My gaze found Kitt first. He couldn’t offer me any outward show of comfort for fear of looking like he was favoring me, but I could see a certain softness in his eyes that I knew meant he was cheering me on.
The chair on the witness stand was made of solid oak wood with a high back, offering plenty of support. It would have almost been comfortable if it wasn’t suspiciously warm in a way that said someone had just been sitting in it a moment ago. I couldn’t help but think about the many people that had sat in that chair before me, not just for this case, but for every case that had ever been presented in this courtroom. So many victims in one place, all supported on these same four legs.
Now, it was my turn.
The judge greeted me with a mere nod, looking neither pleased nor angry at the sight of me. She was a stern woman with a pair of sharp eyes, creased at the corners as though she spent a lot of time squinting.
I was asked to swear in, placing my hand on a bible as I promised to tell the truth, and then the room fell quiet as Kitt approached the witness stand.
“Mister Emerson,” Kitt started off, and I watched as his mouth twisted at being forced to address me in such a formal way. “According to your testimony, you were held captive against your will from the beginning of your life up until the age of eighteen, correct?”
“I was,” I said, keeping my answer brief. We’d already practiced these questions, so I knew what to expect. Kitt would ask me a few basic questions to get me started, but then I would be allowed to explain things in my own words and at my own pace.
It was actually very similar to sitting in a therapist’s office.
I tried to focus only on Kitt, yet I couldn’t stop my gaze from wandering over to the defendant’s side of the room.
Vanshaw and Barr were each surrounded by a team of lawyers that probably cost more per hour than I made in a year. These were the two men I hated most in the world. The leader of the bell ringers, and the financial backer as well as their biggest client. They looked exactly as I remembered them, right down to the last detail. In fact, I was pretty sure I even remembered the suit that Barr was wearing. The buttons on the front had a distinct design.
“Mister Emerson,” Kitt addressed me as he stepped into my line of sight. He could tell I’d gotten distracted. “Can you tell us about the first time you encountered Edgar Barr?”
Since I’d had the most interactions with Barr, it had been decided that my testimony would focus mainly on him. There was already so much evidence tying Vanshaw and Barr together financially. As long as one of them went down, the other was almost guaranteed to follow. Kitt and I had a plan. We’d practiced this. Yet, when I saw Edgar Barr sitting there right in front of me, just a few feet away, all of my rehearsed explanations fled from my mind.
Instead, I merely uttered a simple date.
“Excuse me?” Kitt asked, confused. “I’m afraid I didn’t hear you. Can you repeat that, please.”
I did, repeating the date again. “That was the date I first encountered Mister Barr. I’ll never forget it. I was only six.”
Then, like a broken damn, the details all started spilling out of me. Every perverse thing that man made me do, what it felt like, and how scared I’d been. I didn’t cry, or scream, or break down. In fact, I stayed eerily calm throughout my explanation, but I made sure everyone in that courtroom experienced every traumatic detail as I had, right down to the smell of that monster’s cologne.
The jury flinched, the audience squirmed, and even the judge looked uncomfortable with my descriptions.
Well, that was just too damn bad. If they were going to decide whether or not I deserved justice, then they were at least going to hear everything I was going to say.
The only one in the room who didn’t look upset was Kitt. While he certainly didn’t look happy about what I was describing, his eyes also shone with pride as he nodded along with everything I had to say.
“Objection!” one of Barr’s lawyers shouted. “This level of detail is... obscene, and quite frankly, ridiculous. There’s no way this witness can remember so much about something that happened eighteen years ago.”
Before I could say a word in my own defense, Kitt was quick to argue that there was no rule about the amount of detail a witness was supposed to remember, and that deterring witnesses from divulging too many details was a dangerous precedent to set.
After a moment of thought, the judge agreed with Kitt and overruled the objection, allowing me to continue.
“I remember it all very clearly,” I insisted. “This kind of thing is hard to forget, and I’ve always had a very good memory. In fact, I don’t just remember the first time Barr visited me. I remember every time I was expected to serve him. Including the very last time.” Just to prove my point, I rattled off a date that was just over six years ago. “I was sixteen then. Guess I was getting too old for him, because I never saw him again after that. But it still stands out in my mind.”
Clenching my hands out of sight under the witness stand, I turned my head just enough to make eye contact with Barr. “You were wearing that same suit the last time you visited me. The carving on the buttons is unique. I remember watching them as you took your jacket off.”
Muttering broke out around the room. Edgar Barr’s face turned so red I thought he was about to start squirting bloodout his eyes, and his lawyer was shouting about unfounded accusations. The judge banged her gavel several times, calling for people to come to order, but silence still refused to fall.
Yet, through it all, Kitt didn’t respond. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was busy over at his table with Logan and Gabe, looking at something on a laptop.
A solid two minutes passed before the room was brought back under control. Barr’s lawyers demanded to have my testimony thrown out on the grounds of some legal terms I didn’t fully understand, but Kitt was quick to head off that demand with his own argument.
“Actually, Your Honor, Mister Emerson’s claims can be easily verified.” He pointed toward the projector at the side of the room, which was already booting up to play a video. “The defense’s legal team submitted Mister Barr’s home security footage as part of their evidence to prove his alibi. It’s a very sophisticated system with extensive backup footage that goes back more than six years. We can easily check the date Mister Emerson indicated he last... interacted with Mister Barr and check to see if he is, in fact, wearing the suit in question.”
Even before the judge responded, a video was already cued up on the screen. The defense protested, but with a nod of the judge’s head, the video played.
The first thing everyone saw was the date in the upper corner of the footage, which matched the exact date that I’d given. Then, right there in the courtroom for everyone to watch, Edgar Barr stepped through the front door of his house on the screen wearing a familiar suit.
