Trial

by Richard North Patterson

Genres: Multicultural & Interracial Romance; Legal Thrillers

Synopsis

Trial confirms Richard North Patterson’s place as “our most important author of popular fiction.”
In a propulsive narrative that culminates in a nationally televised murder case, Trial explores America’s most incendiary flashpoints of race.
A Black eighteen-year-old voting rights worker, Malcolm Hill, is stopped by a white sheriff’s deputy on a dark country road in rural Georgia. His single mother, Allie, America’s leading voting rights advocate, restlessly awaits his return before police inform her that Malcolm has been arrested for murder. In Washington D.C., the rising, young, white congressman Chase Brevard of Massachusetts is watching the morning news with his girlfriend, only to find his life transformed in a single moment by the appearance of Malcolm’s photograph. Suddenly all three are enveloped in a media firestorm that threatens their lives—especially Malcolm’s.

Release date: June 13, 2023

Publisher: Post Hill Press

Print pages: 560

Sample

1

In the pitch darkness of an unlit road in rural Georgia, Malcolm Hill drove with the windows cracked open, hoping that the humid crosscurrents would diminish the torpid semistupor of too many beers.

It was past midnight. At eighteen, Malcolm was three years short of the legal drinking age—a young Black man who, he dully realized, had rendered himself vulnerable to mischance. There were no streetlamps. Around him he felt, more than saw, the open fields stretching between dense stands of pines or oaks that blocked the thin silver light of a quarter moon.

As he oscillated between hyperattention and slackness, Malcolm lost the sensation of time passing, and the asphalt road in his headlights seemed to recede before reappearing in sharper focus. Abruptly recalling the pickup truck that, perhaps an hour before, had slowed as it passed the front porch where he sat drinking with his friends, he glanced in the rearview mirror, searching for the beam lights that—in reality or imagination—had appeared in the ghostly distance before vanishing again, conjuring from his subconscious the decades of bad history that had made Cade County, once a cradle of slavery, so dangerous for Blacks.

As he often did, he remembered his mother’s catechism: Don’t play loud music. Don’t violate the speed limit. Don’t drink and drive. Don’t give them any reason to stop you. As if in defiance, Killer Mike was rapping on his sound system, rapping an anthem to resisting the police.

In Malcolm’s mind, the words provoked both fresh anger at rogue cops and the odd sense of himself as a seriocomic figure, a recent honors graduate of Cade County High School living on the edge of criminality by edict of the Georgia state legislature. On the passenger seat beside him was the proof: piles of absentee voter applications that, Wednesday through Sunday, he passed out to the county’s Black electorate—his summer job before going off to college.

But though his ultimate boss was his formidable and demanding mother, the enterprise she ran was no family business. In 2020 the Blue Georgia Movement had persuaded unprecedented numbers of African Americans to vote absentee or by mail, helping to make Joe Biden president and elect two senators, one Black, who had given Democrats control of the United States Senate. Too many people despised her for it.

In response, the legislature had barred election officials and organizations like Blue Georgia from mailing out absentee ballot applications, making it harder for Blacks who worked long hours or were burdened with childcare to vote. Now the election of November 2022 was only five months away. Until September, Malcolm’s job was to knock on doors or go to fairs, churches, concerts, and barbecues—anywhere Black people gathered—to pass out applications.

This, too, might be illegal in the minds of Allie Hill’s enemies. There was just no telling—since the election of 2020, there was so much hatred that she had stopped counting death threats. Instead she had stepped up her warnings to Malcolm: If somebody hassles you for canvassing, don’t get mad; just try to defuse the situation and get out of there. We’re not in the business of creating martyrs—our movement had too many of those long ago.

Once again, Malcolm looked in the rearview mirror.

Nothing but darkness.

In fifteen minutes or so, he would be home in bed, the only consequence of his carelessness her sharply worded disapproval for driving too late at night on a lonely road. Bed would feel good. He was not only borderline drunk but stone tired.

The neighborhood he had worked today was deep in poverty—shotgun houses maybe eight hundred square feet, with aluminum shades outside the windows and, too often, tarpaulins or garbage bags or cardboard covering leaks in the roof that spawned mildew and mold. Most of the postage-stamp yards were dirt or untended grass; the people who lived in these hovels often did not own them—the owners of record, his mom had explained, were parents or grandparents or other dead relations who had passed away without wills or any notion of probate. One wizened old woman had asked Malcolm to check the overhead light in her kitchen; when he unscrewed the bulb, cockroaches fell on his head. The house was clean enough; she simply could not afford to maintain it.

His mother knew everyone in these houses. Sometimes she went there in her old flatbed truck, the one she kept for carrying packets of food to the people she knew needed them most. You don’t just ask folks to vote, she had told Malcolm, unless you care about their lives. Still, she always added, changing lives is impossible unless enough people cast ballots.

Deep down, Malcolm knew his mother had not wanted him to do this work. But he had insisted and, rare for her, Allie Hill had relented. What followed were still more warnings: Once it gets dark, try to have company. You don’t want to be alone if you can help it, at least not anywhere no one can see you. There are still a lot of people in Georgia who hate Black folks, and too many have guns. A few wouldn’t think twice about killing you because you’re my son, or just because you’re a Black man.

Glancing behind him, Malcolm thought again of that truck slowing down, as if to mark the group of young Blacks and whites chilling out after a long day spent putting the power to vote in the hands of their neighbors. In the distance behind him, new headlights slowed and then disappeared as he entered the last stretch of solitude. In ten minutes or so, he would reach the long driveway running through the parcel of land where his mother and grandmother kept up old family farmhouses, the place his grandfather had lived until that heart attack took him so fast that he was dead before he hit the grass where he had been pitching horseshoes with Malcolm in the dusk after supper. The memory felt like lead in Malcolm’s heart.

In the rearview mirror, Malcolm realized with a start, a blue flashing light had appeared.

He felt the dampness of sweat on his T-shirt and forehead. As the light came closer, the shriek of a police siren pierced the night.

Reflexively, Malcolm remembered his mother’s instructions for dealing with cops who could snuff out a life in a moment of fury or fear. Be respectful; don’t move quickly; make sure they can see your hands.

Malcolm had not told her about the gun.

The used Glock 19 was concealed in his glove compartment. He had bought it two weeks ago after starting this work, remembering all the videos of Blacks killed by police. He had imagined a moment like this, but the reality of this moment jolted him fully awake. The squad car loomed behind him, filling his rearview mirror, sirens screeching.

Heart pounding, Malcolm pulled over to the side of the road, wheels skidding on gravel before he jammed on the brakes. The old Honda jolted to a stop, its headlights streaks of white-yellow that evanesced in the infinite black of featureless grassland.

The car stopped behind him. The siren stilled; the blue beacon ceased flashing; the headlights disappeared. Everything around the car became silent and dark.

Malcolm’s stomach knotted. In a panicky reflex, he took out the gun and hid it beneath the papers beside him, the tools of democracy.

2

Pacing the living room of the weathered farmhouse she shared with her son, Allie Hill paused to check her cell phone for texts.

Nothing.

Pacing from room to room, Allie recommenced her restless pursuit of nothing save to kill time. She was slight and intense, gifted with a kinetic energy that fueled a swiftness of thought, speech, and movement so marked that—so her mother said—she seemed to burn calories just by being herself. Waiting for Malcolm, she gazed at the photographs that they had hung on the walls: her parents and grandparents at her kitchen table; a Hill family gathering on the green farmland outside; Malcolm watching his grandfather slip his ballot into a drop box; the faces of ordinary Black people from hard times past. It’s good to remember, she had told her son.

Aimless, she went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Opening the refrigerator, she realized they were down to a loaf of bread, cold cuts, English muffins, and a quart of milk. I’ve neglected my shopping, Allie reproved herself. Malcolm inhaled food, and she didn’t want him eating junk. Tomorrow she would squeeze an hour from her schedule to buy groceries.

She stopped, pensive. Through the window screen she could hear the sounds of a spring night in Southwest Georgia—crickets, wind rustling the leaves of trees—but not the one she awaited, the hum of a motor coming up the drive. Gazing into the darkness, she inhaled the scent of the crape myrtle trees she fitfully tended; felt the moist, lingering heat of a spring day that augured another sweltering summer that would breed mosquitoes as big as dive bombers; sensed the coming of a thunderstorm, perhaps bearing the jagged, shimmering bolts of lightning that, when Allie was small, had split the night sky and announced the awesome nearness of God. All that was missing from the remembered sensations of her childhood was the drone from a television as Wilson Hill watched his favorite team, the Atlanta Braves—Hank Aaron’s team, he had later explained to seven-year-old Malcolm, and then Dusty Baker’s, a Black man with a baseball mind so keen that he was still managing in the big leagues. Sometimes Allie would leave off helping her mother clean dishes after supper to peer into the living room and watch Malcolm sitting in her father’s lap, the boy’s head on the man’s broad shoulder, her father’s masculine warmth serving Malcolm’s need for a father of his own.

But now his grandfather was gone. Across the darkened fields where she, then Malcolm, had played as children, Allie saw the porch light of her mother’s home—as if she, too, would wait until Malcolm returned. Janie Hill’s heritage of worry had long ago become her daughter’s.

But she was far from Janie’s equal as a mother, Allie knew. During election season, Allie worked ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, supervising over one hundred employees in eight offices across the state—many of them canvassers not much older than Malcolm. In three months he would be off at college, and she felt her time with him slipping away.

Through sheer will, she stopped herself from calling him. He was touchy and proud, too aware that the major force in his life was a woman others viewed with something akin to awe. He was on the cusp of adulthood, searching for an identity all his own, and he felt her anxieties and desires for him as a burden. But she would have suffered them in better times than these: He was an eighteen-year-old Black man in Georgia who was sometimes too quick to anger, and one moment of misjudgment could change his life in ways he could not yet imagine.

Tonight, as often, she felt alone. This is how things are, she reminded herself, and much of that is my doing. But no matter the air of certitude she adopted for Malcolm, as a mother she had made her share of mistakes. Tonight she worried yet again that allowing Malcolm to share in her work was another. But in the end, she could not diminish her son out of fear. To stand up was what her family had always done, even back when it could have meant a casual death at the hands of racists that would likely go unpunished and, except by their community, unmourned. Standing up was what she knew, the only way forward. She could not separate Malcolm from three generations of Hills.

Perhaps more than any single person, a columnist for the New York Times had written, Allie Hill had shifted the balance of power in American politics. The price was raising ever more money to buy security for the offices where her people worked insanely long hours for too little money. But Georgia, its northern counties especially, was crawling with militia and white nationalists who carried assault weapons or knew how to build bombs, and hated anyone who had “stolen” the White House from the one “rightful” president.

Now her work meant living with all the hatred welling up from the fever swamp of fanatics who believed she was bent on replacing white Christians with brown and Black people who would destroy their primal America. The fact that Allie, too, was a Christian meant nothing. After the 2020 election, armed white militia had massed in front of her offices in Freedom, right-wing extremists had posted her picture, and then, more ominously, photographs of her home on the internet.

Waking up that morning, she had discovered another voice message from an unknown caller. His ungrammatical threats of sexual violence and asphyxiation would have been almost comical if not for the venom seeping through the honey-dipped inflections. She had given up wondering how these people got her cell number; though she had always loathed firearms except for the rifle her father used for hunting, lately she had considered buying a handgun.

But the fear she felt most profoundly was not for herself. Yesterday, for the first time, a particularly virulent website had posted Malcolm’s high school yearbook picture with the caption “Allie Hill’s illegitimate son.”

Once again, she checked her cell phone. Still nothing.

Stepping outside, she stood in ankle-deep grass, gazing up at the sliver of moon suspended in the darkness above Cade County. Then she snatched the phone from her pocket and called Malcolm.

3

In the thin silver light through the bedroom window of his gracious home in Georgetown, the rising public servant known as Congressman Chase Bancroft Brevard, Democrat of Massachusetts, contemplated the slender back of the woman sleeping beside him, his girlfriend of the moment.

Kara McGuire was twenty-nine, an Irish Catholic from Boston who had worked her way through BU—the people’s school, she would remind him wryly—before becoming a political consultant of considerable promise. She was smart and perceptive, with a keen sense of humor, attuned to the vicissitudes of the world they shared. Politics was in her blood; her father, a plumber, had volunteered for Ted Kennedy, and she had grown up hearing long and colorful stories about politicians whose devotion to the old neighborhood sometimes outran their ethics. Every now and then, inspired by a glass of wine, she made Chase laugh by telling him a couple that were particularly droll.

In their way, at least for now, they were perfect for each other. She was neither a reporter covering the Hill—which would have been an inherent conflict—nor, even worse, a congressional staffer whose involvement with a congressman would have raised the very real question of sexual leverage. If anything, she was mining him for insights helpful to her career and profited from the cachet that came from showing up at social events with a politician most people not only liked, but had marked as someone to watch. Though Kara was younger than he, she was more than old enough to be good company, and he enjoyed her cultivation of an affected cynicism she would one day earn. Chase expected her to thrive.

But though she was ambitious, as was Chase, politics was not all for her. She was the last of five daughters, close to her family, and when the time was right she meant to have children of her own. That time was coming, Chase knew. Last night, over the candlelit dinner that had preceded their lovemaking—her favorite: Dover sole, prepared by Chase himself; a California chardonnay she particularly liked; crème brûlée he’d been smart enough to buy—they had celebrated the final birthday of her twenties, and Chase had felt the first premonition of the unwelcome but inevitable end of their time together

Now, as she slept, Chase wondered about himself yet again.

As a professional matter, he did not mind people knowing that he liked women, and the patina of glamour that came from dating the occasional politically obsessed actress or high-profile journalist had not hurt him with the constituents who kept returning him to office with ever-greater margins. But he was approaching the time when the absence of wife and family was beginning to seem curious, if not emotionally arrested. Damning him with the very faintest of praise, a disappointed ex-lover had told him: “I’d take you for Peter Pan, but you’re not nearly that narcissistic or screwed up. It’s more that you don’t seem to need anyone enough to inconvenience yourself by getting married.” Though that troubled him, then and now, he could find no good way to tell her that only once, too long ago, had he found a woman so compelling that he could imagine sharing something so important as a lifetime, so profound as the love of a child rooted in his love for her.

Beside him, Kara stirred but did not awaken. Admiring her ability to sleep despite his restiveness, Chase pondered how it might feel when she no longer occupied what had become, in their transient monogamy, Kara’s side of the bed.

Perhaps, he acknowledged, he had become so elusive that he had begun to elude himself. “I know what you are,” the woman before Kara had told him, “but not who you are.” But maybe the what and who were one and the same: a man who had been born lucky and, except for one painful passage, had stayed that way.

Chase came from a wealthy Boston family, made so several generations back by a somewhat predatory financier on his mother’s side, great-grandfather Bancroft. Chase had acquired his surname from a French professor of literature who had met Caroline Bancroft while she was studying at the Sorbonne before, as he sardonically put it to tease her, he had followed the money to America. Chase was an only child, more than enough for Jean Marc and Caroline Brevard, and shortly after he turned fourteen they had packed him off to Middlesex with no more sentiment than Caroline’s parents had displayed when they dispatched her to Rosemary Hall. Chase did well on his own, academically and socially; after prep school came seven successful years at Harvard—college, then law school. Looking for a challenge that might prefigure a career in politics, instead of striving for money he did not need, Chase became an assistant district attorney in Boston.

Once more, he had been lucky. True, he had worked hard to become a skilled trial lawyer. But when a daunting but high-profile case had appeared—the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man by a white cop under ambiguous circumstance—Chase had asked the district attorney to give him the case. A year later, after Chase had decimated the policeman on cross-examination, the jury returned a verdict of second-degree murder.

The police union detested him for it. But the profile of a privileged young man turned progressive prosecutor was ideal for the affluent congressional district near Boston where his parents maintained their principal home. After a blistering primary contest, Chase entered Congress at the age of thirty-two.

Politics, too, continued to reward the gifts that came to him naturally. Like any good politician with adequate self-awareness, Chase knew what they were: He was attractive, likable, a smooth but compelling speaker gifted with a pitch-perfect public persona and the instincts to match. He seldom spoke precipitously or let passion outrun good judgment: Ask Chase Brevard a question, a veteran reporter had said of him early on, and he could see the implications in a heartbeat. He was, in short, a talented and reliably mainstream Democrat well-liked by the House leadership, which increasingly abetted his blossoming ambitions.

He was forty now, and among the younger Democrats who forecasters believed could someday become president. But Chase dismissed such talk as a distraction, even a curse. He had resolved to focus on the as-yet-unannounced goal that lay immediately before him: a race for the Senate from Massachusetts in 2024. Lose that race, and idle dreams of occupying the White House would be not merely speculative but absurd.

“It’s way too early,” he had told Kara over dinner. “Start to obsess on that, and you risk breaking your own heart. I’ve seen too many ambitious politicians who think they can only become themselves by becoming president. It’s a form of psychic suicide. Before you even think about running for president, it might be good to have some experiential basis for imagining yourself as a colossus astride the world stage. Besides,” he had finished with a smile, “there are a few barriers standing between me and historic greatness. Some of whom are my colleagues.”

Amused, Kara had raised an eyebrow. “Let me take a wild guess. She’s Black, about five foot two, has a wicked tongue, and thinks you’re white bread in an Armani suit.”

Which had brought Chase back to the problem Kara had identified so astutely: the ardently progressive Black congresswoman from a far more modest district in Boston. Lucy Battle was outspoken, charismatic, and an unapologetic class warrior who mesmerized the activist left. Chase’s mild mockery of Lucy’s call to “defund the police” had provoked her caustic rejoinder that putting one bad cop in jail was a moment, not a vision. Lucy barely concealed, when she bothered at all, her view that Chase was an overly privileged trust fund baby who would never understand people of color. She knew in her bones that she was as worthy of becoming a senator from Massachusetts as Chase Brevard was not.

“She’s kind of getting to you, isn’t she?” Kara had ventured over dessert.

Chase shook his head. “She’d like to think so. Actually, I sort of like her—way more than she’ll ever like me. Four hundred-plus years of racism seem to have curdled her disposition. But what gets to me is how much running against Lucy would become about race, like it or not. No matter how I feel about that.”

The amusement surfacing in Kara’s eyes, Chase had long since learned, augured mischief. In the abrasive tone of a particularly obnoxious Fox News anchorwoman, she had demanded: “So tell me, Congressman Brevard, is America a racist country?”

“Of course it is, Laura,” Chase had answered without skipping a beat. “That’s why your all-white audience is so paranoid about Blacks. How else could a bleached-blonde sociopath like you make ten million bucks a year for saying that the only discrimination left in America targets fundamentalist Caucasians?”

Kara laughed. “That’s certainly one way to go viral.”

“And lose all those suburban swing voters Lucy petrifies?” he inquired with mock horror. “Don’t you want me to become a senator?”

As Kara had smiled at this, he’d regarded her familiar features in the candlelight: thick brunette hair, large brown eyes, generous mouth—the look of a smart and very pretty soubrette. “It’s fine with me, Congressman. The House is way too small for a man of your vast talents. But the Democratic primary is two years away. Tonight is my birthday, and we’ve got other things to do.”

And so they had, slowly and sweetly. Afterward, as Kara fell asleep, with a tinge of melancholy Chase had imagined her as someone else’s wife.

4

Hands on the steering wheel, Malcolm waited. But for the streaks of his headlights converging, he was surrounded by fathomless night. Thick, lowering clouds had begun obscuring the quarter moon; Malcolm could barely discern the cop’s shadowy form approaching in the rearview mirror. Then it disappeared, and the crunch of footsteps on gravel grew louder.

Malcolm tensed, sweat stinging his eyes. His mother’s warnings slowly surfaced in his brain: If police stop you, do what they say. Never show anger. Don’t reach for anything; don’t move unless you have to. The wrong cop could kill you in seconds.

He heard the stranger approaching the driver’s side window, saw his flashlight as a blinding circle of yellow. Malcolm averted his eyes from its brightness. His first fleeting impression was of a big man with an oversized head beneath the visored cap of authority.

What kind of Black man would the cop imagine seeing? Malcolm wondered. For at least some white people, he knew, he wasn’t the menacing predator of their most fearful imaginings. His skin was lighter than his mother’s or grandparents’; growing up, he had learned that all kinds of girls liked his face. But that only put other guys on edge, white and Black, and so did his musculature—that of an athlete. Malcolm lifted weights until his sinews ached, the better to ward off sports opponents or whoever might confront him in a place with no rules. Maybe tonight that time had come.

The cop rapped the glass with his flashlight, thrusting its beam in Malcolm’s face. “Open the window,” he ordered.

The insinuating molasses drawl of a backcountry white speaking to an inferior underscored that Malcolm was alone in the darkness, subject to whatever this man cared to do. Slowly raising one hand from the steering wheel for his faceless captor to see, Malcolm pushed a button.

With a quiet shudder, the glass between them lowered.

Wordless, the cop reached through the window and switched off Malcolm’s headlights, turning the night that enveloped them pitch black. “Get out,” he said in the same quiet, contemptuous tone. “Time for your breath test.”

Malcolm’s stomach clenched. Stupidly, he had licensed his own entrapment, and now he was invisible on a backroad in Cade County. Struggling to separate reality from fear, he realized that the cop had not asked for his name or driver’s license. Malcolm remembered that the new sheriff, a Black man, had required his deputies to turn on their body cameras before making an arrest. But Malcolm saw no light on this man’s chest, nothing that suggested a functioning camera.

“Follow me home,” he managed to say. “We can talk there.”

His own voice, Malcolm heard, sounded like he was frightened or drunk. But the muted laugh through his window seemed oddly contented. “We’re staying where mama can’t help you,” the man answered, and Malcolm grasped with terrible certainty that the cop already knew who he was.

“I’ve got the right to call her,” Malcolm said tautly.

From the darkness came a sigh of feigned sorrow. “Afraid it’s just you and me, Malcolm—a respected law enforcement officer, and the bastard son of a socialist whore who’d fuck any man who didn’t mind watching her fuck three other men first.”

Malcolm tensed with caged anger, torn between the pain of a wound scraped raw and rage at hearing the sick loathing and desire that went back to when white men like this could treat Black women as they pleased. Thinking of the gun, he tightened his grip on the wheel.

“Sad you’ve got no father,” his predator continued in a conversational tone. “You’re just a mama’s boy, rounding up people too stupid to vote on their own.”

Glancing in the rearview mirror, Malcolm hoped for anyone who might see them by the side of the road.

Nothing but darkness.

Suddenly, he felt his cell phone vibrate in the pocket of his blue jeans—his mother, he felt certain. “I need to answer that, Officer.”

“Just keep your hands on the wheel, Malcolm. Out here you’ve got no phone privileges to help you.”

In the suffocating stillness of the car, Malcolm’s phone kept buzzing. The man thrust his flashlight toward the passenger seat. “Tell me what you got there.”

Malcolm froze. In his silence, the phone went still.

“Answer me, Malcolm.”

Malcolm’s throat was dry. “Absentee ballot applications.”

“Seems like you’ve been violating the voting laws of the sovereign state of Georgia. Hand those to me. Slowly.”

He couldn’t, Malcolm knew, without uncovering the gun. “I don’t want any trouble,” he implored. “Please, just take me to Sheriff Garrett.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? ‘Please take me to my mama’s friend.’ But that’s not how your life is going tonight, Malcolm.” The man’s voice hardened. “First, you refuse a breath test. Now you’re defying a lawful order to turn over evidence of a crime. Unless you’re fixing to die, stay where you are.”

Slowly, the deputy backed away from the window. Paralyzed, Malcolm heard his footsteps on the gravel, saw his shadow circling the car. As Malcolm turned, the man’s form filled the passenger window. Reflexively, he slid his right hand down the wheel.

The man jerked open the passenger door, switching on the inside light. For Malcolm, time stopped. As the deputy leaned inside and stretched his hand toward the papers, Malcolm took both hands off the wheel.

Beneath the overhead light, the Glock 19 showed dull black on the passenger seat. In a rush of adrenaline, Malcolm grabbed it.

The deputy wrenched it from his grasp. Desperate, Malcolm gripped the man’s wrist with both hands, struggling to turn the barrel. They fought for leverage in the tight space of the car, their heads inches apart, the deputy using his bulk to push Malcolm down.

Malcolm’s skull struck the steering wheel. Lights flashed through his vision as the deputy twisted the barrel back toward him.

Grasping the handle, Malcolm used all his strength to turn the weapon away from his face. All at once he felt it wrench, twisting in the big man’s hands.

A sudden, percussive pop sounded in the car. The man’s head seemed to lift, and something wet spattered Malcolm’s T-shirt.

Shocked, he recoiled, hands dropping to his side. In the dim light, the deputy toppled sideways, sliding down the passenger seat, his eyes staring, mouth agape. His hair was close-cropped, his face broad and florid. A piece of his forehead had disappeared, and his skin was streaked with blood and brain matter.

Turning in horror and revulsion, Malcolm opened the door, stumbling from the car before falling to his knees.

The night was dark and silent. Head bent over the gravel, Malcolm vomited, the sour smell of beer filling his nostrils. The cell phone vibrated in his pocket.

Too late, he told her. It’s too late.

5

In numb despair, Malcolm sat motionless beside his car.

The shrieking siren grew louder. Breaks squealed behind him, spitting gravel, and blue streaks of light shimmered on the asphalt. A car door flew open, followed by swift footsteps. Malcolm did nothing. He no longer cared what happened.

A man shoved Malcolm’s face forward into the gravel, cutting his skin. Wrenching Malcolm’s arms, the cop cupped his hands behind him.

Malcolm lay in the gravel, silent. Turning his face sideways, he could see a second cop walking toward the car, a dark figure in blue phosphorescence.

The man stopped, staring through the open door. Squaring his shoulders, he slid inside Malcolm’s car.

For a moment all was silent. Then Malcolm heard the cop speaking in an urgent rush, “It’s Nick Spinetta. Officer down on Old County Road.”

Manacled, Malcolm could not move.

More footsteps. Then Spinetta knelt over him and put a gun to his temple. The feel of metal reawakened Malcolm’s fear of death. “It was an accident,” he said dully.

Spinetta drew a deep breath. Holstering the gun, the cop rose to his feet, standing over Malcolm as dueling sirens split the night. More cars skidded to a stop, their headlights bathing Malcolm in yellow.

“It’s George Bullock,” Spinetta told someone in a low voice. “He’s dead.”

Two deputies jerked Malcolm upright and then pushed him into the back of a squad car. Both deputies sat beside him, their faces like stone. Two more jumped into the front seat. The car started, its radio crackling with taut voices.

Malcolm closed his eyes. Hunched forward, he could feel the trapped hatred inside the car. It was an accident, he wanted to tell them, but could not speak.

Opening his eyes as the car finally slowed, Malcolm saw the featureless rectangle of the Cade County jail, its metal fence topped by barbed wire. Every window was illuminated, and sheriff’s deputies waited in front.

The two deputies in back pulled him from the car, pushing him through a gate, down a cement path flanked by more armed men, through the door to the jail.

Malcolm had never been inside. He stepped like an automaton across a bare tile floor, deputies gripping both arms, and was swallowed by a process that separated him from everything he had known.

Uniformed men prodded him to recite his name, address, the birthday he’d celebrated with his mother and grandmother a few months before. Then they booked him; took his fingerprints and his picture; bagged his wallet, cell phone, and keys; swabbed his hands for soot and blood. Sticking a needle in his arm, they watched his blood flow through a tube into a plastic bag. Then they stripped off his clothes, gave him the orange jumpsuit of a convict, took him to a windowless room, sat him alone at a long Formica table, and closed the door.

Alone, Malcolm struggled to comprehend what was happening to him. He had drunk too much beer, and his gun had blown a jagged hole in a white man’s forehead. Now he was here.

For some indeterminate time, he stared at the table. Then two keen-eyed white men in nondescript suits entered the room, introducing themselves as special agents of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

They were a different species, Malcolm realized.

He forced himself to focus. Calmly, the big man wearing a blue-striped tie recited the daunting catechism Malcolm knew from crime shows: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you.” Leaning forward, the man said, “Do you understand that, Malcolm?”

“Yes.”

“Does anyone live with you?” the agent in a white shirt asked.

“My mother. Allie Hill.”

The man paused. “Your father live hereabouts?”

“I don’t have a father.”

His interrogator sat back, appraising him. In an even tone, he said, “You killed a man tonight, a law enforcement officer with a wife and two kids. This is your chance to tell how that happened.”

Malcolm’s mouth felt like cotton. It was an accident, he wanted to say. Please, you have to believe me. The man who died was looking for me because he hates my mother.

Malcolm stopped himself. He imagined his mother waiting up for him, the way she always had. Then he remembered the warnings she had given him when he learned to drive. Don’t think cops are your friend, she had told him, or that you can talk yourself out of trouble. Somebody arrests you for anything, I don’t care what they say to get you talking. Tell them you want to call me and want a lawyer. Anything else is too many words.

Malcolm sat straighter. “I’m not answering any more questions, all right? I need to talk to my mother. She’ll get me an attorney.”

The agent closed his notebook. “We’ll be letting her know soon enough.”

6

Just before two a.m., a thunderstorm struck Cade County.

Waiting for Malcolm on her screened front porch, Allie could hear the sheets of rain pummeling the ground, and the thunder that followed jagged bolts of lightning shook the floorboards. Even the weather here feels primal, she often thought.

But tonight its furious assault deepened her fear that something terrible had reached out for Malcolm. She remembered her own fright at such storms as a child, when her mother or father would come to her bedroom; remembered holding the infant Malcolm before he grew to understand that this was nature’s way in Southwest Georgia. When shimmering headlights suddenly appeared from the torrential gloom at the foot of her driveway, her heart swelled with sudden hope.

She ran to the door, ready to stifle any rebuke out of sheer gratitude that Malcolm had come home safely. Abruptly the car stopped in the driveway, and two shadows emerged in the pale illumination cast by her porch light. They scrambled toward her, head and shoulders down, hunched against the rain.

She drew back, apprehensive. “Mrs. Hill,” one called out. “We’re from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Freedom office.”

Allie hesitated, then opened the door and backed away to give them a small space inside before blocking their path. They were both white, she saw, wearing caps and dressed in blue windbreakers. The taller one fished out identification from his pocket and said, “I’m Special Agent Moss,” before inclining his head toward the squat man beside him. “This is Special Agent Tanner.”

Taut, Allie did not move. “Has something happened to Malcolm?”

Gravely, Moss nodded. “He’s in custody, ma’am, for killing a sheriff’s deputy during a traffic stop. He’s asking for you and a lawyer.”

Allie was whipsawed by conflicting emotions—her son was alive, but in the worst kind of trouble a Black man could face. “Where is he?” she demanded.

“County jail.” The agent placed some papers in her hand, adding with quiet authority, “This is a warrant to search his room.”

She forced herself to stay calm, be the parent Malcolm needed. She scanned the warrant, then directed, “Don’t move. I’ve got a phone call to make.”

She looked from one man to the other, assuring their compliance. Then she went to her bedroom and called Jabari Ford.