Prologue
Prologue
The email arrived at 3:09 in the morning, and I would have slept through it if the rain had not stopped.
That is the part I keep returning to. For six hours the storm had been working on the window of my apartment on Quillen Street, a steady, grinding downpour that had gone on so long I had stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. Then, somewhere after three, it simply quit. The silence woke me the way a dropped glass would have. I lay on my back looking at the ceiling, listening to the gutters tick, and my phone lit up on the nightstand and threw a small cold square of light across the wall.
I reached for it without thinking. Lawyers do. Half my clients have been arrested at that hour, and the other half are frightened of what their children are doing.
Eleanor Hale.
I read the name once and my hand stopped moving.
It was the sender line, not the subject, not the body. The little gray lettering at the top of the screen, where the mail application shows who a message is from. Eleanor Hale <e.hale@halefoundation.org>. I knew the address. I had seen it printed on exhibit 31, a stack of correspondence the prosecution had introduced to show that the victim had been planning to leave her husband. I had cross-examined a witness about it. I had stood in a courtroom in April and told twelve people that the woman who wrote those emails had been loved, and was gone, and that nothing about her death could be fairly laid at the feet of the man I was defending.
She had been dead for ten months.
I sat up. The sheet slid off my chest and the room was colder than I remembered. I did not turn on the lamp. I carried the phone to the kitchen table and sat down in the dark with my elbows on the wood and read the subject line, which was four words long.
Watch to the end.
There was no message. There was one attachment, a video file, a little over four megabytes, named with a string of numbers the way phones name them. I looked at the timestamp on the email. It had been sent at 3:08 a.m. I thought, absurdly, about how that could not be right, because it was the middle of the night and Eleanor Hale was in the Greenlawn Cemetery under a mound of settled earth that I had stood beside once, in November, and had not been able to bring myself to visit again.
I did what I would have told a client to do. I did not forward it. I did not reply. I opened my laptop, disconnected it from the network, and copied the file to a drive I kept in a drawer for exactly this kind of thing. Then I sat there with my finger over the trackpad, and for what must have been a full minute I could hear nothing but the pen in my right hand. I had picked it up from the table without noticing. I was clicking it, in and out, in and out, the way I do in court when a witness has said something I do not like.
I put the pen down. I pressed play.
The picture was dark and slightly tilted, as though the phone had been propped against something on a shelf. A room I knew. I had walked through it with a flashlight in October, past yellow tape, past the chalk-colored dust of fingerprint powder on every surface: the Hales' study, with its leather chairs and its wall of books and the long walnut desk by the window. There was a lamp on, low and amber. There was no sound at first, or rather there was the sound a room makes when someone is breathing in it, close to the microphone, too quick.
Then a man walked into the frame.
I could not see his face. The phone had been set too low, and the shot began at his chest and ended at his raised hand. I could see the line of a dark suit. I could see a white cuff, and the small gold gleam of a cufflink catching the lamp. I could see his other hand reach up to a shelf off to the left, and come down again holding something dull and heavy and the color of old tea. A bronze bird. A heron, fourteen inches tall, six pounds, that I had held in my own hands in an evidence room and turned over to read the tag.
A woman said, very quietly, "Please."
I had never heard Eleanor Hale's voice. In ten months of living inside her death, through eleven boxes of discovery and four hundred pages of transcripts, I had never once heard it. It was lower than I would have guessed. It was not hysterical. It was the voice of someone trying to speak reasonably to a person who has stopped listening.
The man's arm went up.
The video ended there. Seventeen seconds. The screen went black and then showed me the first frame again, the lamp, the shelf, the little paused arrow in the middle of the picture, and I sat with my hands flat on the table and my heart going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
I played it again. Then again. By the fifth time I had stopped watching the man and started watching the corner of the screen, where a gray stripe of numbers had been burned into the image by the application that recorded it. A date. A time.
9:41 PM.
I stopped breathing. It was not a figure of speech. I felt my chest simply hold, the way it does in the second before a verdict is read, when the foreperson has stood up and the whole room is looking at a slip of paper.
Nine forty-one.
On the eighth of April, in the closing argument that people were still calling the best of my career, I had stood three feet from the jury box and told twelve strangers that it was a physical impossibility for Victor Hale to have been in that house at nine forty-one. I had shown them a chart. I had shown them a clock. I had used the word impossible three times, and I had watched the juror in the second row, a bus driver, nod each time, slowly, like a man being persuaded of something he already wished to believe.
They had acquitted him in six and a half hours.
The kitchen was very quiet. A car went by on the wet street below and its headlights crossed the ceiling and were gone. I looked at the little black rectangle of the screen, and I understood, with the cold clarity that comes before every real fear, two things at once.
The first was that I did not know who the man in the video was.
The second was that I had just realized I was no longer certain I wanted to.