The incense reached the pavement before Omar did. It came under the door of the storefront on Warren Avenue in a sweet grey thread, oud and something cheaper, and it followed him in when he opened it, along with a gust of slush and the noise of a bus.
The clinic had been a mobile phone shop once. The shape of the old logo still showed on the window under the new gold lettering, and the counter was the same counter, now draped in green velvet. Six women sat on folding chairs along one wall with children in their laps or at their feet. None of them looked at Omar. One was rocking a boy of about ten who was too old to be rocked and let her do it anyway.
Omar had slept badly and early, which was new. Danny's probable cause conference had taken four minutes the morning before: the prosecutor's office was ready, the defence was ready, everybody was ready except the client, who had sat at the table with his hands folded and looked at the ceiling as though he could hear something up there. Omar still had the conference's paperwork under his arm, because he had not been back to the office to put it down.
A young man in a white skullcap took his card through to the back without a word and came out again and held the curtain open.
The back room was the size of a garage and lit like a television studio. A ring light stood on a tripod in front of a single armchair upholstered in red, with a phone clipped in the centre of the ring and its screen dark. Behind the chair a wall of shelves held Qurans in every size, bottles of oil, jars of black seed, packets of dried leaves labelled in marker pen. On the opposite wall, in a gold frame, hung a certificate in Arabic and English from an institute in Amman, attesting that Nabil Farran had completed a course of study in healing by the Quran. It had a red wax seal. Omar had seen less impressive law degrees.
"Brother Omar."
Sheikh Nabil Farran came round a desk at the far end with both hands already out. He was in his forties, broad and soft in a grey quarter-zip, with a beard trimmed so precisely it looked drawn on. He took Omar's right hand in both of his and held it, warm and dry, a beat longer than a handshake needed.
"You're Imam Khalil's son," he said. "From Schaefer Road. I see him in you. Around the eyes."
"People tell me it's the jaw."
"The jaw also." Farran laughed, an easy, low sound, and let go of his hand. "Your father and I have disagreed, respectfully, about many things. He thinks I talk too much. He's right. Sit, sit."
There was only one chair besides Farran's own, and it was the red one under the ring light. Omar sat in it. The dark lens in the middle of the ring looked down at him like the eye of a patient bird.
Farran told it well. Omar had cross-examined enough police officers to recognise a man who had told a story many times and had come to love it, and Farran loved this one.
"October," he said. "His mother brings him. Good woman. A believer. She sits where the sisters sit and he comes in here and he won't take the chair. He stands by the door with his hands in his pockets, like a boy at a wedding who wants to go home."
"What did you do?"
"I read over him. Only the Quran, Brother Omar. Nothing else. I don't do the other things. The ones with the eggs and the threads and the names." He made a small disgusted gesture, as if brushing crumbs from his sleeve. "I read the Verse of the Throne in his right ear. He begins to shake. I read the last chapters, the ones for refuge. He begins to cry. Then he laughs." Farran's voice dropped. "Not his laugh."
Omar wrote "laughs" in his notebook, then "not his", then put the pen down because his hand wanted to put quotation marks around it.
"And the second time?"
"Two weeks later. Worse. He fights me. And then nothing for months, because the mother's other son, the pharmacist, says no more sheikh, take him to a doctor." Farran spread his hands. "And now there are no more months."
"[[Amal Saleh|Mrs. Saleh]] says you've seen him since."
"On Wednesday. The twentieth. In the jail on Clinton Street, as his spiritual adviser. She asked me. I went."
"I'm his lawyer. Nobody asked me."
"Now somebody has." Farran smiled, to show there was no offence in it. "I'll tell the court everything I've told you. I'll tell them under oath, with my hand on whatever they give me. That boy did not kill his brother. The thing inside him did, and it's still inside him, and I have it on film."
Omar looked at him for a long moment: the drawn-on beard, the quarter-zip, the gold frame and its wax seal, the ring light. He thought of whichever circuit judge drew the case peering at a business card that said "All Afflictions" over the top of his glasses. He thought of Kline on cross. She wouldn't need ten minutes. She'd need the card.
It was a good, clean, professional thought, and right behind it came another, as smooth as the first and in the same voice.
Twelve jurors from Wayne County. Not one of them would be a lawyer. Some of them would be from Dearborn, and some of those would have an aunt who had been read over, or a cousin whose baby stopped crying after a sheikh breathed on it, and they would look at this man and see their own front rooms. You've watched juries believe worse. You've watched them believe Kline.
Omar noticed the thought mostly because it was useful. Useful thoughts at nine in the morning were rare enough that he usually wrote them down. He didn't write this one down. He found he didn't need to.
"You filmed him," he said. "In the jail."
"Yes."
"You can't take a phone into a jail visit."
"The deputy was a brother," Farran said. "He understood what it was for."
Omar let that go into the notebook too. Every lawyer in the building would want that deputy's name before trial, Kline first, and Farran said it as if the man had done him a favour with a parking space.
Farran took the phone out of the ring light's clamp and sat on the arm of his desk, close enough that their knees almost touched, and held it so they could both see. He found the video without looking for it. Omar guessed he had found it many times.
It began on a grey cinderblock wall. The camera swung, steadied, and there was Danny, in orange, at a steel table bolted to the floor of a jail interview room. His hands were folded on the table in front of him exactly as they had been at the conference. He looked tired and younger than twenty-six. Off camera, Farran's voice began to recite in Arabic, the long even rise and fall of the Verse of the Throne, and a broad hand came into the frame and settled on the top of Danny's head.
For a while nothing happened. Danny kept his eyes on the table. Omar heard the hum of the jail's lights through the phone's small speaker, and somewhere in the background a door, a buzzer, a man shouting a surname.
Then Danny's shoulders began to move. Small at first, a shiver, the kind a man gets coming in from the cold. Farran's voice rose. The hand on Danny's head pressed down. Danny's fingers came apart on the table and spread out flat, white at the tips, and his chin lifted toward the camera until Omar was looking straight into his face.
His mouth opened. What came out of it was a scream in a voice that was not Danny's. It was too low and too wide for that thin chest, hoarse at the edges like an old man's after a lifetime of cigarettes, and it went on far longer than one breath should have let it, while Danny's eyes, above it, stayed still and fixed on the lens.
In the back room on Warren Avenue, the ring light hummed. Farran, on the arm of the desk, was watching Omar's face.