“Innocent,” he said, careful to prevent his eyes from making contact with anyone for the moment. “Mr. Sacks, do you consider yourself an upstanding citizen?”
“Yes.”
But the man was fuming inside, spewing filth.
“A family man?”
“Of course.”
“Of course,” Billy repeated. “Do you find this charge of murder offensive?”
“Deeply.”
“How many daughters do you have?”
“Three.”
“And sons?”
Anthony hesitated. “None.”
“None? Did you ever want a son?”
“Yes. My . . . we lost one at childbirth.”
“I'm sorry.”
Billy ran through the questions staring at the man's forehead rather than his eyes.
“What do you know, the monster's got a soft spot in his heart for the son he always wanted.”
The prosecutor stood. “Objection, Your Honor. This grandstanding is a transparent attempt to illicit sympathy. It has no bearing on the facts of the case.”
“I'm establishing character as allowed,” Billy said, withdrawing his hands from his pockets.
The judge dipped her head.“Don't belabor character that has no relation to the charges. Insults constitute contempt, Counselor. I suggest you weigh your words. Continue.”
“Thank you.” To the accused, looking at the wall over the man's shoulder: “I'm going to run down a series of questions, and I want you to answer them as quickly and as frankly as you can, okay?”
“Okay.”
“What is your age?”
“Forty-nine.”
“What is your height?”
“Six foot.”
“How much do you weigh?”
“Two hundred ten.”
“Good. Are you on a diet?”
“Depends who you ask.”
“I'm asking you.”
“Then no. I always eat healthy.”
“You never indulge?”
“Not lately, no.”
Billy glanced at him. Evidently Sacks considered Double Stuf Oreo cookies healthy, because they were filling his mind at the moment.
“Waist size?”
“Forty-two.”
“Shoe size?”
“Fourteen.”
Another plea from the prosecution. “Please, Your Honor.”
“Hurry it up, Counselor,” the judge warned.
“Do you ever cheat on your wife, Anthony?”
“No.”
Billy didn't bother looking.
“Cheat on your taxes?”
“No.”
“Never? Not even a little bit? Fail to report that tip money you receive at the tables now and then?”
“Never.”
Wrong answer
, Billy thought. The man had just thrown out his credibility.
“Good.” Billy looked at his client. “Tell the court how much money you reported on your return last year. Roughly.”
Sacks looked at the judge.
“Answer the question.”
“A hundred ninety thousand.”
“And that was all the income that passed through your hands from all sources? No more cash?”
Now the numbers started to come, streaming into Billy's mind as if fired from a machine gun.
Seven million, cash, gambling only.
Twenty-nine million if you count the trades.
The gravy though, only two million five.
What the heck is he doing?
“Cash? Less cash actually. That was my total income.”
“Have you ever had the opportunity to steal, Mr. Sacks?”
He stared the man down and let the answers flow.
I make my living stealing. If they only knew how much I skimmed . . .
“Sure.”
“And have you ever stolen from your employer?”
Of course. Everyone steals.
Billy pushed on before the man could answer. “Let me rephrase the question. How much did you steal from your employer?”
Which time? Half a mil. What are you doing?
The man's right cheek twitched.
Billy rescued him. “I realize this line of questioning seems strange. I mean, I'm your attorney, right? I have no business even bringing up the possibility that you might steal money from your employer. But I do because I know what you know, Mr. Sacks. That you wouldn't dare steal from your employer. Isn't that right?”
“Objection, leading the witness.”
None of what Billy was saying could mean anything, and that was part of the point. He had to get Sacks off his center quickly, before the judge stepped in.
Billy held up his hand to accept the objection.“My point is, Mr. Sacks is a family man who has his daughters'well-being on his mind. Even if he did steal a dime here or a dime there, he wouldn't dare confess it here, in court, any more than he would tell us where he put that dime. Or if he still had that dime.”He paused. “Or how to get to that dime. The account numbers . . .” Another pause. “The PIN numbers . . .”
Billy let the numbers flow into his mind.
“. . . all of it buried in his mind. It'll go with him to his grave.”
“Counselor! ”Now the judge was beyond herself. “Approach the bench.”
“I'm coming in for a landing, Your Honor. I promise, I have a point. Please don't stop this midstream.”
Billy took the courtroom's absolute silence as an invitation to proceed, and he did so quickly, spinning to the jury.
“My point is this: every one of you on the jury has stolen at some point in your lives. Cheated your employer, misreported to the IRS, lied to your husbandâ”
“Objection! The jury is not on trial here. Your Honor?” the DA squealed, face red.
Billy continued. The jurists looked at him, and he threw their answers back at them without using names.
“A hundred dollars from the teacher's lunch fund, fifty thousand in charity donations you never made, your secretary, Barbara, Pete, Joe, Susan. Those tips are income, all twenty thousand of them. Those SAT scores that got you into Harvard . . .”
Their eyes widened ever so slightly as he named their sins.
“If you've done that and yet refuse to confess, can you really blame my client for doing the same as you?”
“Counselor, this is
enough
!” The judge slammed her gavel down.
Time for an exit. His argument was convoluted. Butchered. Meaningless.
But he didn't care. Nothing mattered except for the numbers that already ran circles in his head.
Anthony Sacks's numbers were his only means of salvation now.
Billy raised his voice and made his final impassioned plea. “Just because a man is a liar and a cheat doesn't mean he's a murderer. You may not like Anthony Sacks any more than I do, but don't hold his lying against himâyou're as guilty as he.”
He faced the courtroom and spread his hands. “We all are. No more questions.”
THERE WAS a God after all,Darcy thought, pouring boiling water over a mint tea bag. Then she immediately pushed the thought from her mind.
At the very least it was a good day to be alive. She dropped in two cubes of sugar, stirred the tea with a teaspoon, and stepped lightly across the tile floor toward the living room, warming her hands with the steaming porcelain cup.
Eight p.m. She could either watch the latest episode of
The Thirty,
which she recorded weekly, or settle for a bit of Net surfing before curling up in bed with the latest Frakes novel,
Birthright
, which had to be the best of the vampire series so far.
Thinking of the book, she stopped halfway to the love seat in the middle of her living room. Maybe she should just skip the Net and head to bed. Nothing was worse than reading too late and falling asleep two or three pages into a novel. It had taken her a month to read a novel in fits and starts last yearâsome vampire-romance book that wasn't very interesting, but that was beside the point. She vowed never to read in such short spurts again.
No, she would surf first and see if anyone had left her any messages while she was at it. She eased into the large leather seat and tapped the built-in controller on the right arm. A five-foot screen on the wall brightened.
Loading
. . .
Her mind tripped back to the review at the plant. She still wasn't entirely sure what had happened. The world was running scared from lawsuits, and her employers had seen her aggressive reaction as a sure sign of her intent.
Had they really doubled her salary? Or had she misunderstood that part? Either way, she hardly cared as long as they left her alone, which they were. For now.
She had a near perfect job.
She had her sweet mint tea.
She had the Net.
It was indeed good to be alive.
Truth be told, she couldn't remember ever feeling so content as she did now. It had taken years of hard work and hundreds of hours of counseling, but she was finally coming to grips with her demons. So to speak.
She'd repressed large chunks of her memory in an effort to survive a tortured past in a monastery, her therapist had concluded. Dissociative amnesia resulting from traumatic events. This was why she'd with-drawn from normal living in favor of the protected environment she'd built for herself.
Billy.
A smile tempted her lips. She did remember her first love. More of a crush, maybe.
The screen waited, homepage loaded. Square windows into her customized on-demand world displayed slots for
Entertainment,News, Friends,
Services
, and
Other
.
She quickly checked to see if any messages had come from Susan, a Net friend whom she'd met only once in person but a thousand times on the screen. The only person other than her therapist who knew everything about Darcy. No messages.
The only noteworthy news was a story about a lynching in Kansas City, the third such lynching in three states. Race related. You'd think the world would have learned by now that race had nothing to do with anything. She had no patience for such stories.
No need to order groceries. She spun through the menus, running through a mental checklist of loose ends and options. This screen was her world in a box. A nice, easy world that accommodated her love of vampires and heroes and saber-toothed villains capped in black. Fictional bad guys, mythical monsters.
Safe
fantasy.
Finding nothing that drew her attention, Darcy got stuck on a half-hour comedy show that she found only vaguely humorous,
Three's Company,
a new show that made fun of one Hindu, one Muslim, and one Christian who shared an apartment in Manhattan.
She found anything religious unsettling; anything to do with priests deeply disturbing. But the writers of this show leveled some of the most audacious religious slurs imaginable with a humorous boldness that she found at times irresistible, if a bit embarrassing. Particularly when it came to Christians, or, as the show sometimes characterized them using the most offensive of all religious slurs,
bloodâ
Darcy cut the thought short. However wounded she might be over her own run-in with the church, she wouldn't stoop to such bigoted name-calling. Society at large had turned against Christianity with a vengeance over the past decade, and for good reason, Darcy thought. But poking fun at those who still embraced the faith was mean-spirited.
She changed the feed and began to surf. News? No, not news. Reality game shows? She didn't have enough patience to watch others make a spectacle of themselves tonight. She should just head to bed with the Frakes novel.
She rotated into the Discovery feed. Tonight's documentary examined events that led to the two assassination attempts on President Robert Stenton last yearâthe second of which succeeded. Numerous theories were still argued, but the one that dominated suggested that Stenton had been hit by Muslim extremists in retaliation for the Iranian prime minister's deathâwhile on U.S. soil.
If there was a silver lining to the upheaval last year, it was the West's final awaking to the volatility of religion, or more rightly, faith. The last twenty years were replete with examples of violence carried out in the name of God or Allah or whatever the fundamental extremists worshipped with their raging hearts and bloody swords.
Tolerance
had become the watchword of the day. A modest but important bit of progress in world history. Or at least American history. It was a step in the right direction, to be sure, but only a step. What the world needed was a thousand more steps in the same direction.
Darcy sipped her tea and lingered on the feed. The commentator switched to an interview with an expert on the subject. The peace in Darcy's small, protected bubble was shattered with a single image.
A priest in a black robe.
She set her cup down, felt it tip as she scrambled for the controls. Hot tea burned her thumb, but her mind was more interested in changing channels.
Not until she'd successfully done so did she manage a curse. That was it; she was done with the screen tonight.
She cleaned up the mess with a towel,went through what she called her retiring ritualâpink flannel pajamas, face wash, face cream, tall glass of iced water, covers back, book in handâand slipped between her sheets with a sigh.
That night Darcy read two chapters of
Birthright
before setting the book on the nightstand, turning the lights off, and snuggling three pillows tight against her body as her mind drifted into the land of flying black beasts seducing young maidens with promises of immortality and power.
She was asleep before she had time to wonder if she would fall asleep quickly.
The sounds began at one that morning. At first in her dreams, a steady thumping knocked about the edges of the tale she was constructing deep in REM sleep.
Knock, knock, knock.
An innocent construction of a healthy imagination.
I'm a-knockin', knockin', knockin' at your back door, baby
.
She felt herself smile at the sound of that voice. She knew it, of course. It was Billy.
Wanna take a look, Darcy? Just one look, one taste, one tiny spike in their
minds. Wanna trip, baby?