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Kate didn’t tell the jury which verdict her client deserved. She had gotten through her speech, and she hadn’t lied to her first jury.

She stood straight and true and returned to the defense table with her head up, and her conscience intact.

Until the verdict.

FORTY-NINE

EDDIE

For a trial lawyer, there are two words in the English language that terrify us more than any other. These two words stared back at me from my phone. They’d

come through by text message seconds ago.

THEY’RE BACK.

The jury had been out for all of forty-eight minutes.

There’s a lot you can do in forty-eight minutes.

But one thing you can’t do in forty-eight minutes is come to a fair and balanced verdict in the most complex murder trial in the history of New York City. That’s not possible. The jury probably has a question to ask, I thought. This isn’t the verdict.

It can’t be.

But it was. Deep down, somewhere, I knew it. I dumped my coffee, turned back toward the courthouse.

Walked beneath the flapping, torn, faded stars and stripes that hung from the flagpole outside the court building. The raven protested my arrival.

So many had died. And perhaps more would die before the end. When I was a kid, growing up in a small, cold house in Brooklyn, my mom told me there was

no such thing as monsters. The stories I’d read as a kid about monsters and witches and taking children away from their parents, into the forest, well, she said they were just fairy tales. There are no monsters, she said.

She was wrong.

The Criminal Court building elevators were old and painfully slow. They took me to my floor, I got out and walked the corridor to the court room, following

everyone else inside. I took my seat at the defense table next to my client.

A hush fell as the jury filed in.

They had already given the paperwork to the clerk. Paperwork they’d completed in the jury room. My client tried to say something, but I didn’t hear her clearly. I couldn’t. Blood roared in my ears.

I was a pretty good judge of which way a jury would fall. I could call it. And I was right, every single damn time.

This was the first verdict that I couldn’t call. I was too close to it. In my mind, it was an even split. The verdict may as well come down to a coin toss. A fifty-fifty. I knew what I wanted to happen. I now knew who the killer was. I just didn’t know if the jury would see it. I was jury blind.

The clerk stood and addressed the jury foreman. A tall man, with a plaid shirt and rough hands.

‘In these matters, have you reached verdicts upon which you are all agreed?’

asked the clerk.

‘We have,’ said the jury foreman.

The clerk said, ‘In the matter of the People versus Sofia Avellino, do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?’

The foreman looked straight ahead. Not a good sign. Usually if the jury is going to acquit they look at the defendant – they’re waiting to watch that tsunami of relief wash over the innocent defendant. It’s what makes justice great.

It’s power.