No One Knows Us Here(94)

Our star witness? Alejandro Navarez. Alive and well! Calvin got Alejandro to tell him everything—how Leo had asked him to show me an apartment, to arrange private meetings with me, to escort me to mysterious doctor appointments, to monitor my movements on Lookinglass, to pluck me away from an evening out with old friends. Did Leo Glass tell Alejandro why he was so interested in me? He never said, Alejandro answered. “But I was pretty sure it wasn’t for her coding skills.” The crowd tittered at that. “No offense,” Alejandro added, looking straight at me. I could have almost sworn I saw him wink.

Alejandro testified that Leo had hired him to follow me around, like some sort of low-rent private dick, for two weeks. I sat up in my seat, paying close attention. I hadn’t known that. “I didn’t want to follow her,” he said. He did it halfheartedly. If he saw me doing anything Leo would disapprove of—flirting with another guy, for example—he was supposed to report me immediately.

Did Alejandro witness any suspicious behavior during that two-week period? Calvin asked. “She spent all day walking in and out of coffee shops,” Alejandro answered. “She led the most boring life of anyone I’d ever met.” Another titter from the crowd. “The next time he asked me to do it, I said no. No way. Not going down that road again.”

“The next time he asked? When was this?”

“January,” Alejandro answered. “Leo’s birthday. He summoned me to pick Rosemary up, and she was standing out in the rain wearing a hideous version of Leo-leisurewear—sweats and a navy-blue hoodie.” The crowd laughed, and Alejandro smiled at them. He was enjoying this.

“And Leo Glass asked you to follow Miss Rabourne around again?”

“No, that was the thing. He wanted me to follow her sister.”

My entire body went cold.

“What was your response to his request?”

“I quit. I quit on the spot.” Alejandro looked straight at me when he said it. Then he turned back to Calvin. “I wasn’t going to stalk some little teenager like a pervert. I could go to jail. Plus it’s just—distasteful.”

Linda didn’t bother cross-examining him.

Teddy testified for me, too. Teddy, who had had the great misfortune of finding Leo’s corpse in a sticky pool of blood. He mumbled so much during his testimony that the judge had to keep advising him to speak up. He admitted to placing the Glasseye over the elevator on the fourth floor of my apartment building, under Leo’s orders. “He was weird,” Teddy said, raising his eyes to the judge, as if he needed approval. “Possibly mentally unstable.”

Linda cried, “Objection!” but Teddy acted like he didn’t hear.

He looked straight at me. “I didn’t want to do what he asked me, I swear!” he choked out, tears streaming down his face.

It was going well. Better than I could have expected. A stream of witnesses followed: Wendy’s school nurse, who reported that I’d been acting odd on the day we picked her up at the school, that she had feared for my safety. The two musicians who had overheard me whispering with Sam in the hallway at the gala after the symphony. They heard Sam ask me if I was safe, if Leo was hurting me.

Our next witness should have been no surprise, but when Sam Ferguson’s name came from Calvin’s mouth, I shivered the way you do sometimes, that someone-must-have-walked-over-my-grave feeling. He must have been sitting there, in the crowd, watching the proceedings. The first few days of the trial, I’d looked for him, scanned the crowd for his face. Now he was here, and I hadn’t even known.

I took in a slow, steady breath through my nose and sat up straighter. It took all my self-control not to twist around and catch Jamila’s eye. I hadn’t told Calvin about me and Sam. Jamila had told me not to. It wasn’t relevant, she said. Not really. Why complicate things?

Calvin’s questions were routine. He had brought Sam in to testify about the conversation we’d had after the symphony. I focused all my energy on Sam the entire time he was up there, trying to figure out what he was thinking, what he felt about me. He never so much as glanced my way.

When Linda Murray got up for the cross-examination, I must have visibly tensed, because Calvin turned his body slowly toward me and then looked back at Sam with renewed interest.

She started out easy, thanking him for coming in today and complimenting him on his work with the symphony. She was attempting to banter with him—gushing over one of the guest conductors last season, cracking some joke about the viola section’s hilarious Twitter feed. She laughed, but Sam didn’t. He narrowed his eyes at her, as if he’d grown impatient and was bracing himself for the real questions. “How did you know Rosemary Rabourne?” she asked him.

“She lived next door in my apartment building.”

“So you were neighbors,” Linda said, raising her eyebrows as if to suggest that this was a very interesting development indeed, although Calvin had gone over this during his questioning just a few minutes earlier. “You were neighbors,” she said. “So you must have seen each other a lot.”

Sam frowned. “Not really.”

“And her sister? You knew Wendy, too?”

“Objection,” Calvin shot out. “Relevance.”

The judge sustained the objection, and Linda Murray waved her hands, impatient. She was wearing a navy suit with gold buttons on this day, a strangely nautical look. It wasn’t quite as matronly as her previous ensembles, and I wondered if this was an intentional move on her part. She looked like a naval officer in an old movie, one from the 1980s. Top Gun, maybe.