IRVINE, Calif. _ Jill Easter wasn't talking. She bounced a basketball in the driveway with her 3-year-old daughter as Irvine police moved methodically through her house, snapping photos and jotting notes.
Inside, detectives found what seemed the well-appointed home of ordinary suburban parents. A garage cluttered with exercise equipment. Rooms with kids' sports trophies, an airplane mobile, a canopy bed decorated with Disney princesses.
In the master bedroom they found a copy of Easter's self-published novel, "Holding House," written under the pen name Ava Bjork. It had just come out. She smiled glamorously from the back cover, with styled blond hair and arresting blue eyes. Like its author, the female protagonist was a Berkeley-educated lawyer who had found work at a Bay Area firm.
She was "a patient woman with a formidable intelligence," the novel explained, alluring to men but unlucky in love. To cope with life's stresses, she mixed wine with Xanax. When wronged, the heroine burned for revenge and applied her patient, formidable intelligence to the task of exacting it.
While Jill Easter waited unhappily for police to complete their search, a second team of Irvine cops had converged on a target a few miles away. This was her husband's 14th-floor law office, in a building overlooking Fashion Island in Newport Beach.
It was March 4, 2011. Detectives were looking for evidence that the Easters had planted marijuana and painkillers in a neighbor's car about two weeks earlier, the bizarre endgame of a year-old grudge that began at an Irvine elementary school.
Police couldn't just go into Kent Easter's office and rifle through his files; they were full of confidential information about his clients.
For the search, they relied on Paul Jensen, a personal injury lawyer who also served as an unpaid special master for the courts. He would take what looked relevant and leave the rest.
That morning, when Jensen showed up at the Irvine Police Department for the operational briefing, he counted a throng of cops _ maybe 15 or 20 _ and thought it seemed like overkill. They were ready for Pablo Escobar. "Kent Easter is a lawyer," he thought. "He's not a Mafioso."
But now, as he went through Easter's papers, Jensen was happy the police were there in force, standing guard at the door. Some of the law firm's employees were raising a clamor, confronting the cops. Why are you here? What gives you the right? This is Newport Beach, not Irvine! Only after a cop threatened someone with arrest did things quiet down.
Neither of the Easters was arrested that day. The evidence seized included the couple's smartphones. Detectives believed their contents might clinch the case.
But the phones were soon locked up inside the chambers of an Orange County judge, where they would languish as legal arguments raged.
Easter's firm wanted his BlackBerry back because it held sensitive client information. The Easters' criminal defense attorneys wanted evidence on both phones kept from police, citing attorney-client and spousal privileges. It was complicated enough to bring a case against two attorneys, even more so when they were married to each other.
