October 15, Thursday

I bound off the last stitch of Lily's second glove during the morning break and slipped it over my hand to check the fit. The thumb gusset lay smooth this time, and the ribbing hugged my wrist without pinching. After two false starts and one complete unraveling, the pair had turned out lovely.

I tucked them into my bag, and thought about the little smile Lily had given me yesterday. Deal. I'd replayed it so many times since, I'd practically worn a groove in it.

Then court resumed, and the good feeling didn't last.

The government's witness was Marcus Dellano, a former lieutenant in the Blackthorne organization, now a cooperating witness serving eighteen years in a federal facility in Kentucky. He wore khakis and a pressed blue shirt, but his wrists bore the faded impressions of handcuffs, and two marshals I didn't recognize flanked the witness box.

McDavid had been building toward him for weeks. Week ten, and every witness pointed at the same man.

"Mr. Dellano, were you present at a meeting in March of last year concerning Horatio Alvarez?"

"Yes, ma'am. Back room of the restaurant on Buford Highway."

"Who else was there?"

"Me. Two of the guys who worked under me." He lifted his chin toward the defense table. "And him."

"What was discussed?"

"Alvarez had talked to a grand jury. Mr. Blackthorne wanted to know what we were going to do about it." Dellano paused. "Somebody said maybe we lean on him. Scare him off. Mr. Blackthorne said scaring didn't stick. He said, 'Men who've already talked will talk again. Close it.'"

"What did 'close it' mean to you?"

"Kill him."

A thin, wounded sound came from the gallery. I didn't have to look to know it was Renata Cole. She'd come back to court every day this week, sitting in the second row beside an older woman who kept an arm around her shoulders. Now she folded forward, both hands pressed over her mouth, and the older woman rocked her gently while the court officer looked away.

Beside me, Yolanda drew a tissue from her sleeve and dabbed at the corners of her eyes. A minute later she did it again. By the time Dellano described how they'd chosen the parking garage because the security cameras on level three had been broken for a month, she'd gone through three tissues and was folding the damp ones into tidy squares on her knee.

I passed her a fresh one from my knitting bag without looking at her. She squeezed my wrist in thanks.

Across the courtroom, a young man in the back row had gotten up and walked out. One of the reporters had stopped writing entirely and simply sat with her pen hovering over the page.

And Robert Blackthorne was examining his fingernails.

He held one hand up, fingers curled toward him, and turned it slowly under the courtroom lights, the way Heidi might admire a fresh gel manicure. He buffed a thumbnail against his lapel. Inspected it again. While a woman sobbed thirty feet away over her murdered husband, he looked about as troubled as a man waiting for his car to be washed.

Then, briefly, his gaze drifted up and across the room, over Renata Cole bent double, over Yolanda's crumpled tissues, over the empty seat where the young man had been. The faintest crease appeared at the corner of his mouth. It was gone almost before I registered it.

He was enjoying this.

Or I thought he was. I couldn't be sure. That was the maddening part.

I watched him lower his hand to the table and lace his fingers together, perfectly at ease. What did a man have to be thinking to sit through testimony like that and look bored? Was it innocence, the calm of someone who knew every word from that stand was a lie a desperate man told to shave years off his sentence? Or was it something much colder, the confidence of a man who'd already calculated how this would end? A man who believed that no jury, no judge, no matter how many witnesses, could ever truly close the door on him?

I would've given anything for five minutes inside his head.

Instead, I rested my hand over the knitting bag in my lap, where Lily's pink gloves lay folded, and I held on.  ~

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