“Your Honor?” the prosecutor said, looking as if he’d sniffed something unpleasant.
“I’ve given you lots of rope, Mr. Wills,” she said. “Try not to hang yourself with it.”
Wills blinked and said, “Yes, Your Honor.”
CHAPTER
56
NANA MAMA SAW the devastated look on my face when we returned to the courtroom. She came to the rail.
“You okay, son?”
“It’s bad, Nana.”
“The truth will out. Just stay fixed on that.”
I nodded but felt like the weight of the world was on me when Judge Larch gaveled the court back into session and announced to the jury that she was admitting the videos. She also cautioned them that the government had decided not to analyze the videos before they were shown to the jury.
“In that light, keep an open and skeptical mind,” she said. “The defense will have its say about these videos, I’m sure.”
As Marshal Avery called up the videos on a screen facing the jury, Nathan Wills was so pleased he jigged a little as he crossed to the witness box. Claude Watkins was again sitting there in his wheelchair.
“Mr. Watkins,” Wills said. “Have you seen this footage?”
“No.”
“They’re all black-and-white, three or four minutes long. We’ll watch them simultaneously. You’ll see the scene from three angles at once.”
The deputy marshal hit a key on her computer. The screen, divided into three frozen feeds, lit up.
On the left, there was an elevated, look-down perspective on the dimly lit rear of the factory where the shooting had occurred. It was a long and largely empty assembly-line space with dark storage alcoves off it on all four sides.
From the perspective, I figured the smartphone had been placed atop an alcove in the middle of the long south wall of the room. On the opposite wall, a mural was lit by soft spotlights.
The middle of the screen showed the feed from a smartphone camera that had been hidden almost directly across the room, above the opposite northern alcove, and aimed back at the floor area, though you could see the bottoms of the three spotlights.
On the far right of the screen, we were afforded a view from above the west alcoves. That angle showed the full length of the factory floor and the spotlight beams bisecting it right to left.
The deputy hit Play and all three feeds started. The people in the c
ourtroom saw me enter the space at the east end of the factory floor, carrying my service weapon and leading Binx along by her handcuffs. Exactly the way I remembered it.
At the west end of the room, Claude Watkins stepped out. He was dressed as Gary Soneji, and in a cracking, hoarse voice he said, “Dr. Cross. I thought you’d never catch up.”
“Freeze them,” Wills said. “Show feed three only.”
A moment later, the screen was filled with Watkins in disguise standing there, palms turned out.
“No gun,” Wills said. “Absolutely no gun.”
It was the second time I’d seen the image and the second time I got furious thinking that, if I wasn’t guilty, I was being railroaded by pros.
“That’s fake,” I whispered to Naomi. “I don’t know how they did it, but that is wrong.”
Before my niece could answer, the screen unfroze. The three videos showed me raising my service pistol, aiming at Soneji, and moving toward him, shouting, “Drop your weapon now or I’ll shoot!”
Watkins’s right hand moved, but there was nothing there, and nothing like the clatter of a gun dropping that I remembered.