That was not our son. It was her. And now we’ve lost him.”
“Tidalwaiv should pay,” Bruce said. “They have just as much responsibility as Aaron does. Even more, if you ask me.”
This was unexpected but quickly fell into place in my case strategy.
After conferring with Brenda Randolph and getting her approval to take on the new case, I filed a new negligence suit against Tidalwaiv on behalf of the Coltons, citing the company’s liability for the actions their son took in killing Rebecca Randolph.
I then moved to have the Colton and Randolph cases consolidated as one.
The Mason twins objected, but it was clear that the two cases were identical in terms of the evidence and the cause of action.
The judge joined the two cases, but as a consolation prize for the Masons, she delayed start of trial until April to give them additional time to prepare and take the Coltons’ depositions.
As the trial date neared, other witnesses remained a work in progress.
I had assigned Jack McEvoy to maintain the relationship with Naomi Kitchens.
She had committed neither to turning over documents nor to testifying at trial, but she had continued to talk with McEvoy.
He made two additional trips to Palo Alto to keep those conversations going in person.
Each time he went, Kitchens came right to the edge of deciding to cooperate but then retreated, citing fear of reprisals against herself and her daughter.
McEvoy even made a trip to San Francisco to visit Lily Kitchens at the University of San Francisco to see if he could enlist her help in persuading her mother, but that effort failed as well.
Witnesses aside, the most important thing we had going for us was the contents of the killer’s own laptop—downloaded to the hard drive I had left weeks earlier on Maggie McPherson’s desk.
I found the drive one morning on the passenger seat of the Bolt after I had left the car unlocked while picking up my suits from the Flair dry cleaner’s shop on Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
The black box was there when I got back to the car.
I looked around and didn’t see who had put it on the seat.
I never once spoke to Maggie about it, as I knew I had to preserve my ability down the line and in front of a judge to say truthfully that I didn’t know who had left it for me.
In the cage, we downloaded the contents of the drive to a clean laptop Lorna had bought with cash.
Without going online—for that would no doubt have alerted Tidalwaiv that Aaron Colton’s account had gone active—we reviewed it all and found what appeared to be the saved history of the relationship between Aaron and the Project Clair AI companion.
He had renamed her Wren, after a professional female wrestler he was infatuated with.
This meant we were able to review his monthslong conversation with Wren—hundreds of hours of interaction.
It became McEvoy’s job to wade through it all and find what could be usable at trial.
The AI image of Wren did not cross the uncanny valley.
While the appearance and body movements were convincing enough, the AI Wren’s eyes were soulless, devoid of humanity.
They stared vacantly from the screen, raising the question of just how a sixteen-year-old boy could immerse himself in this false companionship and heed its words to the point of violence.
What was the emptiness in Aaron Colton that this charade filled?
By late March I felt we were locked and loaded for trial.
But the confidence I exuded during the last settlement conference with the Mason twins led them to ask for another trial extension—denied by Ruhlin—and then for a settlement meeting that, for the first time, would be refereed by the judge.
It was clear that Tidalwaiv desperately wanted to buy its way out of a trial that could expose its secrets and practices and sink the company’s stock just as there was talk in Silicon Valley of it being acquired by one of the bigs—Meta, Microsoft, Apple—for several billion dollars.
The Masons and I returned to the round table in Ruhlin’s chambers and sat in the same places as the last time the judge had called us in. There was no stenographer this time, just the four of us. The judge knew by now that Marcus Mason was the alpha of the twins and fixed him with a piercing stare.
“Mr. Mason,” she said, “let’s start with you offering an explanation as to why you have been unable to bring this case to a settlement agreeable to all parties.”
“Thank you, Judge,” Mason said. “We are at a standstill because plaintiffs’ attorney is inflexible and refuses to negotiate an equitable settlement and solution to the case. We have tried diligently, Your Honor, but it’s like talking to a brick wall at this point.”
“Is that true, Mr. Haller?” Ruhlin asked. “Are you a brick wall?”
“Your Honor,” I said, “my clients have seen their families destroyed. One child is dead. The other will likely never come home. There is no amount of money that can heal those wounds. Mr. Mason seems to think this is all about money, but money really has nothing to do with it. My clients want Tidalwaiv to make Clair safe for teenagers and to apologize for the harm its unsafe product caused. Failing that, they are entitled to their day in court, and they intend to have it. As is my duty, I have taken every offer made on behalf of Tidalwaiv to them, and each has been rejected out of hand because none has included what my clients want more than money: a public statement from Tidalwaiv admitting its intentional decisions to release a product they knew had critical flaws and could hurt people. Without that, and an apology and commitment from the company to retool and safeguard their product, we intend to go to court and have these actions compelled by a jury’s verdict. ”
“Your Honor,” Mason said, his voice now at a higher pitch, “the company is not going to lie to achieve a settlement. Mr. Haller wants it to admit to what it did not do. Tidalwaiv has always operated with the highest levels of consumer protection and safety. Mr. Haller wants its officers to compromise their own integrity by essentially admitting they have none. They are unwilling to do that. They feel very sympathetic to the parents and are willing to make them more than whole financially, but they will not admit to something they did not do.”
“Especially with half of Silicon Valley sniffing around and Tidalwaiv hoping for a billion-dollar merger,” I said.
“That has nothing to do with this,” Mason shot back.
I scoffed at that statement. The judge was silent until she finished writing a note on a legal pad. She finally spoke without looking up from the pad.
“What kind of money are we talking about here?” she asked.
“We’ve offered Brenda Randolph sixteen million dollars,” Mason said. “We’ve offered the Coltons four million.”
That brought the judge’s head up in surprise.
“With nondisclosure agreements attached,” I said.
“They’re waving all kinds of money in front of my clients in exchange for their silence.
My clients won’t even be able to say they won the case.
It all just goes away, swept under the rug.
And nobody gets warned about the danger of Tidalwaiv’s machines. ”