Chapter 28
I HAD SPENT nearly half my life and my whole career defending the accused.
In that time, I had squared off in court against countless numbers of detectives who had arrested my clients, tricked my clients into confessing, sometimes even framed my clients.
I had a half brother who was a detective whom I would trust with my daughter’s life, but I carried only suspicions and distrust for the detectives I questioned in front of juries.
The detective was the natural enemy of the defense lawyer, so the idea that a detective could actually further my case in civil court and go from nemesis to ally took some getting used to.
But that was what I was counting on when I called Detective Douglas Clarke to the stand as my first witness after lunch. He brought with him the power and might of the state, and for once it was on my side of the ledger.
Clarke came to the stand in a blue suit with an open jacket that clearly showed the badge clipped to his belt.
His red hair was cropped short and he had a professional, all-business air about him as he stood in front of the judge and jury and took the oath to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.
He carried with him a blue binder that I knew was a murder book.
I had never encountered him on a case when I was working criminal and I had spoken to him only the one day McEvoy and Lorna and I went to the Van Nuys Division, ostensibly for an informal interview, though it never took place.
But I had checked him out through Cisco and my half brother, Harry Bosch.
From them, I learned that he was a consummate detective who was all about the work and didn’t play LAPD politics.
That was why he was happy to be relegated to working cases in the San Fernando Valley, an hour’s drive from headquarters downtown.
He had grown up in the Valley and still lived there in Sherman Oaks.
As a patrol officer and then as a detective, he had bounced around the divisions that served the sprawling north end of the city until he made it to the homicide squad in Van Nuys.
He’d now been working murder cases there for almost twenty years.
I drew many of these details out in my first questions, wanting the jurors to get to know him and understand that he was a capable and thorough investigator. Then I got down to the business at hand.
“Detective Clarke, were you called to the scene of a homicide on September nineteenth, 2023?”
“I was, yes.”
“Can you tell the jury about that case and what you did that day?”
“I was already in my office at Van Nuys Division when I was notified by my captain that there had been a shooting at Grant High School. There was one victim, a female, and she had already been transported to a hospital and expired in the ER. My partner, Dailyn Rodriguez, and I initially responded to the scene and it was determined that I would stay at the scene to conduct the investigation and gather witnesses and evidence while Detective Rodriguez went to the hospital to view the victim and collect whatever evidence was there. We had been told that the victim’s mother was heading to the hospital, and Detective Rodriguez would be on hand for that as well. ”
“Who was the victim?”
“Rebecca Randolph. She was sixteen years of age and had just begun her junior year of high school. She had been shot after getting out of a car with three other girls in the school parking lot.”
“Was the school on lockdown?”
“It was, yes. It was unknown initially where the shooter went after the incident in the parking lot. The school administrators locked down the school and proceeded with active-shooter protocol.”
“But the shooter had left the school, correct?”
“That was in fact the case. But it was not known at the time, so all precautions were taken.”
“Of course.”
I had been keeping an eye on the jury as Clarke answered the questions.
I knew from the voir dire interrogatories that many of them had children of school age.
The possibility of a school shooting had become a concern and nightmare for every parent in the country.
I had to tread carefully here, but I also wanted to build outrage that I would then direct over the course of the trial toward my villain—the AI chatbot called Wren.
“Now, was the school still on lockdown when you arrived?” I asked.
“It was just opening up,” Clarke said. “It had been searched by the SWAT team and it was determined that the shooter had fled.”
“What did you do at that point?”
“Like I said, my partner and I split up. She went to the hospital, and my first responsibility was to secure the crime scene and let the crims begin their work.”
“What are ‘crims’?”
“Excuse me. Criminalists. They gather the evidence at the scene, photograph it and video it and so forth.”
“Okay, while they were doing that, what did you do?”
“I had been told by the first officers who responded to reports of gunfire that the victim had arrived at school in a carpool that included three other female students. I located them in the school and began preliminary interviews, talking to each one separately.”
“What did they tell you?”
“Each one said the same thing. They identified the victim as Rebecca Randolph—her friends called her Becca—and said that she had been shot by a boy named Aaron Colton, or AC, as they called him. They said AC walked up to them after they got out of the car and shot Becca without saying a word. He used a chrome-colored handgun. He then calmly walked away.”
I looked up at the judge and asked to introduce my first three exhibits, the three witness reports that Clarke had written and that were signed by the girls as being true and accurate.
They were accepted without objection from the Masons.
This way the jurors could read their statements and I would not have to call the girls as witnesses and make them relive the trauma they were all still dealing with.
“Now, Detective Clarke, did you consider this an open-and-shut case at this point?” I asked. “You had three witnesses who said Aaron Colton was the killer.”
“No, not at all,” Clarke said. “I had three witnesses but no evidence yet.”
“So what did you do then?”
“I returned to the crime scene and learned that the criminalists had found a bullet casing in the parking lot.”
“Where was that located?”
“It was under a car parked next to the car Becca had arrived at school in.”
In the hallway before I brought Clarke into court to testify, I had asked him to drop the police-speak as much as possible.
I said, “Don’t call the victim ‘the victim.’ Refer to her as Becca.
” He had taken heed of that and I believed his use of the victim’s first name would help humanize her with the jury.
So much of this case was about what was real and what wasn’t.
I wanted them to fully grasp that Rebecca Randolph was a real person and that her death was a loss to the community as well as to her loved ones and friends.
“And what did you and the criminalists determine from that bullet casing, Detective?” I asked.
“It was a forty-caliber rimless cartridge made by Smith and Wesson,” Clarke said.
“Did you draw any conclusion from that information?”
“Not really, other than that the forty caliber indicated that the gun was smaller than a nine-millimeter or a forty-five. It was the kind of gun used for home defense, not law enforcement.”
“So you were looking for a small, chrome-colored gun. What did you do next, Detective?”
“I learned from the witnesses and school administrators that Aaron Colton was Becca’s former boyfriend and that he was a student at Grant but had already missed half the school days so far.
Classes had just started at the end of August that year.
I got his home address from the school and called my partner so we could go to the Colton home and attempt to talk to Aaron. If he was there.”
“And was he?”
“Yes, we arrived at the house on Kester Avenue, and Aaron’s mother answered the door. When she informed us that her son was home and alone in his room, we asked her to step outside. Detective Rodriguez and I then called for backup.”
“And did you wait for backup?”
“We did not. Fearing that the suspect might be suicidal, we went inside and approached the closed door of Aaron’s bedroom. I heard voices coming from the room. His mother—”
“Hold on a second, Detective. What do you mean by ‘voices’?”
“I heard two voices in conversation. Male and female. Coming from the room. And since Aaron’s mother had told us he was alone in the room, I believed he was on a Zoom or a FaceTime call or something like that.
I tried the door but it was locked. I leaned in to see if I could hear what was being said, and that is when I heard the female say something that I thought could lead to self-harm.
Detective Rodriguez and I stepped down the hallway and conferred, and we decided that circumstances dictated that we enter the room to secure Aaron’s safety. ”
“What was it that the female said, Detective? That you heard.”
“She said, ‘Romeo and Juliet are together in eternity.’”
“And what did that mean to you?”
“Well, I’m an old guy. I remembered it from an old rock and roll song.”
“What song was that?”
“‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ by a band called Blue ?yster Cult.
I actually had it on a playlist on my phone.
I put together Romeo and Juliet and ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’ and I thought this kid might be about to hurt himself.
The mother had confirmed to us that her husband kept a gun in a safe.
She didn’t know the make or caliber, but all of these things were in play at that time. ”
“What did you do?”
“It was a hollow interior door. I threw my shoulder into it and it popped open pretty easily. We entered the room.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, it all moved very quickly. Aaron Colton was sitting at a desk in the room. He had a laptop open on the desk and I saw a woman’s face on the screen.
He was startled when the door came open, by the loud noise of it.
He recovered, then slammed the laptop shut with one hand and with the other reached for a weapon that was on the desk. ”
“What kind of weapon, Detective?”
“It was a chrome-plated handgun.”
“It matched the description of the gun used by the shooter at the school?”
“It did.”
“Okay, what happened when he reached for that gun?”
“My partner and I rushed him as he grabbed it and took him to the floor. I held him down while Dailyn—uh, Detective Rodriguez—got control of the weapon and took it out of his grasp.”
“Did he say anything during this struggle?”
“Yes, he said, ‘Let me die, let me die.’ Twice like that.”
“So was it your belief that he intended to use the gun on himself and not you or—”
For the first time, Marcus Mason stood and objected.
“Your Honor,” he said, “it is beyond the scope of this witness’s skills as a detective to know what a sixteen-year-old boy was thinking at that moment.”
“Your Honor,” I responded, “based on what he heard from the conversation before entering the room and what the boy said as he was wrestled to the ground, I think Detective Clarke was in a position to know what the boy wanted to do.”
“I am going to sustain the objection,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, can you rephrase the question?”
“Of course, Your Honor,” I said.
I turned my attention back to Clarke.
“Detective Clarke, when you entered that room and saw Aaron Colton reaching for the gun, were you in fear for your life?” I asked.
Clarke took a moment to compose an answer.
“Not really,” he finally said. “I was afraid, based on what I’d heard through the door, that he was going to grab that gun and shoot himself.”
“And that was before he said, ‘Let me die, let me die’?”
“Before that, yes.”
“By the way, you said you saw a woman’s face on the laptop screen before Aaron closed it. Did you ever come to identify that woman?”
“I later determined that it was an avatar called Wren. It was Aaron’s AI companion from the Clair app.”
I asked the judge for permission to put the image of Wren on the courtroom screen.
After the request was granted, the judge’s clerk rolled a large screen on a wheeled easel to a position where the judge, jury, and witness could view it, as could the side of the gallery where members of the media sat.
Lorna came through the gate with a laptop in hand and took my seat at the plaintiffs’ table.
She quickly connected the laptop to the screen, and soon the image of Wren appeared.
I let the jurors have a good look at it before proceeding.
“Now, Detective Clarke, is this the image you saw on Aaron’s screen?” I asked.
“Yes, it is,” Clarke said.
“Did it look like a real person to you when you saw it in Aaron’s room?”
“Yes. He closed the laptop as we were coming through the door, so it was pretty quick. I thought he was doing a Zoom or something with a real person.”
“What do you think now?”
“It’s close, but you can tell it’s a fake.”
“But there is a real human being who goes by the name Wren the Wrestler, is there not?”
“Yes, she’s a popular wrestling star.”
“Did you ever compare the avatar of Wren you saw to photos of the real Wren the Wrestler?”
“I did. Like I said, it’s close.”
“What exactly is an avatar, Detective Clarke?”
Marcus Mason objected, arguing that the question was beyond the scope of the detective’s expertise. The judge agreed. I turned to check the clock on the rear wall of the courtroom. I then turned back to the judge.
“Your Honor, my questioning of Detective Clarke will move into another phase at this point,” I said. “It might be a good time to take a break.”
“Very well,” Ruhlin said. “We will take the afternoon break now. The jury is admonished not to discuss the testimony or case with each other or anyone else. Please be back in the assembly room in fifteen minutes.”