Page 74 of Witness 8

I wished that this case was already over.

Tomorrow was the beginning.

I wondered if I would live to see the end.

30

Kate

The defense table was annoying Kate.

It must be the floor, she thought. She bent below the desk, saw that one of the rubber feet at the bottom of the table leg closest to her had come away. That made the table rock back and forth, half an inch, whenever she leaned her elbows on it. This caused the row of four pens in front of her to roll out of alignment.

She tore off half a dozen pages from her legal pad, folded them together until they formed a wedge, which she slid underneath the table leg. At first the corners ripped, but, using the toe of her shoe, she managed to force the wad of notepaper between the tiles and the foot of the table.

With both hands on the desk, she tested it for stability. Solid.

She rearranged her pens. Checked her phone, made sure it was on silent. Checked her iPad, made sure it too was on quiet mode. Adjusted the items on the desk, ensuring they were equidistant from one another, square and to hand.

Nodded to herself. Satisfied.

Kate thrived on order – or so some would say. In truth, what Kate truly enjoyed wasrestoringorder. Fixing things: organizing files into neat piles with multicolored tabs stuck among the pages, tidying her pens into a neat row in front of her a half-inch apart with the pen clips on the caps all facing to the right, and leveling wobbly defense tables. The habit, orcompulsion, applied to people too: taking out corrupt bosses who harassed their staff, adjusting Eddie’s tie to make it straight and even, flicking the more unruly parts of Harry’s hair until it came into line, making sure Eddie didn’t have more than one drink on the rare occasion he joined Harry with a glass of bourbon . . . She drew the line at Gabriel Lake, though – that man’s appearance was so disheveled he sometimes made her feel dizzy.

Order needed to be restored in this courtroom. The jury needed to know that John Jackson was an innocent man.

She turned around and glanced at John and Alison.

John’s eyes were closed. When the jury came in, he would take his seat at the defense table. For now, he sat in the front row, holding hands with his poor wife. He’d lost twenty pounds since Kate had first met him. And he didn’t have twenty to lose. Now, instead of athletic, he looked gaunt. A gray hue permanently shadowed his eyes and bloodless cheeks. A nervous tremor had begun in his left hand. She’d first noticed it after Esther’s murder. On Kate’s insistence, he went to a doctor. Someone who didn’t know him, way out of Manhattan. He got tested, and it wasn’t neurological. Which made it psychological. The strain was beginning to tear him apart.

Beside him, Alison stared into nothing, her mind a thousand miles away. Maybe years away. Maybe thinking about the before times. The good times with her family. Before her husband had been accused of murder. Before her mother had been so brutally killed. Before her perfect life had imploded. It was one thing to lose a parent. It was quite another when that parent was the victim of a brutal murder. And the killer was someone Alison had fired. Even now, weeks later, Kate remembered the sight of Alison at the funeral. She hadn’t cried at the graveside, she had howled. Kate knew that cry. She had echoed it herself when her own mother died. It was a cry of pain and loss and regret madeonly by those who are savagely broken. Sometimes, grief can be a machine that grinds your very bones. And Alison was still in that grinder.

Alison hadn’t been eating either. She covered up the worry lines that crept around her eyes, but no amount of make-up could disguise the hollow look on her face.

She’d almost lost everything. If John was convicted, Kate dreaded to think what might happen to Alison. Some people can take whatever life throws at them. Alison had taken some heavy hits in the last few months and one more might knock her down so hard that she would never get up.

Kate smiled, reassuringly, but it seemed that neither John nor Alison could see her. Their minds were overcome with pain and terrible fear.

Al Parish sat beside Alison. He was checking his phone. Probably work emails. To Al, the Jacksons were just another couple of clients. They meant nothing more to him than how a stockbroker would think of a portfolio of products, or a carpenter would think of a piece of pinewood or ash. They were commodities. A file. A name on top of an Excel spreadsheet of billable hours.

To Kate, they were people. Broken people who needed her help to get fixed.

Kate looked to her right. There were two chairs there. The one on the end would soon be taken by John. The chair beside Kate, the chair for lead counsel in the case, was empty.

Eddie said he would be late.

Kate would take a note of Castro’s opening statement, then give her own.

Jury selection had been uneventful. Twelve ordinary New Yorkers, none more biased or more even-handed than the next. Thanks to Eddie, this case had not received anything like the media attention Castro had craved. Kate also suspected that hehad a hand in keeping Esther’s murder out of the papers so as not to risk the jury feeling in any way sorry for the Jacksons. Still, the main thing was the jury pool had not been infected with fifty news articles speculating on why her client might have killed the one-time starlet Margaret Blakemore. Most of the jurors had not heard of the case before. Some had remembered a mention of the killing around the time of the murder, but nothing else. And certainly nothing that would sway their opinion when it came time to deliver a verdict.

Crime journalists, mostly for the web, huddled in rows at the back of the courtroom. There were few other people in attendance. Even the victim’s widower had not shown up. Maybe it was too much for him. Or he had moved on already. Kate got the impression Margaret Blakemore had lived in a loveless marriage.

Noise from the prosecution table to her left drew Kate’s attention. Castro was standing over his assistant district attorneys, pointing at a laptop screen and whispering. Even though he was trying to keep the volume low, Kate could see he was having trouble keeping his emotions in check. His cheeks were flushed, but he didn’t look pissed off. Still, his pale, ivory-colored suit set off the redness in his complexion. The man in white. The hero. Or so he would have everyone believe. One of the assistants hit some keys on the laptop, then Castro noticed Kate staring at him. He reached over and quickly slammed the laptop closed.

He was up to something. Even though he wore a white suit, he was no innocent.

She glanced over her shoulder at the doors of the court.

No sign of Eddie. Not yet.