Tess had the laser measure out before Omar had turned off the engine. She aimed it through the windshield at the house, read the number and put it back in her coat, a habit she had picked up in her first month at the office and never explained.
"It's in probate," she said. "I pulled it this morning. Father died in March. Marwan Saleh. The older son's personal representative of the estate. Was."
"So whose house is it?"
"Today? The court's. Tomorrow, depends who's left." She looked at the house again. "On the call he says it told him to. What's it?"
"His word, not mine."
"My aunt in Lagos had a word for it," Tess said. "She charged by the hour."
The house sat halfway down Calhoun Street in Dearborn, two storeys of tan brick with a glassed-in porch and a satellite dish aimed at a country nobody in the family had lived in for forty years. The snow on the lawn had been walked flat in a wide path from the drive to the steps, the shape of a lot of boots in a hurry. Someone had cleared the porch since. A white sticker on the storm door said a restoration company out of Livonia had been and gone, with a phone number for questions.
Omar rang the bell. He had shaved, and drunk two glasses of water, and he felt like a man impersonating himself.
The woman who opened the door was in black from her headscarf to her slippers. She was short and straight-backed and had the kind of face that had been handsome for a long time without anyone mentioning it. She looked at Omar, then at Tess, then at the laser measure Tess had not put away fast enough.
"You're the lawyer," Amal Saleh said.
"Omar Haddad. This is Tess Okafor, she works with me."
"He called me," Amal said. "From the jail. He said you told him not to use the phone, so he talked very fast."
She stood aside to let them in.
The kitchen smelled of bleach and lemon, and under that, faintly, of something else, the way a swimming pool smells of the people who were in it. Every surface shone. The grout between the floor tiles was dark grey everywhere except for a patch in front of the stove, about the size of a bath mat, where it had been scrubbed back to white.
Omar looked at the white patch and then made himself look at the rest of the room. There was a calendar from a halal butcher on the side of the fridge, still on December. A row of glass jars of lentils and rice along the counter. A window over the sink with a plant on the sill and a view of the neighbour's garage.
The drawer by the sink was the second one down. Omar opened it. It stuck halfway and gave a short metal squeal before it came the rest of the way, and Tess, at the far side of the room, turned her head.
"Do that again."
He shut it and opened it. The same squeal, the same catch at the halfway mark, as if the runner had been bent and nobody had got round to it.
Inside were wooden spoons, a ladle, a garlic press, kitchen scissors and four knives lying loose on a dish towel, their handles all pointing the same way. There was room on the towel for a fifth.
"Anybody in this room hears that," Tess said. She pointed the measure from the drawer to the white patch of grout and read it off. "Six feet two. He was standing by the stove, or he turned round to it."
Omar shut the drawer with two fingers, and it squealed anyway.
He knew what the next thought would be before it came, which was why he let it. A brother at the stove with his back to the room. A drawer that announced itself. Either Sami had turned round and seen it coming, or he had heard it and not turned round, because it was only Danny. Omar didn't know yet which one was worse for his client. He wrote six feet two in his notebook and drew a box around it.
Amal came in behind them with a tray. Three small glasses of tea in brass holders, a bowl of sugar, a plate of date biscuits dusted white. She put the tray on the counter beside the jars and stood in front of the stove, on the white grout, without looking down.
"Drink," she said. "Sit, drink. Nobody comes in my house and stands."
Danny had warned him. Omar sat at the kitchen table and drank. It was sweet and hot enough to hurt, and it was the best thing he had put in his body in three days.
The front room was for guests, which meant nobody sat in it. Two sofas in gold brocade faced each other under plastic covers, and on the wall between the windows hung the Verse of the Throne in gold Arabic calligraphy, which Omar recognised by its shape before he could have read a word of it. His father had the same one over his desk.
Under it, on a long cabinet, were the photographs.
Sami at his pharmacy school ceremony, in a short white coat, holding the diploma with both hands. Sami at somebody's wedding, laughing at something off to the left. Sami at about eight, in a bow tie, holding a fat baby on his lap with great seriousness, as if he had been told it might go off. At the end of the row a larger frame with a black ribbon across one corner: a heavy man with a grey moustache in a good suit. Marwan, Omar assumed. Nobody introduced him.
"Is that Danny?" Omar asked. "The baby?"
"Yes."
"Do you have any of him older?"
Amal opened the cabinet. Inside, in a stack, were the frames that had not made it to the top: a boy with braces in a school portrait, a young man in a hard hat outside an engineering building, the same young man thinner in a delivery company's polo shirt. She took them out one by one and set them on the cabinet next to Sami's, as though she had only just noticed she'd put them away.
"Sami was easy," she said in Arabic, and then again in English, as if for the record: "Sami was easy. Daoud was never easy. I don't love the easy one more. People think that."
Omar said nothing. Saying nothing was most of his job, and he was good at it in the mornings.
"I buried one son on Tuesday," Amal said. "I have one son left. You understand me? I can't do it twice. I don't care what he did. I know what he did." Her hand came up and pressed flat against her chest, once, and went down. "You save the one I have left."
"I'll do everything the law lets me do, Mrs. Saleh."
"That's a lawyer's answer."
"I'm a lawyer."
She looked at him for a long moment, the way his mother used to look at a melon in the market, deciding whether it was worth carrying home.
"On the phone to the police," he said, "Danny said something told him to do it. Has he said that kind of thing before?"
Amal glanced toward the kitchen. Tess had stayed in there, measuring the window, or pretending to. When Amal spoke again she kept her voice down, though there was nobody else in the house to hear.
"Since the summer," she said. "He talked in his room at night. I thought it was his phone. Then I listened at the door and there was no phone." She folded her hands. "In the autumn I took him to a sheikh. For the voices. Sami didn't want it. Sami said it was a doctor he needed. I said a doctor gives pills, and the pills make him fat and sad, and the voice is still there."
"Which sheikh?"
She went to the hall, to a coat on a hook by the door, and came back with a business card held between two fingers like something she had been saving for the right buyer.
It was heavy cream card with gold edges. A small gold crescent in one corner, a phone number, a website and an address on Warren Avenue. In the middle, in raised black letters: "Sheikh Nabil Farran. Spiritual Healing by the Holy Quran. All Afflictions."
"He read over my son," Amal said. "Twice. He said it was a jinn. He said it's still inside."