Knox leaned back in his chair hard enough to make it creak. “Fuck that. You’re not dropping her case.”
“Knox—”
“No. Discussion over.”
“Can I at least finish explaining the situation before you go all noble sacrifice on me?”
“Fine.” He waved his hand. “Explain. But it won’t change my answer.”
I leaned forward, keeping my voice low. “Kearns has connections. Power. He can probably make your parole disappear with a phone call. And he will. He made that very clear.”
“So?”
“So?” I stared at him. “So, you’ve been in here for years. Your daughter?—”
His jaw tightened at the mention of her. The only crack in his armor.
“Your daughter is growing up without you,” I continued, gentler now. “This could be your chance to see her again. To be part of her life.”
“There’s no guarantee I’ll ever see her anyway.” His voice went flat. Emotionless. The voice that meant he was feeling everything and showing nothing. “Her mom made that pretty clear.”
“But if you get paroled?—”
“If I get paroled, she still might not want to see me. I’m a killer.” He picked at a groove in the table. “At least in here, she can pretend it’s just the walls keeping us apart.”
The words knocked the air out of my lungs. Knox had survived years in this concrete tomb, but the thought of his daughter rejecting him … that was the one thing that could break him. I watched him trace that groove in the table, his finger following the same path over and over, and wondered how many hours he’d spent doing exactly that. Carving out pain one repetitive motion at a time.
“Knox—”
“Besides,” he continued, his tone lightening deliberately, “I’ve got a reputation to maintain in here. Can’t have people thinking Knox Blackwood’s gone soft.”
“You literally drew a frog on that table one of the last times I was here.”
“That was abstract art.”
“It had eyes.”
“Impressionistic eyes.”
Despite everything, I almost smiled. “I can get another lawyer for Faith. Someone clean that Kearns doesn’t have leverage over.”
“Right. And how long before Judge Douchebag finds a way to ‘convince them’ to tank her case? Guy like that’s got a file on every lawyer in Chicago. Probably knows what brand of toilet paper they use.”
“That’s paranoid, even for you.”
“Is it?” He leaned forward, and I saw the calculating intelligence most people missed beneath the tattoos. “You think you’re the first lawyer he’s tried to intimidate? He’s not going to stop until Faith has some burned-out public defender who’ll plead her straight into a life sentence.”
The guard by the door shifted, and Knox eased back.
“Walk me through it,” Knox said, his eyes sharp. “Where are you at with her case?”
I scrubbed a hand over my face, feeling the stubble. “I’ve got warrants served for Daniel’s phone records, financial statements, all his digital footprints. Those should come back soon if the companies don’t drag their feet.”
“What else?”
“I’ve also got a PI digging into the surrounding security cameras. Traffic cams, home surveillance, anything that might have caught Daniel’s or Faith’s movements that night. The neighborhood is high end, so a lot of those homes have surveillance systems that would make NASA proud. Digital gold. But he’s hitting brick walls. Someone’s making it hard to access footage, which is suspicious as hell. We’ll get through it, but the ball is moving slower than I’d like on surveillance.”
“Someone’s blocking access?” Knox’s voice dropped. “Let me guess. Someone with Judge Kearns’s kind of reach.”
