Golantz nodded emphatically from the lectern, driving home the point about Elliot being deceptive. I knew I would be able to handle this point on cross but I wouldn’t get the chance until the next day, after it had percolated in the brains of the jury for almost twenty-four hours.

“What happened after that?” Golantz asked.

“Well, there was still a lot of work to do inside the house. So I had a couple members of my team take Mr. Elliot to the Malibu substation so he could wait there and be comfortable.”

“Was he arrested at this time?”

“No, once again I explained to him that we needed to talk to him and if he was still willing to be cooperative, we were going to take him to an interview room at the station, and I said that I would get there as soon as possible. Once again he agreed.”

“Who transported him?”

“Investigators Joshua and Toles took him in their car.”

“Why didn’t they go ahead and interview him once they got to the Malibu station?”

“Because I wanted to know more about him and the crime scene before we talked to him. Sometimes you get only one chance, even with a cooperating witness.”

“You used the word ‘witness.’ Wasn’t Mr. Elliot a suspect at this time?”

It was a cat-and-mouse game with the truth. It didn’t matter how Kinder answered, everybody in the courtroom knew that they had drawn a bead on Elliot.

“Well, to some extent anybody and everybody is a suspect,” Kinder answered. “You go into a situation like that and you suspect everybody. But at that point, I didn’t know a lot about the victims, I didn’t know a lot about Mr. Elliot and I didn’t know exactly what we had. So at that time, I was viewing him more as a very important witness. He found the bodies and he knew the victims. He could help us.”

“Okay, so you stashed him at the Malibu station while you went to work at the crime scene. What were you doing?”

“My job was to oversee the documentation of the crime scene and the gathering of any evidence in that house. We were also working the phones and the computers and confirming the identities and backgrounding the parties involved.”

“What did you learn?”

“We learned that neither of the Elliots had a criminal record or had any guns legally registered to them. We learned that the other victim, Johan Rilz, was a German national and appeared to have no criminal record or own any weapons. We learned that Mr. Elliot was the head of a studio and very successful in the movie business, things like that.”

“At some point did a member of your team draw up search warrants in the case?”