Chapter 10
Jury
You do not choose a jury. You choose the twelve people you are least afraid of, from a list of seventy-three, in a room full of strangers, in the space of four days. It is closer to triage than to selection.
I have always loved it. I should say so. There is something about the first morning of voir dire, the long wooden benches filling with people who would rather be anywhere else, the smell of damp wool and cheap coffee, the clerk's flat voice calling numbers, that gives me a sensation I can only describe as the opposite of stage fright. Nothing has been decided. Everyone in the room is a possibility. I sit at the defense table with a legal pad and a sharpened pencil and watch seventy-three faces try to look neutral, and I feel the whole slow machinery of the case begin to turn.
Trial began on the third of March, a Tuesday, in Courtroom 4B of the Calder Superior Court, a high, long, oak-paneled room on the fourth floor, with tall windows that faced north and gave a flat, even, shadowless light all day. I had tried eleven cases in it. I knew its sounds. The doors at the back were heavy and fitted with pneumatic closers, so that every time anyone came in or went out they exhaled, a long soft hhhhh, and then shut with a muffled thud. The radiators under the windows knocked on a cycle of about forty minutes. The judge's chair squeaked on the left side when she leaned back.
I had learned to read a room by those noises. Today the doors sighed, and sighed, and sighed, as seventy-three people filed in and sat.
"Good morning," said Judge Teague. "I'm going to explain what will happen over the next several days."
She did it well. She always did. She spoke to them without condescension, without the faint tone of institutional sorrow that some judges adopt, as though addressing patients. She told them that the defendant was charged with murder in the first degree. That the case might last four weeks. That they would be asked questions, some of them personal, and that there were no right answers, only honest ones. That a person who has seen a great deal of the newspaper would not be disqualified for it. She told them that the only thing a juror was required to have, besides a pulse and an open mind, was the capacity to say, at the end, I do not know.
It was a good phrase. I wrote it on my pad. I underlined I do not know.
By the end of the second day we had a pool of thirty-one. Whitlock and I had each exercised eleven peremptory challenges. We had stood at a podium before a wall of questionnaires, filled in by hand in blue and black ink, and had read the answers aloud to each other with the dry courtesy of two people dividing an inheritance. I could feel her reading me. I could feel myself reading her. We were not enemies, exactly, and not allies. We were two fine instruments tuned to the same hum.
I will tell you who I wanted.
I wanted the people who had been wrong. Not careless people, not stupid ones: people who had once held an opinion with their whole weight and had watched it crack. A woman who had trusted a contractor. A man who had been convinced his brother was innocent and then learned otherwise. A grandmother whose granddaughter had been blamed for something she hadn't done. Whitlock wanted the people who liked data, the ones who trusted what a machine said when it told them a number. Accountants, engineers, technicians, the quiet, careful, orderly minds that look at a license-plate log and see a fact.
That was the whole contest, in the end. Whether twelve people believed that a clock was a clock.
The twelve we seated were, in the order of their numbers:
One. A middle-aged nurse's aide named Teresa Ouellette, large and calm, with a tired mouth. She had worked nights for nineteen years. She had told me, when I asked whether she could be fair to a very wealthy man, that she had nursed a great many of them and that they all wore the same gown.
Two. A software tester, twenty-seven, with an earring and a notebook full of doodles. I had not wanted him. Whitlock had. But I had a feeling about the way he'd said, in answer to a question about technology, I mean, nothing works the way it says.
Three. A retired schoolteacher named Alma Finch, seventy-one, who knitted in the gallery during the long arguments and whose needles I would come to know the sound of.
Four. A man in a gray suit who worked for the city water authority and who sat with his arms folded and a look of grim, municipal skepticism.
Five. A young mother, thirty-three, who ran a bakery and had told me she was fond of lists.
Six, seven, eight. A bus driver, a mailman, a woman who sold insurance. Three people with the broad, unglamorous faces of those who spend their days dealing with the public. The bus driver, a quiet man named Raymond Teague, no relation to the judge, had a way of nodding very slowly when he thought something was true, and I would spend four weeks watching his chin.
Nine through twelve. An electrician. A librarian. A cook. A man who owned a hardware store, whose smile was extremely friendly and whom I distrusted on sight.
Behind them stood the two alternates, a pharmacist and a student. Whitlock and I had shaken hands over the last of them, on the afternoon of the sixth, in a corridor outside the courtroom, as the winter light went violet in the windows. "Good luck, Mr. Cole," she had said. Her hand was cool and dry. "I mean it."
"So do I."
"I know." She held on a half-second longer. "I'm going to try very hard to win this."
"I'd be disappointed otherwise."
"Yes. I think you would." A flicker of something crossed her thin face, not quite a smile. "That's the part of you I don't understand."
I did not ask her what she meant.
I found out about the photographs that night.
I was in the conference room at the office, at ten o'clock, with a half-eaten sandwich and a mug of coffee I had made for the third time. Priya was at the other end of the long table with a laptop and a stack of binders. We were preparing the cross-examination of Dr. Okonkwo, the medical examiner, who would be the State's second witness. We had been at it since six.
"Adrian," said Priya.
"Hm."
"Frames one-eighteen to one-thirty-one."
I looked up. She had the State's photograph log open on her screen, a long, plain document, a table of numbers and captions generated by the crime-scene unit. Each frame was listed: the date, the time, the photographer, a short description. 0094. Study, east wall, overall. 0095. Study, east wall, detail. 0096. Study, desk, left. She was scrolling slowly, with one finger on the trackpad.
"What about them?"
"They're not here."
"What do you mean?"
"The numbering jumps." She turned the screen toward me. "Frame one-seventeen is the north wall, overall. Frame one-thirty-two is the baseboard, spatter pattern. Between them, nothing. The log doesn't even say deleted. It just goes from one-seventeen to one-thirty-two. As though they were never taken."
I stood and came round the table. I read the screen over her shoulder. She was right. The log listed the study, wall by wall, in the logical order that a trained photographer would follow: east, south, west, north. The north wall was the long wall of shelves. And the sequence of frames that should have recorded it in detail, fourteen shots, the numbering made clear, was simply missing.
"Check the digital files."
"I did. I've got the raw directory. There are no files with those numbers." She looked up. "The metadata on one-seventeen and one-thirty-two is timestamped eleven minutes apart. In eleven minutes a photographer takes about fourteen frames."
"So somebody photographed the shelf."
"Somebody took fourteen pictures between those two."
"And somebody removed them."
"Or the card was corrupted. Or the numbering reset. There are a dozen innocent explanations." Priya was speaking very evenly. "I'm just telling you what the log says."
I stood there with my hand on the back of her chair. The room was very quiet. The radiator ticked. Outside the window the lights of the city lay spread across the dark like something spilled, and a thin rain was coming down again, and I could hear it, I thought, quite distinctly, in the pipes.
Frames one-eighteen to one-thirty-one.
"Print it," I said.
"I already did."
"Get me Whitlock."
She called me back at 11:20.
I had not expected her to. I had expected a polite letter in the morning, and a delay. Instead my phone lit at twenty past eleven, and her cool, dry voice, with its half-second delay, said, "Adrian. It's Dana."
"Thank you for calling."
"I read your email." There was a faint hum on the line, a car or a refrigerator. "I've spoken to the crime-scene unit. The technician who handled the study is a man named Brandon Voss. No relation to the sister. He tells me that the memory card on his primary camera failed partway through the north wall. He reshot the section on a second camera, but the second camera's output was filed under a different case number and never merged." She paused. "It's a clerical error. I'm told it happens."
"Do you believe that?"
The pause was longer this time.
"I believe it's what he said," said Whitlock.
"May I see the reshot frames?"
"They exist. I'll have them to you by Monday."
"That's the day we open."
"I'm aware of the calendar." A breath. "Adrian. I don't hide evidence. You know that."
"I know you don't."
"Then I'd ask you to believe me when I say I don't know what happened to those pictures. I looked at them myself, in October. There was nothing in them that mattered. A wall of books." She hesitated. "If I thought there were, I'd have sent them."
"What was on the shelf?"
"Books." She said it slowly. "And a gap where the heron sat."
"And the floor of the gap?"
"Adrian—"
"Were there marks in the wood? Scuffs?"
The line was silent. I could hear her breathing, and the very faint sound of a clock ticking somewhere in a room I had never seen.
"I didn't notice any," Whitlock said, finally, and I knew, with the instinct that I have never been able to explain, that she was telling the truth, and that it was not an answer.
"Will you do something for me?" I asked.
"What?"
"Check who signed out the memory card."
She laughed. It was short, and dry, and real. "You think someone took them."
"I think somebody took fourteen photographs of a bookshelf," I said, "from a room in which a woman was killed, and I'd like to know who wanted a bookshelf not to be remembered."
"I'll look," said Dana Whitlock. "Not because you asked. Because I would like to know too." The line clicked. Then her voice came again, quieter, almost private. "Go to bed, Adrian. You'll need it. On Monday I'm going to take your client apart."
I did not go to bed.
I sat in the conference room for a long time after Priya left, with the lights off, in the darkness, watching the rain. I had my own photographs on the table in front of me, the four I had taken in October, with a scale and a flash. In the second one the beam of Hollis's flashlight had raked across the shelf, and the two small parallel scuffs showed in it like a pair of tracks in snow. Feet. Small ones. Rubber. I had them. I had the only copy. The State, it seemed, had none.
I thought about how little I knew.
I knew that a woman had set a phone on a shelf, or someone had. I knew that its feet had scraped the wood. I knew that her phone was missing and that her last message had been sent at 5:12 and that the last time it had touched a tower was 9:43, and that fourteen frames of a bookshelf had vanished from a police log. I knew that a gray sedan had followed me for six blocks in the rain and had never been seen again. I knew that a woman with a thumb that circled on a doorframe was afraid of someone who had sent a man in a gray suit. I did not know who.
I knew, too, with a slow dull weight at the bottom of my chest, that if I followed any of it, if I pulled at any of the threads, it would not stay in the study. It would go to the garage, and the cameras, and the long gray drive along Cranmoor Lane. It would go to a call at 9:44 that my client could not remember. It would go, sooner or later, to the one door he had forbidden me to open.
I had told myself it was a defense lawyer's job to test the evidence. It was a clean, tidy, honorable sentence. And I sat there in the dark with my pen in my hand and understood that I was not testing the evidence at all. I was walking round it, carefully, at a distance, the way you walk round a hole in the floor.
The pen clicked. In. Out.
The sound was small and perfectly regular, and it went on for a long time.