"Skyler? Do you hear me? Answer the phone!"
"Walt. Where's Holly?"
"Are you alone? No police?"
"No. No police. Where are you? Where's Holly? Walt!"
"What the hell is wrong with you? Why can't you do one thing I say!"
"What?"
"This is your fault. This is what comes of your disrespect! I told you, Skyler. I warned you for a solid year: you cross me, there will be consequences. What part of that didn't you understand?"
"You took my child!"
"Because you need to learn!"
"You bring her back!"
"Maybe now you'll listen, maybe now you'll use your damn head! You know, you never believed in me. You were never grateful for anything I did for this family! Oh no, Walt, Walt, you have to stop! You have to stop this! It's immoral, it's illegal! Someone might get hurt! You're always whining and complaining about how I make my money, just dragging me down, while I do everything. And now, now you tell my son what I do, after I have told you and told you to keep your damn mouth shut! You stupid bitch! How dare you?"
"I'm sorry."
"You... you have no right to discuss anything about what I do! Oh, what the hell do you know about it anyway? Nothing! I built this - me, me alone! Nobody else!"
"You're right. You're right."
"You mark my words, Skyler. Toe the line, or you will wind up just like Hank."
"Walt. Tell me what happened. Where is Hank? Please. We need to know."
"You're never gonna see Hank again. He crossed me! You think about that. Family or no. You let that sink in."
"Walt. I just want Holly back. Please, Walt. Just come home."
"I've still got things left to do."
Skyler was bent double in her chair, her hands over her head and her thumbs blocking her ears. Silence descended and she looked up, shaking.
"Defence counsel, do you have any more evidence to present?" said Judge Stephens.
"No, Your Honour," said Kim. She looked at the jury. "With that demonstration of total control and emotional abuse by Walter over Skyler, I rest my case. Skyler White is a victim, not a criminal."
"Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that concludes the presentation of evidence in this trial," said the judge. "We will now hear the closing arguments, starting with the Prosecution. Mr Martin."
Prosecutor Martin stood. "Your Honour, I'm glad I get to follow that. Members of the jury, I would like you to critically question the Defence's decision to prevent that piece of evidence at this time. The last piece of evidence, at the very end of the trial. They have put that there so that it will be forefront in your minds when you retire to consider your verdict. It is a particularly obvious emotional manipulation, but as jury members you cannot give in to your emotions. You have to follow logical and reasonable arguments made by myself and my learned colleague as to whether Mrs White is or is not guilty. Your job is not to let any emotions or beliefs or even values cloud your judgement. Your job is to look at cold hard facts. It is a fact that that was a real phone call that you just heard, recorded by Albuquerque Police on the evening Walter White ran away. It is a fact that that was his voice on the other end of the line and that he did say those things at that time to his wife. That does not prove that he said similar things to her prior to that. The fact that the Defence has chosen to present this evidence last, after the defendant herself has already given her evidence and therefore she cannot now be questioned on it, is something that you should look at critically. You should ponder why they chose to present that so late in the trial that nobody now has a chance to ask any questions about it. Had I been given the chance to ask Mrs White questions about that phone call, I would've asked her whether her husband spoke to her that way often, sometimes, infrequently, or whether it was just that one time. And I would've asked her why a man with verifiable intelligence such as his would have in his wildest dreams supposed that she would be alone just a couple of hours after her son had called the police, her brother-in-law had gone missing and her daughter had been abducted. And then I would've asked myself whether I thought he did really think she was alone with no police, or whether he didn't. Whether he made that phone call and said those things to her precisely because he knew the police were listening."
"Objection!" Kim jumped to her feet. "Conjecture!"
Judge Stephens dropped her head to the side and looked at her. "You're not meant to object during the closing statements, Ms Wexler."
Prosecutor Martin smirked.
"It is yet to be established whether or not you are making a closing statement, though, Mr Martin," the judge continued. "You have been speaking for several minutes and I am yet to hear any summary of your evidence."
Martin's smirk fell. "I'm commenting on the Defence's evidence, Your Honour."
"Kindly stop and make your summary, please."
"Very well." Prosecutor Martin glanced down at his notes. The door at the back of the courtroom clicked open as Marie entered the public gallery.
"Skyler White is an intelligent and calculating woman. Her intelligence is amply demonstrated by her having graduated magna cumme laude from an accounting degree, a discipline which requires not only intelligence but the ability to logically interpret numbers which look very much the same, and the patience to find the differences between them. It requires a cool and calm head. Her training was also, of course, what equipped her to be able to launder money through the account books of a busy car wash business, and we heard from Agent Delanos early on in the trial that the DEA forensic investigation team found the accounts of Mrs White's car wash to be particularly difficult to crack. Agent Delanos said that his team would not even have been able to tell that money laundering had taken place in that business were it not for the external evidence. The defendant had hidden the illegal funds so well that the accounts on their own told them nothing. If it weren't for the external evidence and her own admissions, they wouldn't have even noticed that money had been laundered at A1A Car Wash.
"Speaking of her own admissions, it is very much worth mentioning that Mrs White did confess to money laundering. The Defence has never tried to claim that she didn't do it, only that she did it under duress. But the way in which she set up that business does not speak of a woman under duress. She, without assistance from her husband, engaged a conman to make the former owner of the business think that the Environmental Protection Agency were going to close him down for leaching chemicals into the environment. She found the business, decided she wanted to buy it, or at least that she wanted her husband to buy it, but the owner wouldn't sell it to her, so she hired a conman whom she worked with, reciting environmental protection laws verbatim into his ear throughout his meeting with former carwash owner Bogdan Wolynetz. Mrs White told the conman, Patrick Kuby, what to say, and the con worked. Mr Wolynetz believed that the EPA were gonna close his car wash down, and so he sold it to her. Mr Wolynetz testified that throughout the various offers and negotiations that went on in the sale of the business, he dealt only with the defendant and not with her husband. He said the only time he saw her husband was after everything had already been done and he came to collect the keys. Everything else was done by the defendant: the detailed analysis of the business's activities, the calculation of the offer based on what she determined all on her own that the business must be making – on which, Mr Wolynetz said, she was absolutely correct. She must have watched that business for days to figure out the customer numbers, and put many more hours into studying comparable business values and real estate values - an enormous amount of effort of her own went into obtaining that business. Not to mention the illegal conning of a man. The defendant's husband could have demanded she run a car wash for him all he liked, but if she didn't want to do it, she wouldn't have been able to. She wouldn't have been able to obtain the business in the first place, and she wouldn't have been able to run it, because to launder the money took hours of planned and calculated manipulation of the accounts, and he wouldn't have known if she wasn't doing that. If she didn't want to work for him, if she didn't want to hide the drug money in that business, she could have just done a bad job. Walter White was a chemist - he didn't know how accounts worked! He would've noticed when the IRS or the police came knocking on his door, but not before. Mrs White is a thorough and calculating person, and no-one other than her can have done that work to calculate how much to offer Mr Wolynetz, to con Mr Wolynetz, and to launder millions of dollars through that business's accounts without detection. And she has admitted to it.
"She may have been leaned upon by her husband to do this. But the fact that she did it so well clearly shows that she wanted to.
"One surprising piece of evidence we were presented with was from agent of the IRS. His team had discovered that A1A Car Wash was not the only business whose accounts Mrs White had been doctoring. Beneke Fabricators had more than a million dollars of undocumented revenue, and as a result owed the federal government more than $600,000 in unpaid taxes. Ted Beneke has already been prosecuted for that. He took the fall for it. Mr Beneke claimed that Skyler White's role in it was very minor, just like her husband seemed to be claiming in that phone call we heard just before. The facts say otherwise. As the Accounts Manager of Beneke Fabricators, Skyler White checked and signed off on all of those accounts. And when the IRS questioned Mr Beneke on it, she showed up and pretended to be an unintelligent cashier with no accounting qualifications, giving a performance worthy of an Emmy! Now she was the con artist. And we can say for sure that her husband wasn't at all involved in that one, as it has recently been suggested that the defendant was conducting an illicit affair with Mr Beneke."
"Objection!" said Kim. "That was not covered in the trial and it is nothing more than the attention-grabbing ramblings of a disgruntled ex-employee who-"
"Yes, yes, Ms Wexler," said the judge. "Objection sustained, it wasn't covered in the trial, no evidence has been presented on that: jury members please disregard."
Prosecutor Martin smiled. "My point, Your Honour, is that this was another occasion when Mrs White acted without her husband to very ably accomplish a con and a felony."