Weeks ago Leisha, sitting before her terminal after her meticulous combing of Deepford’s trial record, had pondered Deepford’s and Hossack’s dossiers. She hadn’t expected that Sanctuary could manipulate the choice of either judge or prosecuting attorney; Sleepless power was mostly economic, not political. There weren’t enough of them to constitute a voting bloc, and they were too resented to gain elected office. Sanctuary could of course buy individual judges, lawyers, or congressmen, and probably did, but nothing indicated that Hossack or Deepford were for sale.
More important, Deepford was not a Sleeper fanatic. Whatever his personal feelings, he had presided over nine civil suits with Sleepless litigants—there were very few criminal cases against Sleepless—and in each case Deepford’s performance had been fair and reasonable. He tended to adhere closely to narrow interpretations of both the rules of evidence and the law itself, but that was the only point on which Leisha would have challenged him.
Hossack’s opening statement to the jury set out his case swiftly and cleanly: Evidence existed to prove that the Y-energy deflector on Dr. Timothy Herlinger’s scooter had been tampered with. Further evidence would tie this tampering to Jennifer Sharifi. “The scooter was equipped with a retina scanner, ladies and gentlemen, which showed three prints: a neighbor child who had been playing outside that morning. Dr. Herlinger himself. And the print of an adult Sleepless female. We will further demonstrate that this Sleepless woman was someone in the very highest reaches of Sanctuary power, someone who controlled the most advanced technology in the world.”
Hossack paused. “We will be entering in evidence a pendant found in the parking garage at Samplice, beside the spot occupied by Dr. Herlinger’s scooter. That pendant contains a microchip so advanced, so different, that government experts still can’t duplicate it. We can’t understand how it was made, but we can understand what it does. We tried it. It opens the gates of Sanctuary. In short, the State will prove that the scooter tampering was part of an elaborate illegal scheme planned and carried out by Sanctuary. We will then prove that the only person who could have masterminded this scheme was Jennifer Sharifi, creator and director of illicit power networks that include infiltration of the national banking system and even of government data storage, a concern so grave it is currently under investigation by a special task force at the United States Justice Department—”
“Objection!” Will Sandaleros called.
“Mr. Hossack,” said the judge, “you are clearly beyond the boundaries of an opening statement. The jury will disregard all reference to any parallel investigations, by anybody, in this murder case.”
The jury were all staring at Jennifer, straight-backed in her white abbaya behind a bulletproof shield. The word “power” hung in the air like a high-density charge. Jennifer never glanced sideways.
“Ms. Sharifi’s motive,” Hossack continued, “was to suppress patents which, if developed and marketed, would enable Sleepers to become Sleepless, with the same biological advantages as Sleepless. Sanctuary does not want us—you and me—to have these advantages. Sanctuary, led by Jennifer Sharifi, was willing to commit murder in order to prevent that.”
Leisha studied the jury. They were listening hard, but she could tell nothing from the rigid Sleeper faces.
In contrast to Hossack, Will Sandaleros sailed into his opening statement in low key. “I’m at a loss to refute the prosecution’s actual case,” he began. His handsome, sharply-chiseled face—the Sleeper parents who rejected him, Leisha remembered, had purchased extensive appearance genemods—looked modestly bewildered. No Sleepless, Leisha well knew, could afford to approach a jury with anything that could be interpreted as arrogance. She leaned forward, ignoring the inevitable curious stares from other spectators, studying Sandaleros closely. He looked focused and energetic. He looked competent.
“The fact is,” Sandaleros continued, “that there is no case to refute. Jennifer Sharifi is innocent of murder. The prosecution has no conclusive evidence, as I shall show, to tie Jennifer Sharifi, or the corporate entity of Sanctuary, to the scooter tampering, to any patent dispute, or to any murder conspiracy. What the prosecution does have, ladies and gentlemen, is a thin web of circumstance, hearsay, and forced connections. And something else.”
Sandaleros moved very close to the jury box, closer than Leisha ever allowed herself to get, and leaned forward. A woman in the first row shrank back slightly. “What the prosecution has, ladies and gentlemen, is a thicker web—much thicker than its web of evidence—of innuendo, prejudice, and unwarranted connections built on hatred and suspicion of Ms. Sharifi because she is a Sleepless.”
“Objection!” Hossack called. Sandaleros rolled on as if he hadn’t heard.
“I say this to bring the real issues of this trial out where we all can see them. Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless. I am a Sleepless—”
“Objection!” Hossack called again, with real anger. “Counsel is attempting to put the prosecution on trial here. The law makes no distinction between Sleeper and Sleepless in the commission of a crime, and neither shall our use of the rules of evidence.”
Every pair of eyes in the courtroom—Sleeper, Sleepless, augmented, clouded, tunnel-visioned, uncertain, fanatic—looked at Judge Deepford, who didn’t hesitate. He had obviously thought this issue through beforehand. “I will allow it,” he said quietly, thereby departing from his own record, and making clear how very wide a latitude he would allow Sandaleros to avoid the appearance of prejudice in his courtroom. Leisha found that the nails of her right hand were digging into her left. There was a trap here…
“Your Honor—” Hossack began, very still.
“Objection overruled, Mr. Hossack. Mr. Sandaleros, proceed.”
“Jennifer Sharifi is a Sleepless,” Sandaleros repeated. “I am a Sleepless. This is the trial of a Sleepless accused of murdering a Sleeper, accused because she is a Sleepless—”
“Objection! The defendant stands accused by a grand jury’s consideration of the evidence!”
Everyone gazed at Hossack. Leisha saw the moment he realized he had played into Sandaleros’s hands. No matter what the evidence said, everyone in the courtroom knew that Jennifer Sharifi had been indicted by the twenty-three Sleepers on the grand jury because she was Sleepless. Fear, not evidence, had indicted her. By denying it, Hossack himself looked either dishonest or stupid. A man who could not name ugly reality. A man whose statements should be doubted.
Hossack, Leisha saw, had just had his own sense of fairness and justice used against him, to make him look like a hypocritical ass.
Jennifer Sharifi never moved.
The first witnesses were people who had been at the site of Timothy Herlinger’s death. Hossack paraded a variety of street-team police, pedestrians, and the driver of the car, a nervous thin woman who barely restrained herself from crying. Through them, Hossack established that Herlinger had been exceeding the speed limit, had made a sharp left turn, and, like most scooter drivers, had probably relied on the automatic Y-energy deflector shield to keep him the standard foot away from anything on the other side of him. Instead he had crashed head-first into the side of the groundcar driven by Ms. Stacy Hillman, who had already started to pull forward as the traffic field changed. Herlinger never wore a helmet; deflectors made helmets superfluous. He had died instantly.
The street-team police robot had made its gross check of the scooter and discovered the failed deflector—or, rather, since deflectors never failed and such a possibility was not in its programming, it had listed the scooter as performing safely. This was so contrary to witness reports that a policeman had cautiously mounted the scooter, tried it, and discovered the failure for himself. The scooter had been sent to Forensic, Energy for expert analysis.