tattoos peeking out of his collar seemed out of place against his formal court attire. He wore a pressed suit, a white shirt, and a striped tie that looked a tad short as it hung over his protruding belly, which chafed against the tight fabric of his polyester shirt.
“Mr. Knox, can you tell me how you met Scott?” Quinn asked.
“It was a good three years ago, around the time I moved to Neapolis. I was at the surf beach south of town when a family got in trouble in the water. Tourists,” the witness said, as if that explained it. “They were pulled out to sea by crosscurrents. I swam in. Managed to pull one kid to shore. I tried to help the mother. She was fighting. Scratched and kicked me. Wanted me to leave her and get her other kid who was drifting further out and panicking. Worst thing you can do! If I’d left her, she would have drowned for sure. I didn’t know what to do. Next thing, a teenage boy swam out to the kid thrashing in the water. He grabbed the kid and brought him to shore while I helped the mother.”
“Is the teenager who rescued the drowning child here in the courtroom?” asked Quinn.
“Yes,” said the witness.
“Can you point him out for the court, Mr. Knox?” Quinn pushed, trying to hide his frustration with his own character witness, who needed to be prompted for every detail.
“He’s sitting over there,” the witness, whose full name, Rachel gathered from when he was sworn in, was Vince Knox, nodded toward the defense table, looking directly at Scott Blair.
“Is it your testimony that Scott was a hero? That he bravely risked his life to save the life of a drowning child?” Quinn prompted again.
“… He won a bravery award, so I suppose that makes him a hero,” Knox said after a prolonged hesitation. “Not too many people have the guts to risk their life for a stranger. Got to give credit where credit’s due,” he added in a flat voice that hardly sounded enthusiastic. His faint praise of Scott’s brave act struck Rachel as strange, but she supposed it fitted in with his gruff manner.
Quinn was visibly annoyed by his own witness’s terse answers. He’d obviously hoped for a far more enthusiastic account of Scott Blair’s courageous feat, diving into treacherous seas and risking his life to save a child from almost certain death. Quinn wrapped up questioning quickly. He’d elicited enough testimony to paint Scott Blair as a hero, a virtual Boy Scout who’d shown great courage by diving into the sea to save a drowning stranger.
Alkins opted not to cross-examine Vince Knox, though he reserved the right to recall him to the stand. Rachel figured that Alkins saw no upside in rehashing the defense witness’s testimony about Scott Blair’s bravery.
As Vince Knox left court, Rachel left her seat and followed him out of the courthouse, even though it meant missing Quinn’s next witness. Knox went down the steps and crossed the southern lawn. Rachel did so, too, holding back so that nobody would notice that she was following him. There was something about Knox’s testimony that bothered Rachel, and she wanted to ask him a few questions once he’d left the vicinity of the courthouse.
Knox turned a corner, putting him out of Rachel’s line of sight as she straggled behind him. She sped up so as not to lose him. When she turned onto the street where he’d disappeared, she immediately saw him standing by the curb, talking to a man in a black Lincoln. The car window was all the way down, and the engine was running.
The two men’s voices were slightly raised, as if arguing. The man in the car passed something to Vince Knox, which the latter stared at for a moment and then almost reluctantly stuffed into his pocket. The electric car window slid shut and the car drove off. Rachel glimpsed the driver through the windshield glass as his car slowed to turn at a traffic sign near where she was standing.
He had thick light gray hair and a neatly trimmed beard. Rachel had seen him before, but she couldn’t recall exactly where until she reached the courthouse and remembered that she’d seen him walking with the Blair family from their car, across the plaza, to the courthouse stairs on the first day of the trial. He’d been in a sort of security detail to protect the family from protesters. Rachel