"You sure about this, Kendrick?"
"Yes, sir."
"You absolutely sure?"
Kendrick met his eyes. "Dad, they did it four times. They wrote it down. They filed it with the county. They thought nobody would ever check." A pause. "I checked."
Bobby nodded once, slowly. "Then I'll stand up there and say whatever you tell me to say."
He went back upstairs. Kendrick listened to his footsteps on the wooden stairs, the click of the door, the sound of his father pouring himself a glass of water in the sink. Then he turned back to the maps.
At 4:00 a.m. on day nine, Kendrick was alone with the envelope Renata had given him. The basement was completely silent; even the upstairs compressor was off. He'd already read pages one through eight of Judge Blackwood's financial filings three times. Standard stuff: stocks, bonds, a vacation house in Hilton Head, membership in two country clubs, nothing unusual.
Page nine: a single line near the bottom, almost as if it had been hidden there on purpose:
Belmont Holdings, investment interest, estimated value $217,000.
He read it again. Then he read it again.
His pulse started doing something strange—not fast, just loud. Judge Julia Blackwood, the woman assigned to every Belmont case in the county for the last four years, owned a quarter-million-dollar stake in the company that was suing his father. Every property Belmont took, she got richer. Every ruling in their favor, she got richer. It wasn't bias; it was profit. It was, in fact, exactly the thing the law said a judge could not do.
He sat very still. The basement was quiet except for the hum of the single bulb. Then he reached into the briefcase, pulled out a blank index card, took out his pen, and wrote one question on it—slowly, deliberately, the way you write something you are going to remember for the rest of your life. He underlined it twice.
He placed it in the inside pocket of the briefcase, the same pocket where his grandfather's note still rested. He turned out the light. He lay down on the basement floor and stared up at the ceiling in the dark. He didn't sleep, but for the first time in 10 days, he wasn't trying to.
The morning of the hearing was overcast. Bobby tied his tie three times before he got the knot right. It was his funeral tie, the one he'd worn to bury Marsha; he didn't own another. The fabric still smelled faintly of the cedar drawer he'd kept it in.
Kendrick wore an ironed white shirt that had once been Bobby's, sleeves still a touch too long, cuffed at the wrists. His shoes were cracked at the toes but polished to a shine; he'd polished them himself the night before, sitting cross-legged on the basement floor with an old rag and a tin of black polish.