The Proving Ground

1

To some it’s a stage. A place where carefully choreographed drama takes place. To others, a chess match with moves designed and practiced weeks and sometimes months in advance. Where nothing is left to chance. Where the wrong moves have grave consequences and finality. Where the recruited audience sits in silent judgment with their hidden biases and contempt.

I have never thought of it that way. To me it’s the Octagon, where mixed martial arts are deployed in brutal combat. Two go in; one comes out the victor. No one is left unbloodied. No one is left unscarred. This is what the courtroom is to me.

The hearing on this day was in civil court, a misnomer if there ever was one. There was nothing remotely civil about this fight. Randolph versus Tidalwaiv Technologies LLC was one of those rare cases where the stakes went far beyond the walls of the courtroom or even the reach of the federal court for the Central District of California. This was a fight for the future of everyone — or at least that was how I would argue it.

It was a pretrial hearing before US district court judge Margaret Ruhlin. I had known her since her days as a member of the local defense bar, back when she was called Peggy Ruhlin and hung out after court hours at the bar at the Redbird. She was now a veteran and much respected jurist appointed to the bench during the Obama years. She had consolidated cross-complaints from the parties and was attempting to avoid a trial delay by refereeing the disputes. I was in favor of that but the lawyers at the other table, the Mason brothers, would have liked nothing better than to push the trial off for another few months or more. Tidalwaiv was for sale and its investors were hoping one of the big techs would swallow it. The three Ms were circling — Microsoft, Meta, and Musk. This trial and its outcome could be the difference between millions and billions.

I was determined not to let them delay. Tidalwaiv had turned over twelve terabytes of discovery — enough when printed out to literally line the walls of a warehouse with file boxes. But what was important in those thousands and thousands of pages was heavily redacted, making the documents virtually useless to me. I needed to find what they were hiding in those pages or I was going to lose the most important case of my life.

The judge was patiently waiting for my response to one of the Masons, who had stood up and claimed that the redactions in the discovery materials were necessary because of proprietary protections in the very competitive world of generative artificial intelligence. He said that the information withheld from me amounted to the keys to the kingdom. And they weren’t going to give them away.

“Mr. Haller,” the judge prompted. “Your response, please.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said.

Following the judge’s courtroom protocol, I stood and went to the lectern located between the tables for the plaintiff and the defendant.

“Your Honor, the defense’s argument is specious at best,” I began. “We are not talking about the keys to the kingdom here. We’re talking about key evidence that is being withheld because, as Mr. Mason well knows, it is inculpatory. It supports the plaintiff’s case. Tidalwaiv’s creation told an impressionable young man to take his father’s gun to school and—”

“Mr. Haller,” the judge interrupted. “It is not necessary for you to repeat your cause of action with every objection. I am sure the media you invited here today appreciates it, but the court does not.”

The judge gestured toward the front row of the gallery, where members of the media sat shoulder to shoulder. Cameras and recording devices were not allowed in federal court. Each reporter, even the TV people, was reduced to taking notes by hand. And at the end of the row was a courtroom artist sketching yours truly for CNN. Pen and paper seemed so antiquated in a world where the electronic media reigned, along with its coconspirators artificial intelligence and the internet.

“Thank you, Judge,” I said. “The point is, this case is about guardrails. Tidalwaiv says they had guardrails in place but won’t reveal them, because they are allegedly proprietary. That doesn’t wash, Your Honor. The plaintiff is entitled to understand how Tidalwaiv’s artificial-intelligence-generated creation jumped those guardrails and told a teenager it was okay to shoot people.”

The Masons stood up in unison to object. They were alone at the defense table, their client choosing not to send a representative to court for these pretrial skirmishes.

The twins conferred and then Marcus sat down, leaving Mitchell to state their argument.

“Your Honor, the plaintiff’s attorney is once again misstating the facts and evidence,” he said. “He is talking to the media, not the court.”

I quickly shot back, since I was still at the lectern.

“How do we know the facts and evidence if they won’t provide complete discovery materials?” I asked, my arms out wide.

Ruhlin held her hands up in a signal for silence.

“Enough,” she said. “Mr. Mason, please move to the lectern.”

I retook my seat next to my client, Brenda Randolph, who had tears on her cheeks. Any reference made in court to her murdered child brought tears. It wasn’t a show. It wasn’t coaching. It was genuine loss and grief that would never go away no matter what happened down the line in this courtroom. I reached over and put my hand on her arm to console her. I needed to pay attention to the judge and my opponents but knew how difficult these moments were for her and that they would only get harder as the trial proceeded.

“Mr. Mason, the court tends to agree with Mr. Haller in this matter,” Ruhlin said. “How do you propose we rectify this issue? He is entitled to full discovery.”

“We can’t, Your Honor,” Mitchell Mason replied from the lectern. “Rather than reveal our proprietary sciences, codes, and methods, we have offered the plaintiff a generous settlement package, but that was rejected so that the plaintiff’s attorney can continue to grandstand in front of the media with his wholly unsubstantiated claims and—”

“Let me stop you right there, Mr. Mason,” the judge said. “Every plaintiff has the right to a trial. We’re not going to go down the road of judging motivations for settling or not settling this case.”

“Then, Your Honor,” Mason countered, “we are happy to submit to a court-appointed special master to review the materials we have provided and determine what is discoverable and what should remain redacted as proprietary.”

Now I stood to object, but the judge ignored me.

“I will reluctantly consider the offer in light of what that would mean to the court’s calendar,” Ruhlin said. “But for now, let’s move on to our next issue. Mr. Mason, you—”

“Your Honor,” I said. “Before moving on, may I respond to the defense’s proposal of a special master?”

“Mr. Haller, I know your response,” Ruhlin said. “You object because you want to keep this case on course to trial. If you wish, you may electronically submit a cogent objection, and I will take it into consideration before I rule. For now, let’s move on. The defense has a motion before the court to strike one person from the plaintiff’s preliminary witness list. A person named Rikki Patel, who is a former employee of the defendant, Tidalwaiv. Mr. Mason, do you wish to state your claim for the record?”

Mitchell Mason was wearing a blue-black Armani suit with his signature patterned vest to complete the power ensemble. He had styled but short brown hair and a close-cropped beard just beginning to show some distinguished gray. That was how I told them apart. Mitchell had the beard. Marcus did not.

“I do, Your Honor,” Mitchell said. “As stated in the motion, Mr. Patel is a former employee of Tidalwaiv and upon leaving the company’s employ signed a nondisclosure agreement, a copy of which was submitted with the motion. Your Honor, very simply, this is the plaintiff’s attempt to do an end run around us and get proprietary company data and information, and we object strenuously to Mr. Patel even giving a deposition, let alone testifying in open court in this matter.”

“Very well, you may take a seat,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, I notice that you didn’t file a response to the motion. Are you withdrawing Mr. Patel from your witness list?”

I moved back to the lectern.

“On the contrary, Your Honor,” I said. “Rikki Patel is a key witness for the plaintiff. He was in the lab when this company birthed the AI companion they call Clair and set her loose on unsuspecting—”

“Enough with the sound bites, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin barked. “I have warned you. You play to me, not the people in the first row.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Now, why should the court not enforce the nondisclosure agreement signed by your intended witness?”

“Your Honor, in essence, this is a product-liability case and it is contrary to the public interest to bar a former employee from testifying about Tidalwaiv’s recklessness regarding the safety of its product. California courts routinely refuse to enforce nondisclosure agreements, because they violate fundamental public policy. My client and the public are not party to the NDA and they have an interest in learning the facts and circumstances regarding how an AI companion encouraged a teenage boy to kill his ex-girlfriend. Rikki Patel isn’t a witness who will divulge trade secrets or privileged information; he will testify about Tidalwaiv’s failure—”

“But last I checked, we were in federal court, Mr. Haller. Not California court.”

“That may be so, Judge, but the court should also know that the NDA was signed under duress. Mr. Patel was fearful that if he did not sign it upon leaving the employ of Tidalwaiv, there would be consequences for himself and his family.”

Marcus Mason stood and objected, raising his hands, palms up, in a Where did this outlandish claim come from? gesture.

“Hold right there, Mr. Mason,” the judge said. “That is a very strong statement, Mr. Haller. Again, I warn you, meritless statements made for the benefit of the media and the jury pool will not be tolerated by this court.”

“Your Honor,” I said, “Mr. Patel is ready to testify in chambers or in open court about the fears and pressures that led him to sign an NDA with language that is threatening in and of itself. He should not be bound by the document, and I can assure the court that his purpose as a witness is not to reveal the proprietary information the company seems so concerned about. He will testify about the objections he raised about the Clair project from the very start. Objections that were overruled and that the company clearly doesn’t want the public to know about.”

“Your Honor?” Mason said, in case the judge had forgotten he was standing in front of her.

“Go ahead, Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said.

I went back to my table and Marcus Mason took the lectern. He was the clean-shaven twin who wore bow ties rather than patterned vests with his Armani.

“Your Honor, this is trial by ambush,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less. Mr. Haller, when he was defending criminals, was known as an attorney who wielded the media like a club. He is doing it again here. Of course he did not respond to the motion electronically. Why should he when he could invite a media audience into US district court to hear his exaggerated claims and outlandish lies? There is no threat in the wording of the nondisclosure agreement beyond what is in every NDA ever signed. There was no threat to Patel and there is no legal argument that supports his being able to break the agreement in order to testify in this matter.”

I had to hold back a smile. Marcus Mason was good. He was clearly the smarter of the two brothers and the one I had to key in on. The bow ties served to soften his image as a killer in the courtroom. But that was okay, because I was a killer too. The smile I held back was brought by his mentioning my days in the criminal defense bar as a pejorative. It was true I had made my name in crime. From billboards to bus benches, from the criminal courts to the county jails, I was known as the Lincoln Lawyer. Have case, will travel. I promised reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee. It was rough-and-tumble work. The California Bar waited for me to trip up ethically. The cops waited for me to trip up criminally. Everybody waited for me to fall. That was the legacy that followed me in this town. But I’d had my fill of it and moved on. And in the two years since I left the crowded and grimy halls of criminal justice, I had found new levels of dirty work and dangers in the supposedly genteel high-ceilinged courtrooms of civil practice. I was at home, and the Mason brothers had no idea what they were in for.

The judge closed the hearing by saying that she would take the oral arguments and written submissions under consideration and issue rulings on both matters the following Monday.

“Court is now adjourned,” she said.

The judge left the bench and headed to her chambers. The Mason brothers packed up their documents and law books while the representatives of the media started to file out of the front row. I returned to the plaintiff’s table and took a seat next to my client. Brenda Randolph was a small woman with haunted eyes that would never see happiness again. She worked as a lens grinder at an optometry lab in the Valley. She was using all her vacation and comp time to attend every hearing related to what she called her daughter’s case.

“You okay, Brenda?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, no. I’ll never be okay. Every time her name is mentioned or anybody talks about what happened, I lose it. I can’t help it. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Just be yourself.”

“Do you think the judge will rule in our favor?”

“She should.”

The Masons left their table and went through the gate. They said nothing to me as they passed.

“You guys have a good weekend,” I called out.

I got no response.

2

Outside the courtroom door, a man waited for me in the hallway. I had seen him inside during the hearing, sitting by himself in the back row of the gallery. If he was a journalist, he was unfamiliar to me. I knew most of the court reporters in town by sight, if not by name and acquaintance. But the lawsuit had garnered a fair amount of national attention and I had heard from and seen some members of the national media tribe for the first time. This man carried a backpack over his shoulder and wore a sport jacket but no tie. That told me he probably wasn’t a lawyer — at least not one with business in the building. He stood back while I whispered a goodbye to my client and told her I would be in touch the minute I received a ruling from the judge on the motions just argued. As soon as we separated, the stranger approached. He looked to be in his early fifties and had a full head of brown-going-gray hair. He looked like an aging surfer. It took one to know one.

“Mr. Haller, I was hoping to buy you a cup of coffee,” he said.

“I don’t need coffee,” I said. “I’m jacked from that hearing. Do I know you? Are you a journalist?”

“Uh, a writer, yes. I wanted to talk to you about something that could be mutually beneficial.”

“What kind of writer?”

“I write books about technology. And how it can be turned against us. I also write a Substack column. Same subject.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

“And you want to write about this case?”

“I do.”

“And what’s the part that would be beneficial to me?”

“Well, if we could sit down for a few minutes, I could lay it out for you.”

“Where? I’ve got a meeting across the street in”—I raised my wrist to check my watch — “twenty minutes.”

It was a lie. I just wanted to put a time limit on this conversation in case it wasn’t to my liking. I was planning to go across the street to the district attorney’s office, but I had no appointment. I intended to talk my way in.

“Give me ten minutes,” the writer said.

“Do you need coffee?” I asked.

“Not if you don’t.”

“Okay, let’s go into one of the attorney rooms down the hall here. That would be quickest and quietest.”

“Lead the way.”

I started down the hall, then stopped.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jack McEvoy,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

He held out his hand and I shook it. He had a strong grip and met my eye without hesitation. My impression at that moment was that this might be the start of a good thing.

3

The attorney rooms in the federal courthouse were tiny and furnished with only a small table and four chairs. They were designed for lawyers to confer with clients and witnesses before entering court. I found one that was empty and slid the red OCCUPIED placard across the AVAILABLE sign. I opened the door and signaled McEvoy in first. We sat on opposite sides of the table. I took a notebook out of my briefcase and started the meeting by asking him to spell his last name. He did.

“That name and the spelling are familiar,” I said. “Should I know your work?”

“I’ve published three nonfiction books in the past twenty or so years,” McEvoy said. “They hit bestseller lists. Briefly. But they all have L.A. connections.”

“What are the titles?”

“The Poet was my first one. It was about the internet.”

He paused in case I was going to exclaim that I’d loved the book. I said nothing.

“Uh, then a lot of years went by before I did a book called The Scarecrow,” he continued. “That was about data mining. And then my last book was called Fair Warning. That was a few years ago. It was about the unregulated DNA industry.”

I nodded.

“Fair Warning. Yes, I remember that,” I said. “That was the one about the killer who used DNA to find his victims. I know some of the attorneys who were mentioned in that one.”

“All my books deal with technological advances,” McEvoy said. “Advances that were taken advantage of by criminals and other unscrupulous people.”

“And it was like a magazine or something, right? Fair Warning, I mean.”

“It was based on a news site focused on consumer protection, but the owner-editor retired and it shut down. But I bought the brand rights to the name. Now it’s a Substack that I write.”

“Of course you have a Substack. It’s called Fair Warning?”

“That’s right. It’s about the follies of technology. The Substack, I mean.”

I nodded and studied him. I was more than interested but didn’t want to show it yet.

“I’m beginning to see why you want to be involved in this case,” I said.

“I thought you would,” he said.

“So, what is this case to you? A Substack or a book?”

“It could be both,” he replied without hesitation. “And a podcast. And a movie. Your case encapsulates everything I’ve been researching and writing about generative artificial intelligence. There are new lawsuits filed against AI systems every week, but this is the case that is going to trial, it seems. I think it brings everything together, the good and bad of this world-changing technology. It’s a home run, if you ask me.”

“Okay, so you get a home run out of it. What does my client get?”

“My research. My expertise. I have connections that I think can help you. Bring me inside the case and let me work for you. I won’t write a word about it until there’s a verdict.”

I tried to keep a skeptical look on my face, but what McEvoy didn’t know was that I was drowning. I was overwhelmed by discovery and lacked the wherewithal and expertise to deal with it. By that, I mean I lacked time and understanding. Much of the science sailed over my head. It left me scared that I would stumble into trial uninformed and unready.

I already had an investigator, and he was great at finding witnesses and conducting field investigations. But he was not great at wading through terabytes of code and Silicon Valley memos. It had recently dawned on me that I was in over my head with this case. In the courtroom I was a killer, but I needed weapons to kill with. What McEvoy was presenting to me seemed like a lifeline thrown to a drowning man. I was trying not to give anything away but knew that if I let McEvoy spend just fifteen minutes at the warehouse, he would understand my situation and how dire it was.

“Let you work for me — what does that mean?” I asked. “I took this case on a contingency basis. I don’t win, I don’t get paid. Right now, there’s no money for a researcher.”

“I’m not asking to be paid,” McEvoy said. “Just let me inside the wire. Let me be a fly on the wall. I help you and you help me.”

“I have to talk to my client.”

“Of course.”

“How do I reach you?”

McEvoy was ready with a business card. I noticed that the logo for his Substack underlined its focus: The ai in Fair Warning was embossed in red.

Tidalwaiv did the same thing with their logo, though the ai in Tidalwaiv was in a soothing blue tone. I put the card in my pocket and told McEvoy that I’d think about his proposition and be in touch after discussing it with Brenda Randolph.

4

The entrance to the CCB was across the street and down a half block from the federal courthouse. On my way, I called my investigator, Cisco Wojciechowski, who had stuck with me during the transition from criminal to civil practice even though there was a steep drop-off in the work I required from him. He answered the phone with a question instead of a greeting.

“How’d we do?”

“The judge took both motions under advisement and will issue her rulings Monday.”

“Damn. You want me to call Patel? He was hoping to know today.”

“No, I’ll call him. I want you to run somebody down for me.”

“A witness?”

“No, a writer. Jack McEvoy. He wants to help us.”

“Help us how?”

“He writes about technology. Has a blog or a Substack or whatever you call it these days. He’s also written books. He wants to be a fly on the wall — our wall — and then write a book about the case, with the larger story being about unchecked AI. He says in exchange, he’ll be part of the team and help us weed through the discovery download.”

“Mick, you really want to bring a stranger into this? That’s risky.”

I was at Temple Street, waiting to cross, and I did my usual turnaround to see if anyone was behind me. Tidalwaiv had massive resources in this fight and billions at stake. The company’s founder, Victor Wendt, had promised stockholders at the last board meeting that this case would go away quietly and inexpensively. But here I was, pushing it toward trial. I constantly felt that I was being watched.

There was no one behind me. At least no one that I could see.

“That’s why I want you to check him out,” I said. “He’s got three books he said were all bestsellers.”

“You got the titles?” Cisco asked.

“I just remember the last one. Fair Warning. That’s also the name of his—”

“Oh, I know this guy. Lorna loves his stuff.”

Lorna was my office manager. She was also Cisco’s wife and my ex-wife. But somehow it worked.

“There you go,” I said. “I just want to know if I can trust him enough to bring him inside the wire. We’re drowning in technical discovery. It would help to have another pair of eyes, especially if he truly knows his shit.”

“I’m on it,” Cisco said. “Where are you headed now?”

“The CCB to see if I can get in to see Maggie.”

“You got the black box with you?”

“I have it.”

“A homecoming in criminal court. Good luck with that.”

“I’m probably going to need it.”

I disconnected and headed across Temple to the main entrance of the Criminal Courts Building. There were a lot of things I missed about the place, but the elevators were not one of them. They were just as slow and crowded as I remembered from the years I had toiled in this building’s hallways and courtrooms. Once I was through the security checkpoint and metal detector — during which I had to explain what the black box in my briefcase was — it took me almost half an hour to get up to the sixteenth floor and the office of the Los Angeles County district attorney. I went to the reception counter, identified myself, and explained that I had no appointment but wished to see the district attorney. I said I wanted to talk to her about her daughter because I knew that would get me in.

The seats in the waiting area were plastic on chrome legs, a style that had gone out of fashion a couple of decades earlier. But they had endured, like most of the furnishings of the building, and did the job. I was in one of those chairs for twenty minutes before I was invited back by the receptionist. This moved me to another waiting room outside the DA’s actual office. This time, the chair was a little more comfortable and even had a cushion, threadbare though it was. And this time the wait was only ten minutes. I was granted entrance to the inner sanctum, where my first ex-wife, Maggie McPherson, fresh from her installment as the duly elected DA, sat at a large desk with a row of flags lining the wall behind her. She had won the office in a special election. The previous DA had resigned abruptly after the Los Angeles Times unearthed and published a series of texts he had written that exposed his racial biases.

I spread my arms, holding up my briefcase.

“Wow,” I said. “Maggie McFierce on top of the world.”

“Well, on top of this world, maybe,” she said. “I was wondering when you would just pop in, although using our daughter to sleaze your way in was a little unexpected.”

“Sleaze my way in? All I said was I wanted to talk to you about her. How is she doing?”

“As far as I know, she’s doing good.”

“Well, I wish she were doing good back here at home.”

“She’s just taking a gap year. She was very helpful during the campaign and earned the break, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Good, then you can pay her bills, since you’re the only one around here with a steady paycheck.”

Our daughter, Hayley, with a very expensive law degree from USC in her back pocket, had decided — after growing up with two lawyers for parents — that she was not sure she actually wanted to practice law. She was trying to find herself while riding waves in Hawaii with the help of a boyfriend who had no discernible income but an impressive tan and an even more impressive collection of surfboards.

“Hey, I’m not the one who taught her how to surf,” Maggie said. “That’s on you. I’m also not the one who decided to give up a lucrative criminal defense practice at the height of my career.”

“Yeah, well, thanks for the reminders,” I said. “Happy new year to you too.”

“And to you. I see you’ve got your briefcase. That tells me this might be more than a social visit.”

Maggie was always perceptive when it came to me. I couldn’t ever see her without lamenting the fact that we hadn’t gone the distance. She was wearing a conservative blue business suit with the blouse buttoned to the neck. Her dark curls had a few touches of gray in them. She had aged beautifully in the thirty years I had known her.

“Never could get anything by you,” I said. “Yes, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

“Have a seat,” she said. “I make no promises I won’t keep.”

She smiled. That was one of her campaign slogans.

I pulled out one of the chairs in front of her desk and sat down, putting my briefcase on the floor. The flags behind her were lined up so tightly, they looked like one curtain of silken colors.

“That’s a lot of flags,” I said.

“One for every country of origin of our constituency,” she said.

“You might have to get rid of a few of those if Trump deports everybody like he’s saying.” The new president had won the election the same night Maggie had. His campaign was built on a promise to eliminate illegal immigration. As Maggie was elected as a nonpartisan candidate, she did not take the political bait.

“So, what’s your ask, Mickey?”

“Is that all I am now, an ask?”

“Well, like I said, I assume it’s why you’re here.”

“I was also a platinum-level contributor to the campaign.”

“You were, and I very much appreciate that. So, just tell me, what’s going on?”

“I suppose you are reviewing cases and getting up to speed on things.”

“I am, and I haven’t seen any with your name attached as counselor for the defense.”

“And I hope it stays that way. Besides, the conflict of interest with you being DA would certainly cause your office and mine headaches we don’t need. But there is a case being handled by your office in juvie court that cuts across one of my cases in civil.”

She nodded.

“The Aaron Colton case,” she said. “I spent an hour with Will Owensby on it before the holiday break.”

That surprised me. She had taken office immediately after the election, but that was less than two months ago. There had been holiday breaks, staffing decisions to make, and a mountain of other cases to get current on, so I had hoped she wasn’t prepped on the case yet. It would have been easier to point her in the direction I wanted her to go if she hadn’t been knowledgeable about the inner workings of the case, and I realized my path to success was going to be steep.

“Owensby is a good lawyer,” I said. “But he’s a stickler, you know what I mean?”

“You mean he wants to stick to the rules of the game?” Maggie asked.

“What I’m saying is he’s focused on his case, which is fine. But he’s not looking at the bigger picture.”

“Which is...”

“Let’s call it a fuller justice.”

“I have to say, he came in here and talked about the case for an hour, and your name never came up. I know about your civil case because I saw it on the news. But it has nothing to do with our criminal case.”

“What? No, that’s wrong. It has everything to do with your case. Aaron Colton killed my client’s daughter because of an AI chatbot that went rogue. You’re putting the kid away, but what about the company that made the app with no thought about the consequences of unleashing it on impressionable minds? That’s the bigger crime here, Mags. You have to see that.”

Maggie looked down at her hands folded on her desk. It was a move I had seen many times. She looked as if she were waiting out a storm — that storm being me. When she finally spoke, it was in an even tone that I also recognized from a thousand skirmishes before this one.

“So, what do you want, Mickey?”

“I want you to do the right thing. I want access to the kid’s computer.”

She shook her head emphatically.

“No, that’s not going to happen,” she said. “First, this is a juvenile case, and second, it’s not even close to being adjudicated. We don’t share evidence in open cases whether it involves a juvenile or not.”

“I need to show what happened and why to make my case,” I said.

“Then delay your case, and once my office is finished with Colton, we can talk about what I can share.”

“It’s not that simple. Your case is going to run on for years. You’ve got the ongoing psychological evaluation and then the competency hearing. After that, you’ll have to decide whether to kick it up to adult court, and the case will just go on and on. But time is of the essence here. That company is selling this app to people all around the world. Kids, Maggie. Victor Wendt, the company’s founder, says he sees a time when every kid has an AI companion, like they’re Barbie dolls. This will happen again, Maggie, and my case — not yours — is the best shot at stopping it.”

Maggie shook her head, a dismissive gesture I had seen too many times to count.

“Spoken like a champion of the people,” she said. “And I don’t suppose there’s going to be a fat check for damages at the end of your great public-service trial, is there?”

“It’s not about money,” I said. “If it were, we’d have settled already. The company’s offered seven figures to make this go away. But we don’t want it to go away and get swept under the rug. We want to stop this from happening again.”

“We?”

“My client. Brenda Randolph. She lost her sixteen-year-old daughter. Her only child, Mags. She doesn’t want anyone else to lose theirs. That’s what this case is about. It’s about changing the world for the better and making it safe for these kids.”

“That’s very eloquent. I seem to recall from the news that you filed this in federal court.”

“That’s right.”

“Who’s the judge?”

“Peggy Ruhlin.”

“So why aren’t you here with a subpoena from her? Either she already turned you down or — more likely — you want to get access to the kid’s computer on the sly so your opponent doesn’t know you have it.”

I had no response to that. She was a good lawyer and knew me well.

“Look, Mickey, I can’t do this,” she said. “I’m not going to get involved in one of your Lincoln Lawyer moves.”

“It’s not a move,” I said. “And by the way, I got rid of all but one of the Lincolns two years ago. The only one I kept is under a tarp in my warehouse.”

“Well, my hands are tied by the rule of law.”

“No, they’re not, Mags. You’re the district attorney for this county now. If you want to do the right thing, you can do the right thing.”

I pulled my briefcase onto my lap and opened it. I took out a black metal box about the size of a hardcover book and put it on her desk.

“What is that?” Maggie asked. “Don’t put that there.”

“I’m leaving it,” I said. “It’s an external hard drive. It holds up to twelve terabytes of data. You can download all the data from Aaron Colton’s laptop onto it and I’ll take it from there.”

I stood up.

“Mickey, don’t leave that here,” Maggie said. “It’s not going to happen.”

I headed for the office door, ignoring her command. As I opened it, I turned back and looked at her.

“It will happen if you do the right thing,” I said.

Then I walked out and closed the door behind me.

5

Judge Ruhlin delivered her rulings by email promptly at nine a.m. Monday. I was in the Arts District downtown at the warehouse where I had once stored a fleet of Lincolns and that I now used primarily for records storage and as an office. In terse rulings short on explanatory backup, the judge simply split the decision, giving both sides a win. She cleared the path for Rikki Patel to testify as a plaintiff’s witness in the case but allowed Tidalwaiv to keep its redactions to the discovery material, leaving me to decide whether or not to delay the trial by going with (and paying) a special master to review the thousands of documents and determine what should be removed from redaction. It was passing the buck. I had actually thought the opposite rulings would come, that I would lose Patel but get unredacted discovery. So I didn’t know how to react. If I had lost Patel, I would simply have sent Cisco out to find another person who’d witnessed the inner workings of the company. Going with a special master would delay the trial by months if not a year or more. And whether or not I chose to delay things, the rulings gave Tidalwaiv an opportunity to slow the case with their own appeal on the Patel decision.

McEvoy arrived at the warehouse promptly at ten a.m., as I’d instructed him in a text. I walked him back toward the office, but he stopped when he saw two people behind the mesh of a fenced-off area in one of the storage bays.

“Wait, is that a Faraday cage?” he asked.

“With this case, it’s an absolute necessity,” I said.

“That was going to be my first suggestion to you. Can I take a look?”

“Uh, be my guest.”

The cage was a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cube of chain link. Across the top was a crosshatch of wires supporting copper mesh that also draped down all four sides of the cage, preventing all manner of electronic intrusion. Inside was 144 square feet of workspace. The cage was ground zero for Randolph v. Tidalwaiv.

There was one entrance, through a curtain made of the same copper mesh. I held it open for McEvoy.

Cisco Wojciechowski and Lorna Taylor were standing in front of Big Bertha, Lorna’s name for the industrial-size printer I had leased for dealing with case-discovery materials. Two ten-foot-long tables on opposite sides of the cage held printed documents that were stacked according to category — system development, architecture, testing, and so on. On one of the tables, Lorna had set up a desktop computer with twin wide-screen monitors, a twelve-terabyte external drive, and no connection to the internet. Despite the warehouse’s alarms, cameras, and other protections, that hard drive went home with one of us every night in a locking Faraday bag.

After introducing McEvoy to the team, I explained all this to him.

“You’re going completely off the grid,” he said.

“Trying to,” Lorna said. “As much as we can.”

“Why?” McEvoy said. “Has there been an intrusion?”

“We’re trying to avoid that,” Lorna said.

“We’re taking no chances,” Cisco said.

He said it in a tone that suggested that McEvoy had asked a stupid question.

I walked over to the table with the computer and tapped a finger on the hard drive. It was a duplicate of the one I had left on Maggie McPherson’s desk the Friday before.

“This is what we got in discovery,” I said. “And I think we’d be fools not to consider that a company like Tidalwaiv will take any advantage they can in terms of gathering intel about the case against them.”

“You think it’s bugged,” McEvoy said.

“I think we need to assume, given what’s at stake in this case, that the opposition is desperate to know what we’re up to,” I said. “But let’s talk about that in my office. There are a few things I want to go over with you before we get further into anything.”

I held my hand toward the curtain and McEvoy started that way.

“Nice to meet you,” he said to Cisco and Lorna.

“Likewise,” Cisco said sullenly.

It was obvious that Cisco wasn’t convinced we needed McEvoy.

I walked McEvoy back to my office, which had been the dispatch room when the building was the operations center of a taxi company in the 1960s. After that, it was an artists’ co-op for half a century, and I’d bought it in a bankruptcy auction. The small room where I had a desk had an internal window that looked out on the rest of the warehouse, including the cage. It also had an old stand-up Mosler safe that was too heavy ever to be moved and a private bathroom with what appeared to be hundred-year-old fixtures.

I stepped behind the desk and pointed McEvoy to the chair on the other side.

“Have a seat,” I said as I sat down. “You asked about intrusion into the cage. We’re not so worried about that. I think we have that buttoned up pretty good, and one of us takes the external drive home every night. My main concern is bringing someone I can’t trust inside the wire.”

“Meaning me,” McEvoy said.

“Exactly. So I had Cisco spend most of the weekend running you down. I trust him and he’s very good at what he does. He’s been with me a lot of years, and he says you’re clean. He told me you even went to jail once for protecting a source.”

“Sixty-three days.”

“I’ve had days in jail too. Not fun. Anyway, before we go any further, I need you to sign a few documents that will make me feel okay about you being part of this and writing about it down the line.”

“Good. What do you want me to sign?”

I opened a drawer and brought out the three paper-clipped documents I had prepared Sunday while watching the football playoffs. I slid them across the desk.

“I’ve got a nondisclosure that’s pretty basic,” I said. “You can’t reveal anything you see or hear on this case until the trial reaches a conclusion by settlement or verdict.”

“Is settling a consideration?” McEvoy asked. “That would be anticlimactic. For a book, I mean.”

“Well, it’s not really my call. It’s my client’s decision, but she has turned down all offers so far because they don’t include what she wants more than money. She wants what I call a triple-A settlement: accountability, action, and apology.”

“I get two out of three. What action do you — or does she — want?”

“We want them to fix their damn product that got her daughter killed.”

“Right.”

I pointed to the three documents McEvoy had spread out on the desk in front of him.

“Then there is a personal declaration that you are not working in any capacity for Tidalwaiv,” I said.

McEvoy scoffed.

“Are you serious?” he said.

“Deadly serious,” I said. “This is my get-out-of-jail-free card. If it turns out you’re working as a double agent, this will get me a new trial.”

“Okay, fine. What’s the third one?”

“That’s about the book. I want to see the manuscript before you publish it.”

McEvoy was shaking his head before I finished the sentence.

“I can’t do that,” he said. “No journalist shows the subject of a story the story before it’s published. No good journalist, anyway.”

“You’re not a journalist anymore, Jack,” I said. “At least not here. You’re part of the plaintiff’s team now. I’m going to put you to work in the cage, and you will become part of the case. You’re an employee, and as your employer, I can demand access to and approval of work product. If you sign these documents, you will also be bound by attorney-client privilege, which extends beyond the verdict and judgment in this case. Both my client and I want to make sure you don’t violate that privilege.”

“Are you paying me?”

“Not now. When you sell the book, you get paid. Look, I’m not debating this. You want in on this case, sign the docs. If you don’t want to, let’s just shake hands and say it didn’t work out.”

McEvoy stared at the documents on the otherwise empty desk for a long moment.

“Can I have a lawyer look at these?” he finally asked.

“Sure,” I said. “I recommend it. But you’re not going in the cage until I have them signed and in the safe.”

I jerked a thumb over my shoulder at the Mosler in the corner. I did not tell him that the safe had come with the warehouse and was so old that the combination was lost to time and the locking mechanism was disabled.

“Fuck it,” McEvoy said. “Give me a pen.”

“You sure?” I asked. “You’re not going to be able to say later that I coerced you.”

I pointed up to the corner of the ceiling over the office door. McEvoy turned and looked up at the camera I’d had installed after taking over the space.

“Records sound too,” I said.

“Just give me a pen,” McEvoy said.

I opened a drawer and took out a blue felt-tip pen I used for signing contracts.

“I thought all writers carried pens,” I said.

“Well, I guess I left mine at home,” McEvoy said.

I handed the pen across the desk and watched as McEvoy scanned each page of each document and then signed and initialed where appropriate.

“Sort of ironic, isn’t it?” he said as he was signing.

“What is?” I asked.

“You making me sign an NDA while last week in court you were making NDAs sound like the instruments of corporate devils.”

“Yeah, well, that was in court. I don’t think we’ll ever get to court on this one.”

He finished signing the documents and slid them back across the desk to me. I squared them up in one stack and then swiveled my chair around to the Mosler. After turning the handle and pulling the heavy iron door open, I put them on a shelf that I assumed had once been stacked with cash for cabdrivers to make change with.

After closing the safe, I turned back to McEvoy.

“Welcome to the team,” I said.

McEvoy nodded and spread his arms wide.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“This case is going to be won or lost in discovery,” I said. “I want you in the cage. Work with Lorna. Tidalwaiv is hiding something in the redactions of the documents they turned over, I know it. If we find it, I think we win.”

6

I walked McEvoy back to the cage to leave him with Lorna. He looked at the stacks on the tables, all of them at least six inches high.

“Anyplace in particular you want me to start?” he asked.

“Lorna, which one is training and testing?” I asked.

“That one,” Lorna said. She pointed to the shortest stack.

“Start there,” I said. “Take notes. Look for flaws, look for shortcuts. Figure out what they’re hiding.”

“Sure,” McEvoy said. “Easy enough.”

I noted the sarcasm. McEvoy moved toward the table.

“Cisco, you’re with me,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“Where we going?” Cisco asked.

“To see Rikki Patel.”

“You sure you need me?”

“Yes, Cisco, let’s go.”

I went through the copper curtain and headed toward the warehouse door. I registered Cisco’s reluctance as concern about leaving Lorna with McEvoy. I didn’t address it until we were outside and at my car. I looked at him across the roof.

“You vetted him yourself and he came up clean,” I said. “So what’s the problem?”

“With McEvoy?” Cisco said. “No problem.”

“You don’t have to worry about Lorna. She can handle herself.”

“I know she can. But I still have to worry about her. That’s my job.”

“Your other job. Right now, I need you on this job.”

“Fine. I’m here. What’s the rush with Patel if the judge okayed him as a witness?”

“He hasn’t returned my calls all weekend or today. We’re going to see him and get him on tape before the Mason boys file a motion to stay the judge’s ruling while they appeal.”

I unlocked the car and we got in.

“Did you leave him a message about the ruling this morning?” Cisco asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But he hasn’t called me back. I hope the twins didn’t get to him and pay him off.”

“Mason and Mason? No, no way. He hates those guys and the company, says Tidalwaiv ruined his life. Said they blackballed him. He definitely wants payback. Wants his day in court. After you win this case, he wants to hire you to sue Victor Wendt personally as well as the company.”

“If he likes me so much, then why isn’t he calling me back?”

“I don’t know, man. Last time we spoke, he was talking about moving back up north to try the job market up there again. But he promised to let me know if he made the move.”

“So what was his last known address down here?”

“Venice Beach.”

Cisco was too big for the car, and we were looking at a minimum thirty-minute drive out to the beach. He was an ex-biker and didn’t bother to disguise it — thick shoulders and biceps on a six-four frame. These days I was driving a Chevy Bolt. It was small and cozy, and the top of Cisco’s head brushed the ceiling. The car was a comedown in space and comfort from a chauffeured Lincoln Navigator, but on the other side of the ledger, I hadn’t been at a gas station in fifteen months. We took the 10 out west. Every time I glanced over at Cisco, he was looking at the camera feeds from the warehouse on his phone.

“I’ve never seen you like this,” I finally said. “What is your problem with the writer?”

“My problem is the guy has a track record of involvement with women he works with, okay?” Cisco replied.

“So what, man? You don’t trust Lorna?”

“I trust her. It’s him I don’t trust.”

“Lorna makes good choices. You don’t have to worry. Besides, you have six inches and about a hundred pounds on the guy — he’s not going to try something. You gotta let it go so your mind is focused on the case. I’m serious. We can’t fuck this up.”

“All right, all right. I’m focused. You don’t have to worry about me, Mick. I’m fucking focused.”

“Good. Where in Venice are we going?”

“He’s at twenty-five Breeze. It’s one of the walk streets off Pacific. Good luck finding a parking space.”

“At least we’re not in a Navigator. That boat was hard to park anywhere.”

“I wish we were in the Navigator. I’d at least be able to fit.”

It took almost forty minutes in traffic to get there, and true to Cisco’s concern, there was no parking to be had anywhere near Breeze Avenue. I finally gave up and parked in a beach lot off Speedway. We legged it five blocks back to Patel’s bungalow, which was in a neighborhood where the houses faced each other across a paved walkway and no vehicles were allowed.

As we walked down Breeze, I got a text from Lorna.

“Shit,” I said when I’d read it.

“What is it?” Cisco said.

“The Masons already filed an appeal and Ruhlin wants to hear arguments at three this afternoon on their request for a stay.”

“So we can’t talk to Patel?”

“Technically, no. But I’d turned my phone off and didn’t get the text from Lorna.”

I did just that as we approached 25 Breeze.

The house was behind a line of unkempt jasmine bushes that spilled over a short perimeter fence. Past an unlocked half gate were the steps of a small bungalow with a full covered porch. The wood decking, long exposed to sea air, creaked and sagged under our combined weight of four hundred — plus pounds. Before we even knocked on the door, Cisco made an eerie observation.

“Somebody’s dead.”

“What?”

“You smell that?”

“Yeah, that’s the jasmine.”

“That ain’t jasmine, Mick. We open this door and you’ll get it.”

He looked over at the porch’s furnishings. There was a cushioned couch, two chairs, and a low table. It was set up like an outdoor living room. There were decorative pillows on the couch, and Cisco grabbed two of them and tossed one to me.

“Use that.”

“For what?”

“The smell.”

He approached the front door. There was a glass inset in the upper half. He cupped his hands over his eyes and leaned toward the glass, looking past the reflection of outside light. It was dark inside.

“There’s a note,” he said. “On the floor.”

I stepped up next to him and looked through the glass. There was a loose piece of paper on the floor, waiting for whoever entered.

“Can you make out what it says?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Cisco said. “Says ‘rear bedroom.’ It came from a printer.”

“That’s it? Just ‘rear bedroom’?”

“That’s it.”

I knocked on the glass.

“Nobody’s going to answer, Mick,” Cisco said.

He seemed sure. I knocked again anyway. Cisco didn’t wait for a response. He tried the door handle, a brass loop with a thumb lever below a dead bolt. It was unlocked, and he pushed the door open. It swept the note on the entry rug to the side.

Then the odor hit us fully. I was immediately revolted by the smell of death. I almost gagged. In unison, we held our pillows up to our mouths and noses.

“Jesus,” I said.

“Told you,” Cisco said.

Our voices were muffled. I stepped into the house.

“Wait,” Cisco said. “What are we doing?”

“We’re going in,” I said. “We’re going to find out who’s dead.”

“You sure? Maybe we should just call the cops?”

“Don’t worry, we will.”

I stepped farther in and he followed. There was a dining room to the left with a table holding a desktop computer and a small printer. Documents in unkempt stacks surrounded it.

On the right was a small living room with a fireplace. A darkened hallway led to the back of the house, and Cisco went first, using his elbow to hit a wall switch that turned on the ceiling lights. He passed an archway on the left that led into the kitchen, and an open door on the right that led to a small bedroom. At the end of the hall was a doorway to a bathroom and an open door to a large bedroom. The primary. We entered, and it was dark because blackout curtains had been pulled across the windows. I could see the shape of someone sitting up in the bed, silhouetted against a blond-wood headboard.

“Hello?” I said.

No reply.

Cisco used his elbow again to turn on a ceiling light, this one above the bed. We then saw the body clearly. A man of about thirty with dark hair sitting up, lower body under the covers. He was obviously dead, eyes slitted. A dark liquid, now dried, had flowed from his nose and mouth onto a green T-shirt. The hands were above the covers and on his lap. His left hand held a cell phone.

I had never met Rikki Patel. He’d called me following the filing of the Tidalwaiv suit, and I sent Cisco to do the preliminary interview and judge whether he could be a credible witness. Once that was confirmed, I’d had one or two calls with him but kept my distance because of discovery concerns. I didn’t want to give Tidalwaiv a heads-up that I was recruiting him to testify until I had to submit my first list of witnesses.

“Is that Rikki Patel?” I asked.

“It’s him,” Cisco said.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

Cisco stepped up to the bed table next to the body. He pulled out his phone, turned on the light, and focused it on the table, where there was an open amber-colored prescription bottle. He bent down close to it to try to read the label without touching it.

“OxyContin,” he said. “Prescribed by a Dr. Patel, DDS. A dentist. It’s empty.”

“His father?” I asked.

“Who knows? Patel is like the Indian version of Smith.”

Cisco turned off his light and pocketed his phone. He turned away from the body to me.

“I guess we call the cops now,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said. “You see any note?”

My mind was racing with thoughts about what Patel’s death meant to my case. I knew that his death was a tragedy for him and his loved ones, but I couldn’t help considering the impact on the upcoming trial.

“Uh, no note,” Cisco said. “Other than the one at the door. But he might’ve been texting somebody.”

I looked at the phone in the dead man’s hand. The screen was up in a position that suggested he’d been looking down at the device at the end.

“We have to look at that phone,” I said.

“Mick, you don’t want to fuck around with a possible crime scene,” Cisco said. “It’s pretty obvious what happened here, but you don’t want this to come back at you. We need to call the cops.”

“I told you, we will.”

“Don’t do this, Mick. Let’s just back the fuck out of here and call the cops.”

I didn’t answer him. I looked around and saw a box of tissues on the bed within reach of Patel. I pulled out two.

“What are you doing?” Cisco asked.

“I just want to see what he was doing,” I said.

I came back around the bed, passed Cisco, and went to the dead man’s side. Using a tissue to guard my fingers, I pulled the phone from Patel’s grasp.

“Jesus, Mick,” Cisco said.

I ignored him and used a finger wrapped in tissue to depress the button on the side of the phone. Nothing happened. The screen remained black. The battery was dead.

“Damn.”

“Just put it back, Mick. We go out and call the cops like the good citizens we are.”

I carefully put the phone back where it had been.

“Let’s look around,” I said.

I headed down the hallway to the front of the house. Cisco followed but cut through the kitchen while I went to the dining room. Using the tissue, I pushed around the stacks of documents on either side of the computer. They were all unpaid bills, final notices, and letters from collection agencies for power, cable, Wi-Fi, car payments, insurance, and rent. At the bottom of one stack was an eviction notice that had been served by the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office just before Christmas. It gave Patel thirty days to vacate the property. I knew from handling evictions in the past that you could go nearly a year without paying rent before a landlord finally had you physically evicted. Patel was obviously at the end of the line.

“The side door is locked with a dead bolt. Nobody went out that way.”

I turned. Cisco had come from the kitchen. He was holding the pillow from the porch at his side, as the odor of death seemed far less intrusive at the front of the house. I had kept my pillow in place, hoping it would help me avoid retching. I turned back to the table and used a tissue-clad finger to touch the space bar on the computer keyboard. The screen lit up, but there was an empty password window guarding entry. I was not going to be able to see what Rikki Patel’s last work and messages were.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Call the cops, right?” Cisco said.

“Outside.”

“I guess you can cancel that court hearing today.”

“No way. I’m going to be there. On the day the judge rules Patel can be a witness, he ends up dead? I’m going to have something to say about that.”

“Mick, the guy’s been dead for days. You saw the body, you smelled it. That’s why you couldn’t reach him over the weekend. Besides, it’s an obvious suicide. The side door is locked from the inside and nobody could have left that note on the floor and then gone out the front.”

I nodded, but not in agreement.

“So?” I said. “The judge won’t know that. And neither will the media.”

7

Cisco and I waited by the property’s front gate. I was hoping the sea air would chase the smell of death out of my nose. It was a losing battle.

The first to respond to my call to the LAPD were two patrol officers from Pacific Division. The female took information from me while her male counterpart went into the house to confirm the death. When he came out, he was talking into the radio mic on his shoulder, asking for a supervisor to arrive on scene. Another ten minutes passed before a patrol sergeant appeared and went inside the house to see things for himself. When he exited, he came directly to me.

“You found the body?” he asked.

“My investigator and I did, yes,” I said. I noticed that his nameplate said FINLEY.

“‘Investigator’?” he said.

“I’m an attorney,” I said. “Dennis Wojciechowski is my investigator. The man in there was supposed to be a witness in a civil lawsuit I’m involved with. We were supposed to take his deposition today.”

Finley reared his head in recognition.

“You’re the Lincoln Lawyer guy, right? I’ve seen your billboards.”

The Lincoln legacy — I’d never live it down.

“Not anymore,” I said. “I don’t do criminal. Are the detectives on the way? I’d like to speak to them.”

“I’m signing off on this as a self-inflicted suicide,” Finley said. “No need to call in detectives.”

I didn’t bother mentioning that suicide meant that it was self-inflicted.

“You have the authority to make that call?” I asked.

“I do, yes,” Finley said. “No sign of foul play, empty pill bottle, pending eviction. The coroner’s office will make the final call on the toxicology, and they’re on the way. All our reports will go to the detective bureau for review. But right now, we don’t need to bother the detectives with this.”

“Well, Sergeant, I am going to have to insist that you do. This man was set to be a key witness in an upcoming civil trial where billions of dollars will be at stake, and there is a corporation that would do anything to subvert the cause of justice.”

Finley smiled, glanced around him, and understood he now had an audience — his two underlings. He turned his attention back to me.

“That’s a nice speech,” he said. “But it doesn’t change my call on this. The coroner’s investigator will take a look and I’m sure he will agree. Now, we have your statement and your information and we’ll be in touch if we need to be in touch. You and your investigator can go now, sir. Have a nice day.”

He turned away to confer with the two other cops. I looked at Cisco and shook my head.

“There is a hearing today in federal court,” I said loudly but calmly. “It’s about this witness. There will be media there. A lot of media — the case has already drawn national interest, and we’re not even in trial yet. When I report that there has been no investigation by the LAPD of this man’s death, that will be news, and your decision here will end up being questioned by your boss and his boss and his boss all the way up the line to the chief of police. Just remember, I warned you.”

Finley turned around and put his hands on his hips as he stared at me, clearly annoyed at getting pushback on his command decision. Cisco put a hand on my arm and gave it a tug.

“Come on, Mick,” he said. “We should go.”

I shook his hand off as Finley stepped back to me.

“Sir, did you have permission to enter this home?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Oh, is that how you want to go?” I said. “You’re going to get me for trespassing? You really want to dig yourself in that deep, Sergeant Finley?”

“What I want, sir, is for you to leave these premises,” Finley said. “While you still can.”

“Don’t worry, Sergeant, we’re leaving,” Cisco said.

He pulled again on my arm, but I held my ground and pointed at the front door of the house.

“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving until I know this man’s death is going to be properly investigated. By detectives, not patrol officers.”

Finley smiled.

“Okay, you want an investigation, you’ll get an investigation,” he said. “We’ll investigate you. Officer Dance, put the Lincoln Lawyer in the back seat of your car.”

Dance was the female officer. She stepped toward me.

“Do I cuff him, Sarge?” she asked.

“I don’t think we need to do that,” Finley said. “He’s going to cooperate. Just put him in the car and we’ll get to him when we get to him.”

“This way, sir,” Dance said. She pointed toward the walkway with one hand while taking my arm with the other.

“This is bullshit,” I said. “If you put me in the car, you are arresting me, and you’re going to answer to a federal judge for that.”

“Let’s go, sir,” Dance insisted.

“Mick, who do you want me to call?” Cisco said.

“Call Judge Ruhlin’s clerk,” I said over my shoulder. “Tell them I’m being detained illegally by police, and I need Peggy — I mean, the judge — to issue a show-cause order against LAPD sergeant Finley, Pacific Division. Tell her that otherwise, I won’t make the hearing today.”

I stopped my resistance and let Dance lead me by the arm through the gate. We reached the walkway before Finley called her name.

“Dance, bring him back here,” he said.

Dance and I did a pirouette.

“He’s finally being smart,” I whispered to her.

She didn’t respond. We walked back through the gate and right up to Finley.

“Okay, Dance,” he said. “Why don’t you go out there to Pacific and flag down the coroner’s van.”

“Yes, sir,” Dance said.

She turned to follow the order. Finley took a step closer to me so he would not be overheard by Dance’s partner, who was standing with Cisco by the gate.

“What am I going to do with you, Lincoln?” he said.

I knew by the question and tone that he was going to capitulate. He’d finally seen that the path forward for him was fraught with pitfalls if he insisted on the temporary fulfillment of putting me in my place. Maybe that was why he was a supervisor. My part of the unspoken bargain was to act like he hadn’t blinked. I knew just what to give him to allow him to save face and get me what I wanted.

“Did you see the name of the doctor on the pill bottle?” I asked.

“I didn’t look,” Finley said.

“Same name as the man in the bed. I mean, I’m not a detective, but it seemed kind of hinky to me.”

Finley nodded and turned to the remaining patrol officer.

“Okay, we’ve got some new information,” he said. “Johnson, let’s tape this off and preserve the scene. I’ll call West Bureau and get somebody out here to take a look inside.”

Johnson turned and headed toward the gate, presumably to get a roll of crime scene tape from the patrol wagon. That left me with Finley.

“Happy now, Counselor?” he asked.

“I’m happy the pros are going to take a look at it, yes,” I said. “But I’m not happy I lost my witness.”

“Well, you’re going to have to stay here and talk to the pros about this big case of yours.”

“Not a problem.”

Finley turned away to make the callout to detectives on his radio. I walked over to Cisco to wait.

“What the fuck, Mick,” he whispered. “You almost got arrested over what? The guy did himself. You were in the house. It was obvious.”

I checked Finley to make sure he was not within earshot. He was up on the porch talking into his radio by the front door. I could not hear him and he could not hear me.

“We need an investigation,” I said.

“Why?” Cisco said. “It’s gonna come back suicide. The guy downed a bottle of Oxy.”

“Doesn’t matter how it comes back.”

“Why?”

“Because what matters is that it’s being investigated.”

Cisco stared at me for a long moment before I could see understanding come into his eyes. He slowly nodded his head.

8

The judge was late for the emergency hearing she had scheduled. We — the attorneys — waited silently at our tables. I had nothing to say to the Masons and they had nothing to say to me. I had informed my client of the hearing but she was unable to get away from her job at the lab on short notice. And so I sat alone. In the first row of the gallery, there were three reporters, one print and two TV, all of whom had gotten an anonymous tip about the hearing from Lorna. This allowed me to be insulated from any accusation of setting in motion a news flash unfavorable to the defense. McEvoy had stepped away from his work in the cage to watch from the back row, where he sat next to Cisco.

At 4:15 Judge Ruhlin finally emerged from chambers, took the bench, and got down to business with no explanation for her delay. Federal judges were like that. They rarely had to bother explaining their actions or rulings.

“All right,” the judge said. “We’re back on the record in Randolph versus Tidalwaiv, and we have a motion from the defense to stay my ruling of this morning. Misters Mason, would one of you state your argument for a stay?”

Marcus went toward the lectern, but before he got there, I stood up.

“Your Honor, could I be heard?” I said. “I believe I have information that has significant impact on this hearing and the motion from the defense.”

Ruhlin looked at me for a long moment, showing a flash of annoyance, before responding.

“Very well, Mr. Haller,” she said. “You shall be heard.”

I moved to the lectern, forcing Marcus Mason to step back to his table. I gave him a wink from the eye the judge couldn’t see. He stayed standing, ready to object to whatever I was about to say.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” I said. “And good afternoon. Unfortunately, I have rather disturbing and sad news to deliver to the court. It appears that on the very morning that the court ruled that Rikki Patel could serve as a witness in this trial, his life was cut short. His death is the subject of a homicide investigation being conducted by the Los Angeles—”

“Objection!” Marcus Mason called out.

“—Police Department,” I continued. “There is no need for this hearing, Judge, because my key witness has died under highly suspicious circumstances. The outcome—”

“Objection!” Marcus shrieked again.

“—of the investigation will undoubtedly shed light on the lengths that Tidal—”

“Okay, stop,” Ruhlin said. “Everyone, just hold on.”

She signaled her clerk to the side of the bench. Ruhlin rolled her chair over and whispered to him. He then left the courtroom through the door to chambers and Ruhlin rolled back into position.

“Okay, we’re going to move to chambers to discuss this further,” she said.

“Your Honor, I object to that,” I said. “This is a serious matter and it should be discussed in public.”

“Your Honor,” Marcus Mason said, “plaintiff’s counsel is once again looking to air outrageous claims to the assembled media in hopes that he will taint the—”

“Enough!” Ruhlin boomed from the bench. “Both of you. Enough. My clerk is just clearing documents from another case from view in chambers and then we will convene there to continue this. Andrew will bring you in when we’re ready.”

With that, she left the bench and went through the door to her chambers.

Marcus Mason immediately moved toward me at the lectern and whispered forcefully. “This is bullshit,” he said. “And you’re bullshit.”

“Sure, Marcus,” I said. “Whatever you say.”

“What happened with Patel has nothing to do with this case!”

“Yeah? I hope you can convince a jury of that.”

I left him there and went back to my table, but before I could sit down, one of the reporters, a TV guy who had been around for decades, jumping from station to station in the local market, stood up at the rail and signaled to me.

“Is what you just said true?” he asked. “There’s a murder of a witness?”

“I didn’t use the word murder,” I said. “And I would never lie to a federal judge.”

I turned back to my table and saw Andrew, the clerk, standing at the door that led to the judge’s chambers.

“The judge will see you now,” he said.

The Masons were already on the move. I fell in behind them and we wound our way through the clerk’s corral and through the door into a short hallway that led to Judge Ruhlin’s private chambers. The judge was seated at a round table in front of a floor-to-ceiling wall of shelves containing leather-bound copies of US codes and laws. The volumes were strictly decor, since everything could easily be found and read online. In the corner behind her, the court stenographer sat poised to record the in camera session.

“Gentlemen, sit down,” she ordered. “Mr. Haller, I want you in that seat.”

She pointed to the chair directly across the table from her. She would be flanked by the Masons, but her eyes would be on me.

“We are still on the record,” Ruhlin said. “But now that we are out of earshot of the media, there is no need for posturing or playing to the audience. Mr. Haller, tell us what you know and how you know it.”

I cleared my throat to gain a couple extra seconds to compose a response.

“Your Honor,” I began, “I received your ruling on the motion regarding Mr. Patel this morning by email, as I am sure defense counsel did as well. It was my guess that defense counsel and Tidalwaiv would appeal the ruling and seek a stay preventing me from taking Mr. Patel’s deposition. It has been clear from the start that they did not want me talking to this man, because he knew of the company’s malfeasance and—”

“Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin interrupted, “I said no posturing. Tell me what you know and how you came to know it.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “So, knowing what their move was likely to be, and in an effort to beat the filing of that appeal, my investigator, Dennis Wojciechowski — do you want me to spell his name?”

“Not necessary,” Ruhlin said. “We have it. Go on.”

“Cisco and I went to Mr. Patel’s—”

“Wait, who is Cisco?” Ruhlin asked.

“Sorry, Cisco is Dennis,” I said. “It’s his nickname. Anyway, Dennis Wojciechowski and I went to Mr. Patel’s home in Venice this morning in an effort to talk to him before an appeal was filed and any sort of stay was granted.”

Marcus Mason shook his head condescendingly.

“Perfectly legal — some might even say it was good lawyering,” I said.

I threw a condescending look back at him.

“Anyway, we went there,” I continued. “We found his front door open, and after knocking and calling out his name, we went in. We searched through the house and found him in a bedroom. Dead. We then called the police. Two patrol officers and their sergeant responded to the call and went into the house. When they came out, the sergeant judged the death suspicious and called out a homicide team. We stayed till the investigators arrived and told them what we knew, including that Mr. Patel was a witness in this case. And then we left.”

No one said anything. I tried to fill the void.

“While we were waiting for the detectives, my office manager contacted me and told me the appeal had been filed and that the court had scheduled a hearing on the stay. I came directly from Venice to the courthouse once the detectives cleared us to leave the crime scene.”

Ruhlin twiddled the pen she had been writing occasional notes with during my telling of the story.

“I saw your investigator in the courtroom,” she said. “If I brought him in here, would he tell the same story?”

“Of course he would,” I said. “Do you want me to go get him?”

“I don’t think that will be necessary yet,” the judge said. “Did the investigators tell you what was suspicious about the death?”

“No, Judge,” I answered. “But I have their names if you wish to reach out to them.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary either,” Ruhlin said. “I have my clerk confirming that there is an investigation. Misters Mason, do you wish to be heard?”

Marcus Mason nodded emphatically.

“Yes, Your Honor. Mr. Haller tells a good story but he leaves out key details. First of all, when he says the door was open, we have it on good authority that that was not the case. The door was not open, as he claims, and he and his investigator broke into the house and—”

“That’s a lie,” I interjected. “When I said the door was open, I meant it was unlocked. We found it unlocked and went in when—”

“Mr. Haller, you had your turn,” the judge said. “Do not interrupt opposing counsel. Continue, Mr. Mason.”

“As I was saying,” Mason said, “Mr. Haller’s claims in the courtroom as well as in here are exaggerated. Yes, there is an investigation of Mr. Patel’s death, but it is being investigated as a suicide that occurred as long ago as last week — before there was even a hearing on whether Patel could be a witness. Mr. Haller knew this and yet he chose in open court, with the media as his audience, to spread a completely false narrative he hoped would be carried by the media into the jury pool.”

The judge flashed suspicious eyes at me.

“Mr. Haller?” she asked. “Mr. Mason makes a strong statement. Do you care to respond?”

I needed to quickly turn this around and get the focus off my motives and on Mason’s.

“Well, Judge, all I can say is that Mr. Mason has quite an imagination,” I said. “I am flattered that he believes I can think that quickly on my feet after finding a man dead in his bed and also that I can pinpoint time of death without conferring with a medical examiner. But what I am concerned about, Your Honor, is that Mr. Mason sure seems to have a lot more information than I have. I would ask the court to inquire of him what was inquired of me — that is, what does he know and how did he come to know it. I would also throw in when he came to know it.”

Marcus Mason didn’t need the judge to prompt him. He jumped in.

“Your Honor,” he began, “we have a solemn duty to our client to provide the best defense we possibly can against this frivolous lawsuit. In doing so, we became aware that Mr. Patel was a disgruntled ex-employee who might have been tempted by Mr. Haller or his investigator to break his nondisclosure agreement with Tidalwaiv. We have a large firm with a lot of resources. We used them to monitor Mr. Patel, and this is where our information came from.”

I shook my head. The judge leaned toward Marcus Mason.

“These resources, are they people or cameras or other devices?” she asked.

“Uh, both people and cameras,” Mason said.

“Did you put a camera inside Mr. Patel’s house?” Ruhlin pressed.

“No, Your Honor,” Mason said quickly. “Of course not. Never.”

“Your Honor?” I asked.

“Not yet, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin said. “Then, Mr. Mason, how did you accomplish your surveillance of Mr. Patel to the extent that you knew that his death was being investigated as a suicide?”

“Judge, we had a camera outside the house that recorded audio. It was not on his property. It was on a utility pole on public property. It picked up some of what the investigators discussed outside the house, and that information was forwarded to me. It was not illegal, and some might call it good lawyering.”

He threw my condescending look right back at me.

“I received the information just moments before the hearing began,” Mason said. “I would have brought the situation to the court’s attention at the start, but Mr. Haller jumped in before I could.”

The judge did another twiddle with the pen as she thought about everything she had just heard.

“Your Honor?” I tried again.

“Go ahead, Mr. Haller,” Ruhlin responded impatiently.

“Thank you. Your Honor, I would like opposing counsel to put on the record whether his firm or anyone working for his firm has me or anyone on my staff under similar surveillance.”

“That’s an outrageous claim, Your Honor,” Mason said angrily. “Tidalwaiv had every right to put a disgruntled and volatile ex-employee under surveillance for safety reasons alone. Mr. Haller is using this perfectly legitimate business practice to try to impugn opposing counsel.”

“That is a lot of words, Mr. Mason,” Ruhlin said. “But I did not hear you say that you do not have Mr. Haller or any of his staff under surveillance.”

“Sorry, Your Honor, I’m just very worked up,” Mason said. “The answer is no, we do not have Mr. Haller or any of his staff, or his client, for that matter, under surveillance of any kind. Period.”

“What about before this meeting?” I asked. “Have you been watching me or my investigator?”

“We have not,” Mason said. “There. It’s on the record.”

“Any other questions, Mr. Haller?” Ruhlin asked.

“I would like the record to reflect that the man Mr. Mason calls a disgruntled and volatile ex-employee, I would term a whistleblower,” I said. “But no, no other questions, Your Honor.”

I knew from Ruhlin’s countenance that I did not have to press the outrage button. She would handle that.

“Very well,” she said. “Gentlemen, I find the tactics and behaviors you exhibited outside the courtroom troubling and below the dignity of the court. I am putting both parties on notice that I will have little patience and show little sympathy should any of you or those working for you violate the law or the decorum of the US district court. That includes feeding the media unfounded claims or misinformation. This is not a street fight, gentlemen, and I do mean gentlemen. Be warned — conduct yourselves accordingly.”

Ruhlin got a chorus of Yes, Your Honors from the Masons and me. She then said the hearing was adjourned and dismissed us. We left silently and in single file behind the stenographer and headed back to the courtroom. I was last in line behind Marcus Mason.

“You looked a little stressed in there, Marcus,” I said to his back. “How’re you holding up?”

He didn’t turn around to look at me when he spoke.

“Fuck you, Haller,” he said.

“You sure that bow tie isn’t on too tight?” I said. “You don’t want to be cutting off blood flow to the brain. That’s not good.”

Now he stopped and turned. I almost walked into him.

“You know what you are, Haller?” he asked.

“I have a feeling you’re going to give me your take,” I said.

“You’re an asshole,” he said. “So fuck off.”

I smiled at him until he turned and went to catch up to the others.

9

When Cisco and I got back to the warehouse, I pulled the Bolt into one of the garage bays and lowered the door behind us.

“Cisco, you got your magic wand with you?” I asked.

“In one of my saddlebags,” he said.

The magic wand was a bug detector that picked up magnetic-field and radio-frequency signals.

“I want you to sweep the car and your Harley,” I said. “Then do the whole warehouse.”

“You think Marcus was lying to the judge about surveillance?” Cisco asked.

On the drive from the courthouse I had filled him in on what had been discussed in Judge Ruhlin’s chambers.

“I’m just not taking chances,” I said. “Mason spoke for himself and his firm. That doesn’t mean Tidalwaiv isn’t up to some shit.”

“Right,” Cisco said. “I’m on it.”

“And let’s cut the feeds on the cameras outside the cage. I know you won’t be able to watch Lorna and McEvoy, but too bad. She deserves your trust anyway.”

“I know. I know she does. What about the Wi-Fi in your office?”

“We’ll need that. But let’s turn it off until we do.”

“You got it.”

McEvoy had left the courtroom when I was called into chambers. I could see him already back in the cage. I first went to my office to check in with Lorna and put my jacket on a hook. She was in my seat at the desk, staring at the screen of her laptop. As I stripped off my tie, I came around the desk and saw that she was watching a news feed from KTLA Channel 5 and had her earbuds in.

“What’s up, Lorna?” I asked loudly.

She pulled out one of the earbuds.

“We’ve got some strong Santa Ana winds coming tomorrow,” she said. “They’re saying up to a hundred miles an hour.”

“No way,” I said. “That’s hurricane wind.”

“I know, but it’s what they’re saying. You want your desk?”

“No, I’m going to go talk to McEvoy.”

I hung my tie over the office’s doorknob.

“Did Cisco come back with you?” Lorna asked.

“Yeah, he’s out there checking my car,” I said.

“What happened?”

“Hopefully nothing. But he’s going to sweep it and the whole warehouse. The Masons knew we were at Patel’s house this morning. They claimed to the judge that they were watching him and not me, but I don’t believe it.”

Lorna, instead of being concerned that our opponents might have us under surveillance, thought about Patel. On our way back from Venice, Cisco had filled her in on our discovery of his death.

“That poor man,” she said. “Taking his own life...”

“If he did,” I said.

“What — you think he was murdered?”

“I don’t think anything until the cops confirm. But we are dealing with a company whose whole future is on the line, Lorna. They lose this case, and Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg — none of those guys will want to touch them. That makes it desperate times, and anything is possible. My advice is to look over your shoulder wherever you go until this is finished.”

“That’s not very comforting.”

“It is what it is. Stay close to Cisco.”

“I will.”

“Oh, and how are you doing with McEvoy?”

“Fine. He’s fine. Why? Are you thinking he’s a plant or something? I thought Cisco checked him out.”

“He did, so I’m not thinking anything. But right now, he’s in the cage by himself and is privy to every move we make. I’ll feel a lot better when it’s not a one-way street and he starts producing things we can use. I’m going to go check on him. You can keep the desk.”

I left the office and went through the copper curtain into the cage. McEvoy was at the computer terminal. I was too far away to see what he had on the screen.

“Hey,” he said.

“I saw you in the courtroom,” I said. “You didn’t stay. How’d you know the session wouldn’t continue after chambers?”

“Uh, actually I didn’t. But I wanted to get back to this. I think I might have already found something good.”

He nodded toward the screen.

“I could use something good,” I said. “Show me.”

McEvoy opened a folder on the screen that contained a list of files.

“Okay, so these are some of the emails that were in the discovery download,” he said. “They all went out to stakeholders on Project Clair, starting when it was in early development through training and testing. There’s forty-six of them. Most are innocuous and involve scheduling meetings and Zooms and so forth, but some are more important because they carry content about testing and project guardrails.”

“Just tell me you found the smoking gun,” I said.

“Uh, not quite, but maybe the smoking witness. Or at least someone who might take the place of Rikki Patel for you. Someone who might actually be better.”

“Okay. Who?”

McEvoy picked a file on the screen seemingly at random and opened it. It was an email, and I leaned down to read the subject line.

“What’s PC?” I asked.

“I’m pretty sure it means Project Clair, but that’s not what matters,” McEvoy said. “The content of the message doesn’t matter either. It’s the mailing list we’re looking at here.”

McEvoy clicked on the mailing-list link in the header and it displayed the email addresses of the sender and the recipients. It had been sent from PCM1@tidalwaiv.com to a list of more than a dozen people, all of whose emails ended in tidalwaiv.com. It was an internal message. Midway down the list, an email address had been blacked out by the redaction program.

“So we have these forty-six group emails regarding Project Clair and in all of them one email address is redacted,” McEvoy said.

“Any way of knowing if it’s the same email redacted each time?” I asked.

“Well, it always falls between these two emails, Isaacs and Muniz. So it is likely the same person, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure with the information we have here.”

“So it couldn’t have been Rikki Patel?”

“I don’t think so, because he was a coder, not a stakeholder, as far as I can determine, and these people are all upper management, and because this email list was generated in alphabetical order by last name. You see the names?”

I leaned down closer to the screen to read the names of the email recipients: Alpert, Bastin, Bernardo, Davidson, Harlan, Isaacs — the list was indeed in alphabetical order.

“Got it,” I said. “This is good. We need to find out who that is and why they were redacted.”

“I think I might know,” McEvoy said.

“Then tell me. Make my day.”

“Well, if you start with the idea that they’re trying to hide the identity of this person from you, then you have to assume the person has information or knowledge detrimental to the company’s cause, right? To me, that adds up to this person being separated from the company at some point after these emails. They left or were forced out. Maybe even fired.”

“That makes sense, but how the hell do we find out who it is? Patel could probably have told us, but he’s gone.”

“Right, so what I did was go to TheUncannyValley to look—”

“Wait. What’s the uncanny valley?”

“Well, in the digital world, the uncanny valley refers to the psychological leap humans must make in accepting robots and digital imaging as real — you know, like with a game or a chatbot. Robots and digital images that look almost but not quite human make people very uncomfortable, and if they’re uncomfortable, they don’t believe. That’s the uncanny valley. But what I’m talking about here is a social platform a lot like LinkedIn that is called TheUncannyValley — all one word. It’s for people who work in AI and in coding for digital games and so on. It’s essentially a social and business network with a résumé databank.”

“Got it. So you went to TheUncannyValley, and then what?”

“I did a basic search for former employees of Tidalwaiv. There were a couple dozen, including Rikki Patel, but only one whose last name falls between Isaacs and Muniz: Naomi Kitchens. Her résumé says she worked for Tidalwaiv for about two years beginning in late 2021. The public rollout of the Clair AI companion came at the end of ’22. And, get this, her résumé says she’s an ethicist.”

“An ethicist?”

“All these AI companies have them now. A lot of the time, it’s simply for window dressing, CYA stuff, but sometimes not. Technically, they’re supposed to monitor ethical standards and guardrails in the development of their AI programs and products.”

I felt a jolt of electricity go down my spine. I clapped McEvoy on the shoulder.

“Goddamn, McEvoy,” I said. “One day on the job and you find this? Did you search through the rest of the discovery for this Naomi Kitchens?”

“I did,” McEvoy said. “There’s nothing.”

“Twelve terabytes of documents and not one mention of Naomi Kitchens, the supposed ethicist on this project?”

“None.”

“They’ve completely scrubbed her from the discovery?”

“Looks that way. In documents dated after she left the company, you have a different person listed as the project ethicist — Francis Ross.”

“So they got rid of Kitchens for some reason, scrubbed her from all records, and then brought in Ross.”

“Looks like it. I guess you’ll be able to rake the Masons over the coals in court for this, right?”

“I could, but I probably won’t.”

“Why not? I thought you—”

“I don’t want them to know we know about her. Not yet. Which reminds me, there’s no Wi-Fi in the cage. How’d you search for her on TheUncannyValley?”

“On my phone. I stepped out to do it. I thought that would be okay.”

I thought about that for a moment. McEvoy’s finding Naomi Kitchens alleviated my suspicions about him, so it was unlikely that the Masons or Tidalwaiv knew about my decision to allow him to join the team. My main concern now was hiding from them that we had discovered the identity of the ethicist they were trying to hide from us.

“When you say you stepped out to search on your phone, how far did you step out?” I asked.

“Uh, I actually did it in the courtroom while we were waiting for the judge to come in,” McEvoy said. “Why, what are you worried about?”

“That they might have a sniffer here.”

“A sniffer? Really? That seems kind of extreme.”

“Believe me, Tidalwaiv will go to extremes to win this case. Any idea where Naomi Kitchens is now?”

“Yes, I found her. She’s up in Palo Alto teaching at Stanford, and one of her classes is called Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

I nodded. Things were coming together.

“Then that’s where we’ll go to talk to her,” I said.

“Really?” McEvoy asked. “When?”

“Right now.”

“Don’t you want to call her first?”

“No. They might be watching her like they watched Patel. Besides, we call her and it might scare her away. She’s got to know about this lawsuit, but she hasn’t come forward. Why? Another NDA? I think it’s something else. She’s scared.”

10

“Right now” turned out to be the next morning. McEvoy and I took a JSX flight from Burbank up to Oakland, picked up a Go rental car, and made our way across the lower bay to Palo Alto and Stanford University. On the plane, McEvoy had searched online for Professor Kitchens’s office and schedule. He found both and learned that she gave only one lecture on Tuesdays. The class was called History of Machine Learning.

“Perfect,” I’d said.

The lecture was scheduled from eleven till noon in the Hewlett Teaching Center. We got lost twice while trying to find it in the school’s Science and Engineering Quad and finally arrived shortly before noon. It was held in a midsize lecture hall that was about half full. A hundred or so students were scattered throughout the six tiers of seats. The two entrances were on the top level. We stepped in quietly and took two open seats near the door. Kitchens stood at a lectern below. There was a large flat-screen monitor on the wall behind her that showed a black-and-white photo of a man who looked familiar, but I couldn’t readily place him. On a blackboard next to the screen, Kitchens had written her name and university email address in chalk. That was when I realized that it was the first class of a new semester.

“Deep Blue defeated Kasparov with what move?” Kitchens asked. “Anyone?”

No one raised a hand. I now recognized the man on the screen as Garry Kasparov, the chess champion who famously lost a match to an IBM computer almost three decades ago.

“The knight sacrifice,” Kitchens said. “It was in that moment that many believe machines became smarter than humans. And I will leave it there until next week. Please begin reading Kurzweil’s book and we will add that to the discussion next Tuesday as well. Have fun.”

The students started leaving. I watched one kid shove a book into a backpack. I caught a glimpse of the title, The Singularity Is Nearer, and assumed that was the book Kitchens had assigned the class.

I saw Kitchens gather up her lecture notes and move to a desk. She looked like she was in her mid- to late thirties and she had dark skin and hair in tight rows of braids. She wore faded blue jeans with a red, untucked, and equally faded blouse.

“I don’t want to overwhelm her with two of us,” I said. “Let me go down alone first.”

“You sure you don’t want me to go with you?” McEvoy said.

“No, it should be just me. Hang back until I signal. Or I don’t.”

“Will do.”

I went down the steps toward the stage, passing the final few students going up to the exits. When I got to the front, Kitchens was sliding her notes and the laptop she had used for her PowerPoint presentation into her backpack. Though she was looking down and zipping the pack closed, she spoke before I could.

“I saw you two up there and knew you weren’t students,” she said.

“Yes, we came in late, but what we saw about Deep Blue and the knight sacrifice was very interesting,” I said. “From there to AI being in our phones, our cars, our everything in less than thirty years. It’s scary, if you ask me.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Professor Kitchens, my name is Michael Haller, people call me Mickey. I’m—”

“I know who you are.”

She finally looked up at me.

“You do?”

“I’m following your case against Tidalwaiv. I will probably include discussion of it in one of my other classes.”

“Then you know why I’m here.”

“I do, and I hate to disappoint you, but I can’t talk to you.”

“Because you signed a nondisclosure agreement? There are ways around that. Most prevent you from working for or talking to a competitor. I’m not a competitor. I’m just somebody looking for the truth.”

The backpack was on the desk and she was holding it upright, almost like a shield.

“It’s not because of the nondisclosure,” she said. “It’s because I feel threatened.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to threaten you. I just want—”

“I know what you want. I also know I’m being watched by them.”

“Right now? You’re being watched?”

“If not physically, then digitally. All the time.”

“Because you’re a threat to them. You know things. They turned over twelve terabytes of documents related to the development of Project Clair in discovery. Twelve. And your name is not in any of them. You’ve been scrubbed, Professor. They’re trying to hide you. But I know you were there and you know things. You’re an ethicist. You could make a difference by talking to me.”

I could see her breathing heavily. She was genuinely scared.

“You can’t protect me,” she said.

“The truth will protect you,” I said. “Once it’s out there, they can’t hurt you.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What I know is that a sixteen-year-old girl was murdered because Clair told her ex-boyfriend it was an okay thing to do. You know the truth of how that happened. The world should know it.”

“I have to think about it.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. I have to think. Who is the other man up there that you came with?” She nodded in McEvoy’s direction.

“He works with me,” I said. “He’s a writer and he’s going to write a book about this case. He’s the one who found you for me.”

“How?” she asked. “If I was scrubbed from the records, as you say.”

“It’s kind of a long story. I’ll tell it to you — or, rather, he will — if we can continue this conversation.”

There was one question I needed to ask but I knew it wasn’t time yet. In a perfect world, she would answer it before it was asked.

“We fly back to L.A. at five,” I said. “Is there any time and place we can keep talking, privately?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want this to happen. I’ve gotten past it. None of it was my fault.”

“What about Rebecca Randolph?” I said. “The boy who killed her is in custody and will be prosecuted. But how will the company be held accountable if no one will stand up to them?”

I saw fire enter her eyes and knew I had misspoken.

“That is completely unfair,” she said. “I did my job. I warned them. I have no guilt over what I did.”

“I know, I know,” I said quickly. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. But I have nothing. I need your help.”

“I saw a story on the internet this morning about a man who was going to be your witness. The police said he killed himself. Are they sure?”

I nodded. I’d wondered if she had seen the stories.

“They seem to be,” I said.

“He was your witness and now you want me,” she said. “I don’t want to end up like that.”

“Look, we knew he had problems. There is a good chance that what he did had nothing to do with this. With the case.”

One of the doors at the top banged open and Kitchens startled. A man entered, passed by McEvoy, and quickly came down the stairs to the stage. I turned so that Kitchens was behind me.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He teaches in here next.”

I relaxed and turned back to her.

“Can we continue this somewhere?” I asked.

Before she could answer, the next teacher was at the stage. He was wearing a tweed jacket and looked like a cookie-cutter college professor.

“Naomi, everything all right?” he asked. “Is this man bothering you?”

“No, Moses,” Kitchens said. “I’m fine. I’ll clear out of your way.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Moses was looking at me suspiciously. I just nodded.

Kitchens put her backpack strap over one shoulder and headed toward the steps. We started up, side by side.

“Do you know where Joanie’s is?” she asked.

“Uh, no,” I said. “What’s Joanie’s?”

“It’s a restaurant off campus. On California Avenue. I’ll meet you there. I don’t have a lot of time. Tuesdays I have office hours from two to five.”

“We’ll meet you there. And thank you.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I’m only doing this because of the way you stepped in front of me down there. To protect me.”

I nodded.

“I will protect you if you work with me,” I said.

“I’m not promising anything yet,” she said.

“I understand. But thank you for hearing me out.”

“I’ll see you there.”

11

Joanie’s was a locals’ hangout. By the time we found it, Kitchens was already at a table in the rear. As we sat down across from her, I introduced McEvoy. They shook hands and Kitchens knew the name.

“You wrote the DNA book, right?” she said. “About that predator down in L.A., the one who used genetic traits to pick his victims.”

“Uh, yes, that was me,” McEvoy said. “Fair Warning. You read it?”

“I did,” Kitchens said. “Definitely in my sphere as an ethicist.”

“Cool,” McEvoy said. “I write a Substack. You should check it out.”

On the way over, I had told McEvoy I wanted to shift things in the second conversation with Kitchens. He would be the lead, and this would allow me to analyze her answers without having to worry about keeping the conversation going. It would also allow me to watch McEvoy to get a read on how much of an asset he would be to the case. He had already shown his skills as a digger by coming up with Kitchens. Now I would see how well he could use an interview to get case information. He knew that I had set two goals for the trip to Palo Alto. So far, we had achieved neither.

A waitress arrived at the table, put down menus, and took our order for iced teas all around.

“So,” McEvoy said. “Why academia?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kitchens said. “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.”

“No, not at all,” McEvoy said. “I’m just wondering how bad it got at Tidalwaiv that you said, ‘The hell with this whole AI business.’”

“Yeah, well, it got bad,” Kitchens said. “And my sense was that this was an industry-wide issue, not just a Tidalwaiv problem. Ethics were not really part of the equation. They needed to say they were paying attention to it, but it was the Wild West. They didn’t care about ethics.”

“That’s a pretty strong statement. You mean there weren’t enough guardrails?”

“I mean, what guardrails?”

“So what did you tell them when you quit?”

I wanted to call time out before he finished the question, but it was too late. He had taken it a step too far.

“That would be considered work product,” Kitchens said. “I can’t talk to you about work product.”

I could tell by her demeanor that the question had reminded her who she was talking to and that it wasn’t an innocent lunchtime chat.

“Oh, okay,” McEvoy said. “I didn’t realize—”

No, not okay. I had to step in. “I assume your nondisclosure prohibits you from talking about work product with competitors and probably the media,” I said. “We’re neither.”

“He just said he writes a Substack,” Kitchens said. “That’s media.”

“He’s not writing about this case now,” I said. “He’s part of the plaintiff’s team. Once the trial is over, he may decide to—”

“I don’t really care,” Kitchens said. “I’m not—”

She stopped when the waitress came back and put three iced teas in front of us. The waitress seemed to read the intensity at the table and didn’t ask if we were ready to order. She just turned around and left us alone. I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket but it was not the time to take a call.

“Naomi, we need your help,” I said. “This company’s creation turned a kid into a killer. I think you tried to stop that from happening. We’re trying to stop it from happening again.”

“I help you, and what’s to stop them from coming after me?” Kitchens asked. “You don’t understand. These people are as dangerous as their product.”

I nodded and put my hands out, palms down, in a calming motion.

“There is nothing in all of the discovery materials we have received about Project Clair that so much as has your initials on it,” I said. “And I happen to know that the first rule of ethical oversight is ‘Document everything.’ Professor Kitchens, did you do that?”

“Of course I did,” Kitchens said. “They probably purged it all when I left the company.”

“What about you? Did you purge it all?”

“I’m not answering that.”

“Like I said, we can protect you.”

“No, you really can’t. Not from them.”

“You—”

My phone buzzed again, and I pulled it out of my pocket just to make sure it wasn’t the one person whose call I would accept under any circumstances — my daughter. It was not Hayley, but close. Maggie McPherson had made both calls. I sent this one to voicemail and turned my attention back to Kitchens.

“You don’t understand,” I said. “They are setting you up, Naomi. They have purged you from the project. You’re a redaction. That means you are their out. You will be given as the reason there were no guardrails. You were there to keep them on the straight and narrow and you failed. If you don’t come forward, they will throw you under the bus. You understand? Their defense will be this: We had an ethicist on the project and she didn’t say shit.”

I was just riffing, totally contradicting myself and my earlier statements, but I was getting desperate. She had what I needed and I was ready to try anything, say anything to get it. I stopped to see how my words were playing. I saw a slight stress crease start to form between Kitchens’s eyebrows.

“So what I’m hoping is that you kept copies of your work product,” I said. “It would have been against company policy and maybe even illegal, but I’m hoping you documented what you said and when you said it and that you have copies of those documents.”

The stress crease became more pronounced.

“If you did, that’s what I need,” I said. “And I’d love to have you testify, but if that is asking too much, there is a way to make it work without you coming anywhere close to the courthouse.”

“How?” she asked.

She had just cracked open the door. I leaned across the table.

“If you give me material that should have been in discovery, they won’t be able to tell the judge it wasn’t,” I said. “You understand? They won’t reveal they held it back, because the judge would go ballistic. She’d sanction them.”

“And you’re saying I wouldn’t have to testify?” she asked.

“Don’t get me wrong — I want you to testify. I would love for you to testify. And I already broke their standard NDA once on this case. I’m confident I could do it again. But if push comes to shove, and you kept records of the alarm bells you rang that they ignored, that’s all I would need. I could go to court with that.”

“But they would know it came from me.”

“Not necessarily. I’m sure your ethics reports went to all the stakeholders on the project. Any one of them could have kept the documents and backdoored them to me. And you don’t have to worry about us. We would never give you up. This guy next to me once went to jail for sixty-three days for not giving up a source in court.”

I put my hand on McEvoy’s shoulder.

“And I’ve spent nights in jail protecting clients myself. After this meeting, we would never have to see each other again. You provide us with your reports, and we take it from there.”

I stopped with that. The offer was on the table. There was nothing more to say.

“I have to think about this,” Kitchens said. “I want to talk to my daughter.”

I nodded and smiled.

“How old is she?” I asked.

It wasn’t just a get-to-know-you question. I wasn’t asking because I had a daughter too but because her child could be a tell. Children are idealistic when young and become pragmatic the older they get. I wanted to know whether Kitchens had a pragmatic daughter who would tell her to play it safe and not get involved.

“She’s nineteen,” Kitchens said. “She goes to USF.”

“What’s she studying?” I asked.

“Psychology. She wants to be a social worker.”

“Good for her.”

A student at the University of San Francisco who wanted to be a social worker — that all tilted toward idealism to me. I reached down for my briefcase and brought it up to my lap.

“Of course you should talk to her,” I said. “I’m going to give you a phone. It’s charged up and already has my number saved in it. Use it to call or text me at any time. After you talk to your daughter, let me know. If it’s a no, toss the phone. If it’s not, we’ll use it to communicate and I’ll give you instructions on how to send me what you’ve got.”

I took the phone out of the case and put it on the table in front of her. She looked at it but didn’t pick it up.

“It feels like spy work,” Kitchens said.

“Yes,” I said. “But as you know, we need to take precautions. Tidalwaiv has a lot at stake, and I want to protect you. We’re going to leave now so you can enjoy your lunch.”

“Easier said than done.”

“I know. But thank you for your time.”

McEvoy and I stood up and left her there. The burner was still on the table. I don’t know if paranoia is contagious, but outside the restaurant, I scanned the parked cars and the other businesses to see if I could pick up on anybody watching us. McEvoy noticed.

“You think she’s right?” he asked. “They’re watching her?”

“Hard to say,” I said. “If not physical surveillance, I’m sure they’ve got their sniffers on her. That’s why I brought the burner.”

“You always carry phones like that?”

“Not always. But sometimes. Going to make a good book, huh?”

“Yeah. If you win.”

“I plan to. I need to call my ex. She was blowing up my phone the whole time we were in there.”

“Lorna?”

“No, my first ex-wife.”

“She in the legal business too?”

“Sort of. She’s the DA.”

“What? Of L.A. County? You mean Maggie McFierce?”

I nodded.

“I was the one who gave her that nickname,” I said. “Then they used it as a campaign slogan.”

I had already pulled my phone and hit Maggie’s number in my contacts. My hope was that she was calling to say she was going to return the external hard drive with the contents of Aaron Colton’s laptop downloaded onto it.

She answered right away. I could tell she was in a car.

“Mickey, where have you been? Did you listen to my messages?”

Her voice was adrenalized and panicked.

“No, I just called back. What’s going on? Is Hay—”

“The fires. My house is in an evacuation zone. I’m going home to try to grab things. Pictures and clothes.”

“What fires?”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“Palo Alto. Maggie, calm down and tell me what’s going on.”

“The wind is causing fires all over the place. Palisades, Malibu, Altadena — big fires. I’ve got to get home and get things. I want to know, can I stay at your place?”

“Of course, if it’s safe.”

Her house was in Altadena. My house was on Fareholm Drive in the hills at the southern end of Laurel Canyon, an area also vulnerable to wildfires.

“Right now your house isn’t in the fire zone,” Maggie said. “I’ll go there. Is the extra key in the same spot?”

I had to think back to when we were married and shared the house.

“Yes, same spot. Hayley’s frog.”

Our daughter had made a frog at a pottery-painting party.

“I’ll see you at the house,” I said. “I’m heading to the airport now, and we’re landing at Burbank around six.”

“No, you’re not,” she said. “Burbank is closing. Probably LAX too. It’s hurricane-force winds.”

I remembered the warning Lorna had mentioned in the office yesterday. I hadn’t watched the news or read a newspaper since then. I had been consumed by the Tidalwaiv case.

“All right, I’ll see what’s going on and I’ll get to the house as soon as I can, Mags. Stay safe.”

“You too.”

I disconnected. Once we were in the rental but before we left, I filled McEvoy in. “Sounds like L.A. is burning and Burbank is grounding flights.”

“Shit. Where are the fires?”

“She mentioned the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena.”

“Only?”

“I don’t know. Where do you live?”

“Sherman Oaks. In the flats.”

“You should be okay.”

“You?”

“In the hills at the front of Laurel Canyon.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

I looked at the JSX app to see if there was an earlier flight we could take, but there wasn’t; all flights out of Monterey and Oakland to Burbank were either canceled or delayed due to high winds.

I had apps for Delta and American, and I told McEvoy to check United and Southwest for any flights from Bay Area airports to L.A. or Burbank. Every flight I found that was still going to LAX or Burbank or John Wayne Airport in Orange County was booked, likely with travelers who had been moved off canceled flights. McEvoy found the same on the airlines he checked.

“We’re fucked,” he said.

“No,” I said. “We’re driving.”

12

We cut over to the 5 freeway, but it still took us six hours in heavy traffic to get down to L.A. The rental had satellite radio and we listened to what seemed like around-the-clock wildfire coverage on CNN, NPR, and Fox. McEvoy was also occasionally able to get video feeds on his phone from the KTLA Channel 5 website. Los Angeles was burning in what appeared to be catastrophic firestorms that flanked the county on the west and northeast sides. Maggie called me when she got to my house. She was panicked and angry, reporting that she had not been allowed to get to her home to salvage anything. Despite her standing as the elected district attorney of Los Angeles County, the roadblocks to her neighborhood in Altadena were enforced. Sheriff’s deputies refused to let her through, saying all lanes on the roads were being used for fire department vehicles and to evacuate citizens. Nobody could go in, only out.

The fact that she was safely in my home seemed to be of little consolation to her. After getting instructions from me on how to use the television remote, she said she was parking herself in front of the wall-to-wall coverage on the local channels and hoped there would be a home for her to go back to in the morning.

My daughter checked in from Hawaii as news of the fires spread far and wide. I told her that her mother was safe and that all we could do was wait it out and see what the morning brought in terms of wind and damage.

We crested the Tehachapi Mountains on the Grapevine, and as we traversed the Santa Susanas down into the basin of the San Fernando Valley, we could see the glow of fire on the ridgeline up ahead.

The Santa Monica Mountains cut through the heart of the city, separating the Valley from the Westside. I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, knowing that homes were burning on the other side of the mountain chain.

“Holy shit!” McEvoy said. “That’s gotta be the Palisades burning.”

I just nodded. There was something almost biblical about the firestorm. The newscasters we had listened to referred to the Santa Ana winds that were feeding and spreading the fires as the “devil winds.” A commentator on Fox likened L.A. to Sodom and Gomorrah. I wondered about the retreat humans made to religion in the face of natural disasters.

We shifted from the 5 freeway to the 405, which cut a line down the middle of the Valley toward Sherman Oaks, where I would drop off McEvoy. He killed the radio and we drove in silence and awe at what we were seeing up ahead. It made me think of a Dave Alvin song I had heard a long time ago. I couldn’t remember the tune anymore but the lyrics I could never forget.