[[Ruth Adler|Dr. Adler]] raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth in a voice that reached the back benches without being raised. She sat, pulled the microphone an inch toward her and folded her hands on the rail of the witness box. She wore a navy suit, and her grey hair was cut short enough to need nothing from her all day.
Omar stood at the lectern with his notes face down. He had slept three hours. The passenger seat of his car still smelled of his father's coat, cold air and cardamom, and he had driven down to the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice with the window open until his ear ached.
He took her through her qualifications fast, because Kline had stipulated to them and the jury had stopped listening to careers on the second day. Thirty years in forensic psychiatry. Some four hundred evaluations for courts in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb, for the prosecution about as often as the defence. Kline wrote nothing down.
"Doctor, you examined Mr. Saleh in the Wayne County Jail in February."
"Twice. Six hours in all."
"What did he tell you about the voice?"
"That it began last summer, after his father's will was read. That it spoke rarely at first and then most nights. That it sounded like his own thinking, only surer of itself."
Omar let the jury hold that. Juror nine, the older woman in the navy headscarf, had her pen on her pad and wasn't writing. Two of the men in the back row had turned to look at Danny, who sat at the defence table in the grey suit his mother had bought him with his hands flat on the wood, the way the deputies liked.
The next question had been ready since midnight. It sat in his mouth like a cough sweet. If she says summer twice, summer is a long way from December, and December is in your desk drawer, under the stapler.
"So by his account, the voice was with him for months before the ninth of January."
"By his account."
"Before Christmas. Before December."
"He told me the summer. I can't date something I didn't witness, Mr. Haddad. I can tell the jury what he reported and how consistently he reported it."
"And was he consistent?"
"Very."
"In your report you considered a dissociative disorder."
"I considered it and I didn't find it. I found no psychosis, no mood disorder that would matter here, and no sign that he was inventing it. He isn't lying about hearing it." She turned from him to the jury box. "I don't know what it is. I won't give it a name to be helpful."
Sit down, Omar thought. You've had everything she'll give you. The sheikh's video will carry the rest. He sat.
Kline stood without notes. She had the posture of a woman who had been on her feet since six and intended to stay on them.
"Doctor, you said you can only tell us what he reported."
"Yes."
"Did you have anything besides his report? Records? His phone?"
"School records. A pharmacy printout of his prescriptions, which was short. A written statement from his mother."
"Not his phone."
"No."
"Did you ask for it?"
Adler's eyes came to Omar and stayed there, level, without any accusation in them yet. "I wrote to defence counsel on the first of March and asked for anything relevant to his state of mind in the months before."
Omar remembered the letter. Two lines on her letterhead, the signature in green ink. He had answered by email the same afternoon: "Attached is what we have on his history." He had read the sentence over before he sent it and found nothing false in it, and that had been a comfort at the time.
"If the defendant had written down, weeks before, what he stood to gain from his brother's death, would that be relevant to your opinion?"
"Objection. Facts not in evidence."
"It's a hypothetical to an expert, Mr. Haddad. She's allowed one." Judge Moss didn't look up from his legal pad. "Overruled. You'll connect it, Ms. Kline."
"I will, Judge."
"It would be the most relevant thing anyone could show me."
"Nothing further."
Moss sent the jury out for ten minutes before the defence closed its case. With the box empty he leaned toward the defence table and asked Danny, for the record, whether he understood that he had the right to testify, and that the choice was his and not his lawyer's.
Danny stood. He looked at Omar first.
"My lawyer said not to."
"I'm asking what you want, Mr. Saleh."
Omar kept his face still and his pen moving on a blank page. Danny watched the pen for a while.
"Then I won't."
The jury filed back in. Omar rose and buttoned his jacket.
"Your Honor, the defence rests."
Kline's rebuttal witness was a detective sergeant from the Michigan State Police Computer Crimes Unit, a small woman in a grey trouser suit who carried a laptop under her arm and set it on the rail of the witness box. She had testified, she said, in a little over two hundred trials. She said it like a mileage figure.
Kline handed up the People's exhibit and gave Omar his copy as she passed. He didn't need to open it. Four hundred and six pages, printed single-sided, held with two black clips. The same report had reached him in January on a flash drive in a plastic sleeve, unlisted, and he had found it at three in the morning at his own kitchen table. Last night Tess had guessed the examiner would be on page three hundred. The examiner's copy bristled with yellow tabs.
Danny leaned an inch toward him, which the deputies allowed. "Is that my phone?"
"Yes."
Danny nodded as though he had been asked to confirm his address, and put his hands flat again.
"What is this document?"
"A full file-system extraction of a Samsung handset seized from the defendant at the time of his arrest, with my report."
"Turn to page two hundred and twelve, please. The highlighted message. Date, time and recipient."
"Fourteenth of December 2026, 9:47pm. Outgoing. To a contact saved as Rami."
"Read it to the jury, exactly as written."
"if sami was gone the house comes to mom and me."
The sentence went out over the room in her flat lab voice, lowercase and all. Omar heard a bench creak behind him in the second row, where Amal sat with her handbag on her knees. He didn't turn round.
"Page two hundred and thirty-one. The search history."
"Third of January 2027, 2:06am. A Google search: how long for a stab wound to kill."
Juror nine put her pen down. She set it across her pad and laid her hand flat on top of it. One of the men in the back row looked at Danny and then, for the first time all trial, at Omar. Danny hadn't moved. Only his thumbs had come together on the table.
Omar felt the next part arrive whole, already argued, in the calm tone he used on judges. They listed her as rebuttal and never said a word about that page. Four hundred pages, no index, no flag, no notice. Nobody can prove what you read. Surprise is a ground. A mistrial gives you a new jury and a whole new summer.
He stood.
"Objection, Your Honor. The defence had no notice the People meant to rely on this material. We move for a mistrial."
The words came out in good order and sounded like a lawyer. Kline turned her head and looked at him. Moss took his glasses off and held them by one arm, and for a while he looked at Omar the way a man looks at the weather.
"Members of the jury, we'll take the afternoon recess. Fifteen minutes. Don't discuss the case."
The jury went out through the side door in single file. When it shut, Moss put his glasses back on.
"Counsel. Approach."
Omar walked to the bench. Kline was already there, one hand on the wood, and she waited until he stood next to her. She didn't look at him. She kept her voice low enough that the court reporter, two yards off, wouldn't take it down.
"You had these."