Dread Champion by Brandilyn Collins

400 County Center in Redwood City sported numerous security guards and a metal detector.Chelsea and Kerra placed their purses in plastic bins, then stepped through the scanner. They rode up the escalator to the second floor and found a seat on one of the long benches that lined the expansive hall back-to-back. Attorneys with briefcases milled and chattered while the mix of jurors and witnesses sat silently, watching with curious gazes. Chelsea’s eyes locked momentarily with a young Japanese man standing near one of the pillars. She remembered him from the jury box the day before. He looked at her almost derisively, then turned his eyes away.
    E NERGY ZIPPED AND CRACKLED from Stan Breckshire’s head to his toes. He perched in his chair behind the prosecution table, one heel tapping as he waited for the judge to enter. To his left at the defense table sat T. C.,Mr. Dapper Dan himself, in a dark blue suit and silk tie. The man was so laid back, every movement like a languid river. T. C.’s helpmeet, Erica Salvador, a thirtysomething single woman who’d been his partner for the past seven years, reflected the man’s grace, her left elbow resting lightly on the table, two French-manicured fingernails demurely beneath her chin.
    The door leading to the hallway behind the courtroom opened. Down that hallway lay jury deliberation rooms and judges’ chambers. Sidney Portensic, the heavyset bailiff spilling over his wooden chair at the far left of the courtroom, lazily pushed himself back from his desk. “All rise,” he announced in his gravel voice as Judge Carol Chanson made her entrance. Stan stood and sat back down, the proper puppet.Whoa, the adrenaline rush! Before he knew it, his left heel was busy keeping time with his right. He picked up the notes to his opening argument, leafing through them with deliberate ease, hoping the calm movement would convince his metabolic rate to slow.No such luck. The jury pulled at his eyes, but he focused on the judge as she positioned her computer keyboard just so and generally settled herself like a hen over eggs. Behind him all whispering had stopped. Stan could imagine the reporters’ poised pens, the craning necks of the lookie-loos as they waited for the show to begin.
    Anticipation prickled. Nothing in this world, he thought, absolutely nothing, sawed his nerves like a murder trial. The judge, the attorneys, the jury, the defendant, the crowd. This courtroom. For the next couple of weeks this would be his cosmos, the mini-world of “being in trial.” The Dow could fold, gas prices shoot through the roof, countries bomb each other to smithereens, but for the next two weeks Stan Breckshire would hardly notice. Trials had the strangest way of collapsing the world into small, adjoining pieces, like parts in a Lego set. Pieces of evidence, pieces of sidebar arguments and jury responses and wins and losses. They built upon each other to form a tower that to the outside world may look like pick-up sticks but to him loomed like Babel.
    And this wasn’t just any trial. This was a prosecutor’s worst nightmare—a murder without a body. Or it could be a prosecutor’s best dream, if he won the case. The first thing on Stan’s plate was to prove corpus delicti— that “the alleged victim met death by a criminal agency.” Normally, this wasn’t so difficult. But without a body, proving corpus delicti could be difficult indeed. He had to convince the jury to a “moral certainty” that Shawna Welk had been murdered. And that the “criminal agency” was none other than her husband, Darren Welk.
    Stan itched to get started. Shawna Welk’s body may never have been found, but she was calling from her watery grave, pointing to the truth.With all the evidence, he had little doubt in his mind that he’d help the jury hear her cry for justice.
    â€œAll right.” Judge Chanson swept her gaze over the jury,