"The People rest, Your Honor."
Kline said it on Thursday morning at twenty past ten, and sat down, and capped her highlighter. Four days and nine witnesses, and she had not wasted a question on any of them.
Moss sent the jury out to the room behind the box. When the door had shut, Omar stood and moved for a directed verdict on the charge of first-degree murder. He kept it short because Moss liked it short. One wound. A man who called 911 himself and waited on the porch in his socks. No plan in evidence, no weapon brought into the house, no lie told to anybody afterward. Whatever happened in that kitchen, he said, the People hadn't shown a minute of premeditation, and the jury shouldn't be allowed to guess at one.
Kline answered from her seat. "He crossed the kitchen, Judge. He opened a drawer and chose a knife and walked six feet with it. The law doesn't ask for a minute. It asks for time enough to take a second look."
"It does," Moss said. "Taking the evidence in the light most favourable to the People, a reasonable juror could find he had that time. The motion is denied. Bring them back."
Omar had expected nothing else. He sat. Beside him Danny was looking at the grain of the table.
She's arguing a drawer and six feet of floor. She has no idea what she's standing on.
He didn't answer it. He turned his pad to a clean page and wrote the word OPENING at the top, though he wouldn't look at it again.
At the recess Amal caught him by the water fountain in the corridor, under the window that looked out over St. Antoine Street. She held his sleeve between two fingers, as if it might be rude to take more of it.
"If she asks me about the house," she said.
"Then you answer her question. Only her question. Short."
"And what I told you? About Sami?"
He looked down the corridor, where a deputy was holding the door of the jury room for a woman with a tray of coffee. "Nobody's going to ask you that, Mrs. Saleh. So you don't need to say it."
She let go of the sleeve and smoothed it flat where she had held it.
He had reserved his opening on Monday, and the jury had waited four days for him. He could see it on them when they came back in. They wanted to hear how anybody could stand up for the man on the tape.
He stood at the end of the rail, not the lectern.
"You've heard a lot about a knife," he said. "Nobody at this table is going to argue with any of it. Danny took it. Danny used it. Danny called for help and told the police the truth. What the People didn't spend four days on is the year before that knife. That's where we're going. Some of you told me on Monday you've heard a voice in your own head. I'm going to ask you to remember how it sounded. Then I'm going to ask you to imagine it never stopped."
He told them the law because they'd hear it from the judge anyway and it was better from him first: that the defence had a burden here, a real one, and that he intended to carry it. He told them they'd hear from Danny's mother, from a doctor who had sat with Danny for six hours, from a man who had prayed over him. He told them about the summer. He didn't say the word jinn. He said voice. He said it the way the nurse in seat four had said it on Monday, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and he saw her nod before she caught herself.
Then he called Amal Saleh.
She came up the aisle in black with her bag held in both hands, and the deputy had to tell her she could leave it at the table. She raised her palm too high for the oath, like someone on television. When she sat, her feet didn't quite reach the floor.
He took her through it as they had practised it in March. Her husband. Thirty-four years. The pharmacy where Sami worked. The night shifts Danny drove for the delivery app.
"Mrs. Saleh, your husband passed away last year."
"In March. His heart."
"And in the summer after that, did you notice anything change in Daoud?"
"After they read the will, he. . ."
"Let's stay with Daoud," Omar said, gently, and she looked at him and nodded and found the place again. "What did you notice?"
"He stopped eating with us. He took his plate upstairs. At night I heard him talking in his room. I opened the door once, and his phone was on the dresser, charging. Some nights he sat in his car in the driveway with the engine off, two o'clock, three o'clock, and his lips were moving. I watched him from the kitchen. I never went out."
"Why not?"
"I was afraid of what he would tell me."
"Who was he talking to?"
"I asked him. He said, 'Nobody, Mama, go to sleep.' Another night he said, 'Me.'" She pressed a tissue to her mouth. "He said it sounded like himself."
Juror nine was writing.
"Before that summer, did Daoud pray?"
"With his father, side by side, from when he was seven years old. The night prayer, in the front room, even when he came home late from the university. After Marwan died he prayed alone for a little while. Then he stopped. I put his rug out. He walked round it."
"And in the autumn you were frightened enough to take him to someone."
"Objection," Kline said. "Leading."
"Sustained. Ask her, Mr. Haddad."
Omar didn't mind. He let the jury see him not mind. "What did you do, in the autumn?"
"I took him to the sheikh. Twice. I didn't know what else. I'm his mother."
She began to cry then, without any sound, her shoulders going, and the clerk passed her the box of tissues that every witness stand in that building kept on its rail. Omar waited. He didn't hurry her and he didn't stop her. In the box, two rows of people had leaned forward without knowing it.
You haven't asked her one false thing. You only chose the order.
It was the kind of thing he might have said to a junior lawyer, proud of a direct. He didn't argue with it.
"Thank you, Mrs. Saleh. Nothing further."
Kline didn't go to the lectern. She stood beside her table with one hand flat on a closed folder, and she waited until Amal had folded the tissue into a small square and put it in her lap.
Relevance. The word was in his mouth before she had opened hers. An objection would make her say why. He weighed it for a second. Moss would overrule him in four words, and the jury would watch him try to keep a widow from answering a question about her own house. He stayed in his chair.
Omar knew what was in the folder. Anyone could get it. The probate court at Wayne County kept it on file for whoever asked: the estate of Marwan Saleh, the personal representative, the house on Calhoun Street. He had been waiting for this since March, and he had told himself she would never bother, because she hadn't bothered with four hundred pages of a phone.
"Mrs. Saleh, I'm sorry for your loss," Kline said. "For both of them. I have one question."
Amal nodded. She had stopped crying. She looked very small in the chair.
"Who inherited the house?"
Nobody in the courtroom moved. Danny's hands had gone still on the table. Amal opened her mouth, and closed it, and then she turned in the witness chair, away from Kline, away from the jury, and looked straight across the well of the court at Omar, waiting for him to tell her what to say.