From my shirt pocket I unclipped a laser pointer and held it up for the judge to see. She granted me permission to carry it to Metz. I turned it on and handed it to him. He then put the red eye of the laser beam on the photo of Campo’s battered face and drew circles in the three areas where he believed she had been struck. He circled her right eye, her right cheek and an area encompassing the right side of her mouth and nose.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the laser back from him and returning to the lectern. “So if she was hit three times on the right side of her face, the impacts would have come from the left side of her attacker, correct?”

Minton objected, once more saying the question was beyond the scope of the witness’s expertise. Once more I argued common sense and once more the judge overruled the prosecutor.

“If the attacker was facing her, he would have punched her from the left, unless it was a backhand,” Metz said. “Then it could have been a right.”

He nodded and seemed pleased with himself. He obviously thought he was helping the prosecution but his effort was so disingenuous that he was actually probably helping the defense.

“You are suggesting that Ms. Campo’s attacker hit her three times with a backhand and caused this degree of injury?”

I pointed to the photo on the exhibit easel. Metz shrugged, realizing he had probably not been so helpful to the prosecution.

“Anything is possible,” he said.

“Anything is possible,” I repeated. “Well, is there any other possibility you can think of that would explain these injuries as coming from anything other than direct left-handed punches?”

Metz shrugged again. He was not an impressive witness, especially following two cops and a dispatcher who had been very precise in their testimony.

“What if Ms. Campo were to have hit her face with her own fist? Wouldn’t she have used her right -”

Minton jumped up immediately and objected.

“Your Honor, this is outrageous! To suggest that this victim did this to herself is not only an affront to this court but to all victims of violent crime everywhere. Mr. Haller has sunk to -”

“The witness said anything is possible,” I argued, trying to knock Minton off the soapbox. “I am trying to explore what -”

“Sustained,” Fullbright said, ending it. “Mr. Haller, don’t go there unless you are making more than an exploratory swing through the possibilities.”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I said. “No further questions.”

I sat down and glanced at the jurors and knew from their faces that I had made a mistake. I had turned a positive cross into a negative. The point I had made about a left-handed attacker was obscured by the point I had lost with the suggestion that the injuries to the victim’s face were self-inflicted. The three women on the panel looked particularly annoyed with me.

Still, I tried to focus on a positive aspect. It was good to know the jury’s feelings on this now, before Campo was in the witness box and I asked the same thing.

Roulet leaned toward me and whispered, “What the fuck was that?”

Without responding I turned my back to him and took a scan around the courtroom. It was almost empty. Lankford and Sobel had not returned to the courtroom and the reporters were gone as well. That left only a few other onlookers. They appeared to be a disparate collection of retirees, law students and lawyers resting their feet until their own hearings began in other courtrooms. But I was counting on one of these onlookers being a plant from the DA’s office. Ted Minton might be flying solo but my guess was that his boss would have a means of keeping tabs on him and the case. I knew I was playing as much to the plant as I was to the jury. By the trial’s end I needed to send a note of panic down to the second floor that would then echo back to Minton. I needed to push the young prosecutor toward taking a desperate measure.

The afternoon dragged on. Minton still had a lot to learn about pacing and jury management, knowledge that comes only with courtroom experience. I kept my eyes on the jury box-where the real judges sat-and saw the jurors were growing bored as witness after witness offered testimony that filled in small details in the prosecutor’s linear presentation of the events of March 6. I asked few questions on cross and tried to keep a look on my face that mirrored those I saw in the jury box.

Minton obviously wanted to save his most powerful stuff for day two. He would have the lead investigator, Detective Martin Booker, to bring all the details together, and then the victim, Regina Campo, to bring it all home to the jury. It was a tried-and-true formula-ending with muscle and emotion-and it worked ninety percent of the time, but it was making the first day move like a glacier.

Things finally started to pop with the last witness of the day. Minton brought in Charles Talbot, the man who had picked up Regina Campo at Morgan’s and gone with her to her apartment on the night of the sixth. What Talbot had to offer to the prosecution’s case was negligible. He was basically hauled in to testify that Campo had been in good health and uninjured when he left her. That was it. But what caused his arrival to rescue the trial from the pit of boredom was that Talbot was an honest-to-God alternate lifestyle man and jurors always loved visiting the other side of the tracks.

Talbot was fifty-five years old with dyed blond hair that wasn’t fooling anyone. He had blurred Navy tattoos on both forearms. He was twenty years divorced and owned a twenty-four-hour convenience store called Kwik Kwik. The business gave him a comfortable living and lifestyle with an apartment in the Warner Center, a late-model Corvette and a nightlife that included a wide sampling of the city’s professional sex providers.

Minton established all of this in the early stages of his direct examination. You could almost feel the air go still in the courtroom as the jurors plugged into Talbot. The prosecutor then brought him quickly to the night of March 6, and Talbot described hooking up with Reggie Campo at Morgan’s on Ventura Boulevard.

“Did you know Ms. Campo before you met her in the bar that night?”

“No, I did not.”

“How did it come about that you met her there?”

“I just called her up and said I wanted to get together with her and she suggested we meet at Morgan’s. I knew the place, so I said sure.”

“And how did you call her up?”

“With the telephone.”

Several jurors laughed.

“I’m sorry. I understand that you used a telephone to call her. I meant how did you know how to contact her?”

“I saw her ad on the website and I liked what I saw and so I went ahead and called her up and we made a date. It’s as simple as that. Her number is on her website ad.”

“And you met at Morgan’s.”

“Yes, that’s where she meets her dates, she told me. So I went there and we had a couple drinks and we talked and we liked each other and that was that. I followed her back to her place.”

“When you went to her apartment did you engage in sexual relations?”

“Sure did. That’s what I was there for.”

“And you paid her?”

“Four hundred bucks. It was worth it.”

I saw a male juror’s face turning red and I knew I had pegged him perfectly during selection the week before. I had wanted him because he had brought a Bible with him to read while other prospective jurors were being questioned. Minton had missed it, focusing only on the candidates as they were being questioned. But I had seen the Bible and asked few questions of the man when it was his turn. Minton accepted him on the jury and so did I. I figured he would be easy to turn against the victim because of her occupation. His reddening face confirmed it.

“What time did you leave her apartment?” Minton asked.

“About five minutes before ten,” Talbot answered.