“Oh, why is this happening?” Paige says softly.
There’s no answer to that question. Noah feels like he’s caught in a tornado, unmoored from any reality, whisked away with brutal force and carried through the air against his will. He has lost all control. Forces beyond his reach—the sensationalist media, ambitious prosecutors, crooked cops—have aligned to deem him guilty and deny him any chance of fighting back.
He must focus on this one fact: It doesn’t really matter what anybody else thinks. It only matters what twelve jurors believe. He’s seen the looks on their faces, their disgusted expressions, their averted eyes. He knows he has an uphill battle. He can only hope that their minds are still open, however slightly, to what he has to say.
He has to testify. His lawyer doesn’t want him to. But he has no choice. He has to find some way to convince those jurors that he’s not the killer they think he is.
If he fails, his life is over.
27
JOSHUA BRODY LETS out a sigh. Almost three hours have passed, Noah testifying in response to Brody’s questions, and now it’s coming to an end. A pregnant pause by the lawyer, to emphasize these final questions—questions already asked and answered, but important enough to be repeated.
“Let me ask you one last time, Noah,” says Joshua Brody. “Did you kill Melanie Phillips?”
Noah leans forward into the microphone on the witness stand. “No, I did not.”
“Did you kill Zach Stern?”
“No, I did not.”
Joshua Brody casts a glance at the jury. “No further questions.”
Noah takes some deep breaths. Halfway done. The easy half, and it wasn’t that easy. It has to feel natural, not rehearsed, his lawyer kept telling him as they prepared for today, and Noah feels like, all in all, it was convincing. From time to time during Joshua Brody’s questioning, he glanced over at the jury. Did he see reasonable doubt on their faces? He doesn’t know. This isn’t what he does for a living. And he’s in the moment, tense and focused. He wouldn’t trust his instincts, anyway.
But he can’t suppress the surge of hope he feels. He has a chance.
“Cross-examination?” Judge Barnett asks.
The prosecutor, Sebastian Akers, drops a notepad on the lectern between the prosecution and defense tables. This is the kind of moment a guy like Akers lives for. The packed courtroom, the big trial, the cross-examination that will make or break this case.
Keep your composure, his defense attorney told Noah. Akers wants to paint you as someone who committed murder in a blind rage. He wants you to show the jury that rage. He’s going to try to bring it out, get you upset.
“Mr. Walker,” Akers begins, “you have no alibi for the night of the murder, correct?”
Noah clears his throat. “As I told Mr. Brody, I stayed in that night.”
Akers makes a face. “What I meant was, nobody can corroborate your alibi, correct?”
“Correct.”
“The jury has to take your word, and only your word, for it.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“And you admit you were once given a key to the front door of 7 Ocean Drive, correct?”
“Yes. I’ve done work on that mansion for years. At some point, it made sense for the contractor who used me to just give me my own key.”
“And that key has now magically disappeared.”
“I don’t know about ‘magically’—but I don’t know where it is.”
There was no evidence of forced entry at the mansion on the night of the murders. The fact that Noah had his own key isn’t a good fact for him.
“You deny that you confessed to this crime to Chief James. You deny that, right?”
“Yes.”
“So when he said you did, he wasn’t telling the truth.”
“He wasn’t.”
“And when Detective Murphy testified to what the chief told her about your confession, she wasn’t telling the truth, either.”
“I don’t know if she was or not. Maybe the chief said that to her. Maybe he didn’t.”
“If he did, then he was lying to her, too.”
“Right.”
“Or maybe Detective Murphy just made the whole thing up! Right, Mr. Walker?”
Noah feels perspiration on his forehead, his neck. “Could be.”
“So maybe she was also lying. Right, Mr. Walker?”
“Maybe.”
“Sure,” Akers says with no shortage of sarcasm, flipping a hand. “And Dio Cornwall, who shared a cell with you in lockup, who testified that you confessed to killing Melanie, that you said you ‘cut her up good’ and that she ‘couldn’t be no movie star now’—Mr. Cornwall was also lying. Right, Mr. Walker?”
“He was lying. I never said anything like that to him. I never talked to him about my case at all.”
“I see.” Akers looks at the jury. “Any idea how Mr. Cornwall would have known the name Melanie, or that she’d wanted to be a movie star, if you didn’t tell him anything about your case at all?”