"Daddy’s snake bites me," the little girl cried to 911, but when police kicked the door down, they discovered the monster had no scales, only a human face.

The Sangamon County Courthouse in Springfield was built in nineteen-seventy-two of grey aggregate concrete that was supposed to look like limestone but had weathered into the color of a wet cardboard carton.

Room 402 on the fourth floor was the grand jury room.

It had no windows. It had nineteen orange vinyl swivel chairs arranged in three tiers behind a long oak rail, a walnut lectern with an aluminum microphone base that had lost its foam windscreen, and an old Westinghouse ceiling fan that made a rhythmic, clicking sound—tick-tock, tick-tock—every time the third blade passed the junction box.

Thomas Miller sat at the defense table.

He had been in the county jail on Ninth Street for seventy-two days. He wore an orange cotton jumpsuit with SANGAMON COUNTY DETENTION stenciled in black stencil ink across the shoulder blades, three sizes too large for him because he had lost twenty pounds on the county’s three-thousand-calorie white-bread diet. His hair was longer now, thin and grey at the crown, falling over his ears in greasy strings because the jail barber only came on the second Thursday of the month.

Beside him sat his appointed counsel, an assistant public defender named Kevin Prall, who had forty-six active felony files in his canvas briefcase and smelled of cheap menthol lozenges and old laundry.

Across the oak rail sat nineteen people from the county: five retired state clerks from the Department of Transportation, two farmers from out near Mechanicsburg, three housewives from the west side, and a collection of municipal workers who had been pulled from their desks at the city water department.

Assistant State’s Attorney Margaret Ross stood at the lectern.

She was fifty-two, with iron-grey hair cut into a hard, three-inch bob, wearing a dark green wool skirt that had seen six murder trials and a dozen aggravated assaults. She didn't carry notes; she carried a brown paper evidence sack that had been sealed with red state police evidence tape.

"The People call Officer Daniel Harris," Margaret said.

Daniel walked through the double doors at the back of the room.

He had put on his Class A uniform: the long-sleeved dark blue wool shirt with the gold county stars on the collar points, his tie tucked between the second and third buttons with a gold tie-tack shaped like the state of Illinois, and his eight-point hat under his left arm.

He took the oath without looking at Miller.

"Officer Harris," Margaret said, her voice dry, clinical, and completely lacking in courtroom theater. "On the night of August fourteenth of this year, did you enter the premises at 1427 Maplewood Drive in this city?"

"I did."

"What did you observe on the upper floor of that residence?"

Daniel sat in the high-backed oak witness chair, his boots flat on the rubber runner.

He spoke for twelve minutes.

He didn't use adjectives. He didn't say the house was horrible; he didn't say the child was terrified; he didn't say the father was a monster. He gave the dimensions of the hallway: thirty-two inches wide. He gave the wattage of the bulb: forty watts. He gave the serial number of the Master Lock: 4114-J.

He reached into his pocket and placed the red spiral notebook on the rail before the grand jury foreman, an old grain elevator manager from Dawson who had two missing fingers on his left hand.

"The child kept this record," Daniel said.

Miller shifted in his orange jumpsuit. His plastic-soled jail shoes made a loud, rubbery squeak against the linoleum.

"Mr. Prall," Judge Harold Vance—no relation to the zoo director, though he had the same hard, grey jaw—spoke from the bench. "Does your client wish to make a statement before the grand jury retires to consider the indictment?"

Prall leaned his head toward Miller’s ear. He whispered for twenty seconds, his hand covering his mouth, his shoulders hunched in that defensive posture lawyers take when they know their client has three aces and the dealer has a five-card straight flush on the table.

Miller pushed the lawyer’s hand away.

He stood up.

He was six-foot-one, but the orange jumpsuit made him look narrower, like a cedar fence post that had rotted out beneath the grass-line and was being held up by the wire alone.

"I didn't hurt her," Miller said.

His voice didn't shake. It had that flat, stubborn, small-town resonance that sounds like an old Dodge engine turning over with three dry cylinders.

"She needed to learn," Miller told the nineteen people in the tiers. "Her mother was soft. Her mother gave her candy when she cried, and she let her sleep with the lights on when the thunder came off the prairie. A girl who can't stay still when she’s eight years old is going to be running the streets by the time she’s fourteen."

A retired DOT clerk in the second row—a woman with silver spectacles and a blue knit cardigan—leaned back in her chair until the vinyl groaned.

"The snake didn't have no poison," Miller said. "I bought it from a boy down in Taylorville who had it in his trailer. It didn't do nothing but lay there. If she got bit, it’s because she was kicking her feet against the sides of the box instead of saying her prayers like she was told."

He looked at Daniel Harris.

"You had no right to take my tools out of that house, Harris. You had no right to take my saw."

Judge Vance didn't wait for Margaret Ross to cross-examine.

He laid his gold fountain pen on the green desk blotter, took off his reading glasses, and let them dangle from the black silk cord around his neck.

"The jury will retire," the judge said.

It took four minutes.

The nineteen people didn't leave their seats. The foreman simply took the blue-backed indictment form from the bailiff, laid it on his thigh, and signed his name with a five-cent yellow pencil:

A TRUE BILL.

COUNTS I THROUGH VI.

BOND REMAINS AT TWO MILLION DOLLARS CASH.

As the bailiffs stepped behind Miller to hook the transport chains into his belly band, Daniel Harris walked out through the double doors into the fourth-floor corridor.

Claire Johnson was sitting on the wooden bench beside the elevator.

She wasn't on shift; she was wearing an old grey tweed coat over a blue cotton blouse, her hands in her pockets, watching the elevator indicator needle move from one to four.

"Claire," Daniel said.

"Did they sign it?"

"They signed it."

She looked down at her shoes—old brown leather loafers that had been resoled twice at the shop on Monroe Street.

"She called the center yesterday," Claire said.

Daniel stopped with his hand on his lapel. "Emily?"

"On the administrative line. Her aunt Clara brought her into the state police post in Peoria so she could see the radio room. The dispatcher transferred her down to my desk."

"What did she say?"

"She asked if the line had a tape," Claire said, her voice dropping until it was barely louder than the hum of the air-handling unit above the ceiling tiles. "She asked if the computer kept the sound of her voice from that night."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her no," Claire said. She stood up, her coat swinging open to reveal her old plastic county ID badge pinned to her pocket. "I told her that once the officers get to the door, the tape runs out. I told her that after the door opens, there isn't any recording left in the machine."

Daniel looked down the long, linoleum hall where the bailiffs were bringing Miller out through the secure fire exit.