Page 22 of Jury Woman, Part 4 of 6

"There's nothing shameful about wanting to matter," she said. "Just remember that when you rush in to solve a problem, it prevents others from pitching in."

"What if they don't pitch in?"

"What if they do?"

"But what if they don't?"

"But what if they do?"

I closed my eyes briefly. Darn it… I hated it when people answered a question with another question.

Especially when they were right.

October 23, Friday

BY FRIDAY the rose-pink headband was nearly long enough to wrap around Lily's head, and the timeline being presented was nearly long enough to wrap around the courtroom.

Agent Reyes had added a fourth easel overnight. The flags now marched right up to the week of Blackthorne's arrest, then kept going: jail visits, attorney meetings, a cluster of yellow flags labeled with numbers. The later flags sat so close together that the colors bled into one another from where I sat, like a skein of variegated yarn.

McDavid began on redirect, and guided the agent back to the April call I'd questioned in my notes.

"Agent Reyes, defense counsel asked about a call in April of last year, from the defendant's phone to Marcus Dellano. The defendant's personal phone was off the network that month, wasn't it?"

"Yes, ma'am. He was in the Bahamas."

"So how was that call made?"

Reyes lifted a new exhibit onto the projector. A phone contract. "The call came from a second device. It's registered to a florist in Roswell, owned by the defendant's sister-in-law. That phone traveled with him. Cell site data puts it in Nassau the same eleven days."

"And who else did that second phone call during those eleven days?"

"Dellano. Pike. And the man who purchased the weapon used in the parking garage."

I slipped four stitches onto my cable needle, held them in front, and knit the next four. My hands were steady. My stomach was not.

So there it was. The mismatch I'd boxed in my notebook had a second phone hiding behind it, the way a crooked cable sometimes turns out to be two crosses stacked on top of each other. I'd been right to notice. I just hadn't been right about what it meant.

McDavid moved to the newest flags. After the arrest, she explained, calls from the federal detention center are recorded. Every inmate knows it. There's a warning at the start of each one.

"And yet," Reyes said, "the defendant continued to discuss the organization's business. In code."

She played one. Blackthorne's voice filled the courtroom, lazy and warm, asking someone named Teddy how the garden was coming along. Whether the weeds had been pulled. Whether anyone needed to be reminded to water the roses.

"What were the roses?" McDavid asked.

"In this organization, that was a term for witnesses."

The recording played on. Blackthorne laughed at something Teddy said, a rich, easy sound, the laugh of a man ordering dessert.

Beside me, Yolanda had stopped writing. In the gallery, a man in a sport coat stood and walked out, his footsteps loud in the silence.

My needles had gone still. I realized I'd been holding my breath through an entire row.

I'd kept my shoulders angled away from the defense table all week, but when the recording ended, the silence pulled my head up the way a sudden noise does. Before I could stop myself, I'd looked straight across the courtroom.

Blackthorne was already watching me.

He didn't smile this time. He didn't wink. He held my gaze with a calm, level patience. Then, slowly and deliberately, he moved his head from side to side.