30

I had five days to get ready for the grand jury. I needed to push aside the emotions from my father’s death and pour myself into the Tate prosecution. During the day, I prepared my witnesses. I spent evenings in my war room at home, where the documents and exhibits mushroomed, overflowing to the kitchen and eventually the family room. Justice would beg to go out and play Frisbee, but I just turned him loose in the fenced-in backyard without me. I skipped my morning workouts. I stayed awake until two or three in the morning, drinking caffeine and preparing my case.

At the most inopportune moments, I would break down and cry, loneliness ripping at my heart. I couldn’t plan for those moments, and they would always sneak up on me, unexpected, triggered by something small that reminded me of my dad.

On Friday night, a thunderstorm swept through. The wind howled, bending the big pine trees in the backyard, causing them to sway back and forth. As a little girl, I was always afraid that the trees would snap and fall on our house, but my father had used it as a teaching point. “Those trees know how to bend with the wind, Jamie. You don’t have to worry about them. It’s the oak trees that don’t know how to bend—they’re the ones to worry about.”

Now the pines were dancing in the storm, casting long shadows into the family room through the large picture window. I could almost hear my dad’s voice in the howl of the wind.

On the day of the grand jury hearing, I drove my father’s 300M to court. Nobody had driven it since my dad passed away, but it seemed like a good way to honor him. I also carried his worn-out brown leather briefcase. He had carried the thing around for at least fifteen years, and the leather was dark on the handles from the residue of sweaty hands. There was stuff in the bottom—curled-up yellow stickies, some dead batteries, an old highlighter, pills that had escaped from a bottle. Who knew how long that junk had been in there?

I took the briefcase into the grand jury room with me and vowed that it would stay with me every step of Caleb Tate’s trial.