New Tricks

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

I am raising a literary glass in a toast to a long and wonderful life for Oliver Baron Rosenfelt.

“ANDY CARPENTER, Lawyer to the Dogs.”

That was the USA Today headline on a piece that ran about me a couple of months ago. It was a favorable story overall, but the headline was obviously designed to make a humorous comparison between me and those celebrity attorneys who are often referred to as “lawyers to the stars.”

While you would naturally think it would have exposed me to ridicule from my colleagues in the legal profession and my friends, it really hasn’t. This is because I don’t hang out with colleagues in the legal profession, and my friends already have plenty of other reasons to ridicule me.

Actually, referring to me this way makes perfect sense. Last year I went to court to defend a golden retriever who had been scheduled to die at the hands of the animal control system here in Paterson, New Jersey. I saved his life, and the media ate it up with a spoon. Then I learned that the dog was a witness to a murder five years prior, and I successfully defended his owner, the man who had been wrongly convicted and imprisoned for that murder.

Three months ago I cemented my reputation as a dog lunatic by representing all the dogs in the Passaic County Animal Shelter in a class action suit. I correctly claimed that my clients were being treated inhumanely, a legally difficult posture since the opposition took the position that a key part of “humane” is “human,” and my clients fell a little short in that area.

With the media covering it as if it were the trial of the century, we won, and living conditions in the shelters have been improved dramatically. I’m in a good position to confirm this, because my former client Willie Miller and I run a dog-rescue operation called the Tara Foundation, named after my own golden retriever. We are in the shelters frequently to rescue dogs to place in homes, and if we see any slippage back to the old policies, we’re not exactly shy about pointing it out.

Since that stirring court victory, I’ve been on a three-month vacation from work. I find that my vacations are getting longer and longer, almost to the point that vacationing is my status quo, from which I take infrequent “work breaks.” Two things enable me to do this: my mostly inherited wealth, and my laziness.

Unfortunately, my extended siesta is about to come to an unwelcome conclusion. I’ve been summoned to the courthouse by Judge Henry Henderson, nicknamed “Hatchet” by lawyers who have practiced in his court. It’s not exactly a term of endearment.

Hatchet’s not inviting me to make a social call, and it’s unlikely we’ll be sipping tea. He doesn’t like me and finds me rather annoying, which doesn’t make him particularly unique. The problem is that he’s in a position to do something about it.

Hatchet has been assigned to a murder case that has dominated the local media. Walter Timmerman, a man who could accurately be referred to as a semi-titan in the pharmaceutical industry, was murdered three weeks ago. It was not your everyday case of “semi-titan-murdering”; he wasn’t killed on the golf course at the country club, or by an intruder breaking into his mansion. Timmerman was killed at night in the most run-down area of downtown Paterson, a neighborhood filled with hookers and drug dealers, not caddies or butlers.

Within twenty-four hours, police arrested a twenty-two-year-old Hispanic man for the crime. He was in possession of Timmerman’s wallet the day after the murder. The police are operating on the safe assumption that Timmerman did not give the wallet to this young man for safekeeping, knowing he was soon to be murdered.

This is where I am unfortunately going to enter the picture. The accused cannot afford an attorney, so the court will appoint one for him. I have not handled pro bono work in years, but I’m on the list, and Hatchet is obviously going to stick me with this case.

I arrive at the courthouse at eight thirty, which is when Hatchet has instructed me to be in his chambers. The arraignment is at nine, and since I haven’t even met my client-to-be, I’ll have to ask for a postponement. I’ll try to get it postponed for fifty years, but I’ll probably have to settle for a few days.

I’m surprised when I arrive to see Billy “Bulldog” Cameron, the attorney who runs the Public Defender’s Office in Passaic County. I’ve never had a conversation of more than three sentences with Billy in which he hasn’t mentioned that he’s overworked and underfunded. Since both those things are true, and since I’m personally underworked and overfunded, I usually nod sympathetically.

This time I don’t have time to nod, because I’m in danger of being late for my meeting with Hatchet. Lawyers who arrive late to Hatchet’s chambers are often never heard of or seen again, except for occasional body parts that wash up on shore. I also don’t get to ask Billy what he’s doing here. If I’m going to get stuck with this client, then he’s off the hook, because I’m on it.

I hate being on hooks.

“YOU’RE LATE,” says Hatchet, which is technically true by thirty-five seconds.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor. There was an accident on Market Street, and-”

He interrupts. “You are under the impression that I want to hear a story about your morning drive?”

“Probably not.”

“For the purpose of this meeting, I will do the talking, and you will do the listening, with very few exceptions.”

I start to say Yes, sir, but don’t, because I don’t know if that is one of the allowable exceptions. Instead I just listen.

“I have an assignment for you, one that you are uniquely qualified to handle.”

I nod, because if I cringe it will piss him off.

“Are you at all familiar with the case before me, the Timmerman murder?”

“Only what I’ve read in the paper and seen on television.” I wish I had more of a connection to the case, like if I were a cousin of the victim, or if I were one of the suspects in the case. It would disqualify me from being involved. Unfortunately, I checked my family tree, and there’s not a Timmerman to be found.

“It would seem to be a straightforward murder case, if such a thing existed,” he says and then chuckles, so I assume that what he said passes in Hatchet-land for a joke. “But the victim was a prominent man of great wealth.”

I nod again. It’s sort of nice being in a conversation in which I have no responsibilities.

“I’m told that you haven’t taken on any pro bono work in over two years.”

Another nod from me.

“I assume you’re ready and willing to fulfill your civic responsibility now?” he asks. “You may speak.”

I have to clear my throat from lack of use before responding. “Actually, Your Honor, my schedule is such that a murder case wouldn’t really-”

He interrupts again. “Who said anything about you participating in a murder case?”

“Well, I thought-”

“A lawyer thinking. Now, that’s a novel concept. You are not being assigned to represent the accused. The Public Defender’s Office is handling that.”

Relief and confusion are fighting for a dominant position in my mind, and I’m actually surprised that confusion is winning. “Then why am I here?”

“I’ve been asked to handle a related matter that is technically before Judge Parker in the probate court. He has taken ill, and I said I would do it because of my unfortunate familiarity with you. Are you aware that the victim was very much involved with show dogs?”

“No,” I say. While I rescue dogs, I have little or no knowledge of dog shows or breeders.

“Well, he was, and he had a seven-month-old, apparently a descendant of a champion, that his widow and son are fighting over. The animal was not included in the will.”

This may not be so bad. “So because of my experience with dogs, you want me to help adjudicate it?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Glad to help, Your Honor. Civic responsibility is my middle name.”

“I’ll remember to include it on the Christmas card. I assume you have a satisfactory place to keep your client?”

“My client?”

He nods. “The dog. You will retain possession of him until the issue is resolved.”

“I’m representing a dog in a custody fight? Is that what you’re asking me to do?”

“I wouldn’t categorize it as ‘asking,’ ” he says. “I already have a dog, Your Honor.”

“And now you have two.”

TARA KNOWS SOMETHING IS GOING ON.

I don’t know how she knows, but I can see it in her face when I get home. She stares at me with that all-knowing golden retriever stare, and even when she’s eating her dinner, she occasionally looks up at me to let me know that she’s on to me.

I take her for a long walk through Eastside Park, which is about six blocks from where I live on 42nd Street in Paterson. Except for a six-year span while I was married, it is where I’ve lived all my life, and no place could feel more like home. No one that I grew up with lives here anymore, but I keep expecting to see them reappear as I walk, as if I were in a Twilight Zone episode.

It’s home to Tara as well, and even though the sights and smells must be completely familiar to her, she relishes them as if experiencing them for the first time. It is one of the many millions of things I love about her.

It’s been really hot out lately, but the evenings have been cool, and tonight especially so. All in all it’s a perfect couple of hours, but the ringing phone when I get home is a reminder that perfection is fleeting, and not everything is as it should be. I can see by the caller ID that it’s Laurie Collins calling from her home in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin that is nowhere near New Jersey.

“Hello, Andy.”

Every time I hear Laurie’s voice, every single time, I am struck by my reaction to it. It is soothing, and welcoming, and it makes me think of home. But I’m already home, and Laurie isn’t here.

We talk for a while, and I tell her about my day, and my new client. I glance over at Tara to see if she’s listening, but she seems to be asleep. Laurie tells me about her day as well; she’s the police chief of Findlay, Wisconsin, and has been since she moved back there, a year and a half ago.

We broke up when she first moved, and those first four months were maybe the worst of my life. Then I went up to Findlay to handle a case, and we reconnected. Now we have a long-distance, committed relationship, which is feeling more and more like an oxymoron. Telling her about my day isn’t really cutting it. I want her to be an actual part of my days.

“So when are you getting the dog?” she asks.

“Tomorrow.”

“Have you mentioned it to Tara?”

“No. I think she’ll be okay with it, but it’ll cost me a truckload of biscuits.”

“You seem a little quiet, Andy. Is something wrong?” she asks.

Of course something’s wrong. It’s wrong that you’re in Wisconsin and I’m here. It’s wrong that we only talk on the phone, and we sleep in beds a thousand miles away. It’s wrong that we only see each other on vacations, and that we can’t be making love right now. These are the things I would say if I weren’t a sniveling chickenshit, but since I am, all I say is, “No, I’m fine. Really.”

Laurie is coming here on a week’s vacation starting in a few days, and we talk about how nice it will be to see each other. Talking about it is enough to cheer me up, and it puts me in a more upbeat mood.

I hang up and turn to my sleeping friend. “Tara, my girl, there’s something we need to talk about.”

Tara takes the news pretty well, though the fact that she keeps falling asleep during my little speech means she may not be fully focused. She’s sleeping a lot more than she used to, a sure sign of advancing age. It doesn’t worry me, though, because Tara is going to live forever. Or even longer.

I settle down to read about my new client in a three-page report prepared by the probate court. The dog is a seven-month old Bernese mountain dog named Bertrand II, which strikes me as a pretty ridiculous name for a puppy, or a dog of any age, for that matter.

The dog is currently living at the home of Diana Timmerman, the widow of the murder victim. I have been told to arrive promptly at her house in Alpine, half a mile west of the Palisades Interstate Parkway, at ten AM. I’m a punctual person, and pretty much the only times I’m ever late are when someone instructs me to arrive promptly. I get to the Timmerman house at ten forty-five.

Actually, it’s less a house than a compound, or maybe a fortress. There are two guards on duty at the gate, one inside the gatehouse and one patrolling outside. The one outside is actually wearing a gun in a holster. He’s at least six five, 260 pounds, and would probably only need the gun if the intruder happened to be a rhinoceros.

“Name?” the guard inside the gate asks me.

“Carpenter.” I’m a man of as few words as he is.

He picks up a clipboard and looks at it for a few moments, then puts it down and says, “Drive up and park to the left of the house. Someone will be out to get you.”

I go along a driveway that slopes upward until I come to the house, an amazingly impressive structure that looks straight out of Gone with the Wind. I consider myself independently wealthy, having inherited over twenty million dollars from my father a few years back. If I were willing to part with all of it, I could probably afford the Timmermans’ garage.

Because civil disobedience is my thing, I park to the right of the house, not the left. I get out of the car and wait, and after about five minutes the front door opens and a young man, probably in his early twenties, comes out. He starts to walk toward his car, then sees me and heads over.

“You’re here for Waggy?” he asks, and when he sees that I look confused, he adds, “The Bernese.”

“Yes,” I say.

“I’m Steven Timmerman,” he says, which means he is Diana Timmerman’s stepson, and one of the two people fighting for custody of the aforementioned “Waggy.” He offers his hand, and I shake it.

“Andy Carpenter.”

He nods. “Please take good care of him, Mr. Carpenter.” He starts to walk back toward his car, but stops and turns. “He loves to chew on things, especially the rawhide bones. And he goes crazy over tennis balls.” He grins slightly at the recollection, then turns and goes to the car.

As soon as he pulls away, the door opens again and a woman comes out of the house. She is dressed fashionably; my arrival definitely didn’t interrupt her in the process of cleaning out the attic or scrubbing the toilet.

“Mr. Carpenter?” she asks.

“Andy. You must be Ms. Timmerman?”

She smiles, apparently with some embarrassment. “No, I’m Martha. Martha Wyndham. I’m Mrs. Timmerman’s executive assistant.”

“Nice to meet you. What do you executively assist her at?”

Another smile. “Being Mrs. Timmerman. You’re here for Waggy?”

“Waggy? Is that what everybody calls him?”

She shakes her head. “Just Steven and me. But it would be best if you didn’t mention that to Ms. Timmerman. Bernese mountain dogs were originally bred to pull wagons. That seemed so funny in this case that Steven and I call him Waggy. You love dogs, I understand?”

“Guilty as charged. I’m a certified dog lunatic.”

“As am I. But you might want to let him stay here while you make your determination. It could be upsetting for him to be thrust into a strange environment.”

“He’ll be fine; my house is dog-friendly. Where is he?” I ask.

“In his room. But Mrs. Timmerman would like to talk to you first.”

That’s not completely appropriate; she is the other one of the litigants pressing for ownership of Waggy, and I really shouldn’t be speaking to her without the opposing party present. On the other hand, appropriateness was never my forte, and I did say hello to Steven, so what the hell.

I let Martha lead me into what they probably refer to as the library, since the walls are covered with packed bookshelves. Most of them are classics, and few look like they have been read in a very long time. This may be a library, but it’s not a reading room.

Five minutes go by, during which Martha and I engage in small talk, mostly about baseball. She’s relatively likable, but I’m starting to get annoyed. “Where is she?” I finally ask.

“I’m sure she’ll be down in a moment.”

“Give her my regards, because I’m not waiting any longer. I’ll take Waggy and be on my way.”

“Mr. Carpenter.”

I look up and see Diana Timmerman, tall and elegant and completely unconcerned that she kept me waiting.

“Good guess.” I turn and ask Martha to bring me Waggy, and Diana nods that it is okay to do so.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” Diana lies. “I’m Diana Timmerman.”

At that moment the phone rings, and Diana says to Martha, “I am available for no one today.” Martha goes off to tell the caller just that, and then to get Waggy.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I say. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you; it’s been a difficult time. Walter was a wonderful man. And with the authorities searching the house three times, going through his things as if he were the criminal, it’s been hard to get back to anything approaching a normal life.”

I nod understandingly, but all I really want to do is get out of here. “Murder investigations can be intrusive things.”

“Yes. Now, I did want to talk to you about Bertrand.”

“I’m sorry, but that would be improper. All conversations about the subject can only take place with both litigants present.”

She smiles without humor. “Well, then it’s unfortunate you didn’t get here fifteen minutes earlier. The other ‘litigant’ was just here. I’m surprised you didn’t hear him yelling at me from your car.”

She’s obviously talking about her stepson Steven, and I sense she wants to engage me in a conversation about him. But I’m getting more than a little tired of this; I feel like I’m trapped in an episode of Dallas. “It’s been great chatting with you, but it’s time for me and my client to leave.”

Diana looks toward the door, where Martha has silently reappeared with one of the cutest dogs I’ve ever seen. It’s a Bernese mountain dog puppy, a smile on his face and his tail wagging so hard that it shakes his entire body along with it. There was clearly more than one reason to name him Waggy.

I walk over and kneel on the floor next to him and start to pet him. He seems about to burst with excitement; his energy level is overwhelming. Finally I get up and take his leash. “Let’s go, buddy. But you might want to calm down a little before you meet Tara.”

“Will you be needing his crate?” Martha asks.

“Why would I need a crate?”

“He lives in his crate,” she says.

“Not anymore,” I say. “Not anymore.”

Martha walks me to the door and outside to my car. “Does Steven live here?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No, he doesn’t.”

Martha says good-bye, petting Waggy before she gets into her car. She starts the engine and is beginning to pull out when I see Waggy’s ears perk up slightly. Somehow he senses what is coming before I do, but I don’t have long to wait.

The explosion is deafening, shocking, and somehow disorienting, and at first I can’t tell where it is coming from. But then the windows explode from inside the house, and the flames follow. Martha stops her car, and I can see her mouth open in a scream. Waggy barks, but both of their sounds are overwhelmed by the noise of the house coming apart.

There seems to be a second explosion, not nearly as loud, and then I see security guards come running, but it doesn’t matter how big they are or how many guns they’re carrying. If their job is to protect Diana Timmerman, they are now officially unemployed.

CRIME SCENES are really boring places to be once the crime is over.

The police on the scene want to question everyone who has the misfortune to have been there, but first they want to spend hours walking around looking thoughtful and consulting in hushed tones with one another. The rescue efforts ended a while ago, and Diana Timmerman’s body has been found and carted off by the coroner, but the place is still crawling with police, firefighters, and investigators.

I’m told to wait by my car for a detective to talk to me. It’s better than waiting in the house, since at this point there pretty much isn’t a house. Martha is waiting her turn in the back of a police car, though after maybe twenty minutes she gets out and stands next to it. If she thinks her visibility will speed things up, she hasn’t been at many crime scenes.

Waggy is hanging out with me, and not that happy about it. He still has that irrepressible smile, but he wants to get out and explore the area and hopefully get petted by the cops. I’m impatient as well, but I have considerably less desire to be petted.

The state police are in control of the operation, probably because of the nature of the incident. If it can be determined that the bomb is the work of a terrorist, then I’m sure the FBI will be called in. I’m not sure what distinguishes a terrorist from a regular person who blows up houses, but it’s probably a matter of intent and the message they are sending.

It hasn’t quite hit me yet that if I had been willing to chat with the late Ms. Timmerman a few more minutes, then Waggy, Martha, and myself would be leaving this area in jars. I can see and hear Martha periodically breaking into sobs, but I’m feeling pretty stoic. I’m sure later I’ll start twitching and moaning, but right now it just feels surreal.

Based on his tail movements, Waggy has already moved on.

It’s hot out, and I’m getting very cranky by the time Detective D. Musgrave of the state police finally comes over to question me. I know his first initial because D. MUSGRAVE is written on his shirt; I assume there are other Musgraves in the state police from whom he’s trying to distinguish himself.

“This your dog?” D asks, backing up in a defensive posture as Waggy tries to jump on his leg.

“Actually, he’s a ward of the court,” I say.

“What does that mean?”

I proceed to explain to D how Waggy came to be my client, but he doesn’t seem that interested, jotting only a small note on his notepad.

“So you were in the house before the explosion?” he asks.

“Yes.”

This causes a prolonged note-writing flurry; there seems to be no discernible relationship between the length of what I say and the time it takes him to transcribe his version of it.

D questions me about my visit to the house. In real life, the event took about ten minutes; under his excruciatingly slow questioning, it takes about an hour and a half. My mind wanders during his note taking, but most of the time I’m hoping that Waggy will piss on his shoe.

He doesn’t.

It’s starting to hit me just how close I came to dying, and I’m feeling a need to get home. I make it clear to Musgrave that he’s gotten everything from me that he’s going to get, and he gives me permission to leave. I want to say something to Martha before taking off, but she’s still being questioned, so I take Waggy and head for home.

En route, I call Kevin Randall, my associate in my two-lawyer firm. Kevin supplements his income by running the Law-dromat, an establishment at which he dispenses free legal advice to customers who come in to wash their clothes. It is there that I reach him.

“Hello, and thank you for calling the Law-dromat,” he says when he answers the phone.

“Hey, Kev, it’s Andy. How ya doin’?”

“You mean other than the obvious?” he asks. Most people regard how are you? or how ya doin’? as just meaningless chitchat. Not Kevin; those are questions that he takes quite seriously.

“Which obvious might that be?” I ask.

“Can’t you hear how nasal I sound?”

He sounds the same as always. “I thought it was my phone,” I say. “I have a very nasal-sounding phone.”

“I have unresponsive congestion,” he says.

“Does that mean you talk to your congestion, but it doesn’t answer?” Kevin is a total hypochondriac, which gives me something to torture him about.

His annoyance is obvious. “No, it’s one that doesn’t respond to traditional medicinal regimens.”

“I hate when that happens,” I say. “You want to come meet our new client?”

“We have a client?’ he asks, his surprise evident and totally reasonable, since we haven’t taken one on in a while. “It’s not another golden retriever, is it?”

“Of course not,” I say. “It’s a Bernese mountain dog.”

“Andy…”

“This one’s not my fault. I swear… Hatchet assigned me to the case. We’re actually getting paid for it.”

“Paid for what?”

“It’s sort of a custody case, although the number of people claiming him has recently been reduced by one. And there may be some complicating circumstances.”

“Like what?”

“Did you hear about the explosion at the Timmerman house?” I ask.

“Of course. It’s all over the news.”

“Well, our client lived there, and he and I were in the house before it blew up. Had we stayed there another two minutes, we wouldn’t be responding to traditional medicinal regimens.”

KEVIN IS WAITING FOR ME on my front porch when I get home.

I asked him to come over so I could pick his brains about the situation regarding the now one-sided custody fight, and because I didn’t want to leave Waggy and Tara alone without first knowing that they get along. He’s beaten me home because I hit traffic on Route 4 in Paramus.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say, as I take Waggy out of the car. “I ran into some unresponsive automotive congestion.”

“You never let things go, do you?” he asks.

I smile. “It’s one of my most appealing traits.”

He points to Waggy. “This, I assume, is our client?”

“In the hairy flesh,” I say.

I ask Kevin to take Waggy around to the backyard, and I enter the house through the front door. Tara is there to meet me as always, and I take out one of the biscuits I keep hanging in a bag by the door. We play a little game whereby she won’t take the biscuit from my hand, but instead feigns disinterest until I put it on the floor. Then she slowly eats it while I watch.

Once she finishes, I say, “Tara, I’ve got someone I want you to meet. And I want you to keep an open mind about it.”

I take Tara out back to the yard, and Waggy goes berserk when he sees her. He starts jumping on Tara’s back and head, and poor Tara just stands there and takes it, as if she has no idea what to make of this lunatic. I do detect a slight wag of Tara’s tail, which I take as a positive sign.

The meeting having gone reasonably well, we all go back into the house, and I’m about to bring Kevin up to date on all that has gone on when Laurie calls. I put her on the speakerphone, and am therefore able to update them both simultaneously.

As I tell the story, I can feel the delayed-reaction anger building inside me at the person who planted the bomb that killed Diana Timmerman and almost killed Martha, Waggy, and myself.

“Are there any suspects?” Laurie asks.

“I have no idea. I’ll call Pete Stanton and ask him to see what he can find out.” Pete is a lieutenant with Paterson PD, and pretty much my only friend in law enforcement. Fortunately, he knows everyone there is to know, and often serves as a reluctant source of information for me.

“But someone has already been arrested for the original murder?” Laurie asks.

“Right. And from what I understand, it’s a kid from the inner city. He had Timmerman’s wallet when they picked him up, so they think the motive was robbery. Since he’s not someone who’s likely to be blowing up mansions in Alpine, especially from prison, I would say his defense just got a bit easier.”

In my view, which is shared by Kevin and Laurie, there are no such things as coincidences in murder cases. Walter Timmerman and his wife being murdered separately, less than four weeks apart, certainly wouldn’t cause us to change that view. The two murders absolutely must be connected, and since the accused is in jail and unable to have blown up the house, he’s most likely on his way to being off the hook.

“This is all fascinating,” Kevin says. “But why do we care? The dog goes to the son, since he’s the only person alive with a claim to it. And then we’re out of it.”

“Diana Timmerman was killed today by a bomb that could have killed me and Waggy. I would sort of like to have someone to blame for that.”

“I understand that,” Kevin says. “But we have no role to play here. The police will find the bad guys, the son will get Waggy, and who knows, maybe someday we’ll find a client without a tail.”

“I think Kevin’s right about this one, Andy,” Laurie says. “Starting your own investigation would be a waste of time and money.”

I’m not sure what I want to do about this. “I know, but…”

She presses it. “You’d be on the outside looking in. For all you know, the police have a suspect already.”

As much as I hate to admit it, she’s right, and so is Kevin. “Okay. I’ll let it go. I’ll represent Waggy, and then I’m out of it.”

“Are you telling the truth, or just telling us what we want to hear?” Laurie asks.

“I have no idea.”

BILLY “BULLDOG” CAMERON arrived at my office at nine o’clock, which means he was alone for an hour. When I show up at ten, he is sitting in a chair in the hallway, just outside my locked door, eating a peach he bought from the fruit stand on the street level. My office is on Van Houten Street in downtown Paterson, which is unlikely to be confused with prime real estate.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, and then follow that with, “Did we have an appointment?”

He chooses not to answer either question, but instead asks one of his own. “It’s hot as hell in here. You can’t afford better than this dump?”

“It keeps me in touch with my roots,” I say as I let him into the office.

He looks around at the receptionist area. “You might want to get yourself some new roots. This place makes my office look like the Museum of Modern Art.”

I turn on the wall-unit air conditioners and then ask, “You know how to make coffee?” It’s a process I’ve never quite mastered.

“Of course,” he says, and walks toward the coffeemaker. “What time does your assistant come in?”

“Probably October,” I say. He’s talking about Edna, who’s been with me since I started the practice, and who makes me look like a workaholic.

We take the coffee and go back to my office. I remove a pile of papers and soda cans from the sofa, and he sits down, a little warily. “So I hear you were at the Timmerman house yesterday.”

I nod. “Just before it went ‘boom.’ ”

“Must have scared the shit out of you.”

I shake my head. “I laugh in the face of danger.”

“So I’ve heard. Will you give me a statement describing what happened?”

“What for?”

“So I can use it to help get my client out of jail,” he says.

“Why would he need me for an alibi?” I ask. “Wasn’t he in jail at the time?”

He nods. “Yes. Your testimony is just icing on the cake for my time line. I’ve got other things to point to that indicate my client was in the wrong place at the wrong time when Timmerman took the bullet.”

“Or when he took the wrong wallet from the wrong body.”

Billy won’t confirm that, of course, but he does ask an interesting question. “I understand you can place the son, Steven, in the house just before the explosion?”

“I can. Why?”

“Well, you didn’t hear it from me, but I believe he’s about to become the focus of the investigation.”

“They’re looking at him for killing his father and his mother?”

“Stepmother, and only for two years at that. And the word is they hated each other. With her dead, he stands to inherit almost four hundred million dollars.”

“And with her alive?”

He shakes his head. “Zippo.”

“Four hundred million is substantially more than zippo,” I point out.

“You got that right. In fact, with that kind of money, you could fix this place up really nice.”

Diana Timmerman mentioned to me just before the explosion that her stepson had been yelling at her a few minutes before, and she sarcastically commented that she was surprised I couldn’t hear it from my car. I repeated this to the police, but I don’t see any reason to mention it to Billy.

Edna still hasn’t quite made it in yet, so I type out and sign a one-page statement for Billy. He thanks me and leaves, but not before mentioning how understaffed and underfunded his office is. I nod.

I now have something of a dilemma. I am representing a dog in a custody fight between two people. One of those people is dead, and the other might well be a suspect in her murder, a murder in which the dog would have died, too, had I not shown up at that time.

It doesn’t leave me with too many good choices for Waggy.

PETE STANTON AND VINCE SANDERS are waiting for me when I get to Charlie’s.

They are at our regular table along the back wall of the most fabulous sports bar in America. When I say that they are “waiting” for me, I mean that in a limited sense. They are already eating burgers and fries, watching baseball, drinking beer after beer, and leering at the single women who always seem to be in attendance. But they would rather hang themselves than ask for the check before my arrival; that is an honor left to me.

It has been that way since I inherited my fortune. Pete earns a decent but underwhelming salary as a police lieutenant, and though Vince does somewhat better as the editor of the local newspaper, they share a common cheapness and simultaneous disregard for my money.

“Where the hell have you been?” is Vince’s warm greeting for me when I walk over to the table. Vince’s gruffness is skin-deep; it extends from the skin on the front of his body to the skin on the back.

“Why? You were afraid you would have to pay the check?”

Vince smiles. “I do not fear the impossible.”

“I was almost killed in an explosion yesterday,” I say.

“Are your credit cards okay?”

I proceed to tell them my story, though they’re already familiar with what happened at, and to, the Timmerman house. They didn’t have any idea that I was there.

“You were there to pick up a dog?” Pete asks.

“Not just any dog. He is my client.”

“Don’t you think you’re taking this dog thing a bit far? Maybe you should try some human companionship?”

I stare for a few moments at Pete, then Vince. “Maybe someday I’ll try that.”

I ask Pete if he can use his contacts to find out the status of the investigation, and after about ten minutes of grumbling he agrees.

Then I turn to Vince. “You knew Timmerman, didn’t you?” Vince has mentioned him to me in the past, but even if he hadn’t, the overwhelming likelihood is that he did know him, since he knows virtually everyone. He has a separate closet in his office just for his Rolodexes.

He nods. “One of the worst low-life scumbags who ever lived. May he rest in peace.”

“I take it you didn’t like him?”

He grunts. “When he came up with that arthritis drug… he didn’t give me an exclusive on the story.”

In Vince’s mind, giving someone else a story is original sin. “That was fifteen years ago,” I say.

It takes Vince a lot longer than that to give up a grudge. “Feels like yesterday.”

“Who did he give the story to?”

“The New England Journal of Medicine,” he says, frowning at the recollection. “Those hacks.”

Unlike most pharmaceutical semi-titans, who own or run companies in which other people do research and make discoveries, Walter Timmerman was himself a chemist and researcher. Twenty years ago he developed a drug called Actonel, which revolutionized the study of DNA by allowing for a much smaller sample to result in a reliable test. The implications to the justice system were enormous.

As important as that discovery was, it was not what made Timmerman absurdly wealthy. That came later, when he developed a drug that greatly reduced the pain, and therefore increased the mobility, of arthritis sufferers.

“Do you know the son?” I ask. “Steven?”

Vince nods. “Yeah. Good kid. Nothing like his father.”

“You like him?” I ask, making no effort to conceal my astonishment.

“Hey, I’m not in love with him. He’s a good kid, that’s all. He did me a favor once.”

“What kind of favor?” Vince generally doesn’t like to ask for favors, for fear of having to return them. I’ve done him a couple of major ones, though he’s done more for me.

“He got his father to make a big donation to a charity of mine. And then he showed up and worked a couple of events; just rolled up his sleeves and did whatever was needed.”

Vince is a huge fund-raiser for an organization called Eva’s Village, a Paterson-based group whose mission is to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, treat the addicted, and provide medical care for the poor. It is such an amazingly worthwhile charity that I don’t know how Vince ever got involved with it. But he hits me up for a donation every year.

“You think he could have committed two murders?” I ask.

Vince sneers, which is pretty much his natural facial expression. “I said he’s a good guy. How many good guys murder their parents?”

I can’t think of too many, and I’ve already reached my three-beer quota, so I call for the check.

Vince and Pete are fine with that.

BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, I CALL LAURIE.

At times like these, I like to tell her what I’m thinking, so she can tell me what I’m really thinking.

This time I reveal that I’m getting semi-obsessed with the Timmerman murders, even though I know very little about the circumstances and only barely knew one of the victims. “It must be because I was almost a victim myself,” I say.

“Or because you’re anxious to get back to work,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Andy, when you’re working on a case, you’re engaged intellectually in a way that’s unlike any other time. I think you need that more than you like to admit.”

“That’s crazy. I had a very satisfying intellectual discussion with Vince and Pete tonight at Charlie’s.”

“I can imagine,” she says. “What did you talk about?” “Faulkner and Hemingway.”

“What about them?

“Vince said neither of them can hit the curveball, and Pete said that Vince is an asshole.”

Laurie laughs, probably as appealing a sound as exists in the world. Then, “I’m serious, Andy. I’m not telling you to get involved in this case, other than to take care of Waggy, but I do think it might be a good idea for you to get back to work.”

By the time I wake up in the morning, I’ve decided that it’s possible Laurie knows what she’s talking about. I place a call to Steven Timmerman at the number that was in the records the court provided me. He answers the phone himself, which for some reason surprises me.

I tell him that I’m trying to determine the proper home for Waggy, and that while I know this is a tough time for him personally, he should let me know when he would be ready to meet with me.

“How about today?” he asks.

I’m fine with that, and I tell him so. He asks where I would like to meet, and I suggest his home. Since I might wind up putting Waggy there, I want to get a sense of what it’s like.

He tells me where he lives, and I’m not pleased when I learn that it’s in New York City. I love the city, but it’s my least favorite place in the world to drive.

Waggy a city dog? I don’t think so.

I find a parking place at 89th Street and West End Avenue. The Upper West Side is the part of Manhattan I like best; it has the excitement and pace of the city, but with the feel of a real neighborhood. Just by walking on the street you know that real life is being lived there.

Steven lives on the fourth floor of a brownstone between Riverside Drive and West End on 89th. There is nothing pretentious about it at all, though I’m sure that it’s expensive, real estate prices being what they are.

I’m not put off by the fact that there is no yard for Waggy to ultimately run around in. Many people have the mistaken notion that dogs shouldn’t live in apartments, because they therefore won’t get exercise. The truth is that dogs don’t go outside by themselves to do calisthenics; they have their needed physical activity when their owners take them out. New York has dog owners as good as anywhere in the country. You only need to take a walk through Central Park to realize that.

I ring the buzzer at the street level, and Steven’s voice comes through the intercom. “Come on up,” he says.

“Okay. Where’s the elevator?”

“There isn’t any. The stairs are on your left.”

“It’s a walk-up?” I say, trying to mask my incredulity.

He laughs; I guess I’m not real good at incredulity-masking. “Yes. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s fine,” I lie.

Waggy a walk-up dog? I don’t think so.

The inside of Steven’s apartment is as unassuming as the exterior. My guess is that he didn’t put a dent into his father’s fortune by decorating this place.

He shakes my hand when I enter and notices that I’m still out of breath from the three flights of stairs. “Sorry about the stairs,” he says. “I’m used to it, but most people aren’t.”

“No problem,” I gasp. “You mind if I borrow your oxygen tent?”

He laughs and gives me a chance to catch my breath. While I’m doing so, I notice that there are a number of pictures of Steven and his father, but images of his late stepmother are nowhere to be found. One of the pictures, in which Steven appears to be no more than ten years old, includes the now destroyed house in Alpine.

He sees me staring at it and says, “I guess we got out just in time, huh?”

“That’s for sure,” is my less-than-clever retort. The incident has left me a little shaken, and seeing the house triggers that feeling again.

“I loved that house. I guess you always love the house you grew up in. You feel that way?”

I nod. “I do. That’s why I’m still living in it.”

“I envy you,” he says. Then: “You feel like a slice of pizza? There’s a place on Broadway that’s the best in the city.”

Now he wants me to go back down the stairs? “Why didn’t you suggest that before I climbed Mount Brownstone?”

“I figured you wanted to see my place, because hopefully Waggy will be living here soon. Now that you’ve seen it, we can talk over pizza,” he says. “Or we can stay here; whatever you like.”

I opt for the best pizza in the city. The stairs on the way down fortunately turn out to be far easier to navigate than the same stairs on the way up.

I think it’s a gravity thing.

NEW YORK HAS BY FAR THE BEST PIZZA in the world.

This is not a debatable issue among serious-minded pizza eaters, of which I am one. And not only is the pizza the best, but it is everywhere. There are apparently thousands of pizzeria owners who have mastered the art, and they’ve all chosen to gather on this tiny piece of real estate called New York City. If you live here and throw a dart out your window, you will hit a great piece of pizza.

What is bewildering to me is why it has come to this. I can’t imagine there is anything about the ingredients or expertise necessary to make New York pizza that would disintegrate if transported across city or state lines. Why doesn’t one of these pizza geniuses set up shop in Teaneck? Or Philadelphia? Or Omaha? They would throw parades for him; he would be presented with ceremonial keys to those city’s ovens and hailed as an unchallenged genius.

Instead they fight among themselves for a small “slice” of the pizza market, and the rest of the country is left to munch on pizza that comparatively tastes like cardboard soap.

Steven takes me to Sal and Tony’s Pizzeria, on Broadway and 101st Street. Either Sal, or Tony, or both, are truly artists, the pizza is beyond extraordinary. They serve the slices on those cheap, thin, paper plates that cannot even support the weight of the slice, but that’s okay. They clearly are investing their money in the proper place, in the pizza.

Steven starts telling me about Waggy, though he admits he doesn’t know very much. Waggy is the only son of Bertrand, a Westminster champion who was widely regarded as the finest show dog this country has ever produced. Bertrand died suddenly in his sleep about a year ago, an event that sent the dog show world into mourning.

“What about his mother?” I ask.

“Another dog in my father’s stable. I think she did some shows for a while, but Bertrand was the star of the family. Apparently they all hoped that Waggy would follow in his father’s footsteps.”

“They?” I ask. “Not you?”

He grins. “Personally, I don’t give a shit. I think a dog should be a dog, not a performer. Waggy should have fun.”

“He would have fun living with you?”

He nods, perhaps a little wistfully. “I think so. I know a lot about fun, or at least I used to.”

“Not anymore?” I’m finding myself liking him, much as Vince had predicted.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know… it’s all tied in to my father… I’d rather not go there. Self-psychoanalysis isn’t a requirement to take care of Waggy, is it?”

“Have the police talked to you about the murders?”

“Twice, including this morning. I think they’re floundering, because the guy in jail couldn’t have blown up the house. Maybe they think I did it.”

“Does that worry you?”

He shakes his head. “No, I just figure the truth will win out. That’s more your field; isn’t that the way it works?”

“In theory,” I say. “Do you have any idea who could have done it?”

“Blowing up the house? Or killing my father?”

“Let’s start with your father.”

He shrugs. “I assume the guy they arrested. But I can tell you one thing for sure. My father didn’t go to downtown Paterson looking for drugs or a hooker.”

“Those things didn’t appeal to him?” I ask.

“It wouldn’t matter if they did, he could have made any drug he wanted in his lab, and he would have had the hookers come to him. It would never have been my father’s style to do what they say he did; he would never put himself in a situation he couldn’t completely control.”

Steven gets up to get us another couple of slices, and I use the time to check my phone messages at home. There are two. The first is from Laurie, giving me her flight information for her trip here. No matter what the next message is, it can’t be as good as that one.

It isn’t. It’s from Pete Stanton, telling me that he’s done some checking into the Timmerman murders, and he’s learned that Billy Cameron’s client has been released, and that Steven is going to be arrested. “The kid lives in the city,” Pete says. “They’ll probably take him down there. Looks like you’ve got yourself a second dog.”

While waiting for Steven to come back to the table, I find myself with a dilemma. He clearly has no idea what is about to hit him, and will be unprepared for it. Besides the emotional jolt, he will not have time to take care of any matters he might want to before going into custody.

I would not be breaking any confidences by telling him about the impending arrest. Pete attached no such restrictions on it, and in any event I wouldn’t mention Pete. My instincts tell me that Steven was not involved in the murders, but my instincts have been known to be wrong on many occasions. For example, I’m positive the Knicks will win the NBA title every year.

On the other hand, I could conceivably be exposing myself to some legal jeopardy by telling him. Were he to take flight to avoid arrest, I could be subject to an obstruction of justice charge. I’m confident I could beat it, but in the hands of a prosecutor who disliked me, it would be a major annoyance. And the percentage of prosecutors who dislike me hovers right around one hundred.

I still haven’t decided what to do when Steven comes back with the pizza.

I take a bite. “This really is good,” I say.

End of discussion.

I CAN SEE THEM as we approach Steven’s apartment.

There are at least half a dozen men standing and sitting in strategically positioned places within a hundred feet of the entrance to the building. To me they are so obvious that they might as well be singing the Miranda warning a cappella, but Steven has no idea what awaits him.

I only walked back here because my car is parked along the way, but I decide to pass the car by and continue walking. I may not have prepared Steven for what is about to happen to him, but I’m not about to abandon him when it does.

As we approach I see the men pretending to be carefree and moving aimlessly, but actually executing a pincer movement. Suddenly they close in, and their actions are so swift and stunning that they take me by surprise-and I knew exactly what was going to happen.

One of the officers grabs Steven and turns him toward the building, while another moves me away so that I can’t physically intervene. Obviously, being New York cops, they don’t know me, so they are unaware that I am not a physical intervener. But I’m a hell of a verbal intervener.

Steven is stunned and is muttering something unintelligible as the officer tells him that he is under arrest, and then quickly recites his rights to him. The officer concludes with, “Do you understand what I have just told you?”

Steven does not answer; it’s possible he isn’t even aware that the man is speaking.

“Do you understand what I have just told you?” the officer repeats.

Finally Steven nods and says, “Yes… yes.”

“Do you wish to speak with me now?” the officer asks.

This time Steven doesn’t speak; he just turns to me. The look on his face is a desperate plea for help.

“No, he does not wish to speak to you now,” I say.

“Who are you?” the officer asks, looking at me for the first time.

“I’m his attorney.”

“Well, isn’t that a happy coincidence.”

Steven is taken to the Manhattan County jail, where he is booked and fingerprinted. Before they leave, I instruct him not to talk to anyone at all, and I assure him that I will meet him down there.

I do so, and while I am there I formally agree to waive extradition so that he can be transferred to New Jersey. Lieutenant Dennis Simmons of the New Jersey State Police expresses his appreciation for my cooperation, though we both know I had no choice. Refusing permission would have only delayed the process by a day or so, while Steven would have been sitting in a jail either way.

By eight o’clock in the evening, Steven has been rebooked and is probably not very comfortably settled in the Passaic County jail. I know from having other clients recount their experiences what he is going through; the fear is palpable, and unfortunately warranted.

I won’t be able to see him until the morning, so I go home and call Kevin. I bring him up to date on the day’s events, and assure him that for the moment we have a client who is not another canine.

“Andy, you and I both know that it doesn’t matter whether he is guilty or innocent; he’s entitled to the best defense he can get. And he’ll get it no matter who represents him.”

That is such an obvious statement that I have no idea why Kevin felt the need to voice it. “I know that, Kevin.”

“Do you also realize that if he’s guilty, then he left the house that day thinking you were going to go inside and get blown apart? Along with his stepmother and the dog?”

Amazingly, that hadn’t occurred to me. “I hadn’t thought about that until you just said it.”

“Do you still want him as a client?”

“You know what? I’m not sure.”

“Think about it, Andy. Because if they really wanted to, they could charge him with attempted murder of his own attorney.”

I call Laurie to discuss it with her, but she’s not at home. Since it’s nine o’clock in Wisconsin, my mind would ordinarily start imagining her out to dinner with Brett Favre or some other member of the Wisconsin jet set. The truth is that right now my mind is so preoccupied that I don’t even have the time or energy for petty, ridiculous jealousies. This situation is screwing up my priorities.

My most reliable mind-clearing technique has always been to take Tara for a long walk. It somehow feels like getting down to basics. She is in complete touch with her world; the way she sees and smells everything… the way her ears perk up at any unusual sound… it somehow encourages me to trust my own instincts the way she trusts hers.

It’s a little more difficult tonight, since I’m walking both Tara and the maniac known as Waggy. He is positively crazed with excitement by this walk, though we’ve pretty much followed the same route every day since he’s been here.

I am taking very seriously Kevin’s comments about that day at the house. If Steven planted the explosives, or caused them to be planted, then he is obviously a cold-blooded murderer. And because he saw me outside the house, and knew I was going in, then he was fully content to be a cold-blooded murderer of me.

But I was basically a stranger to him, and it seems silly to feel he is entitled to a vigorous defense if charged with killing his father and stepmother, but not for the attempted murder of an unwitting bystander. On the other hand, I keep coming back to the fact that the unwitting bystander was me.

I cut the walk a little short, not because I am seeing things with total clarity, but because my arms ache from trying to restrain Waggy. We get home, and I pour myself a glass of wine.

Laurie calls me back and is as supportive as she can be, while we both understand that the decision is both personal and mine. I think about it some more, and then decide to discuss it with Waggy, who is sleeping next to Tara on the end of the bed.

I’m nuts to do anything to wake up Waggy; I could be opening myself up for another session of his running around the house like an Olympic hurdler. But I say, “Wag, old buddy, here’s the situation. I’m going to try to help your friend Steven. If we win, you live with him. If we lose, you stay here. Either way you’ll be fine.”

He just looks at me, gives a little wag of his tail, and lays his head on Tara’s back.

I take this as a sign that he approves of the plan.

I PICK KEVIN UP AT THE LAW-DROMAT at eight AM.

His car is being repaired, and we’re going down to the jail for an early-morning meeting with Steven. Though from our point of view the meeting could wait until later in the day, we will be there early for his sake. If he’s like every other client I’ve had in this predicament, he is scared out of his mind and needs to see a friendly face. Someone on his side.

When I arrive, there are about five customers sitting around, waiting for an interruption in the whirring sounds of the washers and dryers that means their clothes are done.

Kevin is in intense conversation with a woman, maybe seventy years old, who is sitting but still leans against a small cart that she would use to transport her laundry. He waves to me and says that he’ll just be a couple of minutes.

I sit down about ten feet away and see that they have papers spread out on the chair between them. I am close enough to hear them talking, which is of little benefit because they are speaking Spanish. I had no idea Kevin could speak Spanish, and certainly not as fluently as it appears. It’s disorienting; I feel like I’m watching a dubbed movie.

They talk for ten more minutes, interrupted only by the woman getting up to put more quarters in her dryer. Finally they finish, and the woman gathers up her papers before retrieving her clothes.

Once Kevin and I are in the car, I say, “I didn’t even know you could speak Spanish.”

“I had to learn, because for so many of my clients it’s a first language.”

“Clients? I thought you give legal advice for free down there.”

“I do, but I still consider them clients. I’m representing that woman on a probate matter. Her husband died, and his will wasn’t correctly prepared or filed.”

What I’m hearing is pretty amazing. “So you actually represent these people? In court?”

“When I have to.”

“For free?” I ask.

He nods. “For free; most of them couldn’t afford to pay anyway. But they wouldn’t take their laundry anywhere else.”

Kevin has obviously become a pro at pro bono. “How many of these clients do you have?”

He thinks for a moment. “Right now? Probably about seventy.”

I don’t know how to respond to this, so all I say is, “Oh.”

On the way to the jail, Kevin tells me that he has checked and learned that Richard Wallace has been assigned to prosecute the case. It’s a mixed blessing for us. I know Richard well; my father trained him many years ago. He is cooperative and professional, but he is also smart and tough.

Once we’re in the small, private visiting room reserved for lawyers and their clients, Steven is brought in to see us. The look on his face immediately tells us he has had a long, horrible night, and the truth is that it will only be the first of many.

The police and prosecutor made an embarrassing mistake in initially arresting and charging the wrong person for the Walter Timmerman murder. They would not then have moved so hastily to arrest Steven had they not been very confident that the embarrassment would not be compounded by another early release. They may not have the goods on Steven, but they damn sure think they do.

I introduce Kevin, and Steven immediately starts pressing us for information on his situation. He’s hoping I’ll tell him something positive, something to give him a reason to hope, when in actuality I’ve got nothing to tell him at all.

“Here’s how it works at this point,” I say. “For now I am more of a collector than a provider of information. And one of the most important sources of that information, maybe the most important, is you.”

“What does that mean?” he asks. “I don’t know what the hell is going on, so how am I going to tell you anything that you can use?”

“You know more about your family than anyone else, and the secret to all this is almost definitely in your family. So I want you to think very carefully about it, and look at it from all different angles. Write down anything that comes to mind; we’ll spend a lot of time talking about it.”

He seems unconvinced, but promises to do as I say. Then he asks the question that every single person asks the first time they face what he is facing. “How long will I be in here?”

“It depends on their evidence. If they have enough to take you to trial, and they probably do, you’ll be in here at least until that trial is over. There will not be bail granted, not in a case like this.”

“I didn’t do this… please believe me… I did not do this. Nothing that they can have can be real, or true.”

“We have to convince a jury of that. But there’s another thing we need to talk about now.”

“What’s that?”

“Your representation. Do you have a criminal attorney?”

He seems offended by the question. “Of course not.”

“You can hire one of your choice, assuming you have financial resources. You should not feel obligated to hire us simply because I happened to be there when this went down.”

“I want you. Everybody says you’re terrific.” He looks at Kevin, who nods, apparently confirming that assessment.

“You checked me out as a criminal attorney?” I ask, since this seems to fly in the face of his previous apparent unconcern at the possibility of being arrested.

He shakes his head. “No, I was doing research about you because you were going to decide what happens to Waggy. I wanted to see what kind of person you are. In the process, I read about cases you’ve handled and people you’ve helped.”

I continue to make sure he understands that he can talk to or hire a different attorney, but he adamantly refuses to entertain the possibility. We discuss my fee, which is considerable but doesn’t seem to give him pause.

“I have a trust fund,” he says. “I’m supposed to get money from it each quarter, but I always put it back into the fund. I’m sure I can have access to it now.”

“How have you supported yourself?” I ask.

“I make furniture. People hire me and I custom-design it to their specifications.”

“Where do you do this?”

“I have space downtown in the West Village. There’s a small showroom in the front, and I do the work in the loft.”

Soon I’ll know everything about Steven Timmerman that there is to know, but right now I see him as an unspoiled, hardworking dog lover.

On the other hand, he may be a cold-blooded killer who murdered his parents, and almost me as well.

My father served many years as the lead prosecutor for Passaic County. When he would start on a case, before he fully examined the evidence and well before it went to trial, he would simply say, “We will see what we will see.”

Yes, we will.

RICHARD WALLACE agrees to see me right away.

It’s not a surprise to me, it’s consistent with how I know he will handle this case. It’s the duty of the prosecutor to share all the evidence with the other side, and Richard understands that he needs to do that on a timely basis. He’s not interested in inhibiting the defense; he’s interested in proving his case.

Arriving at Richard’s office triggers significant nostalgic feelings about my father. I used to come to his office often and just hang out, particularly on weekends. It was his way of balancing the extraordinary hours he worked with his desire to spend time with his son.

On the way home we would stop at the restaurant of my choice, usually a place called The Bonfire, before heading home. Those were great days, and if anything the passing years have made them greater.

“Takes you back, doesn’t it?” Richard asks when he sees that I am lost in thought. Richard is a good fifteen years older than me; he was just starting out back then.

I nod. “Sure does. This very office is where I should have developed a work ethic.”

He smiles. “You’ve done okay for yourself. Your father was proud of you, and he’d be prouder now.”

As usual, I’m somewhat uncomfortable with emotional feelings, so as usual I try to deflect them. “So you’ll drop the charges against my client?”

He smiles. “Afraid not.” Then: “We’re preparing a package now.” He’s talking about copies of police reports and other existing evidence.

“How about a preview?”

“Well, you’ve got a bit of an uphill climb,” he says. “Walter Timmerman had just removed Steven from his will.”

That’s unfortunate, but not a huge problem, and certainly not conclusive evidence. It goes to motive, but it can be dealt with. I don’t bother pointing this out to Richard, because we’re not arguing the case now.

Richard continues: “Steven’s stepmother was to get all the money, unless Steven outlived her. Which he did. He also hated her, and they argued frequently, including a few minutes before her death. I understand that you know firsthand that he was in the house just before the explosion.”

“Perhaps.”

He smiles. “Don’t worry, I won’t call you as a witness. I have other people who can place him there.”

“There were a lot of people there that weren’t killed,” I say. “Any one of us could have planted the bomb.”

“Were you also seen in downtown Paterson near where Walter Timmerman’s body was found at around the same time? Did you also have traces of his blood in your car?”

There’s nothing I can say to this, so I just keep listening. It’s getting ugly.

“I told you this is a bad one, Andy. And it gets worse.”

“Let’s hear it,” I say, even though I don’t want to.

“Steven spent three years in the marines, very much against his father’s wishes. His specialty was explosives, and he had specific expertise in the type used to blow up the house.”

Kaboom.

I head back to my office a little shaken by what I’ve heard. I’ve been doing this far too long to believe anything when only one side of a story has been presented, but Richard’s presentation was quite ominous.

Obviously, I’m going to give Steven the opportunity to explain away whatever he can, but before I do so I want to familiarize myself with everything the prosecution has. I still find it hard to picture Steven at the house, knowing I was going inside, telling me to take good care of Waggy and make sure he had chewies and tennis balls, while aware all along that Waggy and I were going to be dead in a few minutes.

It doesn’t compute, but the truth is that murder cases rarely do.

Kevin is waiting for me at the office, and Edna has made her appearance as well. Kevin seems content to sniffle and pretend to sneeze, while Edna is on the phone dealing with a crisis of her own. Her cousin Stella’s neighbor’s daughter is getting married, and Stella has not received an invitation. Edna has clearly been called upon to advise Stella on how to handle this potential slight, and within five minutes I hear Edna advise her to talk to the neighbor about it, ask other neighbors about it, and forget it and ignore it completely. The fact that her advice is self-contradictory does not seem to give her pause.

I bring Kevin up to date on what Richard told me, and he agrees that we should wait to get the discovery documents, which will be delivered in the morning, before confronting Steven with any of it.

Since there is little to do before the documents arrive, I decide to go home and start preparing for Laurie’s arrival tonight. Those preparations will be basic. They start with changing the sheets on the bed, something I haven’t done in quite a while. I can’t actually remember the last time I did it, but it must have been a long time ago, because I think the sheets were white at the time. Now they’re a dull gray.

After that I’ll shower a couple of times, brush my teeth until my gums bleed, and try to find underwear and socks without any holes in them. Thus finished with the personal-hygiene portion of the preparation, I’ll plug one of those electric air fresheners into a socket in the kitchen. It hasn’t been smelling so great in there lately; I think I may have dropped a frozen pizza behind the stove a few weeks ago.

These tasks will have to be delayed for a while, because as I’m ready to leave the office, Martha Wyndham shows up unannounced. I’m not a big fan of unannounced show-ups, but since I had planned to meet with her anyway, I decide to make an exception in this case.

I bring her back to my private office, which in the area of cleanliness makes my house look like a sterile operating room. I can see her eyes scanning the room, trying to find a relatively clean place to sit down. Unable to do so, she picks the least dirty place and sits in the chair opposite my desk.

“What can I do for you?” I ask.

She hesitates a moment. “I feel as if we have something of a bond, seeing as how we both could have been in that house.”

I can’t believe she’s here because of this imagined bond, so I just nod and wait for her to continue.

“I understand you’re representing Steven,” she says.

“How did you know that? I haven’t even officially registered with the court.”

“He called me and told me so,” she says. “From the prison.”

“You and Steven are friends?”

“I guess so, though I never really thought of it that way. We talked a lot; we have the same view about a lot of things.” She thinks for a moment. “I consider him a friend… yes.”

At this pace, Laurie will have landed at the airport, met someone new, and gotten engaged by the time I get home. “So what can I do for you?” I repeat.

“I want to help Steven in any way I can.”

“Good,” I say. “He can use all the help he can get.”

“So tell me what I can do,” she says.

“How long did you work for Mrs. Timmerman?”

“One week.”

She sees my surprise, so she continues. “I was Mr. Timmerman’s personal assistant, and when he… died… Mrs. Timmerman asked me to work for her.”

“So you know a lot about them?” I ask.

She nods. “To a degree. They were difficult people to get to know. But I can certainly be a source of information, if that’s what you need.”

“That’s helpful,” I say. “I’ll need a road map to help me navigate their lives. Steven may not have killed them, but someone did. Someone with a reason to do so.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know who that might be,” she says.

“Not yet. Tell me about Steven’s relationship with his father.”

“It was complicated; I don’t even think Steven understood it. Steven idolized him, and loved him, and was intimidated by him, and probably hated him. And every one of those emotions made sense. Walter Timmerman was an amazing man, in ways both positive and negative. Not an easy man to have as a father.”

“But you don’t think Steven could have killed him?”

“No.”

“What about his stepmother?”

“That’s another story.”

LAURIE’S PLANE IS DUE at Newark airport at eight o’clock.

I’m there just before seven, which is about normal for me. For some reason I have a compulsion to arrive at airports well in advance, especially when I’m picking someone up. It makes no sense, because planes almost never arrive early. And on the rare occasions that they do, they compensate for it by arranging for the arrival gate not to be ready, so that the plane has to sit on the tarmac until it is.

And the ugly truth is that planes could be early, if the airlines so desired. Nothing is more annoying than sitting on a plane that is late in taking off, and having the pilot announce that he will “make up time in the air.” If they could fly faster when they’re late, why not fly faster all the time? Can you imagine a bus driver on a seventy-mile-per-hour highway arbitrarily deciding to go forty?

So once again I spend an hour looking at the arrivals screen, checking to see if other planes are arriving early, as if that might signify a pattern. They’re not.

By the time the plane lands and Laurie gets her bags, it’s past eight thirty. It’s been an almost nine-hour trip for her; she’s had to switch planes twice. Some people might look tired or disheveled from that kind of day, but not Laurie. She would look great if she traveled cross-country strapped to the top of a covered wagon.

I’m not much for public hugging, but I make an exception in this case. We hold it for at least fifteen fantastic seconds, at which point she pulls back and looks me right in the eye. “Andy, I have missed you so much.”

“Oh?” I ask. “Have you been away?”

We make it home in less than thirty minutes. It’s about fifty feet from the garage to the front door, then another forty feet to the twelve steps leading upstairs, then another twenty feet or so to the bedroom. My plan is to navigate this distance and have Laurie in bed in less than twenty-eight seconds, which would represent a new record.

Unfortunately, Tara and Waggy have other ideas. Tara goes nuts as soon as she sees Laurie, and Waggy goes nuts because he is nuts. Within a few seconds Laurie is on the floor rolling around, petting them and laughing. The look on her face is pure delight.

“You look tired,” I say. “Ready to turn in?”

“Tired? Let’s take them for a walk.”

“A walk?” This is not going according to plan, so I shake my head. “No can do. I tried walking them this morning. They hate walks; they refused to go. We argued about it.”

She smiles. “That’s a shame. A nice walk would have put me in the mood to make love with you. But if they don’t want to walk…”

“Hey, they’re dogs,” I say. “We’ll just show them who’s boss. Let’s go.”

I take Waggy and Laurie takes Tara, and we walk for about an hour through Eastside Park. By the time we get back we’re all a little tired and ready for bed, except for Waggy. Waggy wouldn’t get tired if we walked to New Zealand.

Laurie and I are undressed and in bed within a few minutes of entering the house. She stretches out her arms. “You changed the sheets,” she says.

“I change them every day,” I say. “Force of habit.”

“You’re lying,” she says.

I nod. “I also lie every day. It’s another habit.”

She pulls me close to her. “Let me show you something you don’t do every day.”

And she does. It would be nice if it could become a habit.

While Laurie makes breakfast the next morning I tell her all I know about the Timmerman case. The depth of my knowledge is such that I would have time to relate the entire story even if she were making instant oatmeal, but she’s making pancakes. Her pancakes occupy a prominent spot on the list of things I miss when she is in Wisconsin.

“So where will you start?” Laurie asks after hearing my spiel.

“The father. He was the one with the money and the power.”

She nods. “That’s what I would do.” Then: “You’re going to be a busy boy.”

She’s verbalized what I already knew, and was feeling terrible about. I’m going to be consumed by a case while Laurie is making one of her rare visits. “I’m sorry; the timing is not great,” I say.

She shrugs. “It is what it is. I can use the downtime, and there’s a lot of friends I can catch up with. Plus, I’ll be here to help if you need it.”

“I could hire you on a temporary basis, maybe try it for ten years or so, see if it works out. Fifty bucks a week, but you’ll always have a place to sleep.” It’s a pathetic attempt to suggest she move back, but it’s as close as I’ll come to broaching the subject.

She doesn’t take the bait. “That’s an incredibly appealing offer,” she says. “I’ll talk about it with my agent.”

I head down to Timco Pharmaceuticals, the company Walter Timmerman founded and ran for the last twelve years. Company-naming was obviously not his strong suit.

I usually find that calling ahead in these situations is not the best way to get people to speak to me, especially when I have no idea who those people are. I can be more insistent and obnoxious in person, or at least that’s what everybody tells me.

Timco is located on Route 17 in Mahwah, in a building much smaller and less expensive than I would have expected. It looks like one of those mini medical center complexes that have sprung up everywhere. The entire thing looks like it could have fit in one of the bedrooms of Timmerman’s now exploded home.

The small lobby is not exactly a beehive of activity, matching the feeling that the exterior gives off of a slow-moving environment. Not what one would expect from the cutting-edge company that Timmerman was said to run.

The directory still lists Walter Timmerman as the chairman and chief executive officer, with Thomas Sykes next in line as chief operating officer, so when I approach the receptionist I give her my name and ask to speak to Sykes.

“Is Mr. Sykes expecting you?”

“Anything’s possible,” I say, “but only he can really answer that.”

“What is it about?”

“I’m representing Steven Timmerman.”

She picks up the phone and relays my message to whoever answers. The response is obviously positive, because within moments a young woman comes out to lead me back to Sykes’s office.

The main part of the building is surprisingly alive. It is one large laboratory, with what appears to be the most modern equipment, and a large staff of earnest people using them. If anyone is over thirty-five, they’re aging well. The average basketball team is older than this group.

Sykes himself seems under forty, though he is clearly the elder statesman here. He smiles and shakes my hand, welcoming me to Timco, as if I am joining the team. I thank him and enter his modern, well-appointed office, which has a large painting of Walter Timmerman looking down from the wall, as if he were Chairman Mao.

“Thanks for seeing me,” I say.

“No problem. But I doubt I can help you much; I don’t know Steven very well. The truth is, I’m not sure I’d want to help you if I could.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, if Steven… if Steven did this…”

“That, as we say in legal circles, is a big ‘if.’ ”

Sykes nods vigorously. “I understand. Innocent until proven guilty. I get it.” He shrugs. “But I really don’t know him well at all.”

“I’m more interested in learning about Walter Timmerman.”

He smiles. “Walter, I knew.”

“Good. Please tell me about him.”

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

“Everything. I’m looking to fill in the blanks, and right now blanks are all I have.”

He nods agreeably. “Okay. Well, there’s Walter Timmerman professionally, and privately. Two very different people.”

“Start with professionally,” I say.

“One of a kind,” he says. “An amazing, amazing man.”

“I’m going to need a little more specificity than that.”

“He was collaborative, inquisitive, brilliant… all he cared about was the science and the idea. He treated everyone whose ability he respected as an equal, even though he had no equal.”

“What exactly did he do?”

This question sends him headlong into an extended scientific dissertation, of which I understand maybe ten percent. When I hear the word “biology,” I interrupt. “So he was a biologist?”

“Are you a basketball fan?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Asking if Walter was a biologist would be like asking if Michael Jordan was a shooter. Of course he was, but he was so much more. Think of it this way. Usually you have chemists and microbiologists working side by side. Walter was the best of both; I like to say he lived at the intersection of Chemistry Boulevard and Microbiology Avenue. It was an incredible advantage for him in what he was doing.”

“What was he doing? Particularly recently.”

“Well, I can’t say exactly, because lately he wasn’t very talkative about his work, and whatever he did was in his lab at home. But for years he was studying the physical aspects of life; he understood it better than anyone who ever lived. He understood that the human body, any living organism, is a collection of chemicals.”

“So you’re talking about his discoveries in DNA?”

“That was just scratching the surface.”

We talk some more about Timmerman’s work, though Sykes keeps pointing out that in recent months he was utilizing his lab at home and keeping to himself. This doesn’t seem to fit in with the “collaborative” person Sykes described, but he doesn’t see the contradiction, so I don’t point it out.

When it comes to the personal Walter Timmerman, Sykes is much less expansive. He professes to know little about Walter’s home life, but his sense is that Walter could be a demanding husband and father.

“Had you met his wife?” I ask.

“Twice, but just to say hello. At industry dinners. Walter hated events like that, but he was receiving awards at both, so he couldn’t get out of it.”

“What was your impression of her?”

He grins, but doesn’t look particularly happy. “She was a handful. Knew what she wanted, and how to get it. But Walter seemed crazy about her.”

“With everything you know about Walter Timmerman, can you think of any reason someone would want him dead?”

He thinks about it for a moment. “Walter Timmerman was a person who pushed at the limits of science and knowledge. So who might kill him? I guess someone with an interest in preserving those limits.”

Then he shrugs. “Or not. Who knows?”

I CALL KEVIN AT THE OFFICE, where he’s been wading through the discovery documents.

As bad as they are, he doesn’t seem too distressed about it. Most of the incriminating facts in there are those that Richard has already alerted us to, so it’s not quite as awful as Kevin was fearing.

But it’s bad.

I decide not to go back to the office, since it might make me late for the arraignment. Hatchet wouldn’t look too fondly on that, and I certainly don’t want to get on Hatchet’s bad side at the beginning of a murder case. Or at any other time, for that matter.

Kevin is not going to join me at the arraignment. There would be nothing for him to do there anyway, and we’re better off with him spending the time getting familiar with the facts of the case. Or at least those items that the prosecution considers facts. Hopefully we’ll have a different interpretation.

My plan is to talk to Steven before the arraignment about some of the discovery information, but that plan is thwarted when a screwup results in him being brought over too late for us to meet. We only have about thirty seconds before the hearing starts, leaving me barely enough time to tell him what to expect, and how to behave.

It is rare that an arraignment is eventful, and this one doesn’t break any new ground. Richard states the charges clearly and concisely, and tells Hatchet that the prosecution is current on providing discovery information.

Hatchet asks how Steven pleads, and he answers “not guilty” in an understandably shaky voice. If I were facing two charges of murder in the first degree, I would barely be able to squeak.

I request bail, pointing out that Steven has never before been accused of a crime. Richard takes the opposite viewpoint, pointing out the heinous nature of these particular crimes, and adding that a person of Steven’s means is a particular flight risk.

Hatchet disdainfully denies bail, as I knew he would. I can see Steven flinch when he hears it, even though I had told him we had no chance to prevail and were basically going through the motions.

Richard requests a trial date in two months, and is clearly surprised when I agree to it. Steven has begged me to, since he doesn’t want to spend one day longer than necessary in prison. He isn’t quite focusing on the fact that a loss at trial means he’ll never leave that prison. Besides, I can always request a delay if it seems we won’t be ready.

It’s almost four o’clock, so my options are to go to the office or go home. Edna and Kevin are in the office, and Laurie is at home. It’s not exactly a decision to agonize over, so I ask Edna to have a messenger bring copies of the documents to my house.

“So I have to copy them?” she asks. I can feel her cringing through the phone. It’s standard procedure for her to have copied them when they arrived, but Edna evidently is trying a new approach.

“Not by hand,” I say. “You can use the copying machine.”

She reluctantly agrees to perform this heroic task, and I head home. When I get there, Laurie is cooking dinner, Tara is lying on the living room couch, and Waggy is jumping on her head. Laurie tells me that this particular head-jumping exercise has been going on for about an hour and a half, and if anything it has gained in intensity.

“It’s amazing how much patience Tara has with him,” I say.

Laurie smiles. “Saint Tara of Paterson.”

“Waggy,” I say, “give it a rest.”

“He’s just excited that they were talking about him on television today.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“It was on the news. They were talking about the Timmerman case, and they mentioned that you had custody of him. His father was apparently a legend in the dog show world.”

I’m surprised and a little annoyed that the word has gotten out; I hope people don’t start coming around trying to get a look at him. I glance over at Waggy, who has jumped off Tara and is now smacking a tennis ball with his paw and then chasing it around the room. “I’m not so sure he’d be proud of his son.”

We have dinner and then settle down to drink wine and watch a movie. It’s nights like these that give me a weird, certainly unwarranted feeling of continuity. As soon as Laurie arrives it’s as if she never left, and my remembering that she’ll soon be leaving again is both surprising and jarring.

The movie we watch is called Peggy Sue Got Married, a Francis Ford Coppola film made in the 1980s about Kathleen Turner magically going back to high school and reliving those difficult years, with the benefit of knowing what life has in store for her.

It’s something I occasionally think about. What would I do if I could start over, knowing everything that has happened since? I don’t really know, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t involve law school. And I’d make a fortune betting on sporting events of which I already know the outcome.

When it’s over I ask Laurie what she would do differently now that she knows how things have worked out. My hope is that maybe she’ll say she wouldn’t have moved to Wisconsin.

“Nothing,” she says. “Because I don’t want to know how things will work out. That’s not what the real world is about.”

“I understand that. I’m just presenting a fake-world hypothetical. What if you could go back, knowing what was going to happen in your life? How would you change it? What would you do differently?”

“I’d eat less chocolate.”

“You’re not taking this seriously,” I say.

She nods. “Correct. Because if I knew what was going to happen in my life, it wouldn’t be living. I take each day as it comes.”

I shake my head in frustration, though I’m not sure why I keep pushing this. “Of course you take each day as it comes. Everybody does; there’s no choice. What I’m trying to do is get you to imagine knowing about the days before they come.”

“Andy, would you like to know what is going to happen before it does?”

“Of course.”

“And it would change your behavior?” she asks.

“Absolutely.”

“Okay, let’s try it. If you keep talking about this, we’re not going to make love tonight, and I’m going to sleep in the guest bedroom.”

“Can we drop this whole thing?” I ask. “I mean, it’s just a stupid movie.”

“Maybe it works after all,” she says.

I SET AN EARLY MEETING with Sam Willis to bring him on board.

Sam has been my accountant for as long as I can remember, and has an office down the hall. In the last couple of years he has also taken on assignments as a key investigator for me, a task that he accomplishes without even leaving his desk.

Sam has mastered cyberspace and can navigate it to find out pretty much anything. He is simply a genius at hacking into government agencies, corporations, or any other entity naive enough to think it is secure. If I need a phone record, or a bank statement, or a witness’s background, all I need to do is put Sam on the case. The fact that it’s not always strictly legal is not something that has kept either of us awake nights.

I set the meeting at nine o’clock, because I’m due in Hatchet’s chambers at ten thirty to give him an update on what is happening with Waggy. It’s a meeting that was arranged before I took Steven on as a client, and I’m hoping the new situation will at least get me off the Waggy hook.

I’m in the office at nine sharp, and Sam arrives ten minutes later. Sam always has a disheveled look about him, and it’s exaggerated in the summer, when he’s hot and sweaty. Today is a particularly stifling day, and he comes in looking much the worse for wear. Sam has often said he would rather the temperature were ten than eighty.

“Hot out there,” I say after he has grabbed a cold soda.

He nods. “You ain’t kidding. Summer in the city. Back of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty.”

Sam and I are practitioners of a juvenile hobby we call “song-talking,” during which we try to work song lyrics into our conversations. Sam is a master at it; if they gave out rankings in song-talking he would be a black belt.

He’s opened with a Lovin’ Spoonful gambit. Fortunately, I am somewhat familiar with it, so hopefully I can compete. I nod sympathetically. “Isn’t it a pity. There doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city.”

He doesn’t miss a beat, walking over to the window and looking down on the street. He shakes his head sadly. “All around the people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.”

“You’re too good for me,” I say. “You ready to start the meeting?”

“If we have to,” he says, with some resignation.

“I need some help on a case.”

He brightens immediately. “You do? Why didn’t you say so?”

“I just did. That’s how you found out about it.”

“I mean when you called me. I figured you wanted me to do some boring accountant stuff.”

“Sam, you’re an accountant.”

“And you’re a lawyer, but I don’t see you jumping for joy on the judge’s table.”

“Bench,” I say. “The judge sits behind a bench.”

“Whatever. What do you need me to do?”

“Find out whatever you can about Walter Timmerman.”

“The dead drug guy?” he asks.

I nod. “The dead drug guy.”

“What do you want to know about him?”

“Ultimately, I want to know why he’s not still a live drug guy, but don’t limit yourself. I want to know about his money; how he earned it and where he spent it. I want to know who he spoke to on the phone in the last month before he died. If he sent e-mails I want to see them, if he traveled I want to know where he went and who he went with. Basically, anything you can find out about him interests me.”

“What’s the time frame?” he asks.

I just stare at him and frown. He knows that everything is a rush.

“Okay,” he says. “I’m on it.”

“Thanks, Sam. As always, I appreciate it.”

He shrugs. “Hey Andy, you just call out my name, and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running.”

I’m pretty sure he’s doing James Taylor. “Winter, spring, summer, or fall?” I ask.

He nods. “All you have to do is call.”

This could go on forever, so I attempt to end the conversation, though I can’t resist a final jab. “Okay, Sam, we’re done here. My body’s aching and my time is at hand.”

“No problem,” he says. “But Andy…”

“Yes?”

“Remember, you’ve got a friend. Ain’t it good to know? You’ve got a friend.”

Hatchet is handling an arraignment when I arrive at the courthouse, and I have to wait about half an hour outside his chambers. When he finally arrives, he forgets to apologize for the slight, and keeps me waiting another five minutes before calling me in.

Once I come in, he says, “Have you resolved the issue?”

“About the dog?”

“What other issue is there?” he asks.

“Well, Your Honor, as you are well aware, I’m now representing the defendant in the case. It seems like a clear conflict.”

“Then resolve it, and the conflict will go away.”

“Well, Your Honor, there has been something of a change in circumstances regarding the two people seeking custody of the dog. One is dead, and the other is in prison.”

“Well, then I have a new contender for you to consider.” He searches through some notes on his desk. “Judge Parker’s office forwarded this. A man named”-he squints to read the name- “Charles Robinson has contacted the court seeking custody of the dog. He represents himself as a close friend of Walter Timmerman, and a partner of his in the showing of dogs.”

Charles Robinson is someone I’m vaguely familiar with, and I know him to be a multimillionaire who has made his money in oil and real estate. There have always been vague accusations that his dealings are shady, but as far as I know he has never faced any criminal charges. “Thank you, Your Honor, I’ll certainly consider Mr. Robinson. But I do need to make sure the dog is placed in a loving-”

Hatchet interrupts. “Have I given you the impression that I care what happens to this dog?”

“Well-”

“Resolve the matter. Either give him to Robinson or find another solution.”

“Yes, Your Honor. Right away.”

The phone on Hatchet’s desk rings, and he looks at it as if it were from another planet. He picks it up. “Clara, I told you that I was not to be disturbed. Now…” He stops, an expression on his face that I haven’t seen before. “I see… put him on.” Another pause, and then: “Just a moment.”

He hands the phone to me, the last thing I would have expected. “It’s for you,” he says.

I am gripped by tension. For Hatchet to allow himself to be interrupted by a phone call for me staggers, and scares the shit out of, the imagination.

“Hello?”

I hear Pete Stanton’s strained and nervous voice. “Andy, it’s Pete.”

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“Andy, I’m at the hospital. Laurie’s been shot.”

I can feel my knees start to buckle, and I half fall toward Hatchet’s desk. “Is she all right? Pete, is she all right?”

“Andy, I don’t know… I just don’t know.”

“Pete, tell me the truth. TELL ME THE GODDAMN TRUTH!”

“Andy, they don’t know if she’s going to make it.”

I THINK HATCHET SAYS SOMETHING, some expression of sympathy or concern, but I’m not sure.

Everything seems a blur, and I literally stagger out of his office, heading for the elevator to take me downstairs. I think Pete said there was someone or something waiting for me down there, but I could be wrong.

When I reach the street level, two uniformed policemen seem to be waiting for me. “Mr. Carpenter?”

I nod.

“We’ll be taking you to the hospital.”

I nod again and follow them to their car. It could be the next-to-last car ride I will ever take, because if Laurie does not pull through, I am going to get in my own car and drive it off a cliff.

I don’t ask the officers what they know, because they probably don’t know anything, and wouldn’t be authorized to tell me if they did. The horrible fear that keeps popping up, easily overwhelming my well-developed sense of denial, is that Laurie might already be gone. If she was, Pete wouldn’t have told me over the phone. He would have done just what he did, which was cushion me for the blow by telling me how badly she was hurt.

The Barnert Hospital is on Broadway in Paterson, about fifteen minutes from the courthouse. There is little traffic, but it feels as if the trip takes three weeks. They finally pull up to the emergency room entrance, and I rush to jump out, only to find that the car door is locked.

“Open the door!” I yell. “Open the damn door!”

I hear a popping noise and this time when I pull on the handle the door opens. I get out and run into the emergency room. Kevin is there waiting, and the stricken, anguished look on his face tells me that Laurie is gone.

But she’s not.

“She’s in surgery, Andy. She went in half an hour ago.”

I am having trouble processing words. “She’s alive? Is that what you’re saying? She’s still alive?”

“Yes. That’s what they told me.”

My feet suddenly feel unable to support my weight, and I move over to some metal chairs. Kevin sits down next to me. “Please tell me everything you know,” I say. “Everything.”

It turns out that Kevin doesn’t know much. Laurie was in the front yard of my house throwing a tennis ball with Tara and Waggy when she was shot. She took the bullet in the upper thigh, which became horribly serious because it happened to sever the carotid artery, causing massive blood loss. Only the quick actions of my neighbor, who called 911 and then rushed over to put pressure on the wound, kept her alive.

For now.

I’m about to hit Kevin with a barrage of questions, when I look up and see Pete Stanton standing over me.

“Pete, tell me…”

“All I know is that she’s in surgery, and she’s getting massive transfusions. It’s touch and go, Andy.”

It flashes through my mind that this sounds like the same injury that killed Sean Taylor of the Washington Redskins. Pete must know that, but he has the good sense not to mention it. Kevin would likely never even have heard of the Washington Redskins.

“Who did this?” I ask.

Pete shakes his head. “Don’t know. According to the neighbor, it was a drive-by. But he got a model, color, and partial plate, so we’ve got a shot at it.”

“Where can I wait for the doctor?” I ask.

“There’s an empty room on the floor; he’s going to come there when he’s finished. By the way, I told them you were the husband.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Gives you access; if you’re not family you have no rights.”

I nod. “Thanks.”

Pete, Kevin, and I go up to the seventh floor, which is the surgery ward. We go to an empty room, with a bed, small bathroom, and two chairs. I suppose this is going to be Laurie’s room if she needs one. Please let her need one.

We wait for almost three hours, during which it feels like my head is going to explode from the pressure. The waiting is simply horrible, yet I am clearheaded enough to know that it must mean Laurie is still alive. Otherwise the surgery would be over.

During all the time we’re there, I don’t think five words are spoken, except for Pete getting an occasional cell phone call updating him on progress in the investigation. There doesn’t seem to be much, but it’s early, and I’m not focused on that right now.

I finally realize that Tara and Waggy are alone and unattended, and I mention this to Kevin.

He shakes his head. “I had Willie pick them up. I hope that’s okay.”

As my partner in the Tara Foundation, Willie is as big a dog lunatic as I am, so it’s more than okay. “Thanks, Kevin. That’s perfect.”

Finally, the door opens and a doctor comes in. He’s surprisingly, almost annoyingly, young, certainly under forty. If he isn’t bringing good news, he’s never going to get any older, because I’m going to strangle him with his stethoscope.

I stand as he walks over. I can’t read his expression, which bothers me. I wish he were smiling, or laughing, or doing cartwheels. But he’s not, and I’m scared shitless. The combined pressure of waiting for every verdict I’ve ever waited for pales next to this.

“Mr. Carpenter, I’m Dr. Norville.”

I don’t say a word; I can’t say a word.

“Your wife has come through the surgery. She has an anoxic brain injury, due to blood loss, and she remains in very critical condition. She is currently in a coma.”

“Will she survive?” I manage.

“We’ll have a better idea of that in forty-eight hours. She lost a great deal of blood. And you need to understand that survival is not the only issue.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“It is likely that her brain was deprived of sufficient blood for an undetermined period of time. There is the potential for injury.” He pauses, then adds, “Irreparable injury.”

I find my voice and ask as many questions as I can think of, but I can’t get any more out of him, other than the fact that the shorter the coma, the better. It’s going to take time until we know more.

He can see my frustration, and before he leaves, he says, “Mr. Carpenter, she’s alive. At this point, with what she’s been through, that’s saying a great deal, believe me.”

I nod my understanding.

“One step at a time,” he says. “One step at a time.”

I GO HOME to get some clothing and toiletries to bring back to the hospital.

The front yard is cordoned off with police tape as a crime scene, and a squad car with two officers is in place guarding it. I identify myself to them and go in through the back; I wouldn’t be able to stand seeing Laurie’s blood on the lawn.

My feeling right now is that if Laurie never makes it back to this house, then I will never live here again. Certainly I can’t tolerate the idea of staying here now.

Back at the hospital they still won’t let me in to see Laurie; she is in intensive care and very susceptible to infection. An intensive care nurse tells me that Laurie is a fighter, and I know that’s true. I also know that the cemeteries are full of fighters.

I’ve got to get a grip.

I lie down on the hospital bed, fully clothed, at about eleven o’clock, and start to cry. It’s the first time I can remember crying since my father died, and if memory serves, this feels even more painful.

A nurse opens the door to see if she can help, but when I ignore her, she leaves me alone. Soon I lie down on the bed, and before I know it, it’s four o’clock in the morning. For a brief moment on awakening I forget where I am or why I’m here, and the quick realization is like taking a punch in the gut.

I stagger down to the nurses’ station and ask if there’s any word on Laurie’s condition. The nurse smiles and says, “She’s resting comfortably.”

“She told you that?” I ask.

“Well, no… she…”

“She’s in a coma. How would you know if she’s comfortable?”

“Maybe I should call the head nurse.”

“Never mind,” I say, and head back to the room. I’ve accomplished nothing except attacking a young woman who was only trying to help and make me feel better.

Feeling better seems a ways off.

My cell phone starts ringing at seven o’clock and simply does not stop. Every friend that Laurie has, and that includes pretty much everyone she has ever met, is calling to find out how she is, and to offer whatever help they can provide.

Edna calls at seven thirty. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Edna say a word before nine o’clock, ever, but she has many to say now. It’s a mixture of outrage at the animal who could hurt Laurie, and pleading with me to let her help. She tells me that she is going to come to the hospital and sit in the lobby, so as to be there in case I need her. I tell her not to, but I’m actually touched by her reaction, and Laurie will be as well, I hope.

Kevin comes at eight o’clock, and Dr. Norville arrives half an hour later, as part of his rounds. He has nothing new to report, except to say that Laurie spent a comfortable night. I resist the urge to torture him as I did the nurse.

They let me see Laurie through a glass window into the intensive care unit. She looks better than I would have thought, very pale but peaceful and extraordinarily beautiful. I want to go to her, to touch her and hold her hand, but they won’t let me.

I go back to the room, where Kevin is waiting. I know he wants to talk to me about the Steven Timmerman case, but he doesn’t know how to bring it up.

I save him the trouble. “Kevin, I want to take a day or two to think about things. I may withdraw from the case, if I can’t give it the attention it deserves.”

He nods. “That’s very reasonable. Shall I tell Steven what’s going on?”

I nod. “He has a right to know.”

We hear noises out in the hallway, and Kevin goes to the door to see what has people so excited. He comes back a moment later.

“What’s going on?” I ask.

“You’re about to find out.”

After a few seconds, Marcus Clark walks in the door. Marcus is one of the quietest people I know, silent and invisible when he wants to be, but he creates instant commotion wherever he goes. Actually, “commotion” might not be the right word. It’s closer to panic, bordering on terror.

I’ve used Marcus as a private investigator on a number of occasions, more frequently since Laurie gave up that job and moved to Wisconsin. Marcus has also served as my personal bodyguard when cases have placed me in some physical jeopardy. He is uniquely qualified for both jobs, because he is the most frightening human being on the planet.

With Marcus walking down the corridor, the nurses must have reacted like the cinematic Japanese citizenry when they saw Godzilla wandering the streets of Tokyo. Actually, Marcus and ’Zilla are similar in a number of ways. They are both basically nonverbal, fearless, and perfectly willing to kill anything in their path. I think Marcus has fresher breath.

Laurie first introduced me to Marcus, and I’ve always been struck by the change in his demeanor when he’s around her. He becomes borderline human, and I’ve even detected a hint of emotion. He likes her, which is why I try to remind him at every opportunity how disappointed she would be if he killed me.

Marcus doesn’t say hello; I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say hello or good-bye. He just looks around the room and is probably disappointed when he sees only Kevin and me. “Laurie,” he says, and I think it’s a question.

“She’s in intensive care,” I say. “She’s unconscious.”

He takes a moment to digest that information. “She’ll be good,” he says. “The shooter… nuh.”

That probably represents as long a speech as I’ve ever heard from Marcus, and with that he turns around and walks out, sucking all the air out of the room with him. When talking about celebrities and politicians, it’s often said that when people with real presence, real star power, walk into any room, they take it over. They become the center of everything. That’s the way it is with Marcus, and when he leaves there’s a void left behind.

Kevin stares at the door, openmouthed. “Did he just say what I think he said? That he’s going after the guy who shot Laurie, and that he’ll do something bad to him when he finds him? Maybe kill him?”

“Not in so many words, but yes.”

“That’s vigilante justice,” says Kevin.

“I prefer to call it good old-fashioned vigilante justice.”

Kevin thinks for a moment. “Me too,” he says.

I don’t know who or where the shooter is, but if he’s smart, he’s getting his affairs in order and choosing a casket.

Kevin goes down to the jail to update Steven Timmerman, and I go back to returning cell phone messages. This one is from Cindy Spodek, a good friend of Laurie’s and mine who is an FBI agent in Boston. She is one of the people I turn to for information if my cases involve the bureau in some fashion, and she has been as helpful as she can be while maintaining professional confidences.

Her call was to inquire about Laurie, and I tell her what I know, which is unfortunately not much.

“She’ll make it, Andy. She’s a fighter.”

I know everybody is being well intentioned, but that line is starting to drive me crazy. “Right.”

“Any leads on the shooter?” she asks.

“I think so. They got the make of the car, and a partial license. Pete Stanton is the lead detective on it.”

“Good,” she says. She knows Pete, and the kind of cop that he is.

“And Marcus has vowed revenge,” I say.

“Game, set, and match,” she says. “You going to ask for a delay on Timmerman?”

I’m surprised she’s even aware that I am representing Steven. “I’m going to take a couple of days to figure that out. How did you know I was on it?”

“Are you kidding?” she says. “You cost me an assignment.”

“What does that mean?” I ask.

“There’s a task force on it. I was going to get assigned, but then you came on board, and they reworked it because they knew we were friends.”

This is bewildering to me. “Why was the bureau investigating Walter Timmerman?”

“That I don’t know; I hadn’t gotten briefed yet. And you know I couldn’t tell you if I did know.”

“Understood,” I say. If she doesn’t know anything, there’s no sense trying to cajole her into revealing more.

It’s only when we get off the phone that I realize exactly what she said. If I cost her the assignment, then the bureau’s task force is still in existence, even after Timmerman’s death, because I obviously got involved well after the murder.

It’s not that the bureau “was” investigating Walter Timmerman. It’s that the bureau “is” investigating Walter Timmerman.

The question is why.

AT FIVE O’CLOCK the nurse comes in to speak to me.

It’s really just an update; she doesn’t have any new information to share. She reaffirms the doctor’s comments that the shorter the coma lasts, the better the prognosis is for future recovery, though she won’t come close to committing to specific time frames.

What’s encouraging to me is her focus on Laurie’s chances for recovery, rather than survival. As the doctor said, one step at a time.

Richard Wallace calls me to express his concern for Laurie, whom he knows fairly well. He apologizes for not having called earlier, but he was in court all day.

“Andy, if you need to ask for a continuance on Timmerman, I certainly won’t contest it. Take all the time you need.”

“Thanks, Richard. I appreciate that. Right now Kevin’s working on it while I figure things out.”

“Kevin’s a great lawyer. Much better than you,” he says, trying to lighten the mood.

“Right,” is my clever retort. While Laurie is down the hall in a coma, I am resistant to any mood lightening. “By the way, Richard, why is the FBI on Timmerman?”

“What does that mean?”

“They have a goddamn task force investigating Timmerman.”

He is silent for a few moments. “I didn’t know that.”

This doesn’t seem possible. “No idea?”

“No idea, Andy. Are you sure about this?”

“I’m sure, though please do not reveal where you heard it. Do you have a guess as to why they might care about him?”

“You’ve got all the information I’ve got, Andy. Nothing has come up that should interest the feds.”

Coming from certain other prosecutors, I would suspect that they were dissembling, or outright lying. Coming from Richard, I’m sure that he really is in the dark. I’m also sure that he must be pissed off about it.

I call Willie Miller to make sure that Tara and Waggy are okay, and he assures me that they are. He also wants to help in the search for Laurie’s assailant, but when I tell him that Marcus is on the case, he backs off some. Willie knows that Marcus is usually sufficient, in the same way that a marine battalion is usually sufficient.

I go down to the hospital cafeteria to have dinner, after telling virtually every employee of the hospital where I’ll be should there be any change in Laurie’s condition.

The food is set up in self-serve-buffet style, and I choose what appears to be either very dark-colored chicken or very light-colored meat loaf. The first few bites don’t shed much light on the question, so I decide just to shovel it in quickly and get back upstairs.

I’m almost finished when I look up and see Pete Stanton, who was just upstairs looking for me and inquiring about Laurie’s condition. “You up for talking about the case?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say, somewhat reluctantly. I desperately want the shooter to be caught and punished, but I also have this need for my mind to be focused on Laurie’s recovery. It’s stupid, I know, but it feels like if I relax my concentration on her and her condition, she could suffer for it. I know better, but I feel on some level as if my power of thought is helpful to her.

“Our feeling is that the shooter was a pro,” Pete says. “He used a Luger thirty-eight, not exactly your gangbanger’s weapon of choice. And he only took one shot, which means he was confident it was all he’d need.”

“But he pretty much missed,” I say. “He couldn’t have wanted to shoot her in the leg. If it hadn’t hit an artery, she’d be out jogging by now.”

“Right. But your neighbor said that just before the shot, she was kneeling down in front of one of the dogs, petting it. The neighbor called to her and she stood up, just as the shot was fired. It could be that the shooter was aiming low, and missed because she stood up.”

It’s certainly possible, though at this point unknowable. “So if it was a pro, then it wasn’t random, and it wasn’t cheap. Whoever was gunning for Laurie had the money to hire help.”

“Right,” he says. “You got any idea who that might be?”

“She’s a chief of police, Pete. She could have made a lot of enemies.”

“I called her second in command in Findlay, a Captain Blair. He says that the whole town is praying for Laurie; they’ve organized a candlelight vigil.”

“Did he say she’s a fighter?” I ask.

“Yeah… how’d you know that?”

“Never mind.”

“He’s going through all the files and talking to everybody in the department, but he doubts the shooter had anything to do with Findlay. I tend to think he’s right.”

“Why?”

“It doesn’t make sense. Why come here to do it, when they could have done it there, probably easier? It wasn’t like she was leaving there forever; she had a job, so they would know she’d be back.”

“She was also a cop here, Pete. And an investigator after that. That should give you a long list of possibilities.”

He nods. “And we’re checking them out. I was just wondering if it could be a result of any case she worked on for you.”

“Off the top of my head, no. But I’ll give it some thought.”

“Good,” he says, standing up. “You feel like coming down to Charlie’s for a beer? Might do you good, and they’ll call you if there’s any news.”

I shake my head. “I’d rather stay here.”

He nods. “Vince said you’d say that. You speak to him?”

“This morning,” I say.

“I’ve never seen him this upset. He got his paper to offer a reward.”

“He’s a better guy than he lets on,” I say.

Pete grins. “I won’t tell him you said that.”

A NURSE WAKES ME at three o’clock in the morning.

I experience an instant wave of panic, which is just as quickly relieved by the fact that the nurse looks excited and pleased. “Mr. Carpenter, come with me. Your wife is responding to stimuli.”

I throw off the covers and rush out into the hall before the laughing nurse makes me realize that I’m in my underwear. I go back to the room and put on my pants, since the last thing I need is a floorful of sexually aroused nurses, ogling me. I’m still zipping up as I go back into the hall.

They let me in Laurie’s room for the first time, and I am disappointed to see that she is still unconscious. The head nurse is there, and she tells me that they put patients like Laurie through a regimen of stimuli four times a day, things like pressing a sharp item onto her feet, legs, and arms. For the first time since she’s been there, she has had a slight reaction.

“Talk to her,” the nurse says. “Take her hand and talk to her. If she’s going to respond to verbal stimuli, it will most likely be a voice she knows.”

I take Laurie’s left hand. It feels warm but lifeless, and I have to fight off a need to cry. That’s been happening to me a lot lately, if I’m not careful I could forfeit my membership in Macho Men International.

“Laurie, it’s me, Andy. Laurie can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

She doesn’t squeeze my hand, doesn’t react at all. I try it again, and again there’s nothing. I squeeze her hand, gently, as if I’m showing her how to do it.

Nothing.

I talk to her until about four thirty. I talk about Findlay, and Paterson, and movies, and baseball, and politics, and anything else I can think of. I keep asking her to squeeze my hand, and she keeps refusing.

I doze off until about a quarter to six, then wake up and start the process again. I’ve given a lot of closing arguments, and tried to convince a lot of juries, but I’ve never wanted to get through to anyone as much as I want to get through to Laurie right now.

“Laurie, squeeze my hand. Please. It’s me, Andy. I love you, and I want you to squeeze my hand.”

And she does. At least I think she does; it’s slight and almost imperceptible, so slight that I almost can’t tell if it’s me squeezing or her. So I try it again, and this time I know for sure.

Laurie can hear me.

I run out in the hall yelling to the nurses, and three of them come running. I get Laurie to repeat her performance for them, and they confirm for me that it’s real. And that it’s a damn good sign.

They send me out so that they can run some tests, and I head back to the room, my feet barely touching the floor. For the first time since this began, I’m feeling some optimism.

I take a shower, dress, and check back with the nurses. Laurie is still upstairs, so I go back to my room. Kevin has arrived and is of course thrilled to hear about Laurie’s progress.

“That is fantastic,” he says. “Beyond fantastic.”

“She’s a fighter,” I say.

Kevin brings me up to date on his meeting with Steven Timmerman. Steven is understanding and sympathetic to a point; he expressed his concern for Laurie and me, and will accept whatever decision I reach. He just wants it to be fast. He wants his trial to take place as quickly as possible. It’s a reasonable position for him to take.

Dr. Norville comes in for the daily update on Laurie’s condition. I basically understand about every fifth word he says, but the gist of it is that the brain scans they performed do not show damage, but that I shouldn’t take too much encouragement from that, because they are notoriously unreliable at this early stage.

He is pleased by her responses to the stimuli, but again cautions me in doctor-talk not to read too much into it. Laurie is not out of the woods, and won’t be until she wakes up. Ever willing to grasp on to straws with both hands, I like the fact that he doesn’t say “if ” she wakes up.

Kevin, whose favorite place in the entire world is a hospital, seizes upon the occasion to ask Dr. Norville about his own “unresponsive congestion.”

“How long have you been experiencing it?” Norville asks.

“About three weeks,” says Kevin.

“Do you have an internist?”

“Of course,” says Kevin, slightly miffed. You name the type of doctor, and Kevin has one.

“You might want to see him,” Dr. Norville says, and extricates himself from the conversation and the room.

Kevin is obviously not pleased with the interaction. “Does he really think it’s possible I haven’t consulted with my internist about this?”

I shake my head in feigned sympathy. “What planet is that guy living on?”

Sam Willis drops by to ask if I want an update on his progress in digging into the now concluded life of Walter Timmerman. The truth is that I don’t, but he’s worked hard and quickly on it, so I agree.

It is truly amazing how much of a person’s life is available on computers if you know where to look, have the expertise to do so, and are willing to skirt all applicable federal and local laws. Sam fits the bill on all those counts, and he brings me a treasure trove of information on Timmerman, he says-far too much to go through now. And he’ll have much more later on, when he really has time to get into it.

“Can you give me an overview?” I ask.

“Well, the guy was as rich as the media reports made him out to be; I would estimate his net worth at between four hundred and four hundred fifty million. And he didn’t spend much of it; he had the nice house, spent a lot on jewelry for the current wife…”

“Was Steven’s mother his first wife?”

Sam nods. “Yes. Died about six years ago. Cancer.”

“No recent unusual transactions?” I ask.

“Could be; I’m not sure. At this point I was more into gathering the information than analyzing it,” he says. “I’ve also got copies of the e-mails he sent and received for the last three months from his private and business addresses, but I didn’t read most of them.”

“How did you get that?” I ask.

“You don’t want to know,” he says, and he’s right about that. “By the way, I did happen to see one strange e-mail.”

“What was that?”

Rather than tell me about it, he searches through the reams of paper and finds a copy of it. It is from Robert Jacoby, whose e-mail sign-off identifies him as the director of laboratory operations at the Crescent Hills Forensics Laboratory.

The e-mail conveys what seems to be an annoyance on Jacoby’s part with Timmerman, though it is expressed rather gently:

Walter

I’ve chosen to report back to you in this informal way because of the unusual results we have gotten on the sample you submitted. As you no doubt are aware, the DNA from the sample is your own, as it is a perfect match from a previous sample of yours we have on file.

Did this represent something of a test you felt we needed to pass? That would surprise me, and the fact that you requested the results on a priority basis only adds to my puzzlement. Can you enlighten me?

All my best to you and Diana. Looking forward to getting you back on the golf course.

Robert

I won’t be able to place this in any kind of context until I go through everything Sam has brought, though he says he didn’t see a reply to Jacoby’s questions. Certainly the fact that a man who was soon to be a murder victim was experimenting in any way with his own DNA is at least curious, and something for me to look into carefully if I stay on the case.

But a nurse comes in and asks me to quickly come to Laurie’s room, so right now everything else is going to have to wait.

“ANDY.”

Laurie says it as I walk in the door. She sort of mumbles it, and it’s hard to make it out, but it is without a doubt the most beautiful rendition of my name that I have ever heard.

There is a searing pain in my throat as I fight back the need to cry. I don’t want her to see me cry, not now, because I don’t want her to misinterpret it. She might think I am upset about her condition, when I have actually never been happier than I am at this moment.

I walk to her side. “I’m here, Laurie. God, you look beautiful.”

I take her hand, and she seems to be struggling to speak. It looks as if one side of her face is unmoving and a little distorted. “Andy… don’t know what happened… to me.”

The doctor mentioned that she might have short-term memory loss, so I’m not surprised by this. I decided that I would tell her the truth, and I see no reason to change that decision now. “Someone shot you in the leg when you were in front of my house. You lost a lot of blood, but you’re going to be fine now.”

“Who?” she manages.

“We don’t know that yet, but we will. Believe me, we will.”

Tears start to stream down her face, but I see that they are only coming out of her right eye. It scares me, but I try not to show it. I assume she is crying at the fact that another human being would do this to her, but that’s just a guess. I don’t know what perfectly healthy women are thinking, and I doubt my abilities in this area are any better when the woman has a brain injury and is just coming out of a coma.

She doesn’t answer, just closes her eyes. I call the nurse over, and she takes Laurie’s hand and holds it, probably feeling her pulse. “She’s asleep,” the nurse says. “She needs to regain her strength.”

“Is Dr. Norville here?”

She nods. “He’s finishing up a procedure, and then he’ll be down.”

The “procedure” must require a lot of finishing, because it’s almost two hours before Dr. Norville comes down. He spends about ten minutes examining the sleeping Laurie, though she opens her eyes a few times during the process. She doesn’t say anything; just closes them again.

After he finishes, he looks at her chart for a few minutes, and makes some notations. I’m beyond anxious, and the process feels like it’s taking a week. If he doesn’t stop and tell me what the hell is going on, he’s going to wind up in a bed in the next room, with tubes stuck in his nose.

He finally puts the chart down and turns to me. “Making excellent progress,” he says.

“Any chance you could be more specific?”

He goes on to tell me that Laurie is recovering extraordinarily well, but is suffering the effects of lack of blood, and therefore lack of oxygen, to the brain. It is as if she suffered a minor stroke. Speech will be slightly difficult for a while, and she’ll have some loss of movement on her left side.

“But she’ll be okay?” I ask.

“With some therapy and hard work, she should return to normal, or near normal. If all goes well.”

“Where can that therapy take place? At home?”

He doesn’t see why not, though it will be expensive to bring in therapists, and insurance will not cover a good portion of it. That is not exactly a daunting problem for me, and he tells me that the hospital therapist will provide names. If Laurie continues her current progress, and if the proper arrangements are made, he expects she can go home within the week.

I can’t wait.

They tell me I have to leave the room so Laurie “can rest,” though I’m not quite sure why my being there prevents her from resting. We haven’t exactly been doing any dancing, or playing one-on-one basketball. When I resist, they bring over the head ICU nurse to enforce the ruling that I must depart.

The woman is intimidating and physically imposing to the point that she might be able to take Marcus two out of three in arm wrestling. Suffice it to say that I am out of there and in my own room in short order.

A sniffling Kevin is waiting for me when I get back, and he informs me that we have received notice from the court that Charles Robinson has filed suit regarding the custody of Waggy. He has taken an interesting approach: Rather than pursuing custody himself, he is seeking to replace me as custodian. It would have the same practical effect as his winning custody, but it might ultimately be more palatable to the court.

In the short term, though, this new development will likely be an annoyance and major time waster for Hachet-not to mention me-pissing him off at a time when I can’t afford to do that. He directed me to resolve the matter and contact Robinson, but I’ve been preoccupied with more important matters.

Robinson’s suit is not something I can afford to focus on, so instead Kevin and I talk about the strange e-mail from the lab director about Timmerman’s submitting his own DNA for testing. The lab director was puzzled by it, and Kevin and I both have reacted more strongly than that. Timmerman as a murder victim elevates the mystery of it, and requires us looking into it immediately.

Kevin, after hearing what Sam had to say, has once again been one step ahead of me and gone back to the office for the photos from the murder scene and autopsy report. Timmerman took a bullet in the forehead, but his face should have been recognizable to someone close to him.

I call Richard Wallace and ask him who identified Timmerman’s body, since it is not in the discovery materials. He puts me on hold for a few minutes to find out, and returns with the answer.

“The wife. Diana Timmerman,” he says.

“She was the only one?” I ask.

“As far as I can tell. There would have been no reason to question her identification, if that’s what you’re suggesting.”

“Nope,” I say.

“You have reason to doubt her? His face was mostly intact.”

I don’t want to share with Richard the knowledge I have about the lab director’s e-mail. I don’t know if it helps our defense in any way, and if it does, I certainly wouldn’t want to tip our hand now. Now that I’m feeling better about Laurie’s prospects, I am able to focus more on the case, and feeling like I want to continue representing Steven.

I call Marcus in the hope of learning if he’s made any progress in finding the piece of garbage who shot Laurie. I do this with some reservation, since it will by definition require having a conversation with Marcus, a process that is always bewildering and frustrating.

He answers his cell phone on the first ring. “Yuh.”

“Marcus?”

“Yuh.”

“It’s Andy. Everything okay?”

He doesn’t answer, which doesn’t surprise me. Words are precious to Marcus, and he doesn’t want to waste a “yuh” on idle chitchat.

“Any luck on IDing the shooter?” I ask.

“Yuh.”

“Who is it?”

“Childs,” he says. Or maybe he says “Chiles,” or “Giles,” or any one of a thousand other names. Marcus on a cell phone is even worse than Marcus in person.

“Childs?” I ask. “Like children?”

“Yuh.”

“Do you know his first name?”

“Yuh.”

“What is it?”

“Jimmy.”

“Have you found him yet?”

“Unh.”

“Are you going to?”

“Yuh.”

Fascinating as the call is, I extricate myself from it and marvel for a few moments at the terror Marcus must have caused in the informant community to extract this information so quickly.

I then call Pete Stanton and ask him if the police have made any progress on identifying the shooter. Ordinarily he would give me a hard time before telling me anything, but he knows the depth of our shared desire to nail the bastard.

“Nothing yet, but we’ll get there,” he says.

“The name Jimmy Childs mean anything to you?” I ask.

Pete is silent for a few moments. “You get that from Marcus?”

“Let’s just say I got a tip through my crack investigating team.”

“Childs is bad news, Andy. He’s hired help and doesn’t come cheap. He’d get up from breakfast to slit your throat, without his coffee getting cold. Even Marcus might have his hands full.”

“Who does he usually work for?” I ask.

“Anybody with enough cash. But the last we had heard he was out of the country.”

“Out of the country where?” I ask.

“The Middle East was the rumor, but it wasn’t confirmed,” he says.

“A high-priced hit man comes six thousand miles to shoot Laurie?” It’s bewildering, frustrating, and very frightening.

“What the hell could that be about?” Pete wonders, out loud.

“Marcus will find out,” I say.

“Andy, listen to me on this. Tell Marcus to be very, very careful with this guy.”

“Maybe you’ll find him first. Don’t you police do stuff like that for a living?”

He thinks for a moment, weighing the possibilities. “My money’s on Marcus,” he says.

LAURIE IS NOT IN INTENSIVE CARE when I get there in the morning.

My first reaction is to panic, but then the nurse tells me that she was moved to a private room during the night. In fact, it’s the one next to mine, and I didn’t even know it.

I take the steps, three at a time, to her new room. When I enter she has her eyes wide open, and she gives me a half smile with the side of the face that she has full movement in.

“It’s about time you woke up,” I say, and I go to her and give her a hug. I do it gently, so as not to hurt her, but she hugs me back almost as hard as ever. It feels great.

“Andy, you look tired,” she says. “You haven’t been sleeping.” Her speech is still slightly distorted, but much better than I was expecting.

“I’ve been out partying every night.”

“Andy, please tell me what happened. I don’t remember anything.”

She doesn’t even recall what I’ve already told her, so I relate the details of the incident that I know, and I can see her racking her brain to recall that morning. She draws a blank. “I don’t even remember getting up that day,” she says.

I nod. “The doctor said that was likely, but that your short-term memory might return over time. What about longer-term memory?”

“I think I’m okay,” she says. “Test me.”

“Do you remember when you said you would worship and adore me forever?”

She smiles and manages a very slight shake of her head. “Nope. Drawing a blank.”

“Laurie, does the name Jimmy Childs mean anything to you?”

She thinks for a few moments. “Should it? Because if I should know it, I’m failing the test.”

“He’s the guy Marcus said was the shooter.”

“Marcus is after him?”

I nod. “Yes. He didn’t take too kindly to somebody shooting you.”

“Marcus will kill him, Andy.”

“I’ve heard worse ideas,” I say. “But Pete thinks Marcus might have his hands full.” I go on to tell her what Pete related about Child’s résumé. Laurie is as baffled as to who could be behind this as I am.

We’re interrupted by a team of therapists coming in to work with Laurie. Feeling incredibly relieved by her condition, I take the opportunity to go down to the Tara Foundation, to check out how things are going, and to find out from Willie Miller how Tara and Waggy are doing.

I am delighted to find out that he has brought the two of them with him to the foundation, rather than leaving them alone at home. They like hanging out with the rescued dogs, especially Waggy, since it gives him an unlimited number of wrestling partners.

Tara seems a little out of sorts. This is probably the longest she’s gone without seeing me in a few years. I hardly ever take vacations, and if I do I bring her with me. I’m going to have to provide a ton of biscuits and some serious two-handed petting to get back in her good graces for this one.

Things at the foundation are going well. Willie and his wife, Sondra, have placed eleven dogs in homes this week. I feel guilty that I haven’t been helping out, and Willie feels guilty that he hasn’t visited Laurie, so we call ourselves even.

Willie of course wants to be brought up to date about everything, and I do so. He is not worried about Marcus’s ability to handle Jimmy Childs or anyone else on this planet. Willie holds a black belt in karate and is afraid of no one, but he once told me he couldn’t last ten seconds with Marcus.

“Maybe me and Sondra should be careful,” he says. “Waggy the psycho dog is bad luck.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that woman had him, and she got killed in the explosion. Then Laurie had him, and she got shot.”

Willie is not smiling when he says this, and he shouldn’t be. He’s pointing out the coincidence that two people who seemed to be in control of Waggy got killed. I am angry at myself that I didn’t even think of it.

I don’t believe in coincidences, especially where murders are involved. They might exist, but it doesn’t make sense to act as if they do.

I tell Willie to be careful, and not to tell anyone that he has Waggy.

Just in case.

IT’S TIME FOR ME TO TALK TO MY CLIENT.

There is no sense in our trying to construct a strategy to counter the prosecution before we know Steven’s version of the events. And time is a-wasting…

Kevin makes the arrangements, though I go to see Steven by myself. I find the first significant meeting like this, the one in which the client is called on to state the facts as he sees them, to go better when it’s just one-on-one. Clients seem to open up more.

Steven is clearly relieved to see me and hear that I am staying on the case. He expresses the proper concern for Laurie, but he is certainly more focused on his own predicament. I have to admit, if I were facing life in a seven-by-ten-foot cell, I’d be a tad self-centered as well.

What Steven has been living is not a life. He spends twenty-three hours a day in his cell, eats food just south of miserable, and is treated with a complete lack of respect and dignity. Any ability to control any part of his own existence has been taken away from him, and the desperation in his eyes is the same I have seen countless times with countless clients. I imagine it’s sort of like being a Cubs fan.

What Steven doesn’t fully realize is that, compared with most of the inmates, he is living life in the fast lane. Because he has not been convicted of anything, he is isolated from the other inmates in a cleaner area with relatively kindly guards. Should he be convicted, he’ll look back on these days with a wistful nostalgia.

I decide to hit him right between the eyes with my first question. “Steven, where were you the night of your father’s murder?”

He doesn’t blink. “I was home until about seven o’clock, then I drove to Paterson.”

“Why did you do that?”

“My father called and asked me to. He said he had something to show me that I needed to see right away.”

“Did he say what it was?” I ask.

“No, but he sounded upset, and I was worried because my father never sounded upset. He was always in complete control of everything.”

“And you had no idea why?”

Steven shakes his head. “I assumed it had something to do with his work.”

“Why would you assume that?”

“He had just been very intense and secretive about it lately. But his calling me might have had nothing to do with that. He certainly wasn’t doing any of the work in downtown Paterson.”

“Did you meet your father that night?”

Steven shakes his head. “No, I went to the restaurant he specified, I think it’s called Mario’s, but he never showed up. He told me to wait outside, but after about an hour I went in and had a beer. I waited another hour after that, then tried to reach him on his cell. When I couldn’t get him, I went home.”

This part of the story checks out. Steven got a parking ticket outside Mario’s, probably when he was in having his drink, which is how the police and prosecution knew he was there. Walter Timmerman’s body was found about two blocks away.

“Why didn’t you tell any of this to the police?”

“They never asked; they never talked to me at all. Then they arrested that other guy, and I figured he had done it, so I didn’t think to go to them with it. Is that somehow bad for me?”

“We’ll deal with it,” I say, even though we may not be able to. “Were you and your father close?”

“Yes and no. It was kind of day-to-day.”

“He took you out of his will.”

Steven surprises me by laughing. “About a hundred times, but he always put me back in so he’d have something he could threaten me with.”

“But you didn’t care?” I ask.

“No, and it drove him crazy. I mean the money would have been nice, but having an actual, real-life father would have been nicer. Once I enlisted in the marines, things were never the same between us.”

“He was opposed to that?”

“As opposed as a human being could be. Which I’m sure a shrink would say is why I joined.”

“And you became an expert in explosives.”

He nods. “Is that why they think I blew up the house?”

“It doesn’t help,” I say. “What did you and your mother argue about that day?”

“Stepmother.”

I nod and stand corrected. “Stepmother.”

“Waggy. She didn’t care about dogs at all, but he was a possession she wanted, because of who he was. A future champion.”

“Did you resolve anything?”

“No, I was hoping you would do that. I still am.”

“Do you have any idea who might have wanted your father and stepmother dead?”

“None whatsoever.”

“Steven, I need to show you a picture of your father’s body taken at the murder scene. It’s not going to be a pleasant thing to look at, but it’s important.”

“Why?”

“Some information has come up about him experimenting with his own DNA. We have to make sure that he was really the victim.”

“No one identified the body?”

“Your stepmother.”

He nods. “Okay, let me see it.”

I can see him tense up as I take the photograph out of the envelope. I put it on the table and he looks at it for a few seconds, then closes his eyes and pushes it away before reopening them.

“It’s him,” he says. “That’s my father.”

“You’re one hundred percent sure?” I ask. I’m disappointed, even though I thought it was very unlikely that Walter Timmerman faked his death. But it would have been far easier to defend Steven from a charge of murdering someone if the victim was not actually dead.

“I am completely and totally positive.”

We talk some more, and he asks me how Waggy is doing. It reminds me that Hatchet had been pressing me to find a solution to the issue of at least temporary custody.

“Are you familiar with Charles Robinson?” I ask.

“Sure, he was a close friend of my father’s. We called him Uncle Charlie.”

“He’s trying to get Waggy,” I say. “How would you feel about that?”

“Charles shows dogs as a hobby, like my father did. I think they even co-owned a few dogs. He wouldn’t mistreat Waggy or anything, but he’d put him into training.”

“Anything wrong with that?”

“Depends on your point of view,” he says, leaving no doubt what his point of view is.

When I leave the prison my gut feeling is that I’m somewhat relieved. He answered my questions head-on and did not give the appearance of having something to hide.

Which is to say, my gut tells me that either Steven is telling the truth, or he isn’t.

In case you haven’t noticed, my gut isn’t that gutsy.

DR. ROBERT JACOBY readily agrees to talk to me, but he warns he can’t talk to me.

I called ahead and told him that I wanted to discuss Walter Timmerman, though I did not mention the strange e-mail that Sam found. Jacoby agreed, but alerted me that he regarded his interactions with Timmerman as confidential.

Crescent Hills Forensics Laboratory is located in Teaneck, not far from the campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University. The outside looks like a white spaceship, with a flat, oval, sweeping roof sitting atop a mostly glass building like a white sombrero. It seems to have been the work of a blindfolded architect who was given the mandate to make the building as modern as possible, so that clients would assume the work done inside was state of the art. He was obviously instructed not to be concerned if the building turned out to be embarrassingly ugly.

Jacoby’s office is a study in chrome and glass, with not a test tube or Bunsen burner to be found. He is dressed in a perfectly tailored suit that certainly never knew the indignity of spending a moment on a clothing store rack. This guy has his clothes custom-made as surely as I don’t. And if he’s going to roll up his sleeves and get to work, he’s going to have to take off his gold cuff links first.

I accept his offer of a glass of Swedish mineral water, and then ask him about his business relationship with Walter Timmerman. He smiles condescendingly and then shakes his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Carpenter, but our communications are confidential.”

“I wasn’t asking about specifics,” I say, though I’m certainly planning to.

“The line is hard to draw,” he says, “so I prefer not to say anything. Even though Mr. Timmerman is deceased, our reputation is such that-”

This is getting me nowhere, so I interrupt. “Were you Mr. Timmerman’s personal physician?”

“No.”

“His lawyer?”

“Certainly not. But-”

“Are you a priest? A rabbi?”

“Mr. Carpenter, Walter Timmerman was a close, personal friend of mine, and I will honor his memory. You need to understand that you cannot come in here and bully me.”

“Noted,” I say, as I prepare to bully him. “Now, here’s what you need to understand. I have a few questions that I need answers for. It will be relatively painless for you. The alternative is that I serve you with a subpoena and force you to sit through a full-blown deposition, which will feel like a verbal rectal exam, conducted with a rusty spatula.”

He doesn’t say anything for a few moments, no doubt considering his options and visualizing the spatula. I decide to continue.

“Dr. Jacoby, why did Walter Timmerman send you his own DNA to be tested?”

He reacts to this with apparent shock. “How did you know about that?”

“It came up as part of the investigation.”

He sags slightly, which I take as a sign that he is going to drop his resistance to answering my questions. “I’m not sure why he sent me that. I asked him, but he never responded. I found it to be something of an affront, both professional and personally.”

“An affront in what way?”

“Well, it seemed to be a test of sorts, yet he couldn’t think we would do anything but pass it. Frankly, it was slightly bizarre.”

“Could he have just been wanting to get his own DNA on file?”

Jacoby shakes his head. “No, he had done that long ago, and he wouldn’t have forgotten that. This was a simple match of DNA in pristine condition. There is not a laboratory in the country that would have missed it.”

I have no more idea what to make of this than Jacoby. I could certainly be wasting my time on it as well; it likely has nothing whatsoever to do with Timmerman’s murder. “And the DNA was absolutely identical?” I ask.

“A perfect match.”

“You’re positive?”

He looks at me with clear disdain. “Mr. Carpenter, do you know anything about DNA?”

“I wouldn’t know it if it came in here and bit me on the ass.”

He frowns. “Well, my associates and I know plenty about it. But we were novices compared with Walter Timmerman. Think of us as watchmakers, with DNA as the watch. We understand watches, we can fix them, we know what makes them tick. But Walter Timmerman knew why they tick, he understood them at their core. He knew that the DNA he sent us was his, he knew it was uncontaminated, and he knew that we would find it as such. Why he sent it is a mystery we will probably never understand.”

“But he must have had a reason.”

“On that we can agree,” he says. “Walter Timmerman had a reason for everything he did.”

On the way back to the hospital, I try to make sense of what Jacoby told me. He was certainly telling the truth; the e-mail confirms that. But he was not able to shed any light on the mystery, and therefore I did not accomplish much of anything.

One of the most frustrating things about working on a case like this is that we are obligated to follow every investigative road, not knowing where it will lead. Very often we don’t find out that it has no relevance to our case until we get to the end of that road. Worse yet, sometimes the road has no end, and we just keep moving forward blindly and unproductively, wasting valuable time and resources.

There is no evidence, not a shred, that the DNA dustup between Walter Timmerman and Robert Jacoby had anything to do with his murder, or that of his wife. All it provides me with is a hunch, and a road to go down.

Which is better than nothing, but not by much.

LAURIE IS COMING HOME.

With special equipment, and her team of therapists, and me, and two squad cars that Pete Stanton is sending along for protection. It will be a glorious procession down Park Avenue in Paterson.

Laurie said that Dr. Norville is delighted with her progress, though it is hard for me to picture him delighted. She swears that he even smiled once. A little.

He told her that she has at least two months of therapy ahead of her, but that over time she should regain full movement and normal speech. She starts to cry as she tells me this; it has obviously been an incredibly emotional and trying experience for her.

I turn away and pretend to help her pack so she won’t see me tearing up as well. Crying is for girls; besides, I’ve been there, done that while Laurie was in a coma.

Laurie understands that she will not be able to work for at least the two months, and she has so notified the city manager in Findlay. Her second in command will fill in, no doubt adequately, since Findlay is not exactly Dodge City. Except for the aberrational murders that I went up there to investigate a couple of years ago, the closest Findlay has come to violence in the streets was when word got out that Brett Favre was going to the Jets.

“Andy, are you okay with my staying at your house through all this?” she asks.

I think for a moment, trying to search my memory to see if I’ve ever heard a stupider question. None comes to mind.

“Let’s try it for an hour or two and see if it works out,” I say.

“I’m serious,” she says. “It will cause some turmoil.” There are some sounds that she is still having trouble saying, and the oy sound is one of them. It sounds like turmill. I can see the frustration in her face as she hears herself.

“There is nothing that would give me more pleasure than you spending two months at our house.”

I’m sure she noticed that I said “our house,” but she doesn’t correct me. In my pathetic little world, that qualifies as a damn good sign.

Laurie is very shaky on her feet, so she doesn’t resist the hospital’s policy that patients must use a wheelchair on departure. They will let me do the pushing, and once we make final arrangements for the therapist’s equipment to arrive, we’re off.

I feel a hell of a lot better leaving than I did the night I arrived.

When we get home, Laurie wants to walk into the house under her own power, though she holds on to my arm as she does. I help her up the steps and into bed, and I can see that the effort has exhausted her.

“Andy, it’s so good to be here. I feel better already.”

“That’s good, because you’re going to have to pull your own weight. Light housework, cooking, some gardening, sexual favors, that kind of thing.”

Laurie doesn’t answer, mainly because she is already sound asleep. I’ll have to write that line down to use it later.

I call Willie and ask him to bring Tara and Waggy over. He’s busy at the foundation, and promises to do so when they close for the evening. I’m slightly nervous about this, since we have determined that possession of Waggy has proven somewhat unhealthy in the past. But for the time being I won’t take the dogs for public walks; I’ll just play with them in the backyard, which is surrounded by a fence and can’t be seen from off the property.

Laurie wakes up ravenously hungry and anxious to eat the farthest thing possible from hospital food. Since my understanding of cooking ranks with my understanding of DNA, I offer her a bunch of take-out options. She chooses Taco Bell, and I can’t say I’m disappointed with the choice.

I go to the Taco Bell on Route 4 in nearby Elmwood Park and pretty much order everything on the menu. When I get back, Tara and the maniacal Waggy greet me at the door. Willie is sitting on the edge of Laurie’s bed, and they are laughing and enjoying each other’s company.

Things are getting back to normal, and normal is damn good.

Willie takes one look at the bags of food, smacks his hands together, and announces that he is starved. That, coupled with Laurie’s previously announced hunger, is going to leave me sucking on the sauce packets for nourishment.

I bring out a large tray and some plates, and we eat right there in the bedroom. I wind up with a steak quesadilla and half of a chalupa, and consider myself lucky. Laurie and Willie eat enough for twelve normal people.

As I’m cleaning up, the phone rings, and Laurie answers it. Her “hello” is soon followed with, “Great! I’m doing great! It’s so nice to hear from you.”

What follows is a three-or four-minute conversation, mostly about Laurie’s condition, job status, and immediate plans. There are long pauses in which she listens to apparently lengthy replies. It all ultimately ends with, “He’s right here, Marcus. I’ll put him on.”

As she hands me the phone, I say, “You’ve been having that conversation with Marcus? My Marcus?” The longest conversation he and I have ever had consisted of six grunts and a nod. The way this one sounded, Laurie could have been talking to Henry Kissinger.

I take the phone and Marcus says, “Got him.”

“Who? Childs?”

“Yuh. Bergen Street.”

“Where on Bergen Street?”

“Elevator.”

I was once present when Marcus questioned someone in a dilapidated old warehouse at the end of Bergen Street near the Passaic River, hanging him out over a sixth-floor elevator shaft to encourage his truthful responses. It was vintage Marcus, and I think that he’s now telling me he has Childs at the same place.

“You got questions?” he asks.

“For him? Absolutely. Should I come down there?”

“Now,” he says, and hangs up.

I get up and tell Laurie and Willie about the conversation. Willie insists on going with me, an idea that Laurie encourages. That area can be dangerous at night, and in Childs we are talking about a hired killer, albeit one whom Marcus apparently has under control.

I’d certainly like to bring Willie along, since I’m generally afraid of being alone in my bedroom if it gets too dark. He also shares Laurie’s ability to understand Marcus’s unique way of speaking. I’m reluctant to leave Laurie alone for an extended time, but she points out that her assailant is obviously not available at the moment to come after her.

Willie and I drive down to the designated meeting place, which if anything is more run-down than it was last time. Marcus signals to us from a window on the sixth floor, and we start trudging up the steps. When we’re on the third-floor landing, a rat runs across the floor in front of us, causing me to jump so high I almost fall back down the steps.

“I’ve got to make some changes in my life,” I say, once I’ve recovered.

By the time we get to the sixth floor, I am gasping for air, or dust, or anything else I can take in. Willie, on the other hand, looks like he could go another fifty or sixty stories.

We enter a large room, lit only by moonlight through the window and a large flashlight that Marcus has rested on a table. He is sitting calmly in a chair, while a man I have never seen before sits on the floor, tied to a radiator. Even in the sitting position, it is obvious he is very large, maybe four inches taller and thirty pounds heavier than Marcus. He looks none the worse for wear; Marcus apparently got him into this position without resorting to violence.

“What you want to know?” he asks.

“Well, to start, whether he shot Laurie.”

Before Marcus answers, an obviously unrepentant Childs laughs. “Of course I shot her, I’m just sorry I didn’t kill the bitch.”

Maybe I’ve felt more anger and disgust in my life, but I can’t remember when. I try to control myself and talk calmly to Marcus. “I want to know who paid him, and why.”

Marcus looks at me, expressionless. “S’all?”

“Saul?” I ask. “Who is Saul?” As always, talking to Marcus is leaving me frustrated, so I turn to Willie. “Who the hell is Saul?”

“Marcus is asking if that’s all you want to know,” he says.

“Oh, sorry.” I turn back to Marcus. “Anything you can find out is fine, but that’s basically it.”

Marcus nods. “Take his gun.” He points to a gun on top of the table, which I didn’t see before.

I try to talk softly, so Childs can’t hear me. “Marcus, I’m not going to shoot anyone, not even him.”

“Take the gun,” Marcus repeats, and then takes his own gun out of his pocket. “And this.”

“Marcus, can you tell me what’s going on?”

Willie decides to intervene at this point, and walks over to Marcus. They talk for about a minute or so, with Willie nodding the whole time.

Willie turns to me and talks loud enough for Childs to hear. “Marcus got the drop on this asshole and brought him here. The guy thinks he can take Marcus, so Marcus is going to give him a chance. It will also give Marcus a chance to ask some questions.”

Childs laughs when he hears this; his lack of fear of Marcus is giving me the creeps.

I whisper to Willie: “Can’t we stay here, with you holding the guns, just in case?”

“I suggested that, but Marcus said no.”

“What’s he going to do to him?” I whisper.

“The guy shot Laurie,” Willie says. “Laurie is just about Marcus’s favorite person in the world. I don’t think you’d want to sell him life insurance, you know?”

“Willie, are we talking about murder?”

“No, you’re talking about murder. Me and Marcus… we’re talking about self-defense. You’re a lawyer; you don’t know the difference?”

I’ve got a bit of a dilemma here. If I just leave and don’t try to exercise any influence over the situation, one of these guys might wind up dead. Also, Childs looks every bit as tough as Pete described him, so I cannot be sure if Marcus’s confidence, in addition to Willie’s, is misplaced.

Even if Marcus prevails, it represents vigilante justice of a kind that I ordinarily do not condone. There is no question but that the proper thing is to turn Childs over to the police. Still, if anyone deserves swift and deadly justice it’s Childs, a piece of garbage who admitted to shooting Laurie and vowed to do it again.

The other factor to consider is that there is a far greater chance that Marcus can get Childs to talk than the police could.

I walk over to Marcus. “Marcus, are you sure about this?” “Yuh.”

“This guy is very dangerous. Will you be really careful?” “Yuh.”

“And you’ll try your best to avoid killing him?”

“Yuh.”

I wish I could let that be the final word.

AS SOON AS WILLIE AND I leave the room, I grab his arm.

“What’s the matter?” he asks.

“Sshhh,” I say softly, putting my fingers to my mouth to emphasize that I want him to be quiet. I look around, trying to find a vantage point from which I can watch what happens in the room.

Fortunately, there are literally holes in the wall, and I find one that lets me see Marcus and Childs clearly, yet it is small enough that they’re unlikely to know I’m there. “I can’t just leave him like this,” I whisper to Willie. “If something went wrong, I’d never forgive myself.”

“Marcus will be really pissed,” he says.

“Only if you tell him.”

“What are you going to do if Marcus is losing? Shoot Childs?”

I shake my head. “I could never do that. It’s still a human life we’re talking about. You can shoot him.”

Willie just shakes his head in disapproval, but he quickly finds another place from which he can see as well. I also notice that he has one of the guns out and ready.

We watch as Marcus goes over to Childs and starts to untie him.

As he does so, Childs laughs and says, “You’re a bigger asshole than I thought.”

Marcus doesn’t answer; he just continues freeing Childs from the bonds. At the moment he is free, Childs lashes out and punches Marcus in the face. The sound of fist hitting face is a sickening thud, and Marcus staggers back a few feet.

Childs is up and at him like a cat, showing frightening quickness for a man his size. He lands two more punches, one to the side of Marcus’s head and another that glances off his shoulder. Marcus backs up a few more steps.

I can see Willie’s grip tighten on the gun to the point that I’m afraid he’s going to shoot himself. But we keep our positions; it seems too soon to intervene.

Suddenly we see a slight movement, and Childs screams in pain. The punch from Marcus was so quick and short that it was hard to detect, but it leaves Childs holding his stomach and gasping in pain on the floor.

Marcus moves toward him and Childs somehow summons the strength to punch at him again. This time it’s done with far less force, probably because it’s difficult to punch and wretch at the same time.

Marcus leans down and grabs Childs, lifting him off the floor and over his head as if he were a rag doll. He throws him halfway across the room, and Childs lands in a heap. It is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen in my life.

Marcus walks across to Childs, who is unsuccessfully trying to get up. Marcus pulls his fist back and lifts him halfway up by his collar, preparing to hit the defenseless man in the face. There is no doubt in my mind that it will kill him, and even though I have a great desire to look away, I can’t.

I’m cringing, waiting for the blow to be delivered, when Marcus thinks better of it. He relaxes his hand and lets Childs go, and watches as he crumples to the floor.

Willie looks at me, and I just nod. We turn and go down the stairs. I think Marcus can handle the rest of this on his own, and I sure as hell don’t want him knowing we stayed to see what happened.

Laurie is sleeping when I get home. I’m certainly not going to wake her, so I don’t get to tell her about the events of the lovely evening spent with Marcus and Childs. It’s probably just as well: She needs a lot of rest, and dealing with this lunacy can’t help.

She’s still sleeping when I get up in the morning, and only wakes up after I shower and have coffee. She wants to be updated on the evening’s events, and I take her through it. She’s anxious to hear from Marcus to learn if he got Childs to talk, as am I, but thinks I did the right thing by leaving when I did.

Two off-duty policemen show up, whom I am hiring to guard the house while Laurie is in it. They will alternate with two other cops, so that the house will always be covered, at least until we decide it’s no longer necessary. Even though Marcus has been able to deal with Childs, the fact is that he was hired to shoot her, and whoever did the hiring can find someone else to attempt the job.

Laurie’s daytime nurse and two physical therapists show up a few minutes later. I make a note to stock the refrigerator; these people are going to have to eat and drink. I have seemingly overnight gone from hermit to host, and it’s not a role I’m used to.

Satisfied that Laurie is well taken care of, I head for the office, where Kevin and Edna are waiting for me. Edna has taken to coming in relatively on time since Laurie was shot; she seems to want to be around to help if she can. It’s a side of her I haven’t seen before, mainly because it hasn’t existed before.

Laurie sleeps late and Edna is coming in to work early. I have undoubtedly entered the bizarro world.

Kevin has characteristically analyzed our case and laid out the things we need to do to really get started. First on the list is a trip down to the Walter Timmerman murder scene. He knows that I always like to start at the beginning and get a feel for myself what happened. I know I’m not going to magically find some evidence that the police missed, but it helps me feel grounded.

We still haven’t heard from Marcus, and I’m starting to get a little worried. I also haven’t heard from Pete Stanton, though Marcus was supposed to bring Childs to the police when he was done with him.

Kevin and I arrive at the murder scene, and my guess is that if you had given friends of Walter Timmerman’s ten thousand guesses as to the location where he might someday die, this actual place in downtown Paterson would have placed behind Mozambique and Mars.

I’m sure the feeling Kevin and I have is different from what we would experience if we came here at night, which is when Timmerman took the bullet. At this hour of the day the feeling is dreary and hopeless; it seems as if all available energy has been sucked out of the neighborhood. The unemployed, many of them probably homeless, get through the day talking on the corners and reclining on the curbs. For some reason I think of the line in the Simon and Garfunkel song, “A good day’s when I ain’t got no pain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” By that standard, these people seem to be experiencing a good day, but their lives have surely long ago started “slip-sliding away.”

Were we here at night, we would likely be afraid. It would be a threatening, dangerous environment. Of course, the only way Kevin and I would come here at night would be in an army tank, encased in a bulletproof bubble, guarded by a marine battalion and Marcus.

I can’t stop thinking about Marcus. What if Childs somehow prevailed after we left? Maybe he hit Marcus over the head with a pipe when he wasn’t looking. Marcus is not invulnerable; even Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes.

Timmerman was shot in an alley behind a convenience store.

Kevin and I enter the store, which seems to only sell items identified by their Spanish name, and we talk to the clerk behind the counter. He’s about eighteen years old, and watches us approach with obvious indifference.

“Hi. We’re investigating the murder that took place in that alley awhile back. We’d like to look around, if that’s okay with you.”

He doesn’t say a word; I can’t tell if he doesn’t understand English or is just not interested in the way we are using it.

“So we’ll just look around, all right?”

Again not a word.

“Kev, you want to jump in here?” I ask.

“No, you’re doing great.”

“Thanks.”

I reach for a package of Mentas, which looks and sounds like it must be mints, and hand the clerk a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” I say, and for the first time I see a flicker of understanding.

“We’ll be out back,” I say, and Kevin and I leave the store.

“Out back” is little more than a few Dumpsters and some garbage that didn’t make its way into one of them. It is no longer a protected crime scene, but there remains the faint outline of a chalk mark that identified where Timmerman’s body was found. It is covered by an overhang from the building, which is why it hasn’t been completely washed away by summer rains. There are also what appear to be faded bloodstains on a cement wall nearby.

There is not going to be anything for us to find here, and I can’t imagine Walter Timmerman felt any differently that night. From what I know about him, there does not seem to be a possible reason for him to have come here willingly. In the unlikely event he was out for drugs, or sex, he could have found a much better venue.

It seems far more likely that he was brought here for the purpose of being killed.

“He had to have been forced to come here,” I say.

Kevin nods. “That’s how I see it as well. Especially at night.”

“Why don’t you come back here tonight and check it out?” I ask.

Kevin smiles. “You don’t pay me enough, boss.”

On the way back to the office, I’m feeling somewhat rejuvenated. Going to the murder scene is primarily responsible for this; it has focused me on the case, and at the same time made me more optimistic about its outcome. Nothing like the bloodstained scene of a brutal killing to cheer up Andy Carpenter.

I can see a son like Steven, who perhaps felt wronged his whole life by a domineering father, flipping out and murdering that father in a momentary rage. But I can’t see him bringing Walter down to the area we just visited and committing the murder in cold-blooded fashion. It’s possible, I know, but I just can’t see it.

Laurie’s ongoing recovery has also enabled me to concentrate on the case in a way I couldn’t while I was in fear for her. It was beyond distracting to be worried about her twenty-four hours a day, and I know now that I could not have continued on the case were she not doing so well.

She is in capable hands, and well protected, and while I will think about her a lot, I won’t obsess about it.

My only distraction now is Marcus, and the fact that more than sixteen hours have passed since Willie and I left him with Childs, and I have not heard a word. It’s ludicrous to consider myself responsible for Marcus’s protection and physical well-being, but if last night somehow ended badly, I don’t know that I’ll ever forgive myself for leaving him there.

I decide to call Laurie and see how she’s doing, only to realize that I neglected to bring my cell phone with me. It was a stupid thing to do: With all that is going on I need to be reachable at all times.

I borrow Kevin’s cell and call home, and Willie Miller answers. “Where the hell you been?” he asks.

I’m worried, so I decide I prefer asking questions to answering them. “Is Laurie all right?”

“Yeah, she’s fine, but we’ve been trying to find you.” “Why?”

“Marcus is here.”

LAURIE IS DOING PHYSICAL THERAPY when Kevin and I get home.

Willie is in the den with Tara and Waggy, feet up on the coffee table, drinking a beer and watching ESPN. Tara is working methodically on a rawhide chewie, while Waggy’s front legs are going a mile a minute as he furiously tries to burrow a hole in the carpet.

Willie tells me that Marcus is in the kitchen getting something to eat. I have seen Marcus eat once before, and it is seared into my memory. While I have stocked the refrigerator because of all the people in the house, Marcus will clean it out by himself. Then, if memory serves, he will belch once and start hunting for more food.

“What happened after we left last night?” I ask Willie.

“Laurie said to wait for her to finish her therapy. She wants to be there when we tell you. She’s almost done.”

“I don’t want to wait,” I say.

Willie shrugs. “You can always ask Marcus.”

“I’ll wait.”

Laurie is finished in ten minutes. During that time I hear noises coming from the kitchen, but I am not about to go in there to see what is going on.

She calls us to the bedroom; she is back in bed and obviously exhausted from her efforts. I have seen her run five miles without breathing heavily, and now a few minutes of exercise wipes her out.

“We talked to Marcus and learned what happened after you left. It’s not good news.”

“What do you mean?”

She nods. “Marcus asked Childs the questions you and he had discussed. He is confident that Childs had an incentive to tell the truth.”

“Who hired him?”

“Childs didn’t know; nor did he know why. It was all done in secrecy, and he had no personal contact with the man. He was paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars, with the promise of another two fifty when the jobs were completed.”

“Five hundred thousand dollars?” I repeat. It’s an amazing figure. Then I realize that Laurie said “jobs.” “There was more than one job?”

“Yes. Andy, Childs killed Diana Timmerman. He planted the explosives in the house.”

“What?” I look at Kevin, and he is as bewildered as I am. None of this makes any sense; it’s connecting two different things that I thought had no connection at all.

“Why the hell would someone want to kill you and Diana Timmerman?”

“Andy, Childs wasn’t after me. He was told to shoot the dog. He was told to kill Waggy.”

“Waggy?” I point to him. “This Waggy?”

“Yes.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Somebody paid a hit man five hundred grand to shoot a dog?”

“Marcus was positive about it,” Willie says.

I have no idea what to make of this. It simply does not compute. “Where is Childs now?”

“That’s the bad news,” Laurie says, and she turns to Willie.

“He went for a swim,” Willie says. “But I don’t think he got very far, because he has a broken neck.”

“Marcus killed him?”

Laurie nods. “He was going to turn him in to the police, but Childs took another run at him, and Marcus got a little carried away. He said he dropped him in the river.”

“Damn.” Hearing that Childs is dead doesn’t exactly bring me to tears, and I’m not likely to reflect that his untimely demise “really puts things into perspective.” The problem is that now I have a million more questions to ask him, with no ability to do so.

The truth is that I am defending someone against a charge of double homicide, and I had the real murderer in my hands and let him get away. And thanks to Marcus, he’s not coming back.

Had I realized that the shooting of Laurie and the Timmerman murders were connected, I would have gotten all the information out of him that I could, and then turned him in as the real murderer. And I should have realized that the shootings might be connected; as Willie had pointed out, both Diana Timmerman and Laurie were connected to Waggy when they were victimized.

I’m so frustrated by this turn of events that I go into the kitchen to question Marcus personally, to see if he knows more than has been drawn out of him. I have to wait what seems like twenty minutes while he finishes chewing the four or five pounds of food in his mouth.

I ultimately get nowhere; Marcus doesn’t even know for sure if Childs is responsible for killing Walter Timmerman. It’s not Marcus’s fault; he asked the questions I wanted him to ask. It’s my fault for not understanding that the events could all be connected, though I still don’t know how they possibly could be.

And now it’s too late.

Of course, there is always the chance that Childs was playing a game with Marcus, and that he was not telling the truth when he said Waggy was the target. I mean, Waggy can be annoying, but not quite that annoying. The problem with this theory is that Marcus is not the type one would have a tendency to joke with, especially when the potential joker is about to have his neck broken.

But if there is some wealthy lunatic out there who has decided Waggy is to be killed, then I have to be the wealthy lunatic who is going to protect him, especially since he is going to be hanging out with Laurie and Tara.

It makes the custody fight with Robinson all the more important. Hatchet has set a date for the hearing, which will actually be during Steven’s trial. It is on the calendar for two hours, and Hatchet made it clear that he is not happy about interrupting the trial. I have not handled Hatchet well in all of this, although Hatchet-handling is a rather delicate task in any event.

The off-duty cops I’ve hired will stay on, but now that Marcus is free I’m going to bring him on as well. He can be Waggy’s bodyguard and double as my investigator. It will make me feel better to have him on the team; Marcus can be a really comforting teammate.

I CAN TELL that Martha Wyndham considers my request to be a little strange.

I’ve called to ask her to arrange a meeting for me with someone who knows all there is to know about dog shows. She hesitates for a moment, no doubt wondering how this can possibly help Steven.

“Well… sure… I guess I can do that,” she says. “Is this about Waggy?”

“It impacts on the case in general. It’s quite important.”

“What is it you want to know specifically? That way I can figure out the best person for you to talk to.”

“A person with as much general knowledge about the process as possible. Also with a knowledge of the business end of things.”

“The business end?” she asks.

“Right. The value of the dogs, the prize money they can win, that kind of thing.” There is always the chance that some rival of Timmerman’s on the dog show circuit decided to remove the human and canine competition that Timmerman and Waggy represented. It’s far-fetched and ridiculous, but I’m operating in a world where an international hit man targeted a Bernese mountain dog.

She says that she’ll get back to me after making some calls, and after I hang up, Kevin and I discuss with whom we might want to share the information Marcus provided about Childs. We decide that there is no upside to telling Richard Wallace what we know; we can always do that later if it is to our advantage.

But I would like Childs’s body to be found, if only to prove later on that he was in the area, should we want to do so.

I call Pete Stanton at his office, and he characteristically answers the phone with, “What the hell do you want now?”

“I just had an incredibly weird conversation,” I say.

“You’re still calling those phone sex lines?”

“No, this was from an anonymous tipster. He called himself A. T.”

“A. T.?” Pete asks.

“Yes,” I say. “I assume it stands for ‘Anonymous Tipster.’ ” “You getting to the point anytime soon?”

“Yes. So A. T. calls to tell me that a criminal named Jimmy

Childs has died.”

“Is that right? Did he mention if this criminal died of natural causes?”

“He said it was a boating accident in the Passaic River, near Bergen Street in downtown Paterson.” Of course, there hasn’t been a boat there since Revolutionary War days.

“Probably a yacht race gone bad,” Pete says. “What did A. T. sound like?”

“I think he was English, probably in his sixties. Very stuffy way of speaking… said ‘cheerio’ a lot.”

“Sounds like either Winston Churchill or Marcus,” Pete says in his best deadpan voice.

“Couldn’t be Marcus. He doesn’t say ‘cheerio.’ He doesn’t even eat them; he’s a cornflakes guy.”

“You got anything else you want to tell me?” Pete asks. “Not right now.”

When I get off the phone, Edna tells me that Sam Willis has been waiting to see me. My mind is a song-talking blank, but I tell her to have him come in anyway. Hopefully he’ll let me off the hook.

Sam comes in with a briefcase so large it looks more like a suitcase. He starts to unload it onto the only place in my office that can accommodate all the paperwork, which is the couch.

“What the hell is all that?” I ask.

“Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the lives of Walter and Diana Timmerman.”

I start to skim through a bit of it while he continues to put the papers on the couch. He’s got phone bills, checking accounts, e-mails, brokerage accounts, utility bills… it’s an amazing display.

“This is unbelievable,” I say. “How did you find the time to do all this?”

“Hey, come on, you give me a job, I do it.”

“Have you gotten any sleep?”

“Of course,” he says. “In fact, last night I was trying to finish, but my head grew heavy and my sight grew dim, so I had to stop for the night.”

He’s doing the Eagles’ “Hotel California,” and it’s a sign of my level of maturity that I feel a hint of excitement about it. I’m an Eagles fan, and when it comes to their lyrics, I can song-talk anybody under the table.

“I would think it must have been hard to pick it up again in the morning,” I say. “You had to find the passage back to the place you were before.”

He smiles slightly. The battle has been joined. But while we’re battling, I’d also like to hear about the Timmermans. I ask Sam if he noticed anything that seemed unusual.

“If we were talking about my world, everything would be unusual. For them, who knows?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Timmerman probably made a hundred international calls in the week before he died. Europe, Middle East… he spread it around. And every call was to a different number; he never repeated the same number. Not once.”

“How do you read that?” I ask.

“Either he or the people he was calling didn’t want anybody to find out who it was. My guess is that the calls were routed to one, or maybe a few, numbers, but in a way that couldn’t be traced.”

I nod; it’s possible he’s right, or it could be that Timmerman was just calling a lot of different people. “What else?”

“He had twenty million dollars wired to him from the Bank of Switzerland a week before he died. Now, he didn’t need it to eat, believe me, but it’s still a nice piece of change.”

“Anything about what he was working on in those final weeks?”

“No, and there’s a bunch of e-mails where people were asking him about it. There was no way he was sharing it with anybody; it was like he put up a wall. But he kept telling people that he had no time to see them, or go out, because he was so busy. It’s all here.”

“What about the wife?” I ask.

“She spent money like the world was coming to an end. You name the store, she spent a fortune there. Jewelry, cars… unbelievable.”

“I know the type,” I say. “Her mind was Tiffany-twisted, she got the Mercedes bends.”

He smiles. “And my guess is she got a lot of pretty, pretty boys that she called friends.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She made twelve phone calls to a hotel in New York in the six weeks before her husband died, one of those places that’s so hip they can charge seven hundred bucks a night. And she was there at least twice; she bought drinks on her credit card in their bar.”

“Do we know who she called or went to see?” I ask.

“Nope. No way to tell from this. That’s going to be up to you. But if you get me a name, I’ll take his life apart.”

“Maybe somebody at the hotel will remember her,” I say.

He smiles. “That’s my boy; you can do it. Go get ’em.”

“Your confidence is touching. I can feel my eyes filling up with tears.”

He laughs. “I mean it. I got a peaceful easy feeling, and I know you won’t let me down. ’Cause I’m already standing…”

“You’re already standing?”

He nods. “Yes, I’m already standing on the ground.”

I laugh. “All right, Sam, I want to go though this stuff, so get the hell out of here.”

He nods. “Right, boss.” He gets up, goes to the door and opens it, but then walks back to me.

“Now what?” I ask.

“Sorry, but every time I try to walk away, something makes me turn around and stay.”

This could go on forever; the Eagles have had a long career. “Sam, I’ve got work to do, beat it.”

He nods. “Okay. But all of this is gonna help you with the case, right?”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“What does that mean?” he asks.

I point to the papers. “It means, depending on what I find out, this could be heaven or this could be hell.”

I WALK IN THE DOOR and see Laurie coming down the steps to greet me.

She is holding on to the railing and trying to keep her shaky legs steady. She smiles when she sees me, and this causes her to momentarily lose her concentration. She starts to fall, and I can see the panic as she grabs for the railing.

As I so often do in situations like this, I just stand paralyzed, watching. She is unable to regain her balance and falls down the last three steps, landing with a thud on the floor.

Now that it is too late, I rush to her. “Laurie, are you okay?”

“Damnit! Damnit! Damnit!” she screams, pounding the floor. “Andy, I can’t stand being like this!”

“Really?” I ask. “I thought you were very graceful. Are you hurt?”

She pauses for a while before answering, as she assesses her own condition. “I don’t think so. Just frustrated and embarrassed.”

“Where’s the nurse?”

“I sent her home. I wanted things to be back to normal tonight.”

I help her over to the couch, and though she staggers slightly, she seems to be okay. Tara and Waggy immediately take advantage of the situation to jump on the couch and snuggle next to her, their heads coming to rest on each of her thighs.

Laurie starts to laugh at how quickly they’ve assumed the comfortable positions, and she pets both of them on their heads. It is amazing how comforting dogs can be.

I didn’t see Marcus outside when I arrived, but that doesn’t surprise me. Marcus has a way of not appearing to be somewhere until he needs to be there, and I’ve learned to have confidence in that. I’ve given him a key, so he can come in and out when he pleases, but I know when he’s been inside, because the refrigerator is empty.

“You sure you should be out of bed?” I ask.

“Yes, Andy. Despite my embarrassing performance on the stairs, I’m doing okay. I’m not an invalid.”

“Okay. Good.”

“I can do things. Really,” she says.

“Great. Make me dinner, woman.”

“Except that.”

“Okay. Let’s get naked.”

“And except that.”

I nod. “So, to rephrase, you can do anything except good stuff.”

She smiles. “Right. And I’m especially good at thinking.”

“What have you been thinking about?”

“Going home. Getting back to work.”

That was not exactly what I was hoping she’d say. “You’re not ready for that, Laurie. You must know that.”

She nods. “I do. But I have this need to get back to real life.”

“Living here is fake life?”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Andy, this is coming out wrong. I love it here, and I love being with you. I just can’t stand being helpless like this. I’ve never experienced anything like it before.”

“Laurie, it feels like yesterday that you were in a coma, and you were… fighting for your life.” My voice catches on these last few words; just the thought of that first night in the hospital is enough to reduce me to a sniveling, unmanly wreck. “You’re doing great.”

“I know. I’m just impatient.”

“So how can I make you less impatient?”

“Maybe you can let me help you with the case. I can read through the files, maybe come up with some ideas. It will give me something to think about, and there’s a chance I can contribute something.”