Moss didn't let them speak at the bench. He covered the microphone with his palm, said "Chambers, both of you, bring the report," and stood up so fast that the clerk had to scramble for the door behind him.
Omar went back to the defence table for his file. Two deputies already had Danny on his feet, one hand under each elbow, steering him toward the side door that led down to the holding cells. Danny let them steer. As he passed the rail he turned his head toward the second row, where his mother sat with her handbag clutched in both arms like something pulled out of water. She didn't reach for him. She was looking at Omar. At the door Danny looked back once too, over the deputy's shoulder, with the polite, puzzled face of a man who has been sent to the wrong address and is too well brought up to say so.
His phone buzzed in his breast pocket. Tess, from the back of the gallery, where she'd sat every afternoon that week with her coat on: "Kline has the texts? ?" Then, a second later: "Do you want me?"
He wrote "No" and put the phone away. Then he took it out again and added "Go home. I'll call you," because she'd sat in the back of that courtroom all week on his say-so and deserved more than one word.
The corridor behind the courtroom ran past a copy room and a kitchenette that smelled of burnt coffee. A tall window at the far end let in flat April daylight, and he walked toward it with his copy of the extraction report under one arm and Kline's heels clicking two steps ahead of him. By the time he reached Moss's door the argument was finished. He hadn't written a word of it.
Moss's chambers were small for a circuit judge. There was a desk with nothing on it but a blotter and a green-shaded lamp, three chairs, a radiator under the window that knocked twice a minute, and a framed photograph of a sailboat that nobody had ever seen him mention. He hung his robe on the back of the door. Underneath it he wore a grey cardigan with leather buttons, which made him look less like a judge and more frightening for it.
He sat. He didn't ask them to.
Kline stayed standing anyway. She took a single sheet out of a folder and laid it on the blotter facing Moss, then turned it a few degrees so Omar could read it too. It was a printout of the drive she had handed him in the hallway after the preliminary examination, every file listed, with the receipt he had initialled stapled behind it. The thirty-second file was circled in red: "Extraction Report", four hundred and six pages.
"Twenty-eighth of January," she said. "Signed for. I'll take the hit for not reading my own drive sooner. I've already taken it, from my supervisor, twice. But he stood up in front of my jury and said surprise."
"Sit down, Ms. Kline."
She sat. Moss folded his hands on the blotter and looked at Omar over them.
"Mr. Haddad. Is it your position that the defence was surprised by this evidence?"
It was all there. It came up in order, each point resting on the last, in the voice he used when a judge was leaning his way.
The People produced four hundred and six pages without an index, a summary or a single flag. The People didn't read their own file for three months. Nothing in the court rules or the rules of professional conduct obliges defence counsel to read the prosecution's evidence for them, or to warn them about it. His duty runs to his client and to nobody else in this room. He hadn't claimed the report was never produced. He had said the defence had no notice the People meant to rely on it, and that was true: they listed an examiner, not a page. Every sentence could be checked, and every sentence would hold. Moss was a careful man and would see that it held. Kline would be angry all the way to the car park, and in a month she'd admit in a bar somewhere that he'd been right.
"Judge, the report came to us unindexed, as part of a production of more than. . ."
He stopped.
The radiator knocked. Moss didn't move.
Omar had heard the argument's tone before, and recently. That morning, in the witness box, [[Ruth Adler|Dr. Adler]] had described a voice that sounded like a man's own thinking, only surer of itself. He'd stood at the lectern and let the jury hold the phrase because it helped. Now he heard the same thing in his own head, a little ahead of him, smooth and fitted to his mouth. It was offering him a sentence he believed every word of, as it had offered him the email to Adler, and the drawer, and the word "hold".
He found he couldn't tell which part of it was him. That frightened him more than anything Farran had played him on a phone.
"No," he said. "I withdraw the motion."
Kline turned her head.
"I wasn't surprised. I read those messages in February. My investigator found them and brought them to me, and I told her to hold her analysis. I put the printouts in my desk drawer. When Dr. Adler wrote and asked for anything relevant, I sent her school records."
The words came out flat and in the wrong order and didn't sound like a lawyer at all. He didn't try to fix them.
"You let her go up there blind," Kline said. "She's sixty-one. She's done this thirty years. You let me take her apart in front of a jury over something you had in a drawer."
"Yes."
"And the sheikh? Did you know. . ."
"Stop there." Moss had raised one hand an inch off the blotter. "Mr. Haddad, you will not tell me anything your client said to you, in this room or anywhere else. Not one word. Whatever else you've done, I won't have you do that as well."
Omar shut his mouth. He'd been about to.
Moss took off his glasses and pressed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. When he spoke again he spoke slowly, the way he read jury instructions, every clause given its own room.
"Here's where we are. The jury goes home until I call them. The People's evidence is in, and it stays in. What the defence did with it is now a question about the defence, which means your client may have a claim that his own lawyer's interests ran against his. He's entitled to hear that, and to have someone who isn't you explain it to him."
"I understand."
"I doubt that. But you'll get there."
The voice hadn't gone. It had only moved, softer now, round to the side of him. You had it won. You had the jury leaning in while the video played, you had a mother in tears and a sheikh on video, and you've handed the whole thing to Kline for nothing. Danny will do twenty-five years because you couldn't keep quiet for one more afternoon. That was true as well. Omar stood in it and let it talk, and didn't answer.
Kline picked up the receipt, folded it in half and put it back in her folder. She didn't look at Omar again. At the door she stopped with her hand on the frame.
"My offer to him stands," she said, to the doorframe. "Second-degree. Until I say otherwise. Tell him that as well."
Then she was gone, and her heels went away down the corridor toward the window.
Omar was still standing. The report was still under his arm. He noticed he had been holding it the whole time, the way Amal held her handbag, and he set it down on the chair.
Moss had put his glasses back on and pulled a legal pad from a drawer. He wrote the date at the top of it and underlined it.
"I'll think about what to do with you, Mr. Haddad," he said, without looking up. "Talk to your client first."