Chapter 138 Lucas On Trial

Chapter 138 Lucas On Trial
Ethan's POV

The courtroom was full.

I'd expected that. The Hopper name had been in the news cycle for the better part of a year and a murder trial attached to it was the kind of thing that filled every available seat and had people standing in the corridor outside trying to catch the audio through the door.

I sat in the gallery on the first day. Ginny was at home, the motion was still being argued and the doctor's restriction stood, and I sat in the gallery alone, which was the right way to do this. This one I needed to take with clear eyes, without the additional weight of managing how someone else was receiving it.

Lucas was led in at nine fifteen.

He looked the same. No difference.

That was the first thing I registered and the thing that stayed with me through the morning. The composure was intact. The posture was correct. He wore the kind of suit that communicated seriousness without desperation, which someone had selected carefully for him, or which he'd selected himself from some residual habit of presenting correctly in important rooms.

He didn't look at me.

I noted that without feeling anything particular about it.

He looked at the jury when they were brought in. Twelve people who had been selected for their capacity to hear this story without prior conclusion. He looked at each of them in the methodical way of someone who had read about jury psychology and was applying it, even now, even here.

He looked at the prosecution team.

And then once, briefly, at the seat in the gallery where Ginny would have been.

The seat was empty.

He looked at it for perhaps two seconds. Then he looked forward.



The prosecution opened with clarity.

The lead prosecutor was the kind of person who had spent years being extremely good at one specific thing, and that thing was presenting complicated truths in the most direct possible sequence. 

He named each event in chronological order. The escape from custody. The period of surveillance Lucas had conducted. The gala recording, the car that had struck Holly's security vehicle during the perimeter shift, the intercept of the USB drive intended for the AV booth.

Then the children's center.

He named it plainly. The arrival, the confrontation, the gun, the sequence of shots. Holly Adams.

He let the name sit for a moment.

Twelve jurors, all of them paying attention.

He had everything. Ryan's testimony, prepared and submitted. The police testimony from the officers who had come through the back door. The security footage from inside the center, the cameras I hadn't known about until the police flagged them, positioned near the emergency exits for the overnight care children, which had caught enough of the sequence to establish the timeline beyond reasonable doubt.

Ryan's face when he'd told me about the footage. The look of someone relieved to have evidence and sick about what it showed.
Lucas's defense team was constrained.

I watched them work with what they had and acknowledged, internally and without satisfaction, that what they had was very little.

They argued absence of premeditation. He had gone to the children's center to talk, they said. To have a conversation with someone he had a complicated history with. What happened in that room was the result of a confrontation that escalated, of a chaotic situation in which multiple people were moving and the police had entered from multiple doors and the gun had discharged in circumstances that didn't constitute deliberate targeting.

I sat in the gallery and listened to this.

I kept my face completely neutral.

I thought about the wall in the abandoned property. The map, the photographs, the annotated images of Holly's hospital room, the line written in Lucas's handwriting: ‘The only way to end something is to end it at its center.’

Premeditation was not a difficult argument for the prosecution.



At the morning break I stepped outside and called Ryan.

He answered immediately.

"How does it look?" I asked.

"The jury is paying attention," he said. "All of them, all morning. Not the performing kind of attentive. The real kind. Following each piece, connecting it to the previous one." A pause. "That's usually a good sign for the prosecution."

"And Lucas?"

Ryan was quiet.

"He looks like a man who already knows the ending," Ryan said.

I stood outside the courthouse in the early spring light and thought about a blue notebook and the last entry. I don't know how to stop now. The machine is running. I built it too well. It doesn't have a brake.

He'd known the ending for a long time.

"Yes," I said. "So do I."



The motion to exclude Ginny's written testimony was denied that afternoon.

The judge's ruling was direct. Written testimony was admissible given the circumstances surrounding the witness's medical restriction and the corroborating physical and eyewitness evidence already in the record. The defense's procedural argument had not established sufficient grounds.

The prosecution called Ryan to read Ginny's testimony into the court record.

I watched Ryan stand in the witness box with printed pages in his hands.

He looked at the pages for a while.

Then he started to read.

Her words. Her voice, in a way, the precision of how she put things, the refusal to embellish, the flat clear account of events in the order they happened and what they cost. I had read the testimony when she finished it. I had sat at the desk with the pages and read it and then put it down and not spoken for about twenty minutes.

Hearing it read aloud in a courtroom was different.

Ryan's voice was steady. He didn't editorialize or perform. He just read.

The room was very quiet.

When he finished, the quiet stayed for a moment before the judge moved proceedings forward.

I sat in the gallery and thought about the café in the rain. About the version of Ginny Adams who had walked in with nothing left and had signed her name. About what it had cost her and what it had become and what it was worth.

It was worth everything.


The prosecution lead called me that evening.

I answered in the study, standing, because some calls required being on your feet.

"Mr. Hopper. The day went well. We're confident in the trajectory."
"Good," I said.

"There's something else. The defense has indicated they may call a final witness." 

A pause that lasted slightly too long. "We weren't expecting this. It wasn't in their pre-trial filings."

"Who?" I said.

Another pause.

"Richard Hopper," he said.