September 18, Friday
I CLOCKED juror number six Rodger Benson's calendar before I really clocked Rodger.
It was Ashanti who'd mentioned it first, in the hallway a week or two back, something offhand about him crossing off days like a man serving a sentence, and once I knew to look, I saw the evidence everywhere—the little pen he kept clipped to his shirt pocket, the way his eyes flicked to the wall clock above the jury box door with regularity.
Today, watching him from two seats over, I finally understood what Ashanti meant.
The witness was a digital forensics expert, a slight man with wire-rimmed glasses who'd apparently decided the jury needed a full vocabulary lesson before he'd part with a single useful fact.
Metadata. Hash values. Chain of custody protocols as they pertain to cellular extraction.
I found myself leaning forward despite the density of it, knitting like a madwoman, genuinely fascinated by the idea that a phone could hold a shadow record of everywhere it had ever been.
Rodger, beside Hank Park, had stopped writing entirely.
He sat with his arms crossed, jaw set, radiating the impatience of a man who fixed furnaces for a living and had no tolerance for four-dollar words.
At one point, when the witness circled back for the third time to define "cell tower triangulation," Rodger exhaled through his nose loud enough that Dwayne Fitch glanced over with a grin he was clearly fighting to suppress.
I felt an odd flicker of defensiveness on the witness's behalf, which surprised me.
I liked the density of it, the careful building of one term on another.
It felt like the difference between someone rushing to a conclusion and someone showing their work, and showing your work had always struck me as a form of respect for the people who'd eventually have to trust it.
At the break, Rodger caught my eye in the hallway and shook his head with a rueful half-smile. "Man could've said all that in ten minutes."
"I don't know," I said, careful, aware of the invisible fence around anything resembling the actual case. "I found it kind of interesting, honestly."
"Interesting like a nap is interesting." He laughed, not unkindly, and tapped the closet-calendar joke that had apparently become his whole personality among the panel. "Eighty days and counting. I could've had my whole basement finished by now."
I bristled. Something about the flippancy of it hit me the wrong way—as if the six months were purely an inconvenience to be endured rather than a burden that came stapled to a man's future.
I didn't say that, obviously. I just nodded and let it go, the way you let go of a stray thread rather than pull on it.
Back in the box that afternoon, I noticed him again during an especially dense bout of testimony—his knee bouncing, his gaze drifting toward the windows high above the gallery, visibly counting off the minutes.
And I caught myself doing the thing Jill had warned me about, the quiet, uncharitable arithmetic of deciding who was taking this seriously and who wasn't.
I didn't know him well enough yet to know if that judgment was fair.
But I filed the feeling away anyway, a small, private note beside all my other notes, and wondered—when the day finally came that twelve of us sat around a table and had to actually talk—whether his impatience and my carefulness would end up on opposing sides.