At nine-twenty-eight Taft came out with his clipboard and said, to the lobby in general, "Okay, everybody, for the Dwyer hearing? If you'd follow me, please. Family and supporters on the left side, please, and opposition on the right, and the press section's at the back, but we don't have any press this morning. Phones off, please, not silent, off. Thank you so much."
They went through the inner door in a slow file, down a short hallway with framed photographs of former board chairs along one wall, men and then women in front of the same flag, and into the hearing room.
It was not large. It was a long, low room with the same gray carpet as the lobby and the same drop ceiling, and the light came from fluorescent panels and from a single row of high narrow windows along one wall through which Neal could see the tops of the red maples. At the far end of the room a long table stood on a carpeted platform a few inches high, and behind it sat seven high-backed chairs, and in front of each chair a microphone on a short gooseneck and a name placard and a closed binder thick as a phone book. The Commonwealth's flag and the American flag stood on poles in the corners. Facing the platform, at floor level, there was a smaller table with two chairs and two microphones of its own, and behind that, rows of upholstered stacking chairs divided by a center aisle, like a small chapel. A court reporter sat to one side of the platform at a little desk with her machine. On the wall above the platform there was a clock, and it said nine-thirty-one, and its second hand was the only thing in the room that moved.
Neal and Maureen sat in the second row on the left. Antoinette Reddick sat at the end of the same row, two seats away, with the envelope in her lap and the tote bag between her feet. Across the aisle, in the first row on the right, Sheila Galvin sat between her daughter and the victim witness advocate, with the cousins behind. The DA's man sat at the end of the front row with his rolling briefcase.
At nine-thirty-five, a side door opened, and two correction officers from Norfolk brought in Sean.
He was in his own clothes, or what passed for them: tan khakis and a white button-down shirt that Maureen had bought at the Kohl's in Easton and mailed in, through the proper channels, in August, with the tags still on so the property officer would accept it. The shirt was a little short in the sleeves. He was handcuffed in front, and when they reached the small table one of the officers unlocked the cuffs and stepped back to stand against the wall, and Sean rubbed his wrists, one and then the other, and sat down beside Attorney Raman, and only then turned around to find his mother and father.
He was thirty-four. His hair was cut very short and was going thin at the crown, which Neal had noticed in the visiting room a year ago and had not been able to stop noticing since, because Neal's own father had gone thin at the crown at exactly that age and so had Neal, and there was something unbearable in seeing it happen to his son in a place where nobody would ever tease him about it at Thanksgiving. Sean had lost the weight he had carried since high school; he had lost it in his first two years inside, and kept it off, and his face had come out from under it with cheekbones Neal had never known were there. He found Maureen and smiled at her, the quick, high, surprised smile. He found Neal and nodded, once. Then his eyes went down the row and found Antoinette Reddick, and something in his whole body unlocked a little, and he lifted two fingers from the table in a small wave, and she lifted two fingers from the envelope back.
Then he looked across the aisle, at Sheila Galvin, and the smile went out of his face like a light, and he turned around and faced the board, and folded his hands on the table in front of him.
The board came in through a door behind the platform at nine-forty, and everyone stood, because nobody knew whether you were supposed to, and then sat again when the chair waved a hand. There were five of them that morning, not seven: the chair, Natalia Rosado, a former public defender from Springfield with silver-rimmed glasses and a voice like a schoolteacher on the first day; a heavy, ruddy man named Hartigan who had been a deputy superintendent in the Boston police and whom Neal had once heard speak at a union dinner; a psychologist, Dr. Quintero, very young-looking, with a yellow legal pad she had already half filled; and two others, Fiore and Shanahan, who opened their binders and did not look up.
Rosado read the case into the record. Sean Michael Dwyer, serving a life sentence for the murder in the second degree of Elijah Galvin on June eleventh, two thousand eleven, in Brockton, appearing for his initial hearing, represented by counsel. She read it the way a priest reads the names of the dead, carefully, without hurrying, and when she said Elijah Galvin she looked up across the aisle at his mother and held her eyes for a moment before going on.