Sheikh Farran took the oath with his right hand raised and his left over his heart, and four people in the jury box smiled at him before he had said a word.
He wore a charcoal suit and a white shirt buttoned to the throat without a tie, and he had trimmed his beard for the occasion. He thanked the clerk. He thanked the judge. He sat down in the witness chair like a man settling into a friend's sofa and turned to the jury, not to Omar, and let them have a moment of his face.
Yesterday had ended worse than this. Amal had looked across the well of the court at Omar for what felt like a full minute and then turned back and said, too quietly for anyone to hear, Sami's name, and Moss had asked her to say it again. On redirect Omar had asked her one thing: whether Sami had ever told his brother to leave the house. She had said no. Sami had let him stay in his own room, she said, and never asked him for rent. Omar had sat down on that, and the jury had gone home on it, and he had decided in the night it was enough.
Before the first question Kline asked to approach. The white noise box hissed. She kept her voice low and even.
"Judge, I want it clear what this witness is. He's not a doctor and he's not qualified in anything I can name. If Mr. Haddad offers him as an expert, I object."
"I'm not offering him as anything," Omar said. "He saw my client three times. He'll say what he saw and what he did."
"Then that's all he'll say." Moss looked at Omar over his glasses. "No opinions on mental state. No opinions on anything that isn't in the room. If he volunteers one, I'll strike it, and I'll tell the jury why in words he won't enjoy."
They went back. Omar stood at the lectern and kept it simple. When had Farran first met Daoud Saleh. October, twice, at the clinic on Warren Avenue, brought by his mother. What had Farran done. He had read over him, recited the Quran in Arabic with a hand on his head, as it has been done for centuries. What had he seen.
"His eyes changed," Farran said, to the jury. "His body went hard, here, in the shoulders, like a man carrying something heavy up stairs. And when I recited, he could not stay in the chair. Something in him could not bear it. The boy was possessed. I have seen it a hundred times."
"Objection."
"Sustained. The last two sentences are stricken. Members of the jury, you'll disregard the witness's conclusion. He may tell you what he saw. He may not tell you what it means."
Farran inclined his head to the judge, gracious, sorry. The jurors wrote it down anyway. Omar watched two of them underline something.
They can't unhear it. You never even had to ask.
He moved on before the room could settle. "Sheikh, at the second visit, did Daoud ask you for anything?"
"He asked me to make it stop." Farran's voice dropped, and the jurors leaned to catch it. "He said it talked to him in his own voice, so he could not tell where he ended. He said it was worst at night. He said it was very reasonable."
"Reasonable?"
"That was his word. I remember it, because it is not a word people use for this."
Omar wrote nothing down. He found he had stopped with the pen above the page, and he made himself put it on the pad and turn to the next question.
The video came after lunch.
Omar laid the foundation as he had rehearsed it in his kitchen: the date, 20 January; the place, a visiting room at the county jail on Clinton Street; the phone, Farran's own; the length, four minutes and eleven seconds, unedited. Farran said the jail chaplain had arranged the visit. He said he had filmed it so the family would see the truth.
Kline was on her feet before Omar had finished asking to play it.
"Objection. Foundation, Your Honor. Phones aren't permitted in that building past the lobby. We have no idea how this was made or who's touched it since. And whatever it shows, its value is nothing next to the prejudice. It's a show. That's what it's for."
Moss called them up again. At the side of the bench he listened to both of them without interrupting, which was worse than if he had. Then he put his glasses back on.
"The witness says he made it and that it's accurate and unaltered. How he got the phone in is between him and the sheriff. The defendant's behaviour eleven days after the offence is relevant to the defence he's raised." He looked at Kline. "Your objection's noted, Ms. Kline. It comes in. I'll instruct them."
He turned to the box. "Members of the jury, you're about to see a recording. You may consider it as evidence of how the defendant behaved and appeared on that date. You may not consider it as proof of any spiritual or religious matter, one way or the other. That is not a question this court can answer, and it is not one you'll be asked."
The lights stayed up. The screen on the wall went blue and then grey.
The picture was a small room with grey cinderblock walls. Danny sat at a steel table in jail orange, his hands folded in front of him. The phone was held at chest height and shook a little. Farran's hand came into the frame and rested on the top of Danny's head, and Farran's voice began to recite in Arabic, loud, rising and falling, close to the microphone.
For a minute Danny did nothing. Then his shoulders came up. His head pushed against the hand. His mouth opened, and the sound that came out of it was nothing Omar had ever heard from him: low, torn, a man's voice dragged over gravel, bellowing at the ceiling. It went on longer than a breath should allow. The chair scraped. The phone jerked and found him again. He was weeping now, slumped forward, and Farran's voice was saying over him, in English, that it was gone, that it had gone, that Allah was merciful.
The screen went black.
In the box, juror four had both hands pressed flat on her notebook. Juror one, the big man from the Rouge plant, was looking at the floor. Behind the rail Amal made a sound into her scarf and a woman beside her put an arm round her.
Omar kept his eyes on the blank screen. He could feel the room tilting toward his table the way a deck tilts, so slowly you only notice it in your knees.
Kline's cross took nine minutes. She asked who had let the phone in, and Farran said a deputy had, a brother, and gave the name only when Moss told him to. She asked how many people followed his channel, and he said two hundred and ten thousand, with a little shrug, as if they had found him by accident. She asked whether he had posted the video.
"Never," he said. "Never the boy's face."
"Did you post any part of it?"
He paused. "The sound only. For teaching. With no name."
"Thank you, Sheikh. Nothing further."
It was a small cut and it would heal by morning. Omar knew that, and he knew Kline knew it.
Moss excused the witness at twenty past three and called the afternoon recess. Farran stepped down, and on his way past the defence table he touched two fingers to his chest and bowed slightly to Danny, and to Amal behind the rail, and then to Omar.
Across the aisle Kline hadn't started packing. She had the yellow page with the examiner's name on it squared in front of her, and she was reading something else beside it, a thick binder with coloured tabs that Omar couldn't see into. He thought of his own desk drawer at the office, the one with no key, and the three pages face down in it under the stapler.
You're winning. You could say it once, to yourself. You've earned the sound of it.
He almost did. He was putting his pen in his jacket when Danny's shoulder came against his, closer than Danny had ever sat to him, and Danny's breath was in his ear.
[whispering] "He's lying," Danny said. "Nothing came out of me in that jail. I screamed because he told me to."