But I would ask the court to consider this if the evidence in this case is as strong as the prosecution believes. My presence here shouldn't matter. If it does matter, if my involvement worries them, perhaps that tells us something about how certain they actually are. Judge Watkins looked at Emily for a long moment. Then she said, "Objection overruled.
Miss Carter is admitted as co-consel. Mr. Reigns, if you have concerns about specific courtroom conduct, bring them to me at the time. Let's bring him to the jury." Reigns walked back to his table. He did not look pleased.
But more importantly to Marcus, watching everything, he did not look surprised. He looked like a man recalculating. And that Marcus thought was the first thing that had gone right in this courtroom since the whole thing began. The jury filed in 12 people carrying their assumptions and their morning coffee and whatever judgments they had privately formed over the previous day's testimony. They looked at the defense table.
They saw Gerald How. They saw Marcus Walker with his folded hands and his tattooed arms. And they saw Emily Carter, young composed professional, sitting beside him with a yellow legal pad and a pen that was already moving. Marcus watched three of them look from Emily back to him. He watched the arithmetic happen in their eyes.
The man in the tattoos, the young woman in the suit, the connection between them. He couldn't hear what conclusions they were drawing, but he could see for the first time since this trial began that they were drawing new ones. Emily's first move was quiet. She didn't stand up. She didn't cross-examine anyone.
She didn't make a speech. She leaned over to Gerald during the prosecution's second witness, a forensic technician named Carol Woo, who was walking the jury through the fingerprint evidence, and she passed him a handwritten note. Gerald read it. His eyebrows moved very slightly upward. He passed it back.
Emily added two words at the bottom. He read it again. Then he leaned back and tilted his head toward her and murmured, "You're sure I need the original chain of custody report?" She murmured back. The one in discovery is a copy.
I want to see if the signature dates match. They're not required to produce. They are if the copy is different from the original, which I believe it is. Gerald looked at her. How long have you been looking at this?
6 weeks, Emily said. And you think the fingerprints were? I think the fingerprints were transferred, she said simply. I think someone lifted a print from a surface Marcus genuinely touched and deposited it in the archive room. It's not common, but it's not impossible.
And the analysis report has two anomalies that the prosecution's expert skipped over in testimony yesterday. Gerald was quiet for a moment. "If you're right," he said carefully. "This case doesn't just fall apart. Someone commits perjury trying to hold it together."
"Yes," Emily said. "And that someone is I have a name," Emily said, but I want the chain of custody report before I say it out loud. She turned back to the yellow legal pad. She wrote another note. She drew an arrow.
She circled something. Marcus watched her work and felt something he hadn't felt in months. Not hope exactly, something steadier than hope. He felt the particular quality of trust that had been earned across 9 years. Across Sunday phone calls and school graduations and late nights when when she had called him because a case was hard and she needed someone to talk to who would listen without trying to fix everything.
The trust that grows between two people, not because they're supposed to love each other, but because they chose to again and again, when it was inconvenient and complicated, and when the world kept giving them every reason to stop, he looked at his daughter. She looked up from her notes at precisely that moment, the way people sometimes do when they can feel attention on them. Their eyes met. She held his gaze for exactly one second. Then she clicked her pen and looked back down at the page.
And Marcus Walker, for the first time in months, felt certain that the truth was going to matter. He just didn't know yet how hard the next fight was going to be to get there. The chain of custody report arrived at the defense table on a Tuesday morning delivered by a court clerk who handed it to Gerald with the kind of neutral professionalism that meant absolutely nothing about what was inside. Emily had it out of the envelope before the clerk finished walking away. She read the first page standing up.
Then she sat down. Marcus watched her face. He had learned to read Emily the way you learn to read weather, not from what she said, but from what her body did when she thought nobody was looking. The slight tension in her jaw, the way her breathing slowed when her brain was working fast. The particular quality of stillness that settled over her when when she found something important.
She was very still right now. Emily, he said quietly. She held up one finger without looking at him. She read to the bottom of the page, turned it over, read the back, set it face down on the table, and picked up her yellow legal pad, and wrote four lines in fast, precise handwriting. Then she looked at Gerald.
"The signatures don't match," she said. Gerald leaned in. "What do you mean they don't match?" The original chain of custody report was signed by Carol Woo on March 16th, 2 days after the alleged incident. She tapped the document.
The copy and discovery, the one the prosecution submitted, shows a signature date of March 19th, 3 days later. Gerald stared at her. That could be an administrative error. It could be, Emily said. Except the copy also emits a notation that appears on the original right here.
She pointed to a line near the bottom of the page. Evidence item four, the fingerprint card from restricted archive B. On the original, there's a handling notation that says the card was transported in an unsealed container for approximately 40 minutes between the collection site and the processing lab. Silence. An unsealed container, Gerald repeated.