Page 115 of Night of Shadows
I say, "You walk in for who you are walking in for. Not what you are walking in to do. Who."
Maeve looks at me.
I say, "Tomorrow you walk in for Vincent Marchetti, who cannot testify on his own behalf because he’s dead and the men who killed him made sure of it. You walk in for Nora, who is the reason you got into this work in the first place, even before you had her. You walk in for the woman who took the job at the federal prosecutor's office at twenty-six because you wanted to be the woman who said the names of dead men out loud in rooms where powerful people had decided not to. You do not walk in for the case. You do not walk in for the sentence. You walk in for them. The case is a vehicle. The names are the work."
Maeve is very still.
Then she says, "Walk in for them."
"Walk in for them."
"Lex."
"Yes."
"That is the answer I needed."
"I know."
"Where will you be?”
"In the corridor outside the courtroom. I will not be allowed in the room with you. The grand jury is sealed. Klein has clearedme as far as the corridor. I will be ten feet from the door for as long as you are inside. I will be exactly there when you walk back out."
"Ten feet."
"Ten feet."
She nods. Once.
She picks up her coffee.
She gets back to work.
? ? ?
Mid-afternoon, I step out of the home office to take a call from Petrov about the Karpov federal arraignment, which is happening in absentia today because Karpov is still in federal medical custody after the disarmament.
I am in the hall when I see her.
Maeve has closed her laptop.
She’s not noticed me. The home office door is half-open. Through the gap, I can see her at the desk, the binders pushed aside, her hand at the top right drawer of the desk.
She pulls the drawer open. Slowly.
She reaches into it.
She lifts out something flat. From the angle of her hand, a piece of paper. Eight by ten. She sets it on the desk in front of her. Her hand stays on it for a long second. Her shoulders move once. She’s looking at the paper. She doesn’t pick it up. She doesn’t turn it over. She doesn’t examine it. She just looks.
I do not know what is in the drawer.
I do not need to know.
I have been with this woman for fifty-six days. I know the exact architecture of her interior. I know that she’s, in the home office on a Monday afternoon at 2:47 PM the day before grand jury, opened a drawer she’s not opened in some amount of time, and she’s taken out something she needs to look at one more time before tomorrow, and the looking is private and the looking is hers and the looking is doing the work that the forty-three hours of testimony preparation could not do.
She sits with it for two full minutes.
Then she puts it back.
