Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

prosecution?”
    Aronson was a petite twenty-five-year-old with short hair that was carefully made to look stylishly unkempt. She wore retro-style glasses that partially hid brilliant green eyes. She came from a law school that didn’t turn any heads in the silk-stocking firms downtown but when I interviewed her I sensed that she had a drive that was fueled by negative motivation. She was out to prove those silk-stocking assholes wrong. I hired her on the spot.
    “The video disc came from the lead detective, and the prosecutor wasn’t happy about it at all. So don’t be expecting anything else. We want something, we go to the judge or we go out and get it ourselves. Which brings us to Cisco. Tell us what you’ve got so far, Big Man.”
    All eyes turned to my investigator, who sat on a leather swivel chair next to a fireplace that was filled with potted plants. He was dressed up today, meaning he had sleeves on his T-shirt. Still, the shirt did little to hide the tats and the gun show. His bulging biceps made him look more like a strip club bouncer than a seasoned investigator with a lot of finesse in his kit.
    It had taken me a long time to get over the idea of this giant beef dish being my replacement with Lorna. But I had worked through it and, besides, I knew of no better defense investigator. Early in his life, when he was cruising with the Road Saints, the cops had tried to set him up twice on drug raps. It built a lasting distrust of the police in him. Most people give the police the benefit of the doubt. Cisco didn’t and that made him very good at what he did.
    “Okay, I am going to break this into two reports,” he said. “The crime scene and the client’s house, which was searched by police for several hours yesterday. First the crime scene.”
    Without using any notes, he proceeded to detail all of his findings from WestLand National’s headquarters. Mitchell Bondurant had been surprised by his attacker while getting out of his car to report for work. He was struck at least twice on the head with an unknown object. Most likely attacked from behind. There were no defensive wounds on his hands or arms, indicating he was incapacitated almost immediately. A spilled cup of Joe’s Joe coffee was found on the ground next to him along with his briefcase, which was open, beside the back tire of his car.
    “So what about the gunshots somebody said they heard?” I asked.
    Cisco shrugged.
    “I think they’re looking at that as car backfire.”
    “Two backfires?”
    “Or one and an echo. Either way, there was no gunplay involved.”
    He went back to his report. The autopsy results were not yet in but Cisco was betting on blunt-force trauma being the cause of death. At the moment, time of death was listed as between 8:30 and 8:50 A.M. There was a receipt in Bondurant’s pocket from a Joe’s Joe four blocks away. It was time-stamped 8:21 A.M. and investigators figured the fastest he could have gotten from the coffee shop to his parking space in the bank garage was nine minutes. The 911 call from the bank employee who found his body was logged at 8:52 A.M.
    So estimated time of death had an approximate twenty-minute swing. It wasn’t a lot of time but when it came to things like documenting a defendant’s movements for the purpose of alibi, it was an eternity.
    Police interviewed everyone who was parking on the same level as well as all of those who worked in Bondurant’s department at the bank. Lisa Trammel’s name came up early and often during these interviews. She was named as an individual Bondurant had reportedly felt threatened by. His department kept a threat-assessment file and she was number one on the list. As we all knew, she had been served with a restraining order keeping her away from the bank.
    The police hit the jackpot when one bank employee reported seeing Lisa Trammel walking away from the bank on Ventura Boulevard within minutes of the murder.
    “Who is this witness?” I asked, zeroing in on the most damaging part of his report.
    “Her name is Margo Schafer. She’s a bank teller. According to my sources she’s never had contact with Trammel. She works in the bank, not the loan operation. But Trammel’s photo was circulated to staff after they got the TRO against her. Everybody was told to be aware of her and to report it if she was seen. So she recognized her.”
    “And was this on bank property?”
    “No, it was on the sidewalk a half block away. She was supposedly