Judge Moss read the file with his glasses on the end of his nose and his free hand flat on the bench, as if keeping the paper from blowing away in a wind nobody else could feel.
"The People are ready."
"The People are ready, Your Honor."
"The defence is ready."
"Ready, Judge."
"Then the nineteenth of April holds. I've cleared three weeks. I'd rather not need them." He turned a page. "Mr. Haddad, the court has heard rumours of a notice."
"The defence expects to file one, Judge."
"Expects." Moss looked at him over the glasses. "Thirty days before trial is a Saturday, so it's Friday. I'm told the clerk's office has a calendar, and so do I. If it comes in on Monday, it comes in late, and you'll have to persuade me, and I'm hard to persuade on a Monday."
"Friday, Judge."
"Good. Next."
It was Tuesday, the sixteenth of March, a quarter to ten, and the courtroom on the seventh floor of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice smelled of radiator dust and somebody's orange. Omar picked up his file and went out through the swing gate, and Kline followed him into the corridor without making it look like following.
She stopped by the window at the end, where the light came in grey off Gratiot. She had a coffee in a paper cup and a cardigan over her suit, and the look she always had at ten in the morning, of a woman who had already done one full day before this one.
"Second-degree," she said. "Twenty-five to forty. I'll put it in writing this afternoon."
He had expected an offer, but not that number. It was fair, the number he would have asked for in January if he'd thought he could get it.
"Why?"
"Because I listened to the 911 call more than once, and I don't think your guy's a monster. I think he's a twenty-six-year-old who killed his brother over something, and I'll find out what if we go to trial." She drank some coffee. "And because I don't love spending three weeks of my life on a jinn. Open till Friday at five. After that I try him for first, and you know what first is."
He knew what first was. In Michigan it was life, and life meant until he died, in a cell, and nobody would ever look at the file again.
"I'll take it to him."
"Take it to him properly, Omar." She looked at him with no particular expression. "Nobody's won an insanity defence in this building on voices in ten years. I'd hate for your guy to be the test case."
She went back into the courtroom. He stood at the window and watched a bus kneel at the stop on Gratiot to let an old man on.
The attorney room at the jail was the same room or its twin: the bolted table, the wired glass, the smell of bleach over something older. Danny sat with his hands flat on the steel and listened to the offer all the way through without moving.
Omar did it properly. He said that to himself afterwards, and it was true. He laid out the charge, open murder, and what the jury could do with it. He explained first-degree and premeditation, and what premeditation meant to a jury, which was not much time at all, a second look, a pause long enough to think. He explained life without parole in plain words, the way he had been taught to, so that nobody could ever say later that the client didn't understand. He explained the offer. Second-degree. Twenty-five years at least, forty at most. Out at fifty-one, perhaps. Fifty-one was not old.
There was a sentence that belonged in the middle of all that, and he left it out.
It would have gone after premeditation. It would have said: and the prosecution has your phone, and on page two hundred and thirty-one of the report there is a search you made at six minutes past two on the third of January, and if anybody over there ever reads it, the jury will hear it, and they will not need a pause to find premeditation, because you will have given them six days.
If you tell him, he'll take it. The thought was not urgent. It lay alongside his own, in the same tone. If you tell him, he'll plead, and you'll have done his thinking for him with evidence nobody has introduced, and nobody may ever introduce. Call it advice if you like. It would land on him like a threat.
He did not say the sentence. He moved on to the deadline.
"It's open until Friday at five," he said. "After that, she won't offer it again. I need an answer from you, and it has to be yours."
Danny looked at the table.
"I didn't do it."
"Danny, you called 911 and told them you did."
"I told them what happened. That's different." His fingers pressed on the steel until the tips went white. "If I say I'm guilty, I'm saying it was me. I'm saying I wanted it. Mr. Haddad, it wasn't me."
A plea is a loss. The words came complete and quiet, in the tone of a man reading out a score. You've lost enough. The case at the firm. Leila, who had kept the friends. Your mother, six years ago, in a week you still can't think about straight. And now this, which you could win.
Omar wrote "Client advised of offer, sec. deg. , 25 to 40; advised of LWOP exposure on first; rejects" and the date, and turned the pad round, and held out the pen.
"Initial there," he said. "It says I told you."
Danny initialled it. His letters were small and very neat, an engineering student's letters.
"You believe me," he said. "Right? About the voice."
"I believe you heard it."
Danny nodded, slowly, as though that had settled something, and Omar put the pad back in his bag without pushing at all.
On Friday at twenty to five Tess stood behind his chair and read the screen over his shoulder. The state's e-filing page had a progress bar across the top, three steps, the last one grey.
NOTICE OF INTENT TO CLAIM DEFENSE OF INSANITY. People of the State of Michigan versus Daoud Saleh. Below it, the defence witness list, which he had typed himself at lunch and read four times.
Ruth Adler, M. D. , forensic psychiatrist. Amal Saleh, mother of the defendant.
Kline's letter lay beside the keyboard, where it had lain since Tuesday afternoon. One page. The offer, the deadline, her signature in blue ink. Under it was the sheet from the jail with Danny's small, neat initials. Omar had clipped them together on purpose. A lawyer whose client turned down a fair offer kept the refusal where he could find it again. He had done everything in the right order.
The notice would reach the court and Kline in the same minute. Next week Moss would sign the usual order, and the state would send Danny to its own forensic centre to be examined by its own doctor, and that doctor would ask for records. The answer was ready before the worry had finished forming. Records are what's in the file. The file is what you say it is.
Tess read the third line out loud.
"Nabil Farran. Spiritual healer." She put her finger on the screen, which she knew he hated. "You're putting the ring light on the stand."
"I'm putting a witness on the stand who treated the defendant twice before the offence and once after."
"Okay," she said, in the voice she had used on the morning of the memo, and took her finger away.
Twenty minutes left on Kline's offer. Nobody had called. Nobody would. He clicked the last grey step and the bar went green, and the page thanked him for his submission, and at the bottom, in the court's plain type, under the doctor and the mother, the third witness for the defence sat in the record of the State of Michigan where anyone could read it: Sheikh Nabil Farran, Warren Avenue, Dearborn.