Chapter 15
Clock
Technical testimony has a sound. It is the sound of people trying very hard to be understood, and it is nearly always the sound of the jury drifting away.
I have seen it happen. A good expert will say oscillator and latency and confidence interval, and in the box, one by one, the faces go smooth, like water stilling. They do not stop listening. They simply stop hoping. The trick, if there is a trick, is to ask a question so plain that the answer cannot be ignored, and then to wait, and let the machine confess in a human voice.
The State's engineer was a man named Marcus Webb, and he had been with Vector-Plate Systems for eleven years. He was a stocky, cheerful, sandy-haired man of forty-five in a navy blazer that did not quite close, and he had the air, which I have learned to distrust, of one who believes that his product is a friend. Whitlock had called him on the thirteenth day, a Thursday, to establish that the License Plate Reader data was accurate and reliable. He had done so with warmth. The system, he said, had a read accuracy of ninety-six percent. It was used by police departments in nine states. It had been installed at Hale Meridian in 2019 and had performed flawlessly until that October.
"Until that October?" Whitlock had asked, mildly.
"There was a synchronization issue." He had said it as one mentions a small, cheerful local scandal. "A server on the premises lost contact with its time source. It was reconnected on the twenty-third."
"And did that affect the accuracy of the plate reads?"
"The reads themselves were fine. The timestamps may have been, ah, slightly off."
"How slightly?"
"A few minutes."
She had let it stand. I saw her do it. She had accepted a few minutes and moved on, as one steps over a crack in a pavement, and I wrote on my pad: She knows.
Now I rose and went to the lectern, and set down a folder, and said, "Good afternoon, Mr. Webb."
"Afternoon."
"You've said that the timestamps may have been slightly off."
"That's right."
"A few minutes."
"A few, yeah."
"Mr. Webb, are you familiar with the term clock drift?"
"Sure."
"What is it?"
"It's when a computer's internal clock gains or loses time relative to a reference."
"How much, typically?"
"In a good machine, a second or two a day."
"And in a machine that's been cut off from its time source for five days?"
"Maybe ten seconds. Fifteen."
"In a good machine."
"Right."
I opened the folder. I took out a single sheet of paper and held it up. "This is a log from the server in question. It's been marked as Defense Exhibit 14. It's an output from the server's own diagnostic tool, run by Dr. Fisk on the second of February. I'll read you a line." I let a half second pass. "Offset from reference: plus 00:17:41."
The room made no sound at all.
"Seventeen minutes and forty-one seconds," I said. "Is that what you'd call a few minutes?"
Webb blinked. "Where is that from?"
"The server in the garage. The one you installed."
"That doesn't, I'd have to see the context."
"Of course." I handed the sheet to the clerk, who carried it to him. I watched him read. I watched his face, which had been round and sunny, go slowly, by degrees, the color of putty. "Mr. Webb, you've testified that you reviewed the system's logs before coming to court."
"I looked at the read data."
"Not the diagnostics."
"Not in depth."
"So you didn't know that on the night of the murder the clock in the garage was running seventeen minutes fast."
"It may have, I'd say that's an outlier, that could have been a, a transient."
"A transient?"
"Spike. A short-lived error."
"You said that the clock was not synchronized for five days. Is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Would a short-lived error survive for five days?"
He opened his mouth. Closed it. In the second row, Raymond Teague had put his chin in his hand and his lips had moved, very slightly, as if he were repeating the words five days to himself.
"I'd want to look at that," said Marcus Webb.
"I'm sure." I walked to the side of the lectern and stood with one hand resting on it. "While you're looking, Mr. Webb, let me ask you about something else. Your company's own published white paper on this product. Do you know it?"
"I wrote part of it."
"Would you read the second paragraph on page nine?"
He took the booklet that I handed him. He read it to himself, for a long moment, with a look of mounting reluctance.
"Out loud, please."
"Under adverse lighting conditions, the system may misidentify the numeral one as the numeral two, and vice versa, at a rate of approximately four percent."
"Four percent."
"Yes."
"Of reads, or of confusable plates?"
"Of confusable. That's, the rate applies when, there has to be a similar plate."
"Is there a plate in the Hale Meridian garage similar to HALE 1?"
"I wouldn't know."
"Would it surprise you to learn there is?"
Whitlock rose. "Objection. Calls for speculation, and he's not the registrar."
"I'll withdraw it." I smiled at the witness, a small, almost sympathetic smile. "Mr. Webb. Let me ask it more simply. If a plate reads HALE 1 with a confidence of seventy-nine percent, can you say with certainty that it was not a HALE 2?"
"No."
"You can't."
"With seventy-nine, no. That's, no."
"Thank you."
It took three minutes to finish. I asked about the entry at 10:09 and the exit at 10:49. He said he could not say how much they had drifted either. I asked whether any independent source, a second clock, a person's watch, could confirm the times. He said there was the building badge system, but that it was separate. I asked him whether the building badge system showed my client entering the thirty-first floor at 9:07. He said it did. I asked whether it showed him leaving it. He said, slowly, that the stairwell door did not require a badge.
"So the system that you installed cannot tell the jury when Mr. Hale left the garage, cannot tell them whether it was Mr. Hale, and cannot tell them what time it was."
"Objection," said Whitlock. "Argumentative."
"Sustained."
"I'll withdraw it. No further questions."
I sat. I could feel the room behind me, the long held breath of it. At the State's table, Owen Pryce was writing furiously. Whitlock sat with her pen laid across her pad and her hands folded and her eyes on the middle distance, and her face was perfectly composed. It was the face of a woman who has been given the bill she expected.
Dr. Fisk was my first witness for the defense, on the morning of the twentieth.
He did not do it well. That was the surprise. In the conference room he had spoken with a calm, dry, surgical clarity; in the witness box, under the hard north light, he seemed to shrink. His tremor was worse. His voice, which in private had carried like a bell, thinned into a high, careful, apologetic monotone, and he kept touching the knot of his tie.
But he was right. Right is a powerful thing in a courtroom, even when it is delivered badly, and I took him through it a step at a time. The synchronization service, disabled on the ninth of October, at 03:14. The failed reconnection attempts. The oscillator, running fast. The offset, modeled backward from the diagnostic logs: between twelve and nineteen minutes at nine o'clock on the fourteenth. The reads. The numeral one, and the numeral two, and a gray grid of photographs on a screen.
"Dr. Fisk," I said, "what in your opinion caused the synchronization service to stop working?"
He took off his glasses. "That is difficult to determine."
"Could it have been a malfunction?"
"It could. Systems fail." He polished a lens. "The log records a service stop at 03:14 on the ninth of October, initiated by an administrative account. A local administrator, not a vendor account. It may have been a maintenance action. It may have been a misconfiguration after a software patch."
"Do you know who the administrator was?"
"The account is a generic service credential. It is shared. I can't attribute it to a person."
"Is that unusual?"
"No." A faint, dry smile. "It's very common, and very bad practice."
Someone laughed in the gallery. It was a small unguarded sound, and it eased the room. I let it. I was watching Dr. Fisk's hands, and I thought of a text message that had arrived at 11:52 on a winter night. Ask who set the garage clocks. They stopped syncing on Oct 9. I had not told Dr. Fisk about that message. I had not told anyone but Hollis and Priya.
"Thank you, Doctor. No further questions."
I had not asked who. I noticed that, as I sat down, and put it away, in the place where I was putting a growing pile of such things. The account is shared. I can't attribute it to a person. It was a perfectly adequate answer. It was a very convenient one. And I told myself that I had a trial to run.
The Rotterdam lawyer testified by video.
His name was Pieter van der Linden, and he appeared on a large flat screen, in a plain gray office with a window behind him that showed a sliver of overcast sky and the end of a crane. He was fifty, round-faced, with a tidy beard and an accent I could have cut with a knife. He confirmed in careful English that on the fourteenth of October, at eighteen minutes past nine in the evening, local time adjusted, he had received a telephone call from Mr. Victor Hale. They had spoken for sixteen minutes about the demurrage clause in a charter party. He had known Mr. Hale for nine years. He had recognized his voice.
"Did you hear anything in the background?"
"A keyboard. Mr. Hale was typing as we talked." He shrugged. "He does this. I always say to him, Victor, you cannot do two things. He says, I am doing three."
A ripple of laughter.
"Did you hear traffic? Wind? Anything to suggest he was in a car?"
"No. It was quiet. A quiet room."
"Was there anything unusual about the call?"
"No." He considered. "He was tired. A little hoarse, like a man with a cold coming. I thought, he is working too late."
"Thank you, Mr. van der Linden."
Whitlock's cross was brief and merciless. She established that he could not see Mr. Hale. That he could not say whether Mr. Hale had been at his desk or in a hotel or on a boat. That a keyboard could be a recording. She asked whether he knew where Mr. Hale had been at 9:41. He said he did not. She asked whether it was possible for a man to make a sixteen-minute call from a quiet room and then leave it. He said, with great dignity, that he was a lawyer and not a philosopher, and that anything was possible.
She thanked him. He vanished, and the screen turned blue.
The telephone company's custodian was the last of the afternoon, a gray, stooped, depressed woman named Hilda Brandt, no relation to Hollis, who had spent thirty years in the records department of Calder Telecom and who read from her printouts as though they were a eulogy. I asked her three things. I asked her whether the call from Mr. Hale's phone to Rotterdam had been served by a single tower throughout its sixteen minutes. She said it had. I asked whether, in her experience, a phone traveling by car across a city for sixteen minutes would be handed off between towers. She said, typically, yes. I asked whether this phone had been.
"No, sir. Same sector the whole time. The Harbor Street mast."
"The mast nearest the Hale Meridian building."
"Correct."
"And the incoming call at 9:44, the four-minute call from the unidentified number?"
"Same mast."
"Answered, or unanswered?"
She consulted the paper. "Connected."
"Meaning someone picked up."
"Or voicemail, sir. The log doesn't say. It records a connected state." She looked up, with a kind of mournful honesty. "A voicemail connection is also connected."
I stood very still.
It was the first time anyone had said it. Whitlock had not, in four months. Dunleavy had not. I had known it for weeks, as one knows a thing at the bottom of a bag, and had not looked. Now it lay on the table between us, plain, small, entirely destructive: a four-minute call that might have been a human voice and might have been a machine, answered, or not, on a phone that might have been in a man's hand or on a desk across the city from his wife.
I glanced at Victor. He was looking at the witness, quite calm, his hands lying flat on the table. But a muscle in his jaw had tightened, and as I watched, he blinked, once, slowly, and I thought: He knew. He has always known that this was what it would come to.
"Nothing further," I said.
It was dark when I got to my car.
The parking structure behind the courthouse is six floors of poured concrete, lit by sodium lamps that make everyone look jaundiced and the cars look dead. I had left mine on the fifth. The elevator was out, as usual. I walked up the ramp, with my briefcase in my right hand and the sound of my own footsteps coming back to me off the walls in a flat double echo, and the rain beat on the roof like a drum.
On the fourth level I stopped.
I did not know why. A sound, perhaps, or the absence of one. I stood in the half-dark between two concrete pillars with the case dragging at my arm and listened. The garage hummed. Far below, a car door slammed. A pipe dripped somewhere, steadily, into a puddle.
Footsteps. Not mine.
I did not turn round. It is a rule I have learned from men who do what Hollis once did for a living: never show them you've heard. I walked on, at the same pace, up the ramp, and the footsteps came on behind me, soft, rubber-soled, perhaps fifteen yards back. They matched mine. When I slowed, they slowed. When I reached the fifth level and crossed to my car, a gray Honda three bays from the stairwell, I pressed the key and the lights flashed, and I heard them stop.
I opened the door. I did not get in. I put my briefcase on the roof and turned, slowly, with one hand on the frame.
There was no one there.
The garage stood empty, a long concrete cave of pillars and shadows, and the sodium lamps hummed over the rows of dead cars. Fifteen yards away, at the head of the stairwell, a door was closing on its pneumatic arm, the same long, slow, exhaling hiss I knew from Courtroom 4B. It shut with a soft click.
I got into the car. I locked the doors. And for a minute or more I sat with both hands on the wheel, looking at the rain on the windshield, with a pulse in my throat that I could feel in my teeth.
When I looked down, there was something on the passenger seat.
It was an envelope. It was plain, white, unmarked, the size of a greeting card, and I had not seen it when I got in. The door had been locked. I had locked it. I sat staring at it for nearly a minute before I could make myself touch it. Then I took a pen from my pocket, and slid the tip under the flap, and opened it.
A single sheet of paper. Typed, in a clean small font.
You are asking the wrong person about the call.