The panel came up at ten past nine, sixty-two people in a loose line behind a deputy, each of them holding a numbered card flat against the chest like a boarding pass. Omar stood because the clerk had told the room to stand. He stayed standing while they filled the benches, and he looked at every face he could reach.
He had slept four hours. At eleven the night before he had poured one glass of wine and then emptied the rest of the bottle into the sink, and he had been proud of that at eleven and less sure of it at three. The coffee from the cart in the lobby of the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice sat in him like a stone. None of it showed. He had shaved twice.
Danny sat beside him in a grey suit his mother had bought at Fairlane, a size too big across the shoulders. The deputies had taken the cuffs off in the corridor behind the courtroom so the panel would never see them, and under the table Danny kept touching the insides of his wrists with his thumbs, one and then the other, as though checking they were still his. Behind the rail, in the second row, Amal sat in black with both hands folded on her bag. Tess had the end of the same bench and a legal pad on her knee.
"Do I talk today?" Danny asked, without moving his lips much.
"Not today. Today you sit there and look like somebody's son."
Danny looked down at the sleeves of the suit. "I am somebody's son."
"Then it won't be hard."
Across the aisle Kline had drawn fourteen boxes on a yellow pad, two rows of seven, and laid three highlighters beside it in a row. She caught Omar's eye and nodded. He nodded back. She had offered twenty-five to forty in March and nothing since, and she had never once mentioned it again, which he respected.
Judge Moss came in, sat without looking at anyone, put on his glasses and read the case into the record in the voice of a man reading a gas bill. The People of the State of Michigan against Daoud Saleh. Open murder. He told the panel the defendant was presumed innocent and that the burden was on the People. He told them the trial would take three weeks, maybe less. Then he read the witness list aloud and asked whether anyone knew any of the names.
When he reached Sheikh Nabil Farran, two women in the back row looked at each other.
Omar wrote down their numbers.
The clerk drew fourteen names from a wooden box and fourteen people climbed into the jury box with their coats over their arms. Moss took them through the ordinary questions. Had anyone been the victim of a violent crime. Did anyone have family in law enforcement. Could anyone not sit for three weeks. A woman with a mother on dialysis went. So did a man who drove for a bakery and would lose the route. A retired Dearborn firefighter said his cousin was a detective with the city and he couldn't promise to be fair to anyone the police had arrested, and Moss thanked him and excused him for cause, and each time the clerk reached into the box again.
Omar counted while they reseated. Four Arab names in fourteen. Maybe five. A woman in seat nine in a navy headscarf, reading glasses on a beaded chain. A young man in seat six with a Lions lanyard who sat back with his arms folded like he had been pulled over.
You know these people, the thought said. You grew up across a dinner table from every one of them. She's reading a seating chart, and you're reading faces.
It came whole, before he had reached it himself, the way the right question came in a cross when he was going well. He let it stay, because it was only true.
Moss gave each side fifteen minutes. Kline used eleven. She stood at the lectern with her pad and asked plain things in a plain voice. Could they hold a man responsible if he was troubled. Could they follow the law on insanity as the judge gave it, even if they felt sorry for someone. If the evidence showed a person had chosen what he did, could they say so out loud in that room. Hands went up and down. She thanked them and sat.
Omar didn't take notes to the lectern. He walked to the rail of the box and stood close enough to see the lint on the jacket in seat five.
"I've got one question," he said. "I'd like an answer from each of you, and there's no wrong one. Have you ever heard a voice in your head that sounded exactly like your own?"
Somebody in the box laughed. Somebody behind the rail did too.
"Objection," Kline said, already standing. "May we approach?"
They went up to the side of the bench. The clerk switched on the white noise box and it hissed over the room like rain on a tin roof. Moss leaned down over the edge with his glasses in his hand.
"He's arguing his defence to the panel, Judge," Kline said. "That isn't a question about qualifications. It's an opening statement with a question mark on it."
"The defence is insanity," Omar said. "She gets jurors who'll hold a man responsible. I get jurors who won't call him a liar the moment he says he heard something. I need to know who in that box thinks anyone who hears a voice is lying."
Moss looked at him for longer than was comfortable.
"Ask it once," he said. "Plainly. No speeches. If I hear the word jinn during jury selection, Mr. Haddad, you'll be sitting down for the rest of it."
"Understood."
"Overruled, then."
Kline went back to her table, uncapped the pink highlighter and did not look at him. On her pad, as he passed, he saw that seat nine already had a pink question mark beside it. He went back to the rail and asked it again, the same words, slower.
Seat one was retired from the Rouge plant, a big man with hands like folded maps. "Every morning," he said. "Tells me to stay in bed." The box laughed and Moss let it.
Seat two said she didn't think so. Seat three said yes, when he was driving, mostly about other drivers. Seat four was a nurse at Beaumont, thirty, still in clogs, and she frowned at the question like it was a chart she had to sign.
"Sure," she said. "When I'm tired. That's just thinking, though."
"Does it ever surprise you?"
She took a second. "Sometimes it's meaner than I am."
Nobody laughed at that. Omar thanked her and moved on, and he felt the box come with him.
Seat six, the young man with the lanyard, didn't uncross his arms. "No," he said. "Never."
He's lying, or he has never once listened to himself, and either way he'll hang you.
Omar wrote a six on his pad and drew a ring round it. Anyone would have. It was ordinary trial sense, the kind they paid him for, and it felt no different from the rest.
Beside him Danny had stopped touching his wrists. He was sitting forward with both hands flat on the table, watching the box as if he could see something written on the jurors' faces that Omar couldn't. In the second row Amal had unfolded her hands.
Seats seven and eight said yes, both of them, fast, as if to get it over with. Then Omar came to nine.
She was in her sixties, the navy scarf pinned under her chin, a bus pass clipped to her bag. Her card said she had taught third grade in Dearborn Heights for thirty-one years. She took off the reading glasses and let them drop on their chain, and she looked at Omar the way a teacher looks at a boy who has the right answer for the wrong reason.
"Ma'am?" he said. "Juror nine?"
"Everybody has," she said. "The question is whether you listen."