"She does."

Mrs. Freeman let out a long breath, half sigh and half laugh. "Then I suppose I'd better find a pen."

She had signed with a careful, looping hand. When Elijah thanked her, she waved him off, then paused at the door.

* * *

"Mr. Carrington?"

Tolbert's voice pulled him back to the present. The judge had finished reading, and the pages lay in a neat stack beside his gavel.

"Yes, Your Honor."

"And Mrs. Freeman confirms that the defendant was not inside her home?"

"She says she did not see him at all that day, sir. She only learned someone had been arrested in connection with her house from the local newspaper."

Tolbert's eyes narrowed. The smirk, which had been gone for several minutes, did not return. In its place was something sharper, the focus of a man who had stopped being entertained and had started to think.

"Ms. Lindholm," he said. "Did your office speak with the alleged victim?"

The prosecutor hesitated. "The State's file contains a report of the incident, Your Honor, based on the dispatch call."

"That is not what I asked."

"No, Your Honor. We did not."

"I see." Tolbert nodded slowly, in the manner of a man tallying a column of figures that refuses to add up. He turned the statement face down and rested his palm on it, as if to keep it from flying away. "The court will admit the statement for purposes of this hearing."

Behind them, the courtroom door creaked open as someone slipped in late, a small, stooped man in a faded cardigan. In the third row, Mr. Klein glanced up from his notepad and whispered something to the woman beside him.

"What's going on?" the newcomer murmured.

"Some kid is defending his brother," the woman whispered back. She did not take her eyes off the boy at the defense table. "He's killing it."

Chapter 12: More Prepared

For a few seconds, nobody in the courtroom moved.

It was the kind of stillness that comes after a thunderclap, when the whole world waits to hear if there will be rain. Tolbert had set the affidavit aside. Haskins, still in the witness chair, stared at a knot in the wood of the rail. Lindholm was writing very fast on a legal pad, her pen jabbing at the page like a woodpecker.

Elijah did not sit. He stood with his hands folded in front of him, his father's jacket hanging off his shoulders, and waited.

He had learned this in the library, from a video of an old trial lawyer with a voice like gravel: After you land a punch, don't throw another. Let them feel it.

It was Tolbert who broke the silence. He cleared his throat, and when he spoke, his voice was lower and more careful than before.

"Let me see if I understand where we are," the judge said. "The arresting officer's timeline is off by five minutes. The call that supposedly set this matter in motion has no recorded trace. The alleged victim denies that anything was taken. And there is no evidence of forced entry."

"Yes, sir," said Elijah.

"And you, Mr. Carrington, uncovered this on your own."

Elijah glanced sideways at Isaiah, who sat rigid and wide-eyed, his shackled hands gripping the edge of the table. Then he turned back to the bench.

"I had to, Your Honor. No one else was doing it."

A pause. Tolbert leaned back in his high leather chair. His fingers drummed once against the armrest, then went still. For a long moment, he studied Elijah the way a man studies a puzzle he thought he had solved and now sees was drawn wrong from the start.

"You said you are seventeen."

"Yes, sir."

Tolbert let out a long breath through his nose. When he spoke again, it was with the reluctance of a man pulling a splinter from his own palm.

"Well. So far, you are more prepared than half the licensed attorneys who stand in front of me."

The gallery gasped. It was not a loud sound, just a collective intake of air, but it ran through the pews like a current. Mr. Klein's pen froze above his notepad. A woman in the front row put her hand over her mouth and shook her head slowly, as if she were witnessing a miracle and was too polite to say so.

At the prosecution table, Andrea Lindholm crossed her arms. She did not smile.

Elijah kept his expression perfectly flat. Inside, his heart was pounding so hard he could feel it in his teeth. It was not nerves. It was something closer to focus, the narrow, burning clarity of a runner in the final stretch of a race. Every moment counted. Every word mattered. He could not afford to feel proud. Pride was a luxury for people who had finished.

"Thank you, Your Honor," he said quietly. "But I'm not finished."

"I didn't think you were."

* * *

Elijah sat down for the first time in forty minutes. His legs felt strange, like they belonged to somebody else. He squared the stack of folders in front of him, lining up the edges with the flat of his hand, and rested his eyes on the page.

Isaiah leaned in until his shoulder touched Elijah's.

"You all right?"

The whisper was so soft that no one else could have heard it. Elijah did not turn his head.

"I'm all right."

"You're doing better than I ever imagined," Isaiah said. His voice shook. "Better than Carter. Better than anybody."

Elijah allowed himself the barest curve of a smile, the first of the day, still looking straight ahead. "You just wait."

Because he knew something Isaiah did not. He knew what was in the last folder, the thickest one, the one he had saved for the end. If the judge thought that the first two blows had been heavy, he was about to find out what a third could do.

Across the aisle, Lindholm had stood again. Her face was composed now, her jaw squared, and Elijah recognized the posture of a lawyer who had decided to stop being surprised and begin fighting back.

"Your Honor," she said. "Before the defense continues, the State would like to note for the record that none of this changes the fact that stolen property was found in a vehicle the defendant was seen operating."

"Operating?" Tolbert said. "A moment ago, you told me he fled from it."