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He alternated jogging and walking, carrying his grocery bag and racket and bouncing his tennis ball, a man cooling off from a hard workout who had stopped by the store on the way home.

He made himself slow down; h

e shouldn’t run on a full stomach. He could choose his pace now.

He could choose anything.

42

Crawford sat in the back row of the jury box eating Red-skin peanuts while Graham closed the courtroom blinds.

“You’ll have the profile for me later this afternoon, I take it,” Crawford said. “You told me Tuesday; this is Tuesday.”

“I’ll finish it. I want to watch this first.”

Graham opened the express envelope from Byron Metcalf and dumped out the contents—two dusty rolls of home-movie film, each in a plastic sandwich bag.

“Is Metcalf pressing charges against Niles Jacobi?”

“Not for theft—he’ll probably inherit anyway—he and Jacobi’s brother,” Graham said. “On the hash, I don’t know. Birmingham DA’s inclined to break his chops.”

“Good,” Crawford said.

The movie screen swung down from the courtroom ceiling to face the jury box, an arrangement which made it easy to show jurors filmed evidence.

Graham threaded the projector.

“On checking the newsstands where the Tooth Fairy could have gotten a Tattler so fast—I’ve had reports back from Cincinnati, Detroit, and a bunch from Chicago,” Crawford said. “Various weirdos to run down.”

Graham started the film. It was a fishing movie.

The Jacobi children hunkered on the bank of a pond with cane poles and bobbers.

Graham tried not to think of them in their small boxes in the ground. He tried to think of them just fishing.

The girl’s cork bobbed and disappeared. She had a bite.

Crawford crackled his peanut sack. “Indianapolis is dragging ass on questioning newsies and checking the Servco Supreme stations,” he said.

“Do you want to watch this or what?” Graham said.

Crawford was silent until the end of the two-minute film. “Terrific, she caught a perch,” he said. “Now the profile—”

“Jack, you were in Birmingham right after it happened. I didn’t get there for a month. You saw the house while it was still their house—I didn’t. It was stripped and remodeled when I got there. Now, for Christ’s sake, let me look at these people and then I’ll finish the profile.”

He started the second film.

A birthday party appeared on the screen in the courtroom. The Jacobis were seated around a dining table. They were singing.

Graham lip-read “Haaappy Birth-day to you.”

Eleven-year-old Donald Jacobi faced the camera. He was seated at the end of the table with the cake in front of him. The candles reflected in his glasses.

Around the corner of the table, his brother and sister were side by side watching him as he blew out the candles.

Graham shifted in his seat.

Mrs. Jacobi leaned over, her dark hair swinging, to catch the cat and dump it off the table.