security personnel and a makeshift first-aid station. Across the street, the vans were back, with their satellite dishes and telescoping antennae bearing the logos and numbers of all the major networks and several cable channels.
In the lobby, despite the addition of extra banks of metal detectors, the line waiting to go through them backed up and snaked out the door and around the corner. Several food vendors had set up their trucks and were doing a brisk coffee and doughnut business, and one enterprising young man quickly sold out his stock of battery- operated hand warmers to early-morning shiverers.
By nine o'clock, Justice Hinkley's courtroom was filled to capacity. Anticipating as much, the administrative judge had ordered all other cases in the building postponed for the duration of the trial, and had set aside not one but two additional courtrooms to accommodate the overflow. Those rooms had been fitted with coatracks, extra rows of seats and oversize screens and speakers, so that those who'd failed to make the cut could still follow the proceedings via closed-circuit television.
Jaywalker took it all in as he entered, making mental notes and smiling bitterly at the environment in which his client was expected to get a fair trial, free from outside influences. Just prior to opening statements, he renewed his motion for a change of venue for the fifteenth time, and for the fifteenth time Justice Hinkley denied it.
Abe Firestone delivered his opening in workmanlike fashion, surprising Jaywalker with both his restraint and his command of the facts. He drew the obligatory comparison between his remarks and the table of contents of a book. Mercifully, he refrained from reading the indictment from start to finish, settling instead for listing the specific crime charged in each of its ninety-three counts. He told the jurors which witnesses he would call, and briefly summarized what each of them would contribute to his case. Finally, as all prosecutors apparently feel compelled to do, he predicted with confidence that at the end of the case, after all the evidence was in, he would address them again, at which time he would ask them to convict the defendant on all charges, including nine counts of murder. Why? Because the defendant's own behavior would prove not just beyond a reasonable doubt, but beyond all doubt, that he'd acted in a reckless manner, evincing a depraved indifference to human life.
With that, he thanked the jurors for their attention and sat down, exactly forty minutes after he'd begun. If his opening had been less than riveting, it had certainly done its job. Had Jaywalker been sitting in the jury box, he would have been more than ready to vote guilty right then.
But Jaywalker was sitting at the defense table. And he kept sitting there, just long enough to force Justice Hinkley to inquire if he, too, wished to make an opening statement. 'Unlike the People,' she reminded the jurors, 'the defendant has no burden of proof, and therefore no duty to open.'
Just as he'd counted on.
'Yes,' he said.
Jaywalker had been debating for weeks-for months, actually-whether to include the wasp story in his opening. On the plus side was his belief that it was generally best to get his client's side of the facts in front of the jury as soon as possible. And then there was his conviction that his own telling of the story would be better than Carter Drake's version. Drake, he felt, was likely to come off as a decent storyteller, but hardly a great one. Jaywalker, on the other hand, was one of the best. Not that he came by it naturally. It was more of an accidental by-product, he figured, of having spent his adult life first posing as a drug dealer, then defending criminals, and lately writing fiction.
Lying, others might call it.
In the end, he'd decided against including the wasp incident in his opening statement. To do so would put it out there too early, where the jurors would have it, but would have nothing but Jaywalker's word for it, nothing to corroborate it. It would be better, he'd convinced himself, to have it come from Drake's mouth, however imperfectly, and then to quickly back it up with the medical records Nicolo LeGrosso had dug up.
The problem was that such a tactic would limit what Jaywalker could say in his opening. He hated the stan dard K eep-your-minds-open-until-you've-heard-all-theevidence approach that so many of his colleagues hid behind, and hated even more the Don't-rush-to-judgment mantra that Johnnie Cochrane had used to such success in a certain West Coast trial some years back.
So he compromised.
He conceded, as he had during jury selection, that his client had been driving the Audi that swerved across the dividing line and forced the van off the highway. 'By doing that, Carter Drake's actions were the direct cause of nine deaths. And eight of those deaths ended the lives of this community's most prized treasure, its children.' Furthermore, he again confessed, his client had been drinking earlier that afternoon, and by his own admission, drinking more than he should have, considering that he was going to have to drive home.
Jaywalker left out the business about Amanda and Eric's having shown up, and Drake's refusal to let Eric drive illegally. Let the jurors hear that, too, from the defense witnesses. Let them hear firsthand Drake's regret over that fatal bit of miscalculation.
Then he got to the point.
'Once the prosecution finishes calling witnesses to tell you what they saw and heard and assumed and calculated from outside the Audi, we're going to put on the stand the one witness who can tell you what happened inside the Audi. Because he was there. He was in the driver's seat. He's the defendant, Carter Drake. The prosecution's witnesses may tell you the absolute truth, they may exaggerate a little, and some of them might even tell a lie or two. It doesn't much matter. Because until you hear Carter Drake's testimony, you're going to have no way of knowing what really caused him to swerve. And once you hear why, you're going to know immediately, and you're going to understand everything.'
Looking into their eyes, he searched for a spark, a glimmer, a sign that they were finally with him at that moment. Was that a nod coming from Number 3, or just a stiff neck she was stretching? Was Number 6 leaning forward in his seat because he was buying it, or because his hemorrhoids were bothering him? And there in the back row, Number 10. Did her hint of a smile mean Jaywalker had her hooked, or was she seeing right through his act?
And the thing was, as with so many things that came up at trial, he had only a split second to decide. Did he go on, and begin talking about the rest of his witnesses? Did he take Firestone to task for having predicted what he'd be asking for in his summation before they'd heard a word of testimony or seen a single shred of evidence? He'd even settled on a term for that display of arrogance, and for two days now had been working on his pronunciation of c hutzpah. Did he thank the jurors for their attention, as Firestone had made a point of doing? Or did he leave it right where he was, while he had them. In his dreams, at least.
He sat down.
'Call your first witness, Mr. Firestone,' said the judge a little too quickly, to Jaywalker's way of thinking. Had she deliberately cut short his moment of drama? Was she that smart? That worried?
Along with everything else he did during the course of a trial, Jaywalker had a habit of asking himself an awful lot of questions.
'The People call Hannah Weintraub.'
Jaywalker reached to the very back of a folder he'd marked Other Prosecution Witnesses. The files it contained were arranged alphabetically, so he wouldn't have to waste precious time searching for them as their names were called. Old Cousin Dorothy had been at work. A lot of prosecutors he'd tried cases against told him in advance the order of the witnesses they intended to call. Not Firestone, though. When Jaywalker had asked him for the same courtesy, Abe had responded with a sneer and a gruff 'Show me where it says I gotta do that.'
What Firestone had been required to do was to turn over another carton of reports to the defense, this one containing the prior statements of his witnesses. True to form, he'd waited to the last possible moment, meaning that Jaywalker had been up half the night reading the stuff, making notes from it, and arranging it into files. Hannah Weintraub, he therefore knew, was one of three individuals who'd been driving on Route 303 shortly before the crash and had seen a red car either speeding, in the wrong lane of traffic, or both.
Had Jaywalker been prosecuting the case, he'd decided some weeks ago, he would have started off with the witnesses from the End Zone, to show how many drinks Carter Drake had downed prior to the incident. Then he'd have followed up with an expert to translate those drinks into an estimate of Drake's blood alcohol content. That way the jurors would have had an explanation for his driving even before they heard the details of it, and would have had ample reason to be hostile toward him. Then again, they looked hostile enough as it was. Perhaps Firestone had figured as much when he'd decided to start with the driving and then backtrack to the reason for
