The courtroom speakers popped once, and then the dispatcher was in the room with them, a woman's voice, flat and quick, asking for the address of the emergency.
Kline had asked to play it first, before any witness, and Moss had let her. She stood beside the evidence cart with the remote in one hand and didn't watch the jury. Omar watched them for her. Fourteen people sat very still in a row of padded chairs while a voice from the middle of a January night came out of the ceiling.
Then Danny was speaking. The recording had him calmer than the dispatcher. He gave the house number on Calhoun Street, slow and clear. He said his brother was on the kitchen floor. He said it twice, the same words, as though checking he had them right. The dispatcher asked whether his brother was breathing, and there was a long scrape of nothing on the line, a fridge humming somewhere in it, a tap running, and then Danny said a little, and that he had put a towel on it.
"Is the person who did this still in the house?" the dispatcher asked.
"I'm the person," Danny said on the tape. "I did it. It told me to."
Kline stopped it there. The silence after was worse than the recording. Juror four had her hand over her mouth. Juror nine had her eyes shut.
Beside Omar, Danny sat with his head a little on one side, the way a man listens to a song he knows and can't place. He didn't look down. He didn't look at his mother in the second row. When the speakers clicked off he let out a breath through his nose, and Omar felt it against his sleeve.
Kline's case moved like she had cut it from a pattern. A patrol officer from the Dearborn police, young, his hat on his knee, said the defendant had been waiting on the front porch in his socks, holding a wet dish towel. He said Danny had told him which room. He said Danny had told him where the knife was.
The medical examiner was next, an older woman with a soft Lebanese accent who had done the autopsy on the Sunday. She used a pointer on a diagram of a man's torso. One wound below the left collarbone, she said, angled downward, seven centimetres deep. It had opened the big artery under the collarbone. She gave the time of death as before the ambulance arrived and would not be pushed closer than that, and Kline didn't push.
Then the knife. A crime scene technician carried it in a long cardboard box with a window of clear plastic on the lid, and nobody in the gallery moved while he set it on the cart. An eight-inch chef's knife, black handle. Recovered from the kitchen floor of the house on Calhoun Street. The tech read out the evidence tag and the chain of signatures on it, every hand that had held the box from that kitchen to this courtroom, the dates and the times, and Kline moved its admission.
"Mr. Haddad?"
"No objection."
He had no reason to object. Nobody had ever claimed the knife was anyone's but Danny's. Omar let the photographs in too, all but two, and for those two he stood and argued they added nothing but the colour of the floor, and Moss agreed with him and kept them out. Kline only nodded. She had expected to lose those two. She had brought them so she would have something to give.
At three o'clock she called the officer in charge.
Detective Brandt had been a Dearborn homicide investigator for nine years and had testified in that building more often than Omar had tried cases in it. He was grey, neat, and patient. On direct he walked the jury through the night: the scene, the arrest, the interview at the station a little after two in the morning. He had read Danny his rights. Danny had waived them. He had asked Danny what happened, and Danny had told him.
"What did he tell you?"
"He said he took a knife out of the drawer by the sink and stabbed his brother. He said it told him to."
"Did you collect anything else from the defendant that night?"
"His clothing. His phone. Both went to the lab on a warrant. That's routine."
"Thank you, Detective. Nothing further."
Omar stood. He left his pad on the table. He had the interview transcript in one hand and he held it rolled, so the jury could see he had it and not what was in it.
"Detective, my client called 911 himself."
"He did."
"Waited on the porch for your officers. Told them where to find the knife."
"Yes."
"In the interview, did he try to tell you somebody else did it?"
"No, sir."
"Did he ask for a lawyer before he'd told you what happened?"
"No, sir. After."
"How would you describe him?"
Brandt thought about it. "Calm. Polite. He asked for water and said thank you for it."
"In the eleven minutes you spoke to him, he used the word 'it' nine times to mean something other than the knife. Would that number surprise you?"
"I didn't count. I wouldn't argue with it."
"Did you ask him what 'it' was?"
"I did."
"What did he say?"
Brandt glanced at Kline to see whether she would object. She didn't. "He said I wouldn't write it down right. Before that he said it sounded like him."
Omar let that sit in the room. Juror nine took off her reading glasses.
He could feel the next question waiting on his tongue: what the lab had found on the phone. Any defence lawyer would ask it. It made a detective look thorough or lazy, either one useful.
You don't need the phone. It came quiet and practical, in a clerk's voice. They're looking at Danny right now, and they won't be for long.
"Thank you, Detective," he said. "Nothing further."
He went back to the table and sat, and he didn't let himself look at the box on the evidence cart or at Kline's legal pad, where she had written nothing at all during his cross.
Moss sent the jury home at a quarter to five with the instruction he would give every afternoon for three weeks: no news, no internet, no talking about the case, not even to each other. When the door closed behind the last of them, Kline stayed on her feet.
"One matter before we break, Judge. The People move for leave to add a rebuttal witness."
Moss took his glasses off. "Now, Ms. Kline?"
"The defence noticed insanity. They've put the defendant's state of mind before the night of the ninth squarely in issue, and they've listed a spiritual healer to tell the jury about it." She didn't look at Omar. "The People are entitled to answer with something other than our own opinion. The defendant's phone was extracted on a warrant in January. We'd like a qualified examiner to read it and testify to what it shows about his state of mind in the weeks before."
Omar was already up. "Your Honor, we're in trial. The witness list closed a month ago. The People had that phone in January, and they're asking for a new expert on the second day because they don't like where the testimony is going."
"Has the defence had the extraction report?"
There was only one answer. "Since January."
"Then it's your client's phone, Mr. Haddad, and it's your discovery, and it's rebuttal. You can't be surprised by what's in it." Moss wrote something on the sheet in front of him. "Leave is granted for rebuttal only. Ms. Kline, the name to Mr. Haddad tonight."
Kline tore a page off her yellow pad and walked it across the aisle herself. She had written it out in block capitals: a detective sergeant, a woman's name, and under it, Michigan State Police, Computer Crimes Unit, digital forensic examiner.
"She gets the extraction tomorrow morning," Kline said. "Four hundred pages. She reads fast."
She went back to her table and started packing her bag. Behind Omar, at the end of the second row, Tess had stopped writing. He could feel her looking at the back of his neck, and he kept his eyes on the name.