Tess put the binder on his kitchen counter without taking her coat off. The counter was too small for it, so the corner hung over the edge above the bin.
"Adler's report, her notes, the jail logs for every visit, and the questions you sent her Friday with her answers in the margin," she said. "She answered all of them. You won't like four of them."
Omar had the window open in the flat because the radiator in the corner still came on at night in April and wouldn't go off. The noise of Corktown came up off the street, a bar door, somebody's car stereo going past slow. It was Sunday, a little after eight. Adler took the stand at nine in the morning.
"Thank you."
Tess didn't move toward the door. "Kline's paralegal called me Friday afternoon. She wanted to know if we had the extraction in the native format, the actual database, not just the PDF. For her examiner." She looked at the bottle on the counter, not at him. "Their examiner has had the report since Wednesday, Omar. She's on page what, three hundred, by now? She won't skim it like Kline did. She does this for a living."
"I know what she does."
"I held it like you asked." She took a breath. "If Moss asks me under oath what I found and when, I'm going to tell him. I wanted you to hear that from me tonight and not in a hallway." She picked up her bag and put it down again. "One more thing. I took Danny his clean shirts yesterday. He asked me if he gets to tell it himself. On the stand. I said that was your call."
"It is."
"He said to tell you he wants to."
He nodded. He thought about saying something that would make her stay ten more minutes and be argued round. He found he was too tired to want it. She let herself out. He heard her on the stairs, quick, and then the street door.
He poured a glass and opened the binder and read Adler's answers in the margin. She was careful and she was honest, which he had always known about her and had counted on for other clients. The voice had begun in the summer, she wrote, by the patient's own consistent account. She had no evidence of psychotic illness. She would not say otherwise.
He finished the glass. The window let in cold and the radiator pushed back heat, and he sat between the two of them. The thing came as it had for weeks, whole and ready, his own voice at his own speed.
The summer is a long time. She can't put a date on a voice. Asked softly whether it could have started before December, an honest woman would have to say it could. And then every word Danny typed in December is a symptom.
He reached for the legal pad. The pen was already in his other hand.
Danny never takes the stand. That one's easy. No client of yours has testified in a murder trial in six years, and nobody will think twice. Kline can't make him.
He wrote that down too.
And if the texts come in anyway, you stand up. Surprise rebuttal, an expert endorsed in the middle of trial, a device report the People sat on for three months and never flagged. You move for a mistrial. Moss might give it to you. Even if he doesn't, it's preserved, and the Court of Appeals has to read it.
All of it was law. He could have cited it. That was the part that kept him in the chair: there was nothing in the three lines that a grievance lawyer could point to and call a lie. He looked at what he had written. One, two, three, numbered down the margin in his own small capitals, the way he wrote the outline of a closing.
He tore the page off and folded it into his shirt pocket. Then he picked up his keys.
He was at the light on Michigan Avenue before he had decided where he was going, and on Schaefer Road before he admitted it. On the way he passed the bar where the kind man had sat beside him the night he filed the notice and finished his sentences for him. The neon in its window was on. He didn't slow down. He had had one glass. Two. He drove carefully, both hands, under the limit.
The mosque sat between a tyre shop and a dentist's, a low brick building with a green sign and a car park that held eleven cars. The double glass doors were propped open on a rubber wedge, and the light inside was yellow. He parked on the other side of the road, under a dead streetlight, and turned the engine off.
The night prayer had started. Through the doors he could see the backs of the men in two short rows, coats and work jackets and one boy in a football shirt, and in front of them, small at this distance, the white cap of his father. His father's voice came across the road in pieces, between passing cars, reciting in Arabic, unhurried, the same pitch it had always been.
The last time Omar had stood in a row behind that voice was the week they buried his mother. He had driven in from a deposition in Lansing and gone straight to the mosque in yesterday's suit, and stood at his father's shoulder before the trestle and its green cloth while his father led the funeral prayer for his own wife. Three days later he had come back in the dark for the dawn prayer. Omar remembered his father's voice not breaking once that week, and how much he had hated him for it, and he remembered lifting his forehead off the old carpet and thinking, with a clarity that felt like his own, that he would not do this again. He hadn't.
A bus went by on Schaefer Road and took the voice with it. When it had passed, his father had reached the end of a verse and begun another, and Omar found that he knew which one. He had not heard it in six years. He knew the next line before it came. He put the window down an inch to hear it better and then put it up again, fast, as if someone had seen him do it.
The rows went down together in prostration. He watched them through the windscreen, a dozen backs folding at once, and he sat with his hands on the wheel.
He noticed after a while that he wasn't thinking anything. The three lines were still in his pocket. He could feel the fold of the paper against his chest when he breathed. But nothing came to add to them, and nothing came to defend them, and he sat in the car in a silence he had last had lying on his own floor in March, under the call to prayer, and didn't trust.
He didn't get out. He didn't start the engine either.
The prayer ended. The men came out in ones and twos, sat on the low wall to put their shoes on, shook hands, got into their cars. The boy in the football shirt ran. The lights in the car park went off one by one, and the yellow light inside dimmed to a single lamp at the back.
His father came out last. He pulled the doors shut, kicked the wedge inside and locked them. He was seventy-two and he walked like it, slowly, a carrier bag in one hand. He stood on the kerb and looked both ways, the way he had taught Omar to do outside this same building at five years old. Then he crossed the road straight to Omar's car, as though he had known it was there since the first prayer.
He opened the passenger door and got in. He set the carrier bag between his feet. He didn't ask anything and he didn't look at Omar. He folded his hands on his knees and looked out through the windscreen at the dark mosque.
Omar waited for him to speak.
The dashboard clock said 10:14. It went to 10:15, and then to 10:20, the old man breathing steady beside him, the engine ticking as it cooled. At 10:24 his father was still looking at the dark mosque with his hands on his knees, and he still hadn't said a word.