August 20, Thursday
THE WITNESS sworn in that morning had the pallor of a man who hadn't seen sunlight in some time—prison pallor, I deduced from the gray jumpsuit he wore.
He identified himself as Dennis Karras, and the prosecutor established that he'd once served as what she called "an operational lieutenant" within the Blackthorne organization.
I'd brought the yellow blanket with me, further along now.
The wool had the smell that fresh skeins carry before enough handling wears it away—something faintly like a barn, warm and animal and clean all at once.
I worked a row while Karras described in a voice devoid of emotion how orders moved downward through the organization.
"Nothing happened without approval," he said. "Doesn't matter how small. You wanted to move product through a new corner, you needed a yes. You wanted to lean on somebody behind on a payment, you needed a yes."
"Whose yes?" the prosecutor asked.
Karras's eyes flicked toward the defense table. "His."
Bryan Stone was on his feet within seconds of the prosecutor sitting down, circling the topic of Karras's plea agreement with visible relish, laying out for the jury exactly how many years the man had shaved off a life sentence in exchange for his cooperation.
"You'd say quite a lot to spend a decade in prison instead of dying there, wouldn't you, Mr. Karras? "
"I'd say the truth," Karras answered, unbothered, "which happens to also help me. Doesn't make it less true."
I found myself liking that answer more than I expected to, the plainness of it, and glanced down to find I'd dropped a stitch somewhere in the last few rows without noticing. I fished the crochet hook from my bag and worked it back into place, one rung at a time, while Stone kept circling.
"You never met personally with my client, did you?"
"Twice."
That answer seemed to catch Stone slightly off guard, a half-beat pause before he recovered. "Under what circumstances?"
"Once at a restaurant. Once at his home. Both times, business got discussed without anybody using words a wiretap could've made sense of. But everybody in the room knew what was being decided."
"That's your interpretation."
"That's what fifteen years in the organization taught me to hear."
"You expect the jury to believe a convicted felon?"
Karras shrugged. "They don't have to. But I'm telling the God honest truth."
I finished repairing the dropped stitch and let my hands settle back into rhythm. The room had a late-morning quality to it now—stale air recirculated too many times, the faint mechanical hum of the ventilation system, someone two rows back unwrapping a cough drop with excruciating slowness.
The prosecutor returned for redirect, walking Karras back through the timeline, laying his testimony directly alongside the financial records from the week before—transfers that lined up, almost to the day, with meetings he'd just described. I watched the pattern assemble itself.
Blackthorne sat through all of it with his hands folded on the table, jaw tight, staring directly at Karras.
Karras looked at him a couple of times, then nervously looked away.
After that, his responses became more cryptic and devolved into monosyllables.
When the U.S. Attorney realized she was losing her witness, she ended the questioning.
When Karras left the witness box, he seemed relieved to be on his way back to prison.
It made an impression.