Mickey Haller 4 - The Fifth Witness

in the process of stopping the foreclosure. But I kept my mouth shut about that. My job was to gather information here, not give it away.
    “What else you got, Detective?”
    “Nothing that I care to share with you at the moment. You’ll have to wait to get the rest through discovery.”
    “I’ll do that. Has a DA been assigned yet?”
    “Not that I heard.”
    Kurlen nodded toward the back of the room and I turned to see Lisa Trammel being walked toward the door of an interrogation room. She had the classic deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes.
    “You’ve got fifteen minutes,” Kurlen said. “And that’s only because I’m being nice. I figure there’s no need to start a war.”
    Not yet, at least, I thought as I headed toward the interrogation room.
    “Hey, wait a minute,” Kurlen called to my back. “I have to check the briefcase. Rules, you know.”
    He was referring to the leather-over-aluminum attaché I was carrying. I could’ve made an argument about the search infringing on attorney-client privilege but I wanted to talk to my client. I stepped back toward him and swung the case up onto a counter, then popped it open. All it contained was the Lisa Trammel file, a fresh legal pad and the new contracts and power-of-attorney form I had printed out while driving up. I figured I needed Lisa to re-sign since my representation was crossing from civil to criminal.
    Kurlen gave it a quick once-over and signaled me to close it.
    “Hand-tooled Italian leather,” he said. “Looks like a fancy drug dealer’s case. You haven’t been associating with the wrong people, have you, Haller?”
    He put on that canary smile again. Cop humor was truly unique in all the world.
    “As a matter of fact, it did belong to a courier,” I said. “A client. But where he was going he wasn’t going to need it anymore so I took it in trade. You want to see the secret compartment? It’s kind of a pain to open.”
    “I think I’ll pass. You’re good.”
    I closed the case and headed back to the interrogation room.
    “And it’s Colombian leather,” I said.
    Kurlen’s partner was waiting at the room’s door. I didn’t know her but didn’t bother to introduce myself. We were never going to be friendly and I guessed she would be the type to stiff me on the handshake in order to impress Kurlen.
    She held the door open and I stopped at the threshold.
    “All listening and recording devices in this room are off, correct?”
    “You got it.”
    “If they’re not that would be a violation of my client’s—”
    “We know the drill.”
    “Yeah, but sometimes you conveniently forget it, don’t you?”
    “You’ve got fourteen minutes now, sir. You want to talk to her or keep talking to me?”
    “Right.”
    I went in and the door was closed behind me. It was a nine-by-six room. I looked at Lisa and put a finger to my lips.
    “What?” she asked.
    “That means don’t say a word, Lisa, until I tell you to.”
    Her response was to break down in a cascade of tears and a loud and long wail that tailed off into a sentence that was completely unintelligible. She was sitting at a square table with a chair opposite her. I quickly took the open chair and put my case up on the table. I knew she would be positioned to face the room’s hidden camera, so I didn’t bother to look around for it. I snapped open the case and pulled it close to my body, hoping that my back would act as a blind to the camera. I had to assume that Kurlen and his partner were listening and watching. One more reason for his being “nice.”
    While one by one I took out the legal pad and documents with my right hand, I used the left to open the case’s secret compartment. I hit the engage button on the Paquin 2000 acoustic jammer. The device emitted a low-frequency RF signal that clogged any listening device within twenty-five feet with electronic disinformation. If Kurlen and his partner were illegally listening in, they were now hearing white noise.
    The case and its hidden device were almost ten years old and as far as I knew, the original owner was still in federal prison. I’d taken it in trade at least seven years ago, back when drug cases were my bread and butter. I knew law enforcement was always trying to build a better mousetrap, and in ten years the electronic eavesdropping business must have undergone at least two revolutions. So I was not completely put at ease. I would still need to exercise caution in what I said and hoped my