Morix: Web of Mistrust

Turnabout Masquerade, Part 12

November 22

Courtroom No. 6

11:00 AM

Deirdre Brigit

As soon as I made the accusation, everything about Ms. Lesa's demeanor changed. Her posture straightened out, and she began to carry herself with a completely different aura. I frowned in her direction and waited for her to be ready to speak once again. 

When she finally did talk, she shook her head. "You sure do seem confident in your deductions," Ms. Lesa remarked simply. I waited for a moment, expecting her to say something more, but she was completely silent. 

"I suppose I am," I told her with a light shrug. "I know that there's something going on here, and I intend to get to the truth of the matter no matter what happens. I hope that you understand my intentions as well as I do."

Ms. Lesa hummed to herself. "I suppose I do," she repeated. "If you really think that I'm involved with something like that, then prove it. You say that I wasn't in the area of the bush across from the street, but you have to be able to back that up, you know. You can't simply say something of that nature without providing any evidence to prove that I did so much to hide my identity."

"Allow me to go over my explanation of what I believe happened at the time of the crime," I began, and the entire gallery of the courtroom looked to me in curiosity. They hadn't broken into confused chatter at my accusation towards Ms. Lesa, so I could tell that their attention was too centered on what I was trying to accomplish. I decided to take that as an advantage and use it to push my progress forward once again. If they were going to pay attention, I was going to give them something to focus on. 

"Go ahead," Judge Diaphan said. Her expression was unreadable, but I could see a bit of hidden tension despite her silence after the two simple words. She wasn't sure about how to feel about all of this in the slightest, and I couldn't exactly blame her for that. 

I glanced across the courtroom after I was done watching her, and I noticed that there was some new anger beneath the surface of Prosecutor Burke's expression. There was something wrong, but I didn't know quite what it could have been. Chief Prosecutor Bespoke looked to be just as upset, but he seemed more concerned than outwardly angry. Anton, on the other hand, was just confused about everything that was happening. He looked back and forth between the two in confusion and panic, clearly trying to put the pieces together but lacking a critical part of the puzzle. 

"The witness here claimed that she was across the street at the time of the crime. She declared rather confidently that she witnessed the crime from near the bushes that were across the road from the building where the attack took place, but this could not have been true. She didn't show up on the security footage for the nearby apartment building, and she also didn't have any signs of having been in the bushes at all. The bush was spotless, clearly not having been tampered with at all. This doesn't fit in with her claims of an injured ankle, and she likely received such an injury while she was there... At the very least, that was what she led us to believe, but if you ask me, it was a cover story for something that she couldn't tell us about related to the crime," I began to explain. 

"If she didn't hurt her ankle there, then... It would make sense if she hurt it elsewhere, and I'm starting to think that I figured out what you're trying to say," Victoria murmured. She still seemed to be reeling from the revelation of the witness being involved with the crime far more than we expected, and I admittedly felt bad for freaking her out to such a degree. 

I nodded. "She hid what happened to her ankle as a way of keeping us from asking questions. If you want my opinion, we know where the blood came from at the crime scene now. She was attacked there because Ms. Lesa is, in all honesty, Eileen Liyle, the victim of this case. She knew about the woman with red hair because that's who she is. She knew about the man with white hair because that's who attacked her, but she doesn't know specifically who that could have been," I went on.