Tess put her coat on at half past eight and stood in the door of the conference room winding her scarf round twice, watching him over it.
"I'll write it up in the morning," she said. "Timeline, page cites, the forum. Two pages. I'll copy Adler, she said she wanted everything."
"Fine."
"You want me to leave the stacks?"
"Leave them."
She went. He heard the lift. Then the security door at the bottom of the stairs. Then the building made the sounds it made when it was empty: the radiators knocking under the windows, a fax machine somewhere on the floor below waking up to print nothing.
Omar took the three pages to his own office and shut the door, though there was nobody to shut it against.
He did not pour a drink. There was a bottle of rye in the bottom of the filing cabinet behind the closed files of 2022. He thought about it and left it there. He wanted to be able to say afterwards, to himself, that he had been sober.
He laid the pages out on the blotter in date order. The fourteenth of December. The third of January. The forum page, with its grey header and its little cartoon of a bandage. He read them again, slower, as if a slower reading might change the dates. It didn't.
Then he did what he had been trained to do with a bad fact, which was to ask what he owed to whom.
The prosecution had produced the report. That was the first thing, and it came to him clean and finished, in his own voice, at the speed of a thing he already knew. They had it before you did. They had it for weeks. It came from the state police to their detective, from their detective to their office, from their office to you. On a flash drive in a plastic sleeve, with the case name on it in Kline's own handwriting. Discovery had been served. Nobody had hidden anything from anyone.
They had not flagged it. That was the second thing. Their own detective had read it, or said he had, and written one line. Nothing of evidentiary value. That was their judgment, on their letterhead, and it was not his job to correct their judgment. He had not asked them to write it.
He had no duty to point it out. He went through that one carefully, because it was the one that mattered. The answer was waiting for him at the end of every road he took to get there. The prosecutor had to hand over what helped the defence. Nobody, anywhere, in any rule he had ever read, had to hand the prosecutor what hurt his own client. A defence lawyer who walked across the corridor with his client's worst page in his hand would lose his licence for it. Everything Danny had told him was privileged. Everything Omar learned in the course of defending him was confidential. The rule did not say "unless it's bad." The rule said keep it.
His duty was to his client. That was the last thing, and it was the first thing he had learned. It sounded, in the empty office, like the lecture he used to give the first-years at Wayne Law before they stopped inviting him. Your duty is to your client, the man in orange who has nobody else, and the prosecutor has a whole building.
Every word of it was true. He checked each one the way he would check a witness statement, line by line, looking for the place where it bent. It didn't bend anywhere. That was what made the back of his neck cold. He had expected to have to argue with himself. He had been agreed with instead, thoroughly and patiently, by a voice that knew the rules better than he did and quoted them in the right order.
He thought about Adler.
Adler had asked for all collateral, and she would get Tess's memo in the morning. She was honest. She would put the texts in her report, because she would think it was her job, and it would be. Her report would go to the prosecution the day he gave notice that he meant to call her. Then the texts would arrive on Kline's desk tabbed and dated, with a forensic psychiatrist's name on the cover. Somebody over there would finally read past page fifty.
That one came without any voice at all, as plain as arithmetic.
The bottom drawer of his desk had lost its key in 2019. He opened it. Inside were a box of staples, a dead phone charger, a tin of mints and the stapler he had stopped using because it jammed. He laid the three pages in the drawer face down and shut it.
He sat for a while.
Then he opened the drawer again and took the pages out and put them on the blotter. He looked at them: the fourteenth of December, the third of January, the cartoon bandage. He thought of the drawer by the sink in the kitchen on Calhoun Street, which squealed when you pulled it, and of a young man in a jail room with his hands flat on the steel, saying, "I shut the drawer."
He had never hurt anyone in his life, and a page lying face down in a drawer would hurt nobody.
He put them back, face down, and put the stapler on top of them, and shut the drawer with his knee.
He drove home to Corktown with the radio off. The streets were salted white and empty. At the light on Trumbull a man in a parka crossed in front of the car with a dog in a parka too. Both of them looked at him through the windscreen. Omar raised two fingers off the wheel to them, the way his father did to every car that let him cross.
In bed he lay on his back with the curtains open. The orange of the streetlight lay across the ceiling in a long bar.
His father had stood in the doorway of the mosque on Schaefer Road with the tea glasses on a tray and said the thing about the door. The door left open a long time. Omar had driven away from it with his jaw tight. He thought of it now without wanting to.
The answer came before he had finished the memory, and it was gentle. Your father thinks every door is a mosque door. He has been saying the same three things since 1990. He has never once in his life had to win anything for anybody.
That was true too. Omar turned on his side, away from the bar of light. He slept.
Tess was in before him in the morning, which was usual. She had the memo printed, two pages stapled at the corner, and an email open on her screen with Adler's address already in the field. The subject line said "Saleh: phone, timeline (Dec/Jan)."
"I'll send it now if you've read it," she said. "Or you can read it after. It's not long."
He put his coffee down on the corner of her desk. It was eight o'clock on Friday morning, the fifth of February, and the sun was coming in flat along Griswold and lighting the dust on her monitor. He felt very clear. He had slept five hours, sober, and woken before the alarm. The decision had been waiting for him when he woke, already made, sitting at the foot of the bed like a dog.
"Hold it," he said.
Tess's hand stayed on the mouse.
"Hold it how?"
"Don't send it to Adler. Don't send it to anyone. Put the memo in the file, and leave it there."
"She asked for everything."
"She asked for collateral. I'll decide what collateral is. I want to think about how we handle the texts before they go into an expert's report. Once they're in her report they're in Kline's hands. I'd like to be the one who decides when that happens." He heard how it sounded and found that it sounded fine. It sounded like a lawyer. "It's a strategy question. That's all."
"Okay."
She closed the email without sending it. She put the memo in the Saleh folder, behind the autopsy, and squared the folder on her desk. Then she looked up at him.
She didn't say anything. She had a way of looking at a witness when the witness had finished a sentence and she was waiting to see if there was more. She looked at him like that now, steady, a beat too long.