August 4, Tuesday
THE COURTROOM felt different today, with the gallery full and the jury box occupied—charged, somehow, like the air itself had been swapped out for something denser.
I settled into my seat with my knitting bag on my lap but didn't open it yet. Something told me I should listen to the opening statements with my hands still.
U.S. Attorney Lorna McDavid rose without notes, buttoning her jacket in one economical motion, and walked to a spot squarely between the jury box and the defense table.
"Ladies and gentlemen," she began, "over the next several months, the government will prove that the man sitting at that table"—she didn't point, didn't need to—"built an empire on fear."
She laid it out methodically, no theatrics, which somehow made it land harder.
The Blackthorne Syndicate operated across six states.
Extortion rings disguised as protection services.
Shell companies laundering money through legitimate-looking construction firms and restaurant chains.
Bribes paid to local officials in amounts that made my mortgage look like pocket change.
And then the murder-for-hire charge.
"You will hear testimony," McDavid said, her voice dropping into something quieter and more deliberate, "about a man named Horatio Alvarez, a witness in a prior federal case, who was found dead eleven days before he was scheduled to testify.
You will hear evidence connecting his death directly to orders issued by the defendant. "
A ripple moved through the gallery. I kept my eyes on my hands, which had found their way, without my permission, into my knitting bag. My fingers wrapped around a needle like it was a life preserver.
I glanced up once, toward the defense table, and found Blackthorne already looking at McDavid with contempt. His jaw worked slightly, and when McDavid gestured toward the jury box to underscore a point about the human cost of his enterprise, his gaze swept over to us—to me.
I looked back down at my needles and made myself knit a stitch, then another, just to have something to do with the part of my brain that wanted to bolt.
McDavid continued for nearly forty minutes, walking the jury through wiretap evidence, financial records, cooperating witnesses who would testify under protective custody.
Numbers piled on numbers—dollar amounts, dates, body counts.
Somewhere around victim number four, a shop owner in Macon who'd refused to pay and lost his store to an arson fire, I stopped being able to think of this as an abstraction.
This wasn't a limited TV series I could turn off when it got uncomfortable. These were real people, with real names, who'd had real things taken from them allegedly by the man twenty feet away from me.
And it also occurred to me the heavy responsibility and fear associated with voting to convict a dangerous man who, if the prosecution was correct, had incomparable reach to upend someone's life.
At this moment, I was very, very glad to be only an alternate.