The ice in the glass cracked when the rye hit it, a small sharp sound in the quiet of the flat, and the thought was there before the sound had finished.
You could win this. Nobody else could.
Omar stood at the kitchen counter with the bottle in his hand and did not move. He had thought plenty of things like that in eleven years of practice, usually after the second drink, usually about cases he then lost. The timing was new. He had been thinking about nothing, about whether there was a lemon in the fridge, and the sentence had arrived finished and polished and set down in front of him, the way a waiter sets down a plate you don't remember ordering. He had found it already thought.
He put the bottle down and looked at the glass. Two inches of rye, which was one more than he had meant to pour.
The flat was one bedroom on the second floor of a converted brick row house in Corktown, with a view down the street to the old train station, which had been empty for most of his life and was now full of a car company's engineers and lit up at night like an aquarium. He had moved in after the divorce. Leila had let him take the reading lamp and the good knives, and had kept the friends, which they both agreed was fair. On the kitchen table, under the lamp, sat the case file, a legal pad and a small black flash drive in a plastic sleeve with "SALEH, D. DISCOVERY 1" written on it in Kline's handwriting.
He carried the glass to the table and sat down, and the thought sat down with him.
The preliminary examination had taken forty minutes the day before. Kline had put on one detective, Brandt, a heavy, patient man from Dearborn PD who described the porch and the socks and the dish towel, and the wound, and the words. Omar had cross-examined him for six minutes, mostly to hear how the detective said "It told me to" when he quoted it. He said it flatly, like a man reading a licence plate. The district judge had found probable cause in a sentence and a half and bound Danny over to the Third Circuit Court, where the case had gone, by the blind draw, to Judge Harlan Moss.
Afterwards, in the hallway, Kline had handed him the drive.
"Round one," she said. "Reports, photos, autopsy, his interview. The rest when the lab's done." She looked at him over the top of her reading glasses. "Moss hates theatre, Omar. I'm telling you as a friend."
"We're friends?"
"We're going to be in the same room for three weeks," she said. "Let's be friends."
He opened the autopsy first, because it was the worst and he wanted it behind him. A single stab wound below the left collarbone, angled down, seven centimetres deep, through the subclavian artery. No defensive wounds. No other injuries. Death by exsanguination, which meant Sami had bled out on his mother's kitchen floor in the time it took his brother to find the phone and put a towel on it and say his address slowly for the dispatcher. The pathologist estimated minutes. She did not say how many.
No defensive wounds. Omar wrote that down and looked at it. Sami had not put his hands up.
Then the photographs, which he went through quickly and then again slowly, because quickly was for people and slowly was for lawyers. The kitchen with every light on. The drawer by the sink, pulled all the way out. The white towel on the floor, not white. Danny on the porch in the blue light, in his socks, his hands held out in front of him for the cuffs before anyone had asked.
The police interview was eleven minutes long. Danny sat in a grey room with a can of Coke he didn't open. He said, "It told me to," twice, and once, to the can, "It sounds like me." When the detective asked him what "it" was he said, "You won't write it down right," and asked for a lawyer, which was the cleverest thing anyone in the file had done.
Omar poured another inch and started a list on the legal pad. Mental illness, under the statute, caused the act. Lacked substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness, or to conform his conduct to the law. Burden on the defence, by a preponderance. He wrote "Adler" and underlined it, because if anyone in Michigan could find a diagnosis in that grey interview room, Ruth Adler could, and she would say so in a voice juries trusted. He wrote "mother" and "summer" and "voices in his room." He wrote "Farran," and then sat looking at the name. Then he picked up his phone and found the channel. Two hundred and twelve thousand subscribers. The videos had titles like "Is Your Child's Anger a Jinn?" and "Signs of the Eye in the Workplace", and in every thumbnail Farran sat in the red armchair under the ring light with one hand raised, mid-sentence, kind. The most recent one had been posted on the night of the twentieth. It was called "A Brother in Prison Needs Your Prayers", and it had forty thousand views.
Nobody in Wayne County has ever walked a jinn past a jury. The first one will be remembered.
It came the same way as before, finished and ready, the glass already cold in his hand. It was a reasonable thought. It was the kind he paid himself to have. Kline thinks it's easy. Moss thinks it's theatre. Your father thinks it's your soul. They're all looking at the same boy and none of them is looking at the law. You are. Omar found that he was nodding along, alone at his kitchen table at one in the morning, and he stopped.
It was the rye. He knew the rye well. The rye had made him brilliant before, at this table, and the morning had never once agreed.
He kept reading anyway.
At half past two he went back to the drive to find the dispatcher's log, and opened Kline's cover letter so he could look up its number.
The cover letter was one page, on the prosecutor's letterhead, listing the discovery item by item in a numbered column. Police reports, one through six. Scene photographs. Autopsy report. The 911 audio and transcript. Interview video. Evidence log. Lab requests. Thirty-one items. At the bottom an assistant had initialled it and stamped it with the date.
The folder on the drive held thirty-two files.
Omar counted them twice, the way he had counted the men coming out of the afternoon prayer, and then a third time on the pad with a pen, ticking the cover letter against the screen. Thirty-one of the files had Bates numbers stamped in the corner of every page, the prosecutor's office's careful little serial numbers. The thirty-second had none. Its filename was a string of letters and digits that some forensic software had given it by default, ending in the word "Report". It was dated the twenty-second of January, a week before the drive was burned, and it was not on the letter.
He opened it.
The cover page carried the logo of the Michigan State Police computer crimes unit and the words "Extraction Report", followed by a phone model, an IMEI number and a case number. Under "Device Owner" someone had typed "SALEH, DAOUD". Beneath that was a table of contents, and the table of contents ran for three pages. Contacts. Call log. Messages. Web history. Searches. Location data. Deleted items, partially recovered.
At the bottom of the screen the PDF viewer told him where he was. Page one of four hundred.
There was no cover memo, no highlighting, no sticky note from an investigator saying "See page 212." Nobody had numbered it. Nobody had listed it. As far as Omar could tell, somebody in Kline's office had dragged a whole folder onto a drive on a busy afternoon, and four hundred pages of a twenty-six-year-old's phone had gone along with it, and nobody on the other side knew it was in his hands.
The flat was quiet. Down the street the old station glowed in the dark.
Omar sat with his finger on the trackpad and did not scroll.