The guard at the attorney window on Clinton Street slid Omar's bar card back under the glass with one finger and said they were short-staffed, so he could have forty minutes, maybe less. Omar said forty was fine. It was a quarter past nine and the sun had been down for an hour. He had sat in the car park of the Wayne County Jail for most of that hour with the engine off.
The voice had kept him company. It had never once told him not to go in. It had helped him plan what to say when he did.
The texts, of course. He'll hear about them anyway. The prosecutor's offer is back, and that's good news to carry in. You don't have to tell him about the drawer. You don't have to tell him why you said not to testify. And the sheikh, well. He told you that at the table himself. He already knows what he knows.
Everything it offered was a kindness to somebody. Most of them were kindnesses to Omar.
The attorney room was a cinderblock box painted the green of old hospital corridors, with a steel table bolted to the floor and two plastic chairs that weren't. A deputy brought Danny in, in orange again, the grey suit gone back to wherever the jail kept it. Danny sat down and put his hands flat on the table out of habit, then took them off when nobody told him to.
"They sent the jury home," he said. "The deputy told me. He said it's bad when they send them home."
"It's bad," Omar said. "Most of it's my fault. I'm going to tell you all of it, and then you can decide what you want to do about me."
He told him in order, because that was the only way he could get through it.
The phone report in January, on the drive, the night he found it and didn't scroll. The texts to Rami and the search at two in the morning, which Tess had found in February and put on his desk. The drawer he'd put them in. The word he'd used to her, "hold", and how she had looked at him when he said it. The email to [[Ruth Adler|Dr. Adler]], with the school records attached and nothing else. Then the advice he had given Danny, as recently as that morning, not to take the stand, which had been good advice for some reasons and had also kept a prosecutor from asking him about his phone.
Danny looked up at that. "You said it was for me. Not testifying."
"Some of it was."
"How much?"
Omar thought about it, because Danny had asked properly and deserved a real number. "I don't know. Less than I told you."
The voice had gone quiet somewhere around the email. It came back when he got to the sheikh.
He's had enough. Nobody would blame you for stopping here.
"And Farran," Omar said. "You told me at the table that he was lying, that you screamed in that video because he told you to. I heard you. I didn't stand up. I let the jury go home for the weekend believing him, because it was helping."
Danny's face didn't change. He was looking at a spot on the table between his hands where someone had scratched initials into the paint and someone else had tried to scratch them out.
"The judge says you may have a claim against me. It means my own interests got in the way of yours, and you can ask for a different lawyer, and a different lawyer can use what I did to help you later. He'll send someone who isn't me to explain it properly. You should listen to them."
Nothing.
"The prosecutor says her offer stands. Second-degree. Twenty-five to forty. I'm not telling you to take it. I'm telling you it's there."
Still nothing. A door banged a long way off, and then another, nearer. The voice said, mildly, that Danny would ask for the other lawyer now, and the other lawyer would put Omar's name in an appeal brief, and that this was the night his career ended, in a green room on Clinton Street, for a client who wouldn't look at him. Omar listened to it the way he listened to the doors.
Omar put both his hands on the table, the way Danny had when he came in.
"One more thing, and it's not legal advice. I think the voice was real. I don't think you made it up, and I don't think Dr. Adler does either. I've heard something like it since January. It talks like me. It's very reasonable." He made himself keep looking at Danny. "But it never had your hands, Danny. The knife was yours."
Danny didn't answer for a long time. Omar didn't fill the silence, which was the hardest thing he'd done all day, harder than chambers. Eleven years in courtrooms had trained him to fill a silence with options, with appeals, with the next step, and he kept his mouth shut on all of them. The fluorescent tube over the table had a flicker in one end, too fast to see, slow enough to feel behind the eyes. The deputy outside the door shifted his weight and his keys moved. Somewhere in the building a man was shouting the same word over and over, too far off to make out.
The minute hand on the wall clock, behind its wire cage, went round past the six and kept going.
At last Danny moved. He lifted one hand off the table and rubbed the inside of his wrist with his thumb, the way he did in court, as though checking it was still attached.
"Can I tell the judge?" he said. "Myself. Not you. Not anybody. Me."
"If you plead, he'll ask you what you did. You have to say it in your own words, under oath. Nobody can say it for you."
"Can Mama be there?"
"It's an open court. She can be there."
"I want her to hear it from me. Not from a lady reading off my phone."
He nodded to himself. Then he started talking, in the same polite, careful voice he had used to the magistrate in January, as though helping someone fill in a form.
"Sami was at the stove," he said. "He was making tea, the way he did every night before bed, with the little pot. He had his back to me. I opened the drawer by the sink and it made that noise it makes, and he didn't turn round. He said, 'Shut that properly, it sticks.' Like I was twelve. I took the big knife out and stood there with it."
He stopped and looked at his own hand, palm up, as if it might have something written on it.
"Then I put it back. I put it back in the drawer, on the towel, with the others. I shut the drawer and it made the noise again. I thought, that's it, I'll go up to bed. I really thought that. And it said, nice and friendly, he's never going to turn round, is he? He's never going to look at you. The house, the money, Mama, he gets all of it, and he doesn't even turn round."
Danny's voice didn't rise. It got smaller and more exact.
"So I opened the drawer again. It made the noise. He said, 'Danny, come on,' and that time he turned round." Danny's thumb stopped on his wrist. "He turned round right at the end. He had the little pot in his hand. That's the last thing I remember properly, the pot."
The tube flickered. The deputy's keys moved outside. One wound, below the left collarbone, the police report had said. Omar had read it in January and had never once asked himself which way Sami was facing.
"Everybody keeps asking me what it said," Danny said. "The sheikh, the doctor, you. Like it gave orders. It never told me to do anything. Not once. It just asked. Wasn't I tired. Didn't I deserve the house. Wouldn't it be easier. Wasn't he asking for it, with his back to me." He looked straight at Omar. "It asked. I said yes. Every time, I said yes."