Lyndon sat down.
I wasn't watching the screen. I'd seen it enough times; I could have drawn it for you frame by frame. I was watching Bobbie Tillotson.
When the clip started, she was looking at the screen with polite attention, the way you'd watch a slideshow at somebody else's church. At three seconds, when the flashlight beam swung across the rear window, her expression didn't change. At five seconds, when the rear passenger door of my Subaru opened and a woman in a quilted vest and floral gardening gloves leaned into the infrared light, Bobbie's face simply stopped. I don't know how else to say it. Everything in it that was moving, the little social muscles around the mouth and eyes that we all use without thinking to tell each other we're fine, we're pleasant, we're listening, stopped moving all at once, as if someone had pulled a plug. Her mouth stayed exactly as it had been, slightly open. Her hand stayed exactly where it was around the paper cup. She didn't blink. I watched for it. For the whole minute and six seconds, I don't think she blinked once.
And then Teo's cleaned audio came out of the projector's little speaker, and every person in that room heard it.
"—I'm wearing my gardening gloves, Lyndon, I'm not an idiot."
And the small tinny voice from the phone in her hand, clear now, every word, a voice that every person at that table had heard ten minutes before presenting the district's case: "Front pocket. The small one. So it's the first place I look. You're sure it's his bag?"
"It's got that swim patch on it. Steel City something. It's his."
"Okay. The tip goes in at seven. I'll pull him second period. Saldana's in the building Thursdays."
On the screen, the woman in the vest pushed the black-and-red pouch to the bottom of my son's front pocket.
"And Cade's things. The rest of them. You get rid of them tonight. I don't want them in my house."
"Roberta. I said I'd handle Cade."
"You said that in September. You said that before that Kuchar boy—"