Cassidy felt the familiar prickle of cold sweat at her nape, despite the courtroom's oppressive warmth. Her worn leather briefcase, still damp from the morning's trek through slush, sat heavily by her feet. Joseph, her client, slumped beside her, his usually vibrant face drawn and pale, eyes fixed on the witness stand with a mixture of dread and a desperate kind of hope. He was barely older than she was, twenty-one, caught in a corporate web that threatened to snap his life clean in two. The weight of it, the absolute crushing responsibility of holding his future, sometimes felt like a physical pain in her chest.
“Mr. Foster,” Cassidy began, her voice steady, despite the tremor in her hands that only she could feel. She gripped the podium’s edge, the smooth, cool wood a small comfort. “You’ve testified that on the night of November 14th, you were working late at the corporate headquarters, specifically in the server room, until approximately 3:00 AM. Is that correct?”
David Foster, a man whose suits seemed tailored from cynicism itself, adjusted his spectacles. His gaze, behind the thick lenses, was unblinking, unwavering. “That is correct, Barrister. As I’ve stated in my deposition, and again today.” His voice was a flat, uninflected drone, every word measured, precise.
“And you maintain that during this entire period, you observed no one else enter or exit the server room?” Cassidy paused, letting the question hang in the air, a thin, taut wire. The ambient hum of the courthouse’s ancient ventilation system filled the silence.
“No one,” Foster affirmed, a tiny smile playing on his lips, a man utterly confident in his own truth. Or his fabrication, Cassidy thought, a sour taste coating her tongue. He was the star witness for the prosecution, the IT guru who claimed to have seen Joseph’s login credentials being used remotely, simultaneously with his own presence in the secure server room, thereby placing Joseph at the scene of the digital crime without physically being there. A convenient, almost too-perfect narrative.
“You were alone,” Cassidy pressed, stepping closer to the witness box, a deliberate invasion of his carefully constructed space. “From 11:00 PM until 3:00 AM, a four-hour window, you were the sole individual in an area critical to the company’s network security?”
“My duties often require late hours, Barrister. And yes, for that specific maintenance protocol, solitary access is preferred to prevent… interruptions.” Foster’s eyes flickered to Judge Haroldsen, a subtle appeal to authority. The judge, an older woman with sharp, observant eyes, merely watched, her face a neutral mask.
Cassidy consulted her notes, a sheaf of yellow legal pads filled with frantic scribbles and circled doubts. “During those four hours, Mr. Foster, did you take any breaks? A meal break, perhaps? A comfort break?”
“No,” Foster replied instantly. “I had a flask of coffee. My work was uninterrupted.”
“Uninterrupted,” Cassidy repeated, letting the word resonate. “So, no movement from the server room for a period of four consecutive hours, save for the movements necessitated by your work within the room itself?”
“Precisely.” Foster straightened his tie, a small, almost imperceptible gesture of smugness. “I am a professional, Barrister. When I undertake a task, I see it through.”
A Thread of Discomfort
“I see,” Cassidy murmured. She walked slowly to the prosecution’s table, observing Mr. Cannidy, the lead prosecutor. He sat back, a picture of relaxed confidence, his gaze daring her to find a crack in Foster’s perfectly smooth façade. Cassidy felt the familiar sting of self-doubt. Had she missed something? Was this a dead end?
She picked up a small, laminated diagram of the server room, an exhibit Foster had introduced himself. It was a dense schematic, full of cooling units, server racks, and network cables. She held it up for Foster, then for the jury. “Mr. Foster, could you point out your usual workstation within this server room?”
Foster obliged, tapping a spot near a bank of humming servers. “Here. Directly across from the main diagnostic console.”
“And where exactly is the emergency exit in relation to your workstation?” Cassidy asked, her voice low. This was a Hail Mary, a shot in the dark based on a faint memory from the building schematics. Foster had been too perfect, too precise.
Foster hesitated. A fractional, almost imperceptible pause. His eyes darted to the diagram, then back to Cassidy. “The emergency exit is… to the far wall. East side.”
“Correct,” Cassidy acknowledged, though a thrill shot through her. He hadn’t pointed directly. He’d described. Why? “And the staff washrooms?”
“Outside the server room, through the main access corridor, then a left.” Foster’s voice was still firm, but the cadence was off, a subtle shift in his usual rhythm. His jaw was a little tighter.
“And the emergency fire extinguisher? Where is that located in relation to your workstation, Mr. Foster?” She fixed him with a stare, trying to project an unwavering certainty she didn’t fully feel. Her breath hitched, an involuntary gasp, quickly covered. This was it. The tiny, almost irrelevant detail she’d fixated on during her late-night dives into the building’s fire safety protocols.
Foster frowned, the first crack in his placid composure. “It’s… mounted on the pillar. To my right.”
“To your right,” Cassidy repeated. “Not behind you, near the diagnostic console. Not to your left, by the cooling units. But specifically, to your right?”
“Yes,” Foster said, his gaze hardening. “What is the relevance of this, Barrister?”
“The relevance, Mr. Foster, is that you provided an exhaustive, almost photographic memory of your activities in that room for four hours. You detailed the exact server banks you worked on, the precise cables you re-routed, even the ambient temperature fluctuations. Yet, when asked about the location of a standard, highly visible piece of emergency equipment, you paused. You had to think. Then you stated it was to your right.” Cassidy stepped closer, her voice now a low, dangerous hum. “The architectural blueprints of that building, a copy of which is available to the court as Exhibit C, clearly show the emergency fire extinguisher mounted directly *behind* the main diagnostic console, not to the right of your stated workstation. It would require you to turn around, completely. Not a casual glance.”
Foster’s face, which had been so perfectly composed moments ago, now looked as if it were carved from ice, melting under a harsh light. A single bead of sweat trickled down his temple, betraying his carefully maintained calm. “I… I may have misremembered that specific detail. It was a long night.” His voice had lost its flat precision, a faint waver entering.
“A long night, indeed,” Cassidy conceded, her tone almost gentle, yet sharp as a shard of ice. “Long enough, perhaps, to step out for a few minutes? Long enough for someone else to slip in, perhaps using an emergency exit or an unsecured service entrance, without your knowledge, during those brief moments you were not ‘uninterrupted’?”
The courtroom erupted in a low murmur, quickly gavelled into silence by Judge Haroldsen. Cannidy was on his feet, objecting, but the damage was done. Cassidy saw Joseph’s eyes, suddenly alight with a desperate spark, fixed on her. She had landed a punch, small as it was. A seed of doubt, planted. Foster’s composure was gone, replaced by a sullen, defensive glare. He knew, and Cassidy knew, that the ‘uninterrupted’ narrative was now severely compromised.
The afternoon dragged, a cold, miserable affair. Cannidy tried damage control, but Foster’s shaky re-direct examination did little to mend his credibility. When the court recessed for the day, the winter air outside bit harder than before, stinging Cassidy’s cheeks and ears. She pulled her wool coat tighter, the rough fabric scratching her chin.
“Cassidy,” Joseph said, catching up to her on the courthouse steps. His voice was hoarse. “You… you did good in there. That guy, he looked rattled.”
She offered a tired smile, though her insides churned with a mixture of exhilaration and exhaustion. “It’s a start, Joseph. Just a start. He’s still a credible witness on other points. But he’s no longer unimpeachable.”
“So, what now? Do we… do we go after him?” Joseph’s eyes were wide, hopeful, and slightly desperate. He looked like a deer caught in headlights, and Cassidy felt a familiar ache. She remembered feeling that same way, a different kind of trap, but just as suffocating. The need to run. The need to leave everything behind.
“We follow the thread,” she told him, trying to keep her voice firm, professional. “That pause. That misremembered fire extinguisher. It implies he wasn't as present, as attentive as he claimed. Which means he could have been somewhere else, or something else happened.” She thought about his flicker of unease, a split second before he tried to recover. It was a tiny thing, easily missed, but it was there.
“Where do we look?”
“The maintenance logs for the building. Specifically, for that emergency exit. And a detailed analysis of all security camera footage from that night, internal and external. He claimed he was alone, but what if he wasn't? What if someone else was there, and he didn’t see them? Or worse, what if he *did* see them?” Cassidy shivered, despite the quickening pace. The implications were chilling.
Snowbound Clues
The idea burrowed into her mind, a cold, sharp point. Foster had been so calm, so rehearsed. But under pressure, the human element emerged. He'd been too proud of his perfect memory, and that pride had been his undoing. Or, at least, the beginning of it. She walked faster, the snow crunching under her boots, the biting wind whipping strands of hair across her face. The rush of the city at dusk, the blur of headlights, the faint scent of diesel and cheap perfume, all faded as her mind replayed Foster’s testimony.
She thought about the details: the precise model of the cooling units Foster had worked on, the brand of coffee in his thermos, the colour of the network cables. He hadn’t forgotten those. Only the fire extinguisher, a stationary object, a critical safety measure, that would have been behind him. Why that particular detail? Why the hesitation? Her old life, the one she’d walked away from, felt a million miles distant, a hazy memory of easier days and simpler choices. This was her reality now, these cold cases and the heavy burden of justice.
The thought gnawed at her: what if Foster hadn’t just misremembered? What if he’d been so focused on projecting an image of solitary diligence that he hadn’t accounted for a moment of genuine absence? A quick smoke break? A furtive phone call? Or something far more sinister? The chill of the evening deepened, seeping into her bones. The case felt like a vast, icy lake, and she was only just beginning to chip away at its surface. Every chip revealing another layer of opaque, frozen water.
She arrived at her small, barely heated apartment, the building's ancient boiler rattling complaints from the basement. The window panes were thick with frost, a white shroud against the darkening sky. She peeled off her gloves, her fingers stiff with cold, and tossed them onto the rickety coat rack by the door. The silence in the apartment was heavy, broken only by the groan of old pipes and the distant wail of a police siren, a melancholy sound that seemed to encapsulate the entire day. She stood there, in the dim light, watching the snow continue to fall outside, each flake a tiny, fleeting truth. The case had just gotten far more complicated, far more dangerous, and the weight of Joseph's future settled around her shoulders, a shroud against the deepening winter night. She knew, with a certainty that chilled her to the core, that she was walking into something far bigger than a simple corporate hack. Foster’s discomfort wasn’t just about a fire extinguisher; it was a symptom of a deeper, colder truth, waiting to be unearthed beneath layers of ice and lies.
She had to find what he saw. Or what he *didn't* see, because he wasn't there to see it.