Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 09

Call Me Copy Girl One More Time Chapter 09: Courtroom 4B

I could have changed it back.

stood at the terminal with my hand on the keyboard for four full minutes, and I could have called the clerk’s emergency line and moved that trial into any room on that floor, and Sloane Whitaker would have gotten nothing but a wasted evening.

I didn’t.

Because at some point between the fourth minute and the fifth, I heard my brother’s voice not the courthouse voice, the kitchen voice, the one that used to say Tess, you can be scared and loud at the same

time.

So at 8:41 a.m. Monday I walked into Courtroom 4B.

The defense table was the same. The clock was the same. The wood had the same gouge near the rail where a marshal’s belt had caught it.

I put my briefcase down and my whole body said no, and I said yes, and my hands kept unpacking exhibits because they’re better people than I am.

The team was six. Brody, who’d stopped panicking and started being useful. Two paralegals from my own sub-basement who had never once treated me like furniture and who looked, that morning, like they might

levitate.

Eli was at the table in a suit that didn’t fit.

“Hey, date-stamp lady.”

“Hey, hamster.”

He laughed, and then the bailiff said all rise, and the room went quiet in that particular holy way.

I looked up. Gallery, third row: Cole Ashford. Behind him, half the firm. And in the corner, arms folded, Sloane

/ Whitaker.

“Ms. Calloway,” Judge Okafor said. “Ready for the defense?”

“Ready, Your Honor.”

Here is what four days feels like.

It doesn’t feel like four days. It feels like one long held breath with weather in it.

Day one. Deakins’s opening, all midnight and cell towers. My opening, ninety seconds long: “The People tell you where Eli Ashford was at midnight. I’m going to ask you one question they never asked. What time did Tyler Reed actually die?”

Day two. The pool company’s maintenance tech, subpoenaed, bewildered, holding a log sheet: water temperature 103 degrees, checked at 6 p.m.

Day three. The medical examiner.

“Dr. Fenn, your worksheet lists an ambient temperature of seventy-one degrees.”

“Yes.”

“That’s the air on the rooftop.”

“Yes.”

“Where was the body, Doctor?”

“…In the water.”

“How warm was the water?”

Silence. Six seconds. I let it sit until the jury started looking at each other. Silence.

“I didn’t record the water.”

“So your time-of-death window assumes a body cooling in seventy-one-degree air, when it was actually sitting in a hundred-and-three-degree bath.”

“Is it possible, Doctor, that Tyler Reed was dead before ten p.m.?”

She looked at Deakins. Deakins looked at the table.

“I can’t exclude it.”

“Thank you. Nothing further.”

Somebody in the gallery said something out loud that I couldn’t hear.

At 3:40 that afternoon, I stood up for closing, and I could feel him the entire time.

That was the thing I’d spent three years running from, and it turned out to be the thing that got me through:

Chapter 9 Courtroom 48

my brother, at my left shoulder, dead and absolutely present.

Slower on that sentence, Tess.

I see it.

Don’t get proud yet.

I’m not.

Day four. The jury went out at 10:02 a.m.

That awful, endless silence while twelve people decide what they’re going to do.

They came back at 12:43.

“On the sole count of the indictment, murder in the second degree, we the jury find the defendant-”

Two hours and forty-one minutes.

“-not guilty.”

The room made a sound like a stadium.

Éli’s knees went. I caught him under the arm. “Don’t cry in front of the jury,” I said, “thank them,” and then I had to stop talking for a second because my eyes had gone wrong.

I came out into the hallway at 1:14 p.m. with my jacket over my arm and my blouse stuck to my back and my legs full of sand.

Cole Ashford was standing at the end of the corridor.

He’d been in that gallery for four days. There was a coffee in his hand that had clearly gone cold hours ago.

I said, “He’s free. Double jeopardy attaches. They can’t touch him again. He’ll be home tonight and furious about the ankle monitor paperwork.”

He didn’t say anything.

He set the coffee down on the floor – actually set it on the marble like a man who had run out of other ideas – walked the length of that hallway, and put his arms around me.

“Thank you,” he said into my hair.

And I stood there in the doorway of Courtroom 4B, in the room where I lost everything, and let a stranger hōtd.

me up.

Qver his shoulder, at the far end of the hall, Sloane Whitaker was on her phone.

Watching us.

Talking fast.