“Please tell us, sir, where was the phone between six thirty p.m. and one a.m.?”

The phone company rep seems confused. “That’s the whole point. I don’t know.”

“Oh. So you don’t know if, for example, it was taken by Richard Trofino and brought to his home, correct?”

“I don’t know who Richard Trofino is.”

“And you don’t know whether it was Mr. Trofino who turned off Ms. Goodwin’s phone, after taking it from Ms. Goodwin’s desk, and then powered it back on once he was in Central Park, ready to kill his wife. That’s correct too, isn’t it?”

The double negatives, as well as the repetition of a name the witness has already indicated is unfamiliar to him, renders the man speechless. I object, just to give the witness some time to get his bearings.

Judge Gold sustains my objection, even though he probably shouldn’t. The fact that the witness is spared from answering the question, however, is of little import. The damage has already been done.

Yosef Izikson is the last of the science fair for a reason—he’s going to be the means by which I get the text messages into evidence.

Izikson is a short, bald man, of slight build, who speaks with a heavy Israeli accent, even though he testifies that he’s been living in this country for more than thirty years. He tells the jurors that he’s the chief executive officer of a firm located in New Jersey called ABS, which does nothing to erase the jurors’ glassy-eyed expectation that Izikson is just another nerd testifying about boring science.

It’s only when he says that his firm specializes in security, and was responsible for cracking Lauren Wright’s iPhone, that I hear the rumblings in the jury box of people starting to focus. But before I can ask my first substantive question about Lauren’s cell phone, Burrows objects.

Rather than state his grounds, Burrows asks Judge Gold for permission to approach. The judge curls his fingers, inviting us to the bench.

When everyone arrives, the judge has already placed his hand over the microphone and is leaning over to hear us better. “Your dance. You lead, Mr. Burrows,” Judge Gold says in a whisper.

“The last text received on Ms. Wright’s phone is hearsay,” Burrows says. “The prosecution is going to argue that these texts came from Ms. Goodwin because it says so on Ms. Wright’s call log. But that statement—like any document—is still hearsay if it’s being offered for its truth.”