New Tricks

This is an easy one for me; Laurie is as good an investigator as I’ve ever been around, and it can’t do anything but help to have a mind like hers on our side. “Absolutely. That’s a great idea.”

“I know I can’t come down to the office yet, but-”

“You don’t have to. We’ll bring the office here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Kevin and Edna would be fine working here instead of the office. It’s no hardship at all. And that way you can sit in on meetings and be a part of things.”

“Andy, please tell me if I’m being childish.”

“Not at all,” I say. “It’s a great idea.” And in fact it is. “Now, what else can I do?”

“You can hold me.”

Since Waggy and Tara are still on each side of her, that is going to be difficult. “You seem to be surrounded,” I say.

“Not now. Tonight. In bed. I want you to hold me all night.”

“You’re asking a lot, you know.”

She smiles. “I realize that. And I wouldn’t blame you if you refused.”

“This is not going to turn into an every-night thing, is it?”

“No, I promise,” she says. “Tomorrow night I’ll find someone else to hold me.”

“I’ll tell you what. We’ll try it with me for a year, and see how it goes.”

She smiles again. “I think it will go fine.”

Me too.

THE HAMILTON HOTEL is on Hudson Street in New York City.

At the moment it is considered the hippest part of the entire city, and I am aware of that because I know people, who know people, who know people, who are hip.

This is actually known as the Meatpacking District, because for years it has been the city’s center of wholesale meats. Mind-bogglingly, the meatpacking business is still thriving, even though hipness is springing up all around it. The area is now filled with expensive hotels and boutiques in addition to less expensive lamb chops and veal shanks.

Only in New York.

In front of the Hamilton are velvet rope lines, and even though it is only three in the afternoon, they are preparing for the influx of people who will try to get into their rooftop bar tonight. I am told that people will regularly stand out here for hours in the hope, often vain, that they will get past the bouncers and gain admission.

Like everything else about the hip world that I’ve never inhabited, it makes no sense to me. There are half a billion bars in New York City that you can just walk into and order a drink. They’re more ubiquitous than pizzerias. What could prompt a person to wait hours, and risk rejection, in order to get into this one? And the drinks are probably priced like used cars. So why do people come here? How good could their vodka be?

I enter through the revolving door and walk the fifty feet or so to the concierge desk. On the way there, three employees wish me a good afternoon. They obviously care about me a lot.

I have found that expensive hotels in New York either are very modern or look like they were furnished during the Revolutionary War. This one is modern, and the entire lobby is done in black, white, and chrome. The floor is white with diagonal chrome stripes, and the only carpeting is a few small area rugs in the seating areas. I guess if they raise their room rates to nine hundred a night, they’ll be able to afford wall-to-wall.

I know my bias is showing, but I hate hotels like this. The rooms are usually smaller than the average Holiday Inn, and you have to take out a mortgage to eat peanuts from the mini bar. Yet those rooms are always filled, at least until another, even hotter, hotel opens up down the street.

The female concierge is helping a male guest, so I stand behind him and eavesdrop. He has a number of requests: dinner reservations, theater tickets, limousine rental… all of which she handles with ease with a phone call.

Each call she makes she starts with, “This is the concierge at the Hamilton Hotel,” spoken in the same imperious tone she would use if she were announcing that the queen of England was calling. But it certainly works; this is a woman who gets what she wants, or at least what the guest wants. If I were staying here I would be throwing requests at her all the time; it would be like having my own genie.

When it’s my turn, we exchange greetings and I say, “I’d like to speak with the manager, please.”

She smiles and says. “Perhaps I can help you?”

“Are you perhaps the manager?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you likely to be promoted to manager in the next few minutes?”

“No, sir, I-”

“Then I’m afraid you won’t be able to help me. So please tell the manager that I would like to see him.”

“Who may I say is calling?”

“My name is Carpenter… I’m investigating a double murder.”

Apparently among the things concierges don’t like to deal with are double murders, since once I say that, she seems rather relieved that I am not asking her to help. She picks up the phone and dials the manager, or at least his office, and within moments I am on the elevator on the way to the top floor. There are video screens on the elevator running old cartoons, which must be another sign of hipness. I should be taking notes on this stuff, so I can impress Laurie with it.

The manager’s name is Lionel Paulson, and he seems not to be more than thirty-five or so. He’s dressed in a suit that, while I’m no expert, appears to be silk. In fact, it looks so silky smooth that he must have to hold on to the arms of his chair so as not to slide to the floor.

We say our hellos, and I take the chair across from his desk. He asks me to show him some identification.

“You mean like a driver’s license?” I ask.

“No, I mean like a badge, or a shield, or whatever it’s called that shows me what agency you are employed by.”

“I’m an attorney,” I say. “We don’t get badges, but I can show you our secret handshake.”

He is surprised, and tells me that since I had told the concierge that I was investigating a murder, he assumed I was a law enforcement officer.

I assure him that I am not, and I tell him that I want to interview his staff to see if anyone remembers Diana Timmerman. I take out a picture of her that I have and show it to him.

“I certainly have no idea who she is,” he says, holding the picture up as he looks at it.

“Was.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Who she was,” I say. “She was one of the murder victims.”

He drops the picture as if it were on fire. “Oh, my. And she was a guest in this hotel?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think so. But she visited someone who was on at least two occasions. I want to know who that was.”

“Our guests have an expectation of privacy.”

“Then one of them is not going to have his expectations met.”

“Your hope is to ask hotel employees if they have seen this woman?”

“I won’t be doing the asking. I’ll send a few private investigators in; they’ll be discreet.”

“I can’t have disruptions, I…”

I shake my head. “A disruption would be if I send a team of big burly guys to serve subpoenas on everyone when you’ve got a line of people waiting to get into your bar.” I’m not being honest about this; I don’t have subpoena power, and couldn’t get it if I tried.

“When do you propose to have your people here?”

“Tomorrow at five thirty. That’s the time of day that she was here both times. And I’ll need to know if someone was on duty those days, especially in the bar, who won’t be here tomorrow.”

He agrees to my request, after getting me to promise to have my people go about their business quietly and professionally. He will convey to the hotel employees that they should answer the questions openly and honestly.

There’s always a chance that he will check, learn that I don’t have subpoena power, and change his mind. It’s unlikely; he will probably just go through with it and hope it doesn’t cause any problems.

I thank him and leave, and then call Kevin and tell him to hire an investigation agency that we sometimes use. I somehow forget to mention the part about making sure everyone is quiet and discreet; I want to learn who Diana Timmerman was there to see, and I don’t care if they have to set fire to the place to find out.

ANOTHER ONE OF MY STEREOTYPES IS about to unceremoniously bite the dust.

I hate when that happens; I like it much better when my ignorant, knee-jerk opinions about people and events are shown to be one hundred percent accurate.

This particular ill-fated stereotype concerns the people who enter their dogs in prestigious shows. I expect them all to be named Muffy or Buffy (I’m talking about the humans) and to eat watercress sandwiches and sniff about how hard it is to hire decent help these days.

When Martha Wyndham called to tell me she arranged a meeting for me with Barb Stanley in Greenwich, Connecticut, it made perfect sense. Connecticut’s snootiness quotient is way up there; as far as I know all people there do is play croquet, drink martinis, and eat bonbons.

Actually, even though I live in what is called the tristate area, which comprises New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, the latter is sort of a mystery state to me. I don’t even know what the people are called. Connecticutites? Connecticuttians?

In any event, my predispositions about the people being snobbish and superior don’t seem to be holding true at all. The woman I assume is Barb Stanley is in her early thirties, tall and thin and seemingly possessed of boundless energy. Her place of business, where we are meeting today, is an old warehouse, modernized and designed as a doggy day care facility. People drop their dogs off on the way to work, secure in the knowledge that the animals will have a blast running and playing with friends on some incredible equipment.

When I arrive she is running with the dogs, pausing every so often to roll around on the floor with them. I watch her for about ten minutes, and I don’t know how she does it. I wouldn’t last thirty seconds. The most amazing part of all is that the NY METS baseball cap she is wearing does not fall off. It must be cemented to her head.

She finally sees me, waves, and then jumps to her feet. She signals to another young woman, whom I hadn’t even noticed, and that woman comes over to play with the dogs. Their tongues are hanging, and I think one of them looks over to their imaginary coach to see if they have any time-outs left.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes,” I say. “Please tell me you’re tired.”

She laughs. “Not yet. But you should see me around four o’clock.”

“My name is Andy Carpenter…”

“Oh, right. Martha said you’d be by. I’m Barb Stanley.”

I nod. “She said you were an expert in showing dogs… the whole process.” I take another look at the dogs, back in play with their new leader. Very few of them look like purebreds. “Are any of these show dogs?”

She shakes her head. “No, although the springer in the back could be.”

She invites me back to her office, and when we get there she offers me a drink from a small refrigerator. I choose a bottle of water, and she takes one of the four or five million power drinks that are now on the market. Everybody seems to be drinking them, but I don’t think they work. These drinks are selling like crazy, yet the people I see on the street don’t seem any more powerful than they were ten years ago. Barb is the exception.

“So where do you want to start?” she asks.

“Do you show dogs yourself?”

She nods. “Sure.”

“Have you had any champions?” I ask.

“No, but I just missed a couple of times.”

“At Westminster?” I ask.

She laughs. “No, not even close.”

“Why do you do it?”

“I love it. I love the dogs, I love being around people who love dogs. It’s a lot of work, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’m doing a show this weekend; you can come if you’d like.”

I say that I’d like that very much. “Is there a lot of money to be won?”

She laughs again. “Not by me.” Then, “Sure, the prizes for the big shows are very nice.”

“What’s the biggest prize you are personally aware of?” I ask.

“I think Westminster Best in Show is a hundred thousand dollars.”

So much for the money motive. In the world that Walter Timmerman inhabited, a hundred thousand dollars is tip money. And it is quite unlikely that it would have motivated a rival to go on a murder spree.

“Are you familiar with the Bernese who won Best in Show for Walter Timmerman?” I ask.

“Bertrand. Of course. The most perfect dog I’ve ever seen. I cried for two days when he died.”

“Did you know he had a son?”

“I hadn’t,” she said. “But I’ve since read about it. Is he in training?”

“Not yet,” I say. “Do you think he should be?”

She shrugs. “Only if he takes to it. Otherwise whoever has him should just let him be a dog.”

“Have you ever shown dogs at the same show as Walter Timmerman?”

She nods. “A few times… maybe five.”

“Do you know if he had any rivalries… was there any antagonism between him and another dog owner?”

“I really don’t know,” she says. “That’s a little above my world.”

“But have you known emotions to run high, because of the competition?”

She looks at me strangely. “Are you asking if someone could have murdered Walter Timmerman in order to win a dog show?”

I nod. “Yes.”

“Mr. Carpenter,” she says, “that’s crazy.”

I’m not prepared to tell her the really nutty part: that Waggy has been the target of a hit man. “Barb,” I say, “you don’t know the half of it.”

ACCORDING TO THE MORNING PAPER, a body was found in the Passaic River last night.

No identification has yet been made, but Pete Stanton, Willie Miller, Marcus, Laurie, and I all know that it will prove to be Jimmy Childs. Soon the world will know it as well. What the world will not know is that Childs killed Diana Timmerman, and almost certainly Walter as well. That particular secret will remain with Steven Timmerman’s idiot lawyer, Andy Carpenter.

Ordinarily, for a defense attorney to learn who the real killer is, and have that killer not be his client, is a major positive. It’s an out-and-out case winner. Yet I’ve managed to turn it into a negative by allowing that killer to himself be killed, so as never to be able to reveal all that he knows.

I’ve scheduled a meeting this morning to go over our current situation with Kevin and Laurie. The trial date is rapidly approaching, and while we have succeeded in accumulating some interesting information about Walter Timmerman, we are not yet able to connect it to a coherent defense for our client. Which is unfortunate, since that is our job.

Kevin brings with him the initial report from the investigators who questioned the employees of the Hamilton Hotel yesterday.

“We finally caught a break,” he says. “Five different people remembered Diana Timmerman being there.”

“Really?” I say. “I’m surprised.”

“Apparently, she was obnoxious. She even accused the bartender of using the wrong kind of vodka in her drink. People remember things like that.”

“Did they find out who she was there to see?”

Kevin nods. “Thomas Sykes. In each case he checked in for one night, and Diana Timmerman came to see him.”

“Now, that’s interesting,” I say.

“Who is Thomas Sykes?” Laurie asks.

“The CEO of Timco Laboratories, Timmerman’s company. He owned twenty percent of the company.”

“So Diana Timmerman was having an affair with her husband’s business partner?”

I nod. “And he told me he barely knew her to say hello.”

“Lying about a love triangle is not exactly an earth-shattering event,” Laurie says.

“But it potentially takes on an added significance when two-thirds of the triangle are murdered by a hit man. It sort of gives new meaning to the word ‘isosceles.’ ”

“According to Marcus, Childs didn’t say that he killed Walter Timmerman,” Kevin points out.

I nod. “That’s true, but probably only because it was another question I didn’t tell Marcus to ask.”

“So in a normal world,” Laurie says, “this would all be starting to make sense. Sykes, who no doubt has a lot of money, hires Childs to kill Timmerman, so as to clear a path for Sykes and Diana. Then Diana starts to pressure him, cause him problems, and he decides to get rid of her as well.”

“And then, because he hired the hit man as part of a ‘kill two, get one free’ promotion, he sends Childs out to kill Waggy.”

“I said ‘in a normal world,’ ” Laurie points out.

“Still, it does make Sykes a person of interest,” Kevin says.

“Certainly interesting to me,” I say. “Let’s give him a call.”

I place a call to Sykes’s office and am told he is in a meeting. I leave word that it is urgent, and he calls me back in half an hour.

“Mr. Sykes, I’ve been doing some investigating, and I’ve got a few more questions for you. If we could meet sometime tomorrow, then-”

He interrupts. “I’m afraid I’m very busy, Mr. Carpenter. I can’t keep taking the time to-”

I return the interruption. “I understand, but I’ll make it as convenient for you as possible. I can come to your office, or if you’d rather we can meet at the Hamilton Hotel.”

There is silence on the other end for at least twenty seconds while the message is digested. “Mr. Sykes?”

“I see you’re not above dragging people through the mud.”

“Actually, I’m not dragging anyone through the mud. I’m trying to clear the mud away so I can see through to the bottom.”

He agrees to see me, as I knew he would, but I’ve got a feeling we’re never really going to be buddies again.

Once I get off the phone, I ask Kevin to go down to the jail and ask Steven if he is aware of any particular rival that Walter Timmerman had on the dog show circuit. It still seems like a ridiculous long shot, but I believe in covering every base.

Then I call Cindy Spodek at her FBI office in Boston. Once again I’m told that she’s in a meeting, but when I say it’s important, the meeting mysteriously ends and she gets on the phone.

“What’s up, Andy?”

“You weren’t in a meeting, were you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“They said you were in a meeting, but then you got on the phone. I think it was a fake meeting.”

“It’s a fake meeting that’s about to start again, if you don’t get to the point,” she says.

“I want to talk to the agent heading up the task force on Walter Timmerman.”

“You mean the task force you don’t even know about because I never told you?”

“That’s the very one.”

“Forget it, Andy.”

“I know who killed the Timmermans, and I thought I should share it with the government, my government, as a way to demonstrate my patriotism.”

“I’m getting all misty.”

“I would think that a task force investigating Walter Timmerman might want to find out who killed him. That might even be one of their primary tasks.” I’m overstating things a bit here, but I’m comfortable with the assumption that if Childs admitted killing Diana Timmerman, then he must have killed Walter as well.

“Was it your client?”

“No.”

“Is your client still in jail?” she asks.

“That’s another story,” I say. “Can you set up a meeting?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.

“Your country will be forever grateful to you.”

I ASSIGN SAM WILLIS THE JOB of giving Thomas Sykes a cyber strip search.

Maybe it will turn out that all Sykes was doing was getting into his partner’s wife’s pants, but I want to know what else he was getting into before the Timmermans died.

Laurie has cooked dinner tonight, the first time she’s done so since she was shot. She’s doing remarkably well; though her walk is unsteady, her facial features and speech are both almost back to normal. She still tires easily, which drives her crazy. I know that, because she tells me so.

I have my own, admittedly unscientific, way of measuring how Laurie is progressing. Basically, my theory is that the more I think about sex, the healthier she must be.

For a few weeks after the shooting, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. All I cared about, all I obsessed over, was Laurie surviving and then someday regaining her health and strength.

Then, as it became clear she was out of the woods and on the way to a full recovery, the idea of sex as an eventual possibility appeared on the horizon. But it was certainly nothing imminent, and I just as certainly didn’t consider doing anything about it.

But now I detect some faint rumblings out there. It’s still not anything I would act on; my fears of rejection and humiliation would simultaneously rule that out. But I am definitely at the point where if Laurie suggested it, it would not provoke a raging argument. It might even be good for her psychologically, and I’m certainly a guy who would do anything to help.

After dinner Laurie makes coffee in two devices she uses, which involve pushing down on the tops and sort of squeezing the coffee out. I think they’re called French presses and she considers this the only way to drink coffee. Unfortunately, my taste buds aren’t quite sensitive enough to know the difference. I can happily drink any kind of coffee, even instant, while Laurie would rather drink instant cyanide.

“Andy, was there ever a time when you thought I was going to die?”

My knee-jerk instinct is to say no, but for some reason I decide to try the truth, just to see how it goes. “I thought you had died,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

I tell her about receiving the phone call in Hatchet’s office from Pete, and my desperate fear that he wasn’t telling me the full truth, that he was just getting me down to the hospital so he could convey the devastating news in person.

“That must have been awful for you,” she says.

“I can’t ever remember a worse time in my life. But once I got there, and you came out of surgery, then I knew you were going to make it.”

“What made you so sure?”

“It was like, once I could put my mind to it, then I could control it. I thought you had died before I had a chance to focus on your recovery, but once I had that chance, I knew we’d make it.”

“We’d make it?”

“I only wanted to live if you did.”

“Please don’t say that,” she says.

I nod. “Okay. I won’t say it.”

Laurie is quiet for a few moments, then says, “We’ve never talked about dying, about one of us being left behind.”

“We don’t talk about a lot of things,” I say. “It’s natural; we’re both busy, and we’re usually in different time zones.”

She smiles. “We talk about our days; I tell you how my day went, and you tell me about yours.”

“I have to come up with more interesting stories. Or more interesting days,” I say.

“I love my job, Andy. And I love Findlay. And I love you.”

“You’ve got your cake and you’re eating it.” It comes off as a little petulant, probably because it is.

“I know you’re not satisfied, Andy. And I’m not, either. I just don’t know how to make it better.”

“For now you should just worry about getting better.”

“I am,” she says. Then, “I’d like to go with you tomorrow night.”

“To the dog show?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I need to get out of the house; it will help me feel alive again.”

“You think you’re up to it?”

“Why? What are you going to do there?”

I shrug. “Hang out… I guess look at dogs for a while.”

She smiles. “I should be able to handle that. That’s what I do here.”

I could argue with her, but I’d lose. Which would be fine, because I’d want to lose. “It’s a date,” I say.

THOMAS SYKES seems less happy to see me this time.

I find that’s not unusual in my interpersonal relationships; my sunny disposition is usually good for one relatively pleasant meeting. Two max.

“Let’s make this brief, Mr. Carpenter. Say what you came here to say. Ask what you came here to ask.”

“Here’s the way I work, Mr. Sykes. I ask a lot of questions, and people give me answers. Then I ask some more questions, and sometimes I find out that the previous answers that people gave me weren’t true. They were lies. That’s what happened in this case, with you.”

“Lies?”

“Yes. You told me you barely knew Diana Timmerman. Hardly well enough to say hello. Then I find out that she visited you repeatedly at a hotel in New York. Based on my definition, that qualifies as lying.”

Sykes smiles. “Believe it or not, there could be some private matters that I might not want to share with you.”

“The woman was murdered,” I say. “That makes this a rather public matter.”

“Our relationship had nothing whatsoever to do with her death.

That I can say without fear of contradiction.”

“Just what was your relationship?”

“We had an affair.”

I’m surprised that he comes right out and says this. “Which was still going on when she died?”

“I don’t really know how to answer that. The last time I saw her was about a week before Walter’s death. Whether I would have seen her in the future or not, I really don’t know.”

“So their marriage was in trouble?”

He smiles. “I’m not sure what that means. Obviously, she was not completely faithful, and my understanding was that he was not, either. But to say the marriage was in trouble, does that mean it was nearing an end?”

“Possibly, yes.”

“I can’t imagine Walter would have given her a divorce. It would have been a public humiliation for him, and a financial disaster.”

“No prenup?”

“Diana? No way. I wasn’t kidding when I told you she was a woman who knew what she wanted.”

“You’re going to have to testify to all of this at the trial,” I say. “Why?” he asks, but he doesn’t seem fearful or concerned, just amused.

“Because generally in a murder case it’s good to explore what the victims were doing, and who they were doing it with.”

He shrugs. “I’m not married; I can handle the embarrassment.” I nod. “Can I use your phone?”

He points to the phone on his desk. “Help yourself.”

I go to the phone and pick up the receiver. “Do I dial nine?” Sykes shakes his head. “No, it’s a private line.”

I dial Sam Willis’s number, and he answers on the first ring. “I got the number,” he says. “The dope didn’t block it.”

I pretend that I’m talking to a machine. “Kevin, it’s Andy, give me a call at the office later.”

Sam laughs and hangs up, and I hang up as well.

“Thanks,” I say to Sykes.

He smiles. “No problem.” He’s held up pretty well under my less-than-withering questioning.

“By the way, you said that it was your understanding that Walter Timmerman was fooling around as well. Any idea who he was doing it with?”

“Not a clue,” he says.

As soon as I get outside, I call Sam Willis again and tell him that I’ve left. He promises to call me back with any information as soon as he can.

When I return to the house, Laurie tells me that Cindy Spodek called: The agent in charge of the task force investigating Walter Timmerman has agreed to see me. She will be setting up the meeting at a convenient time for everyone, and will be coming down to New York to join us.

I’m not surprised that the agent has decided to meet with me; Cindy would have represented me as being credible, and the chance to find out who killed Timmerman must be very appealing to him.

I’m very interested in having that meeting, but my interest increases tenfold when Sam Willis calls me. I instructed Sam to find out who, if anyone, Thomas Sykes called when I left his office. My assumption was that Sykes was at least somewhat worried by what I had to say, and that if he had any kind of accomplice in whatever he was doing, he would call that person and alert him.

“He made one call immediately after you left his office,” Sam says. “The call lasted eight minutes.”

“Who did he call?”

“The FBI.”

LAURIE AND I can barely find a place to park at the dog show, and we’ve arrived almost an hour before it starts. It’s taking place at a large civic center in southern Connecticut, but given the packed nature of the parking lot, you would think we were at Giants Stadium for a play-off game.

“I’m surprised no one is tailgating,” I say as we get out of the car.

“You are hereby notified that you have just used up your quota of puns for the evening,” Laurie says.

“One? That’s all? What kind of quota is that?”

“Sorry, that’s my ruling.”

We go into the ticket-buying area, where a sign tells us that upper-level seats are the only ones available. That’s not a problem for the well-connected Andy Carpenter, because Barb Stanley has left tickets for us at the will-call window.

We get the tickets and hand them to the woman letting people in, and she informs us that we are allowed down in the prep area, which is what Barb had told me. So that’s where we go.

We walk into a room that is truly hard to believe. It is divided into walled cubicles, maybe fifty of them, each one containing one dog and anywhere from one to three humans. In each case the dogs are the absolute center of attention, as the humans fuss over them and talk to them, frequently in a baby-talk kind of voice.

It reminds me of a boxing match between rounds, where the fighter sits on the stool and he gets worked on by the cut man and given guidance by his trainer. One major difference is that fighters occasionally pay attention to their trainers, while these dogs couldn’t be less interested in what is being said to them.

Barb Stanley sees us, waves, and comes over. “Andy, glad you could make it.”

I introduce her to Laurie, and she offers to show us around. The tour really involves little more than what we have already seen, just more of it. We won’t be going out into the main area where the competition takes place until later.

All the dogs are very large, and I recognize a Saint Bernard, a bullmastiff, a Great Dane, and a Bernese mountain dog like Waggy. It’s a little disconcerting to see big, powerful dogs like this being fussed over; it would be like watching someone apply eye shadow and lipstick to a middle linebacker.

“These are called working dogs,” says Barb, but the truth is, I don’t think any of them have worked a day in their collective lives. I’m feeling a little envious.

Barb brings us to her own cubicle, where her assistant from the doggy day care business is fussing over Barb’s dog, an Australian shepherd. Barb introduces us to her assistant, Carrie, and then says, “This is Crosby. Isn’t he beautiful?”

“Crosby?”

She nods. “Yes. My grandfather was a huge Bing Crosby fan. He used to play his records when I came over in the hope that I would stop listening to ‘hippie music.’ I’ve been naming dogs Crosby in his honor for as long as I can remember.”

“Can we pet him?” Laurie asks.

“Sure.”

Laurie and I do that for a few minutes, and then back off so that Carrie and Barb can finish prepping Crosby. Barb says that the dogs really enjoy this, but you’d never know it. They pretty much just sit there impassively. If Waggy ever had to remain this calm, he’d commit doggy suicide.

When the time comes we go out with Barb into the main ring for the competition. It is as bewildering as anything I’ve ever seen. There is constant motion, owners moving their dogs around the ring when competing and into position when not competing. And all spare time is spent making sure their hair hasn’t gotten mussed in any way.

Everything is done strictly to time, and people are expected to have their dogs exactly where they should be at exactly the time they should be there. It’s all run by someone called a ring steward, which is dog show language for Kommandant. No one messes with the ring steward.

It only takes about three or four minutes for me to get bored with this, and I’m about to suggest to Laurie that we take off when I hear a voice. “Andy Carpenter, right? I heard you were here.”

Standing in front of me holding out his hand is a very, very large man, who must be carrying 320 pounds on a six-foot frame. Everything about him is oversize. His nose is fat; his ears are fat. If he turned around I would expect to see taillights.

“I’m sorry,” I say as I shake his hand. “Have we met?”

“We have now. I’m Charles Robinson. Actually, I’m about to fight you in court.” He says this in a matter-of-fact, fairly cheery manner.

“So you are.”

“I love showing dogs; it’s almost as much fun as golf. My entry for today is over there.” He points in the general direction of about a thousand dogs. “Name’s Tevye.”

When I don’t say anything, he says, “You know, from Fiddler on the Roof. I always liked that song, ‘If I Were a Rich Man.’ ” He laughs at his own joke a little too loudly. Robinson seems relentlessly upbeat and garrulous, and sounds a lot like Santa Claus, without the ho, ho, ho. “But between you and me, I don’t think he’s going to win.”

“Don’t you have to be with him?”

“Nah, I’ve got people who do that.” He leans in to confide that he wouldn’t know what to do anyway, and then goes on to ask, “What are you doing for lunch tomorrow?”

“Probably eating Taco Bell at my desk.”

He fake-laughs. “Well, I’ll do you one better. Meet me at my club. You play golf?”

“No.”

“Smart man. If I had all the time I spent on golf back, I could have saved the world. Come on, maybe we can talk this through and avoid going to court.”

I have no desire to have lunch with this guy, especially with the trial date almost upon us. But I have even less desire to spend my time in court on the custody issue, and I can’t afford to have Waggy unprotected. So I agree to have lunch with Robinson at his club, which is located in Alpine, about twenty minutes from my house, and he goes back to watching Tevye.

Laurie and I say our good-byes to Barb and wish her luck. On the way home, Laurie says, “So if not for you, Waggy would be doing that?”

I laugh. “Waggy in that ring. Now, that would be worth the price of admission.”

I DON’T PLAY GOLF, I don’t watch golf, and I don’t get golf.

I just can’t get interested in anything that requires a “tee time.” Even if I wanted to play, if I went for a four-hour walk on the grass without taking Tara, she would turn me into a giant steak bone.

Everything about golf is grossly oversize. First of all, it takes forever. People drive to a club, get dressed, play eighteen holes, and then spend more time talking about it than it took to play. It’s a full day’s operation; I can watch six college basketball games in that time, and drink beer while I’m doing it.

And the space these golf courses occupy is unbelievable. The one I am driving along now, the one at Charles Robinson’s club, is endless. If this amount of land were in a normal city, it would have four congressmen.

The idea of taking turns swinging a stick every ten minutes has no appeal for me. One of the reasons, I think, is that I prefer games where defense can be played. Football, basketball, baseball, even pool, all include attempts to prevent the opposition from scoring. Golf doesn’t, and that for me is crucial. It’s probably why I became a defense attorney. I don’t like golf, or swimming, or figure skating, or anything else in which defense isn’t a major factor.

As I’m handing my car off to the valet guy, I see Robert Jacoby standing in front of the club, waiting for his car. I’m not surprised he’s here; Walter Timmerman was also a member, and Jacoby’s e-mail had mentioned that they golfed together.

He waves to me and I just wave back. If I go over to him I’ll start talking about the DNA e-mail again, and neither of us would be in the mood for that. When the valet guy gives him his keys he calls him Mr. Jacoby, and he responds, “Thanks, Tim,” so I assume he’s a member here.

If Charles Robinson has been playing a lot of golf, he’s been using a cart. When I enter the dining room he is sitting at a corner table, and he certainly looks to be in his natural habitat.

He sees me from across the room and waves me to the table. He doesn’t get up to greet me, understandable since to do so a crane would have to be brought over.

He tells me how delighted he is that I could join him, in the same garrulous way he talked at the dog show. He does this with his mouth full and chewing, and I notice that there are already enough bread crumbs on his plate for Tara to bury a bone in.

A waiter instantly appears and takes our orders. I get a chicken Caesar salad, while Robinson orders veal parmigiana with a side of pasta. The food comes quickly, and we mostly make small talk while we eat. I’ve got a feeling that in Robinson’s case, everything takes a backseat to eating.

Once the plates have been cleared, he gets down to the reason he summoned me. “So you’ve got your hands full, huh?” he asks.

“You mean with the dog?”

“Hell, no, I mean with the case. The way I hear it your client is in deep trouble.”

“Then I hope you haven’t gotten any jury duty notices lately.”

He laughs far too loudly. Nobody at nearby tables looks over, so I suspect this is not an unusual event.

“Truth is, I know Steven. He used to call me Uncle Charlie. Back in the day. Tough situation, especially if he did it.”

There doesn’t seem to be a question in there, so I don’t bother answering.

“You think you’re going to get him off?” he asks.

“I think justice will prevail.”

Robinson laughs again. “Uh-oh. Sounds like you really got a problem. So let’s talk about the dog, what’s his name again?”

“Waggy?”

“Where is he now?”

“On a farm in western Pennsylvania.”

“What the hell is he doing there?”

“Mostly plowing, some hoeing, a little weeding. He just loves to work the land.”

“Everybody says you’re a wiseass,” he says.

“Really? Nobody’s ever mentioned anything like that to me.”

Robinson laughs again; I’m thrilled to pieces that he finds me so amusing. “So how do I get my hands on this dog without us fighting it out in court? He’s a champion, and if Walter had lived he’d be competing already.”

“But Walter didn’t live. And another thing he didn’t do was mention you in his will.”

“Hell, I know that. But the two people he did mention are dead and in jail. Walter and I were best friends; we played golf here every day. And we were partners on some dogs. He’d want me to have the Bernese.”

“He told you that?”

“Nah, if he had lived he wouldn’t let me near that dog. He’d want to use it to kick my ass.”

“What does that mean?”

“That dog could be a champion, and winning was all that mattered to Walter.” He laughs again. “Like me.”

“So you were rivals? I thought you were friends?”

He nods. “We were both. All of my friends are rivals.”

“But you were in the dog show business together?” I ask.

“That ain’t business; that’s fun. It’s like owning racehorses, except they eat less and shit less.”

If Robinson had any chance to get me to give him Waggy, which he didn’t, he just blew it. I move my napkin from my lap to the table. It’s my way of telling him I’m about to get up and leave. “If your intention in inviting me here was to give you custody of Waggy, it’s not going to work. I’ve been asked by the judge to decide where he should go, and it won’t be with you.”

For the first time the smile leaves his face, and it is replaced by a cold anger. “You have a problem with me?”

“No, not at all,” I say. “But I’ve got a hunch Waggy would.”

The smile comes back to his face, albeit a little forced. “So what do they say? See you in court, counselor?”

I shrug. “It’s my home away from home.”

FBI SPECIAL AGENT DAMIEN CORVALLIS doesn’t look the part.

He’s maybe five eight, 160 pounds if you tied weights to his feet. Of course, I have no idea why anyone would tie weights to an FBI agent’s feet; I know I wouldn’t. But if someone were to tell you that Corvallis was in law enforcement, you would guess library cop.

On the other hand, he has mastered the disdainful stare that all agents must be taught their first day in FBI school. It tells the person at whom the agent is staring that he is inferior and not worth the agent’s time.

We are at the FBI offices in Newark, and I’m surprised that the only other person in the room is Cindy Spodek, who flew down from Boston this morning. Usually someone in Corvallis’s position would want a bunch of his minions in attendance, so as to intimidate me. That he’s kept the meeting so small could be a sign that he wants to talk frankly. At least I hope so.

Cindy is no doubt here because she knows me, and might be of value in getting me to cooperate. She and I know better, that I am chronically uncooperative, but Corvallis has yet to be enlightened as to that fact.

“So, Agent Spodek informs me that you may have some insights as to who may have killed Walter Timmerman.”

“In addition to the possibility of having some insights, I also know who did it. And the same person killed his wife,” I say. Again, I feel comfortable that if Childs killed Diana, he killed Walter as well. The alternative would be too great a coincidence to believe.

“She also informs me that you can be an irritating pain in the ass.”

I turn to Cindy in mock exasperation. “You’ve betrayed me.”

“Let’s get this over with as soon as possible,” Corvallis says. “What is it you know?”

This guy is annoying me. “Well, for one thing, I know the ground rules for this meeting,” I say. “We will exchange information. You’ll answer my questions, and then I’ll tell you who put a bullet in Timmerman’s head.”

He stares at me for a few moments, looks at Cindy, and then back at me. “Get the hell out of my office,” he says.

I nod and get up. “Have a wonderful day.”

I leave the office and go out into the hall. As I knew she would, Cindy follows me out a few seconds later.

“Let me guess,” I say. “That bozo sent you out here to tell me that you talked him into giving me one more chance, but that if I don’t drop my attitude, I’m not going to find out anything at all, and I will be in deep shit with the bureau.”

She smiles. “You took the words right out of my mouth.”

I return the smile. “You’re incredibly persuasive, Agent Spodek. Now, shall we get this over with?”

We go back in and immediately get down to more serious negotiating. I repeat that I know with certainty who killed Timmerman, but that I can’t reveal how I know. I also tell him that I’ll need him to answer certain questions, and that I will not reveal where I got any information he provides. But I will, of course, use that information in the defense of my client.

“Agreed,” he says. “With the caveat that there will be certain questions I cannot answer.”

I insist on asking the questions first, because I’m not about to tell him what I know and then have him clam up. He goes along with that, which I take as a good sign. Cindy obviously told him I can be counted on to live up to my terms of the deal.

“Why are you conducting an investigation into Walter Timmerman’s death?” I ask.

“We’re not. Our interest in him started well before he died.”

I nod. “Okay. Why were you interested in him?”

“In the last year of his life he was doing scientific work that was of extraordinary importance.”

“Was he doing the work for you?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No, but it was a matter of national security. We were intent on making sure that it did not get into the wrong hands. Let’s just say that Mr. Timmerman was not quite as concerned about national security as we were.”

“So he was going to sell it to the highest bidder?”

“That was a distinct possibility.”

“What kind of work was he doing?”

“That I cannot tell you. It would cost me my job, as it should.”

“Was he murdered because of his work?” I ask.

“I’ll be better able to answer that when I learn who did the murdering.”

I ask some more questions, trying without success to probe into the kind of work Timmerman was doing. If I can demonstrate to a jury that Timmerman was doing something involving dangerous people, then I have a better chance of demonstrating reasonable doubt.

I’m reasonably sure that Corvallis is telling the truth, but I decide to play my last card as a test. “Where does Thomas Sykes fit in with all this?”

Corvallis looks surprised. “Timmerman’s partner? As far as I know, he doesn’t fit in at all.”

I stand up and start sniffing the air. “Anybody smell any bullshit in here?”

“What does that mean?” he asks.

“It means that I know you are working with Sykes, but you just told me you aren’t. And I know that he called you the other day. So why are you telling me otherwise?”

Corvallis nods. “Sykes has been working with us for months; we’ve been using him to learn as much as we can about Timmerman. He’s still under instructions to call us if he learns anything. He told us about your discovery of his affair with Mrs. Timmerman.”

I nod; the explanation makes sense.

“Your turn,” says Corvallis. “Who murdered Timmerman?”

“Jimmy Childs.”

Corvallis doesn’t look surprised, nor does he ask who Jimmy Childs is. Obviously, he is familiar with the man. “How unfortunate for your client that he turned up dead.”

I nod. “You got that right.”

“Who hired him?” he asks.

“I have no idea. But he was paid half a million dollars for three hits.”

“Three?”

“Timmerman, his wife, and their dog.”

“Their dog?” Corvallis asks, again not showing any surprise.

“Yes, a Bernese mountain dog puppy, the descendant of a recently deceased champion.”

“And Childs was definitely targeting the dog?” Corvallis asks.

“Yes. Any idea why that would be?”

“I’m afraid that’s something I can’t answer.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“At the end of the day, does that matter?”

Actually, it does. Especially to me and Waggy. But I’m clearly not going to get any more out of Corvallis, at least not until I have something more to trade, so I look to end the meeting.

“Well, this has been a true joy,” I say. “Hard to believe it’s ending so soon.”

I expect a sarcastic retort from Corvallis, but he surprises me. “Why did you have lunch with Charles Robinson?”

“I have lunch with a lot of people.”

“I’m only asking you about one of them,” he says.

“He’s trying to get custody of a dog.”

“The dog Childs was sent to kill?”

I nod. “The very one.”

“Did he say why?”

“He wants to train him to become a champion show dog.”

“What did you say?”

“I said no, and he said, ‘See you in court.’ Why are you interested in Robinson?”

Corvallis looks at Cindy, then back at me, and smiles. “This has been a true joy,” he says. “Hard to believe it’s ending so soon.”

As soon as I get back to the house, I meet with Sam Willis and Kevin, instructing them to find out as much as they can about Charles Robinson. If the FBI is interested in him for reasons having nothing to do with Waggy, then I am as well.

Waggy and Tara sit in on the meeting, but they seem preoccupied with gnawing on a pair of rawhide chewies. If Waggy is familiar with Robinson, he doesn’t let on.

The only time Waggy looks up is when he finishes the chewie. He sees that we’re busy talking and Tara is still chomping away on hers. Since nobody is paying any attention to him, he starts rolling around on his back, playing some kind of weird game that only he understands. Every once in a while he rolls over and jumps to his feet, as if something has interrupted him. Then he flips back on to his back to resume the game.

Life for Waggy is never boring.

“IS THE DEFENSE READY?” is Hatchet’s question for me. The presiding judge asks that at the opening of every trial, and I have answered “yes” every time. And every single one of those times I have been lying.

No defense team, at least when I’ve been in charge of it, has ever been ready. I always want more time, more information, and more exculpatory evidence. But I never have it, so I just always answer “yes.”

I have coached and prepared Steven as well as I can for what is about to take place, and he claims to be ready. But he isn’t. He’s going to watch and listen as the state of New Jersey, using all its power, attempts to take his life and liberty away. No sane person can be fully ready for that.

“This is really a very simple case. Murder cases are not always like that. They can often be very complicated, with a lot of cross-currents, and conflicting motivations, and evidence that is not always clear-cut. But that’s not what we have here.”

This is how Richard Wallace begins his opening statement to the jury. Richard is not a powerful or particularly eloquent speaker, but he brings an authenticity to the process that makes juries want to believe him.

“Steven Timmerman had a falling-out with his father, Walter Timmerman. That can happen between fathers and their sons, and usually differences can be worked out, but sometimes not. There was a unique economic component to these differences, though. You see, Walter Timmerman was worth almost half a billion dollars, and he was threatening to take Steven out of his will.

“Now, Steven’s job was making furniture, making it by hand, and while that may be a noble enterprise, one would have to make a lot of tables and chairs to earn half a billion dollars.

“So the evidence will show that Steven arranged a meeting with his father in downtown Paterson, an area that was foreign to both of them. We don’t know what he said to get his father to go there, but we do know that once they arrived, he killed him with one bullet through the head. Evidence will place Steven there, and will show that Walter’s blood was found in Steven’s car.

“But that didn’t accomplish what Steven wanted, because he was to find out that the will had already been changed. And the way it was structured, the only way Steven would get the money is if he outlived his stepmother, a stepmother whom the evidence will show he hated.

“Well, that was no problem for Steven. He argued with his stepmother at her house, and fifteen minutes after he left the house it blew up in a massive explosion and killed her. And the evidence will further show that Steven was an expert in the type of explosive that was used.

“So that left nothing standing between Steven and his father’s fortune. Nothing except you.”

When Richard finishes, it becomes my job to convince the jury that there are two sides to the story, that their natural instinct to call a vote and send Steven to prison for life is somewhat premature.

I’ve never quite been in this position before. My financial situation allows me to take only cases in which I think the client is worth defending, which means I think he or she is innocent. But it is always simply my belief that my cause is just; I could never be positive about it.

This time I am positive. I know Steven didn’t kill his father, because I know who did. Yet there is no way for me to tell this jury what I know; it is unlikely they will ever hear the name Jimmy Childs. Even if I revealed the circumstances behind Marcus’s encounter with Childs, it would not be admissible at trial, because it would correctly be ruled hearsay.

My allowing Childs to be killed that night altered this trial in a way I never dreamed possible, and in the process seriously imperiled my client. It is tremendously frustrating, and dramatically increases the pressure I feel to successfully defend Steven.

“Steven Timmerman has not killed anyone,” is how I start. “He has also never assaulted anyone, or robbed anyone, or defrauded anyone, or cheated on his tax returns, or gotten a speeding ticket. There is absolutely nothing in his background, nothing whatsoever, that makes it remotely conceivable that he could have done the horrible things that he is accused of.

“Money has never been important to Steven. He has never taken a dime of his father’s money, though he was given many an opportunity to do so. He declined a lucrative offer to work in his father’s company, choosing instead to follow his artistic instincts and make furniture.

“The truth is, Steven’s lack of interest in his fortune drove Walter Timmerman a bit crazy, and he kept taking Steven out of his will in a futile effort to control his son. Yes, Steven was taken out of his father’s will nine times, but it never worked, and each time he was put back in. It makes absolutely no sense to believe that this particular time he was driven to murder.

“Walter Timmerman was an extraordinary scientist, and his work has had an enormously beneficial effect on the state of our health, and the state of our justice system. It brought him wealth and acclaim, and all of it was well deserved.

“For much of the last year of his life, Walter Timmerman worked in secret, worked on a project so significant that he kept it from everyone around him. It is reasonable to assume that the work was of tremendous importance, and the evidence will show that the FBI was monitoring him closely.

“It is in that work that deadly dangers lurked, not in the supposed resentment of a son who never displayed any resentment whatsoever. Walter Timmerman feared for his life, and sought to protect himself. But the forces aligned against him were ultimately too great, and those forces had nothing to do with his son.

“Steven Timmerman has been made to look like a villain, and stands accused as a murderer. He has lost his father, and his stepmother, and he is in danger of losing his freedom. I hope and believe that after you hear all the facts of this case, and consider them carefully, you will make sure that does not happen. Thank you.”

As his first witness, Richard calls Alex Durant, the guard who was on duty the day the house exploded. He is as large as I remember him, and seems about to burst through the buttons of his suit. My guess is that it’s the suit he wore to his senior prom, minus the corsage.

Richard painstakingly takes Durant through the events of the morning, making him detail the procedures he and his associates went through to make sure no one dangerous made it to the house. He has logs that he refers to that show when various people arrived, including me.

“Once Steven went into the house, did you hear any conversations that he might have had?” Richard asks.

“Yes. I could hear him arguing with Mrs. Timmerman. He was screaming at her, and she was screaming back at him.”

“Do you know what it was about?”

Durant shakes his head. “No.”

“Had you ever heard them argue before?”

“Yes,” Durant says, “it happened pretty often.”

Finally, Richard leads him to the moment of the explosion, and Durant says that he was in the guardhouse at the main gate at the time.

“How long after Steven Timmerman left did the explosion take place?” Richard asks.

“Maybe fifteen, twenty minutes,” Durant says.

“Did you have any conversation with him as he was leaving?”

Durant nods. “Yes. I had noticed that his right front tire was low, and I asked him if he wanted to wait a minute. We had a pump and could fill it for him.”

“And did he want to wait for that?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did he say why?”

“He said he was in a hurry, and that he’d deal with it later when he had more time.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

Durant has done us considerable damage, and he unfortunately has done so by telling the truth. It makes my job of shaking him that much harder. There is no sense going after him on the facts of the day as he’s described them, because he did so accurately.

“Mr. Durant,” I start, “how long did you work for Walter Timmerman?”

“About seven months.”

“Who did you replace?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who was the Timmerman’s head of security before you?”

“There wasn’t any.”

I feign surprise, though of course I knew what the answer was going to be. “So Mr. Timmerman had a sudden concern about security about seven months ago?”

“He said he would feel safer if people were watching the house.”

“How many people?”

“What do you mean?”

“How many people were employed, like yourself, to protect the Timmermans and their house?”

“Around ten.”

“And among them, these ten people protected the house twenty-four hours a day?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“How long did the Timmermans live in that house, if you know?”

“I believe six years.”

“But suddenly, seven months ago, he didn’t feel safe?”

Richard objects that Durant could not know how Timmerman felt, and Hatchet sustains. That’s okay; my point has been made.

“When I showed up that day, why did you let me go up to the house?”

“Your name was on a list,” he says. “You had been approved to enter.”

“Had I not been approved, you wouldn’t have let me in?”

“That’s correct.”

“So I wasn’t considered a threat to the Timmerman’s safety?”

“Right.”

“And I assume you were being extra vigilant because Walter Timmerman had recently been murdered?”

Durant won’t concede the point. “I was always careful; that was my job.”

I nod. “Right. Your job was to only let people in who were approved, and who were not considered a threat by you or by the Timmermans. Correct?”

He knows where I’m going, but he can’t stop me from getting there. “Yeah.”

“Which is why you let Steven Timmerman in as well? He was on an approved list?”

“Yes.”

“So for the seven months that Walter Timmerman was so concerned with his safety that he built guardhouses and hired ten security people like yourself, Steven Timmerman was always approved to enter?”

“As far as I know.”

“You know pretty far, don’t you, Mr. Durant?”

Richard objects that I’m being argumentative, and Hatchet sustains, so I rephrase. “Mr. Durant, is there a higher authority than you regarding who was allowed access to that house? Someone else we should talk to, who is more knowledgeable about it than you?”

Durant looks over at Richard, hoping he’ll object, but he doesn’t. “No,” he says.

“So you’re the guy?”

“Yeah. I’m the guy.”

I turn the witness back to Richard for redirect. He gets Durant to remind the jurors that no one other than the people he already mentioned had gotten through the guards into the house. No sinister mad bombers, no serial killers. The implication is clear: It had to be Steven.

EACH NIGHT DURING A TRIAL, I do two things.

I rehash with Kevin what went on in court that day, and then we prepare for the next day’s witnesses.

In this case, our rehashing consists of telling Laurie what transpired. She is still doing physical therapy during the day, and therefore cannot attend the court sessions. In this fashion we’ve inadvertently stumbled on a good way to reflect on the day’s events, since she probes us with questions that make us consider and pay extra attention to some things we might have glossed over.

I’m slowly dealing with my guilt about “losing” Childs in the manner that we did. I am doing this by thinking of Childs not as the murderer, but as the murder weapon. He was sent to kill the Timmermans by someone else, and therefore that someone else is the person who had the motive. Childs was just doing a job; the key player in all this is the one that hired him. That is who we have to find.

We have made very little progress in coming up with ways to attack the evidence against Steven. This is of course frustrating; since I know with certainty that Steven is innocent, the evidence had to have been fabricated and planted. But it is also puzzling. I don’t understand why the actual killers went to such pains to frame him.

My belief, especially after my meeting with the FBI, is that Walter Timmerman was murdered because of something having to do with his work. It was therefore, as Tom Hagen would say, business and not personal. But someone who could afford Jimmy Childs was not someone likely to fear they would be suspected of the murder. They were doing it from a distance, and that doesn’t seem to fit with an elaborate frame-up.

“Whoever hired Jimmy Childs had to know a lot about Walter Timmerman’s life, not just his work,” I say. “For instance, he had to know all about Steven, about his knowledge of explosives, about his being written out of the will.”

“If you have the resources to pay Childs half a million dollars, then you have ways of finding out those things,” Laurie points out.

I nod. “Maybe. But I’ve been thinking of some Middle Eastern jillionaire. Don’t forget, twenty million dollars was wired to Timmerman a few weeks before he died. Yet this feels more intimate than that.”

“Charles Robinson has that kind of money, and he knows so much about Timmerman’s life that Steven called him Uncle Charlie,” Kevin says. “And the FBI is interested in him.”

I nod. “But we’re not close to connecting the dots.”

Nothing Sam and Kevin have come up with on Robinson has moved our case forward. He originally earned his fortune as an energy trader, sort of a one-man Enron. His reputation has long been as sort of a shady operator, but if the authorities were ever close to catching him at anything, we can find no evidence of it.

He made worldwide contacts that enabled him to be a facilitator of many things, most of them energy-related. The trading of energy across countries obviously involved huge fortunes, and Robinson has usually put himself in position to get a piece of it.

In recent years he has entered other businesses as well, everything from magazines to a retail clothing chain. But these seem to be secondary to his real business, and showing dogs and racing horses are just hobbies for him.

Kevin and I spend the rest of the evening preparing for tomorrow’s witnesses. These are the toughest days in a case like this. One witness after another will lay a solid foundation of apparent proof that Steven is guilty. We’ll put a few dents in it, but if we’re going to win, it’s going to be on the strength of our own case in chief.

I only wish we had a case in chief.

Richard’s first witness today is Captain John Antonaccio, the chief of ordnance at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina. Antonaccio is the person under whom Steven trained in explosives when he was in the service.

Richard takes Antonaccio through his qualifications as an explosives expert. I offer to stipulate as to his expertise, but Richard asks Hatchet to let him detail it for the jury, and Hatchet reluctantly agrees.

To hear Antonaccio tell it, pretty much the only bomb in the last twenty years that he was not responsible for was Waterworld. His résumé is impressive, and he is clearly well aware of it.

Next Richard introduces a map of the Timmerman property, and a diagram of the house itself. He gets Antonaccio to show where the bomb went off, near the center of the house, and Antonaccio says that this is where an expert would have planted it, so as to cause maximum damage.

The demonstration is jarring to me, because it reminds me of something that I missed. I will not be able to bring it up on my cross-examination, because I haven’t learned enough about it to risk asking a question I don’t know the answer to. It’s a frustrating mistake on my part, and it’s not the first.

Eventually, Richard questions him about his time working with Steven. “Was he competent working with explosives?”

Antonaccio nods. “Very much so. One of my best students.”

“What qualities did he have that make you say that?”

“He was smart, he was careful, and he had a healthy respect for the materials he was dealing with.”

“Some people don’t respect the explosives?” Richard asks.

“You’d be amazed how many; they become complacent, overconfident. But Lieutenant Timmerman followed the correct procedures every time.”

Richard introduces a document stating that the explosive used at the house was Cintron 321. I don’t object, because I know that he could bring in an expert witness to say the same thing.

“Did Mr. Timmerman ever work with Cintron 321?” Richard would never call Steven “Lieutenant,” as Antonaccio does. To do so could inspire respect from the members of the jury; I’m surprised Richard hadn’t told Antonaccio not to do it as well.

“Absolutely… all the time. He knew everything there was to know about it.”

“And the detonator that was used, which was set off remotely by a cell phone-to your knowledge he would have the requisite expertise for that as well?”

“It would be a piece of cake for him.”

Richard turns Antonaccio over to me. It’s been an excruciating two hours, but an effective time for the prosecution. The fact that Steven is an expert in the type of explosive that killed his stepmother is pure circumstantial evidence, but the type that juries eat with a spoon.

“Captain Antonaccio, you testified that you have been teaching the use of explosives for twenty-one years? Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“During that time, how many people have you trained?”

“I don’t have an exact number.”

“That’s good, because I don’t need one. Ballpark it.”

He thinks for a while and then says, “About three hundred a year.”

“So for twenty-one years, that would be more than six thousand?”

“I guess so.”

“Are you the only person in the marines who does what you do?” I ask.

“No. Of course not.”

“How many such instructors are there? And again, you can ballpark it.”

“Maybe a hundred.”

“So if we assume there have been a hundred for the last twenty-one years, and each person trains three hundred people a year, then in that time a total of…” I turn to Kevin, who has been using a calculator, and he hands me the calculator with the total on it. “… six hundred and thirty thousand people have been trained in the use of these explosives?”

Antonaccio is not pleased with the way this is going. “I can’t verify those numbers.”

“I understand,” I say. “Now, do the army and navy blow things up as well? Do they train people in explosives?”

“Of course.”

I shake my head slightly and smile at where this is going. “I won’t go through the numbers for them, because I’m not a math major. But it sounds like you can’t walk down the street without banging into someone who is an expert in explosives.”

Richard objects and Hatchet sustains, so I switch to another area. “How would someone no longer in the service go about getting Cintron 321?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Really? For instance, you wouldn’t know if it’s available on the black market?”

“I’m told if you have enough money you can get anything,” he says.

“Including Cintron 321?” I ask.

“I would assume so.”

“And detonators?”

“Yes.”

“If people had enough money, and they could buy explosives and detonators, could they also pay someone to show them how to use it all?”

Richard objects that I am asking something outside the witness’s area of expertise, but Hatchet overrules and makes him answer. “I would think they could.”

“Captain Antonaccio, I’d like you to consider a hypothetical. Suppose you sold me Cintron 321 and a detonator to set it off. Would you be able to prepare it in such a way that all I would have to do would be to plant the explosive, and then dial a number on my cell phone to set it off? Would that be possible?”

“Yes.”

“So were you to do that for me, all I would have to know is how to dial a phone?”

“Well…”

“In my hypothetical,” I say.

“Then yes.”

“So even though, based on your previous testimony, I seem to be one of the few people in America not trained in explosives, I could blow something up with your help, just by placing a call? Would I have to include the area code?”

Richard objects and Hatchet sustains, but I couldn’t care less. My point has been made as well as I can make it. In reality, of course, it’s a debating point; the jury is still going to find Steven’s expertise in the explosive used to blow up the house to be a damning fact.

And the truth is that they should.

THE MOMENT I GET HOME, I dive into the discovery documents.

The police and forensics reports confirm what I realized during Antonaccio’s testimony this afternoon. They refer to one explosion as causing all the damage, the one that took place near the center of the house.

Yet I was there that day, and I am positive that I heard a second, much smaller blast, which seemed to come from farther back in the house. I just assumed, if I thought about it at all, that it was a secondary explosion, perhaps a gas tank or water heater, precipitated by the first one. It certainly seemed much weaker than the initial blast, and the damage had already been done.

I still think all of that may be true, but the diagram of the house shown today reminded me that Walter Timmerman’s home laboratory was back in that area of the house where the second explosion seemed to take place.

I discuss all of this with Laurie, and we kick around what to do with it. “We’re going down the tubes at trial,” I say. “And the courtroom is not the place we’re going to win it. If we’re going to get Steven off, it’s by understanding what his father was doing, and who wanted to stop him from doing it.”

Laurie agrees. Even though she has not been in the courtroom, Kevin and I have kept her up to date. We’ll put up a fight there, and we’ll score some points, but at the end of the day the existing evidence is on the side of the prosecution.

I alluded in my opening statement to Walter Timmerman’s work causing him to be murdered. But the truth is, at this point I can’t even introduce evidence of that on a good-faith basis. Of course, we have no hard evidence anyway, but even if we did, we have only guesswork to tie it to the murder.

I call Sam on his cell phone, which is the only phone he ever uses. He answers on the first ring, which I think he has done every time I’ve ever called him. He must keep the phone taped to his ear.

“Talk to me,” he says, his standard greeting.

“Sam, I’ve got an assignment for you. You can do part of it on the computer, but you may have to do real legwork on the rest.”

“Can I carry a gun? I just got a license… in case.”

Sam has some serious mental issues. “No gun, Sam. This isn’t official police business. But you can say stuff like ‘ten-four’ and ‘roger’ if you like.”

“I copy that,” he says.

“Good. I want you to find me the best expert you can on the work that Walter Timmerman was doing.”

“What kind of work was he doing?” Sam asks, quite logically.

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I admit.

“That’s going to make it harder.”

“Let’s start with DNA. Timmerman was an expert in it, and we have that e-mail about him sending his own DNA in to be tested. So we’ll start there. Bring me the mayor of DNA-ville.”

“Will do.”

“And Sam, if you find someone, but they don’t want to help, don’t shoot them. Move on to someone else.”

But Sam has already hung up, so he doesn’t hear me. I turn to Laurie, who has overheard my side of the conversation. “Sam has a gun?” she asks.

“Apparently so.”

“You might want to confiscate his bullets.”

My next call is to Martha Wyndham, who is not at home. I leave a message that I need to talk to her, and I give her the address of the house, should she be able to come over after court tomorrow.

Laurie and I talk some more about the case, and we then go upstairs to the bedroom. I head into the bathroom to wash up and brush my teeth, and when I come back Laurie is already in bed. This is not a surprise. What is a surprise is that she’s naked.

“You’re naked,” I say, trying not to drool.

“Wow, you don’t miss a thing.”

I put on a fake Western accent. “Where I come from, when a lady gets herself naked, she’s got a reason for it. At least that’s what my pappy always told me.”

“You had a wise pappy,” she said.

This is shaping up as a too-good-to-be-true moment, but I’m also slightly concerned about it. “You’re sure you’re okay?” I ask. “I mean, you’ve been through a lot. Are you up for this?”

She smiles. “I was going to ask you the same question.”

It turns out that we are both more than equal to the challenge. It also turns out to be one of the most intense, loving experiences of my life.

It wasn’t long ago that I thought I had lost Laurie forever, and now she’s here, with me, fully and completely.

As Al Michaels once said, “Do you believe in miracles? YES!”

ROBINSON ARRIVES AT THE HEARING with eight lawyers. Since I don’t attend bar association meetings, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this many lawyers in a group before. I’m not even sure it’s called a “group” of lawyers; maybe it’s a flock or a gaggle.

The lead attorney is Stanford Markinson, one of the founding partners of Markinson, Berger, Lincoln amp; Simmons. It is one of the largest law firms in New Jersey, with offices around the state. Robinson must be a hell of a big client to get Markinson to show up personally at a dog custody hearing.

Hatchet makes it clear that he is not at all happy to have to be going through this, and he tells both sides to be economical with their time. This is going to be done before lunch, or he’s going to have the attorneys for lunch.

I am very concerned about this hearing, and it has nothing to do with the number or quality of lawyers that Robinson has enlisted to represent him. The fact is that I have very few legal bullets to fire; if I were Markinson I would view this as a slam dunk.

More important are the stakes involved. I don’t trust Robinson and view him as a possible suspect in the Timmerman killings, which automatically makes him a suspect in the attempted Waggy killing. Even if he were innocent of all that, I certainly don’t trust him to protect Waggy in the way that I have been doing.

Complicating matters is my inability to share with the court the danger that Waggy is facing. Clearly I can’t reference what Childs confessed to Marcus, and without that I have no evidence at all of any threat to Waggy.

I am also in the uncomfortable position of not really having a positive goal that I can verbalize. Robinson’s is clear: He wants to be named custodian of this dog. My preferred outcome is more vague. I want to maintain my role as the court-appointed decider when it comes to Waggy’s future, even though I have done nothing but avoid making a decision for months.

What I want is for Steven to take custody, but I certainly can’t guarantee with any certainty at all that Steven will ever again be in a position to do so. Hatchet knows that as well as anyone. I have to try to play a continuing delaying game until I can win Steven his freedom.

Markinson calls as his first witness a trainer named Pam Potter. She has been the primary trainer of Robinson’s show dogs for four years, and she describes the conditions that Robinson provides as humane and perfectly acceptable.

“You would be aware if that were not the case?” Markinson asks.

“Oh, yes. I’m around the dogs all the time. I wouldn’t stay there if they were being mistreated. I love dogs far too much for that.”

“And Mr. Robinson provides whatever veterinary care is necessary?”

“Certainly. Money is never an object.”

Markinson turns the witness over to me for cross-examination, but before I can start, Hatchet calls both of us to the bench for a whispered conference. He directs his comments to Markinson.

“What was that witness all about?” he asks.

Markinson is taken aback by the question; he’s not used to Hatchet’s eccentricities. “Well, Your Honor, we were using her to show that the dog will be well cared for by Mr. Robinson.”

“Why?”

“So that you would feel comfortable awarding the dog to him.”

Hatchet gives him the icy stare. “This dog is not going to the person who will provide the cushiest life. He is going to the person with the strongest legal claim to him. So stick to the ownership issues.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“I would still like to cross-examine this witness, Your Honor,” I say.

“To what end?”

“To challenge what she said.”

Hatchet is not very adept at concealing his annoyance. “I just told you that what she said does not matter.”

“I understand, but it’s still in the record, and I would not like the record to show that it went unchallenged.”

“For possible appeal?” Hatchet asks.

“If we don’t prevail here,” I say. I’ve got to be careful with this, since Hatchet is not only the judge, he is also the jury. It doesn’t make much sense to piss him off.

“If you take more than fifteen seconds to cross-examine this woman, then it’s a good bet you won’t be prevailing,” he says.

I nod, and Markinson and I go back to our respective tables. He has been “Hatcheted” for the first time, and seems a little shocked by the experience.

“I have no questions for this witness,” I announce, and I see Markinson smile when I say it.

Markinson calls Charles Robinson to the stand, and studiously avoids asking any questions about how well the dog will be treated. He focuses on his friendship with Timmerman, and their partnership in owning three dogs, none of whom is in competition anymore.

“This dog was special to Walter,” Robinson says. “He told me many times that he thought he could be a champion. I know he would want me to help realize that dream.” The words would be enough to make me gag no matter who said them, but coming out of the mouth of this slimy worm make them even harder to take.

There is no way I can let this guy have Waggy.

My first question on cross-examination is, “How long has it been since you were in partnership with Walter Timmerman on a dog?”

“A little over four years,” he says.

“How many dogs have you owned since then?”

“I’m not sure. I would have to check the records.”

“I’ve checked the records,” I say. “Does eleven sound about right?”

“Sounds right,” he concedes.

“The records also say that Walter Timmerman has had fourteen dogs since then. Does that sound about right?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he says.

“You and your close friend and partner didn’t discuss these things?”

“We did. I just wouldn’t know the exact number.”

“So between you, you’ve had twenty-five dogs since your partnership ended?” I ask.

“Our partnership never ended.”

I nod. “I see. You no longer owned dogs together, but you were partners on some metaphysical level. How come your partner didn’t leave the dog to you in his will?”

“He left it to his wife. I’m quite sure that if he had any idea she would be killed, he would have included me as well.”

“So you believe he made a mistake in leaving you out?”

“Yes. Definitely. It surprised me.”

“I can imagine your shock, especially after you left him your dogs in your will.”

Robinson doesn’t respond, so I ask, “You did leave your dogs to your friend and partner, Mr. Timmerman, didn’t you?”

He suddenly becomes more subdued, and it doesn’t take Freud to sense an intense anger beneath the surface. “No.”

“So you made the same mistake that surprised you so much when Mr. Timmerman made it?”

“I’m afraid that I did.”

There’s little more I can do with Robinson except get some things on the record in case the worst should happen and he gains custody.

“If you had possession of the dog, what would you do with him? Would he be a household pet?”

“The first thing I would do is have my trainer, Ms. Potter, evaluate him and determine what his potential is as a show dog.”

“Because that’s what you think Mr. Timmerman would have wanted?”

He nods at finally hearing something he can agree with. “Exactly.”

“So he would spend the first month or so at Ms. Potter’s training facility, so as to see if he is capable of fulfilling Mr. Timmerman’s dream. Is that what you are representing to this court?”

“Yes.” He’s not happy at the direction this is going.

“And if he were judged incapable of mastering the training necessary to be a successful show dog, you would then have no interest in keeping him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“So what do you say?’

“I’d deal with that situation if it came up, but I doubt that it will.”

“No further questions.” I at least got him on record as promising to keep Waggy at the trainer’s facility for a month. I’m not sure how that will help, but I’d feel better if he were there than at Robinson’s.

I have no witnesses to call, since my position is that Steven remains the rightful heir. The only place I can make that point is in my closing argument, and I’ll get to have the final word, as Markinson will be speaking first.

He’s a smart guy and has caught on to Hatchet quickly, so he leaves out anything referring to the health and well-being of the dog. Instead he focuses on Robinson being the court’s only real option. Mrs. Timmerman is dead, Steven is obviously not in a position to take the dog, and there are no other candidates.

He adds the importance of a timely decision being reached, since show dogs must start their training at an early age. Obviously Walter Timmerman would have trained Waggy as a show dog, and the court has an obligation to try to follow through on his wishes when they are as obvious as this. If Charles Robinson is named custodian, he will see that Timmerman’s wishes come true.

It is a professional, persuasive closing, and the truth is that no matter what I say, it is likely to carry the day.

“Your Honor, as you know, Steven Timmerman is currently on trial for murder. You also know that I believe him to be wrongly accused, but that is now for the justice system to decide. And that decision will be reached in a relatively short period of time.

“Mr. Robinson’s alleged close friendship with Mr. Timmerman has not been demonstrated by a shred of evidence before this court, only by Mr. Robinson’s own testimony. And their partnership in the showing of dogs, such as it was, has not existed for a number of years. If Mr. Timmerman had wanted to place Mr. Robinson in the line of succession for custody of this dog, he could have. But he did not, and no evidence has been presented to show that his failure to do so was an oversight.

“If a verdict of not guilty had already been reached in Steven Timmerman’s trial, we would not be having this hearing. He would have been granted rightful custody of the dog, and justice would be done, and that would be that.

“I would submit that for Steven to lose custody before the verdict is reached would be to deny him his rights. And make no mistake: If Charles Robinson is made the custodian, Steven will never get this dog. The only proper reason for granting Mr. Robinson’s petition would be a demonstration that irreparable harm would be done by waiting for that verdict.

“The only such harm even claimed by the plaintiff, though also not supported by the evidence, would be that this animal’s future as a show dog would be damaged by a delay in training. Therefore, I will guarantee the court that if a decision is delayed, I will employ a leading trainer to work with the dog until a verdict in the Timmerman trial is reached.

“Thank you for your consideration, Your Honor.”

Hatchet does not exactly seem swept up in the emotional power of the arguments. He quickly says that he will consider his decision and announce it when he’s ready to do so.

I have absolutely no idea whether I’ve won or lost, and really don’t have the time to worry about it either way. If we lose, I’ll try to file an appeal, hopefully delaying a decision until Steven Timmerman is a free man. Or not.

Right now winning that freedom is what I have to be focused on.

RICHARD HAS A BASKETFUL of effective witnesses to call on, and to belatedly start the day he chooses Sergeant Michele Hundley, the forensics technician who was originally called to the Walter Timmerman murder scene in downtown Paterson. The police were smart enough to bring Hundley to the Timmerman house when it blew up, since they knew that the two cases would be connected. Therefore Hundley, whom I know to be good at her job and a terrific witness, would be able to testify to the entire case.

Hundley dresses conservatively in a suit with her hair up and wearing glasses. She reminds me of those women you sometimes see in TV commercials who miraculously transform themselves into knockouts simply by letting down their hair and removing their glasses. I can’t be sure about this, of course, since every time I’ve seen Sergeant Hundley she has rigidly clung to the librarian look.

Richard starts with the Walter Timmerman murder in downtown Paterson, getting Hundley to describe the conditions that existed when she arrived on the scene. Walter died from one bullet to the forehead, and Hundley testifies that the gun had been pressed to his flesh as it was fired.

“So would you describe that as execution-style?” Richard asks.

“Usually we consider it execution-style when the bullet enters the back of the head, not the front.”

“So this was perhaps more personal?” Richard asks.

I object that the witness could not possibly know this, and Hatchet sustains.

Hundley then talks about the murder weapon, which was a .38-caliber revolver, but has never been found. Childs used a different gun to shoot Timmerman and Laurie; I assume the Luger he used in the latter case was better for distance.

Hundley goes on to describe the splatter of blood, brain matter, and skull fragments against a wall just behind Walter. I glance over and can see Steven cringing at the testimony, even though I had instructed him to be impassive. I know that Steven is upset at hearing how gruesomely his father died, but the jury might think that he is racked with guilt.

Hundley then talks about the specks of blood that were found in Steven’s car.

“Did you test that blood?” Richard asks.

“We did.”

“Whose blood was it?”

“Walter Timmerman’s.”

Richard spends some more time on this, and then shifts to the house in the aftermath of the explosion. Hundley testifies that the explosion came from the upstairs guest bedroom toward the center of the house, the bedroom that Steven used before he moved out.

“It was an extraordinarily powerful explosion,” she says, and then goes on to describe the extent of the damage. She concludes that “Diana Timmerman, who was in the den at the time, died instantly from massive head trauma.”

I could object a lot more than I do, since Hundley is testifying to some things more properly brought forth by others. For instance, she is not a coroner, and her description of the head trauma as the cause of death is inappropriate. But I know all of what she says is true and Richard can bring in witnesses to prove it, so I don’t want to be seen by the jury as attempting to impede the truth.

I need to make at least a few points in my cross-examination. “Sergeant Hundley, it’s a difficult subject to talk about, but you testified that Walter Timmerman’s blood, brain matter, and skull fragments splattered off the wall?”

“Yes.”

“It was something of a mess?”

“Yes.”

“So whoever did the shooting would have been sprayed by it, either directly or when it bounced off the wall?”

“Absolutely.”

“The blood that you found in the car… when was it left there?”

“It’s impossible to tell.”

“How old is the car?”

“I believe three years old.”

“So from what you are scientifically able to determine, it could have been left there any time in the last three years?”

“It’s possible.”

“Thank you. Who left the blood there?”

Hundley seems slightly taken aback by the question. “Well, it was Walter Timmerman’s blood.”

“Could it have been planted there by someone else?”

“There is no evidence of that,” she says, indignantly.

“Is there evidence against it? Is there anything in what you saw that says that’s not possible?”

“Of course it’s possible, but that proves nothing.”

I smile. “I agree that nothing has been proven.”

Hatchet intervenes even before Richard can object, and tells me to cut out the little digs and move on.

I do. “What about the brain matter and skull fragments that you found? Can you determine how long they had been in the car?”

“We didn’t find any brain matter or skull fragments in the car,” she says.

I feign surprise; over the years I have gotten to be a terrific surprise-feigner. “Only blood?”

“Yes.”

“If Steven Timmerman was splattered with blood, brain, and skull, how come he only transferred blood to the seat of the car?”

“That’s difficult to say.”

“I’m sure it is. Doesn’t it make it far more likely that Walter Timmerman, Steven’s father, had a cut that bled a little in Steven’s car sometime in the last three years? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that, considering the lack of brain and skull fragments in the car?”

“I don’t make assumptions, Mr. Carpenter. I just report the facts.”

I nod. “Just the facts… gotcha. Lieutenant Hundley, how many times have you cut yourself in the last three years after which you’ve bled, even a bit, from a little accident? Could be a paper cut, splinter, torn fingernail, shaving your legs, whatever.”

“I really wouldn’t know.”

“Then guess,” I say.

“Maybe four or five.”

I smile approvingly. “Then you’re very careful; in my case it’s a lot more. How many times have you had a little accident that caused you to lose brain matter or skull fragments?”

“Never.”

I nod. “Same here. So people bleed all the time, but they rarely get their heads blown up. Walter Timmerman could have left traces of blood in his son’s car at any time, but if he had left brain or skull in there, that would have been rather significant. Don’t you think?”

“That’s not for me to determine.”

“And it’s equally significant that those things were not there, don’t you think?”

“That’s not for me to determine,” she repeats.

I nod. “Because you just report the facts.”

“That’s correct.”

“Is it a fact that you found clothing of Steven Timmerman’s that was covered with his father’s blood?”

“No.”

“Did you factually find any of that blood in Steven Timmerman’s house?”

“No.”

“Not in the drains, or the washing machine?”

“No.”

“And that’s a fact?”

“Yes.”

I turn to the scene at the house, though there is little fertile ground for me to cover. As part of my questioning, I ask if all the damage had been done by one explosion, and she tells me that if there were any additional explosions, she is unaware of it.

When I let her off the stand, Richard stands for what I assume will be a redirect examination.

Instead he says, “Your Honor, may we have a discussion in chambers?”

“YOUR HONOR, we believe we have located the murder weapon. I was informed of it moments ago.”

“How convenient for you,” Hatchet says. “Where did you find it?”

“In the defendant’s downtown loft, where he makes and sells his furniture.”

This is not making sense to me. “Richard, I’ve seen the reports of a previous search of the loft. It didn’t turn up then, but it suddenly appeared now?”

“My information on this is not complete; I just thought I should inform the court and defense immediately when this was brought to my attention. But there was apparently a secret, or at least a hidden, compartment in the leg of one of the tables the defendant made. The police discovered the gun in there.”

Hatchet obviously finds this as strange as I do. “What made them decide to do another search in the first place?”

Richard is himself looking uncomfortable with this. “There was an anonymous tip, I believe in the form of a phone call.”

I argue that the gun should not be allowed to be introduced as evidence, though I really have no solid grounds on which to base my objection. Hatchet delays his decision until the gun is confirmed to be the weapon that killed Walter Timmerman, but he will rule against me. I can tell he’s not pleased with this turn of events, but just as I can’t come up with a good reason to keep the evidence out, neither can he.

I ask Hatchet if we can adjourn for the day, so that I can talk to my client about this while the tests are run. Richard backs up my request, since if the gun is shown to be what we all think it will be, he’ll want to introduce testimony to that effect immediately. Hatchet grants the request, and the jury is sent home until tomorrow.

I arrange to meet with Steven in an anteroom. In a normal situation, I might start by telling him that his loft was searched again, and I would be looking to gauge his reaction for any obvious worry. But once again this case is different; I know that Steven didn’t kill his father, Childs did. So it therefore isn’t possible that Steven hid the murder weapon.

“They think they found the murder weapon,” I say. “It was hidden inside a piece of furniture in your loft.”

He recoils as if shot. “That isn’t possible. Oh, my God. How is this happening?”

“Do you ever build hidden compartments into your furniture?”

He nods. “Sometimes, when people request it. But it’s not for hiding things generally, it’s often for storage.”

“Who would know about that?”

“Almost anyone who’s ever bought a piece of furniture from me.”

“That doesn’t narrow it down much,” I say.

“How bad is this?” he asks. “Is there any chance we can recover?”

“We’ll have a better idea about that tomorrow.”

When I finish meeting with Steven, I go back into the courtroom, where Kevin is waiting for me. Also there is Martha Wyndham, who tells me she was in court today. I left word for her to come over to the house after court, and I ask if she’d mind meeting me there. She’s fine with that.

I stop at the supermarket before going home, since the four hundred people who seem to be staying at my house have, if anything, started to eat even more than before. I’m not sure, but I think I saw Marcus gnawing on the garage the other day.

Martha beats me home, and Laurie has let her in. When I get there Martha is playing with a crazed Waggy. I could wait for Waggy to calm down before talking to her, but by then Steven would be up for parole.

“Waggy looks terrific,” Martha says.

I nod. “And he’s matured a lot.”

She starts to ask me some questions about the trial, and how I think it’s going. Since I don’t want to be honest about it, I fend off the questions, including the one about why court was adjourned early. I want to keep the information about the murder weapon quiet until tomorrow, though obviously I have only limited control of that.

I finally get the conversation around to where I want it, which is Charles Robinson. “Did you spend any time with him?”

“Some. Not a lot,” she says.

“What was his relationship like with Walter Timmerman?”

She thinks about it for a few moments. “They would have said they were friends. I would describe them as competitors, but with people like that, the line is blurry.”

“What do you mean?”

“They were both all about winning, so that’s what their friendship was about. They wanted to surround themselves with people who would challenge them, people whom they wanted to beat. I’m not sure they thought about it in those terms, but to them it would make perfect sense.”

“Did you ever hear them talking about Timmerman’s work?”

“No, when it came to work the only thing they had in common was it made both of them rich. Walter was a scientist; Robinson is some kind of international financier, or trader, or something.”

Martha has no real knowledge of Robinson or his activities, and the conversation shifts to her own life in light of the death of her employers. She’s saved some money over the years, she says, and her mother left her a decent amount when she died, so finding work immediately is not necessary. She renews her offer to help us with Steven’s case in any way she can, but there’s really nothing for her to do.

“By the way, did you hear a second explosion that day at the house?”

“No, I don’t think so. But all I could really hear was myself screaming.” She grins with some embarrassment at the recollection, but I understand her reaction. It was a frightening, surreal moment.

Laurie invites Martha to stay for dinner, but I’m glad that she declines, since I need all available time to prepare for tomorrow’s witnesses. Martha offers to help out with Waggy if we need a break, but I decline that offer as well.

After dinner I receive a phone call from Richard Wallace. “Sorry to bother you at home, Andy, but the ballistics test came back and I thought you’d want to know the results.”

It’s typical of Richard that he would be giving me this heads-up. “Let me guess,” I say. “It’s the gun that shot Kennedy from the grassy knoll.”

He laughs. “Close. It’s the one that shot Timmerman from behind the Dumpster.”

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other. See you in court, counselor.”

HATCHET ALLOWS the murder weapon in as evidence, as I knew he would. Once the ruling is made, Richard calls Detective Roger Manning to the stand. Manning is the officer who led yesterday’s search at Steven’s loft, and he supervised the ballistics tests that were immediately done.

Manning testifies quite simply that the police received a call in the form of a computer-masked voice, alerting them to the location of the weapon, and that when they conducted a subsequent search, there it was.

He further says that the loft was locked when they arrived, and that they had locked it when they searched it the first time. There was no sign of forced entry, according to Manning.

Richard has him describe the manner in which the ballistics tests were performed, and he introduces photographs of the bullets, allowing Manning to show the jury exactly what he is talking about.

“So there is no doubt that this is the gun that killed Walter Timmerman?” Richard asks.

“No doubt whatsoever.”

Obviously I have no ability to challenge the scientific tests, so when Richard turns Manning over to me, I focus on other areas.

“Detective, were there any fingerprints on the gun other than Steven Timmerman’s?”

“There were no fingerprints on the gun at all.”

I do a double take, as if I am surprised. “Not even Steven’s?”

“No,” he says. “The gun was wiped clean.”

“So your view is that he hid the gun in his own loft, in his own furniture, but wiped it clean so that it couldn’t be traced back to him?”

“I can’t answer that,” he says.

“Can you think of any reason why he would do that?”

“I haven’t thought about it.”

I nod agreeably. “Why don’t you spend some time thinking about it now? We’ll wait.”

Hatchet, it turns out, has no desire to wait, and he tells me to move on. So I do. “Detective, did you run a trace on the gun, in an attempt to find out its history?”

“Yes. It was not in any database.”

“So the gun’s only connection to Steven Timmerman is that it was hidden in his loft?”

“The only connection that we could find,” he says.

“Okay, for Steven to have done this, he would have had to shoot his father in downtown Paterson, drive an hour or so to his loft, and then hide the gun in the one place it could absolutely be traced back to him.”

“Your Honor, is there a question in there?” Richard asks.

“Would you like to try that as a question, Mr. Carpenter?” Hatchet asks. “That is the general procedure that we like to follow.”

I nod. “Thank you, Your Honor, I will. Detective, if Steven Timmerman was going to wipe the gun clean, and if it couldn’t otherwise be traced to him, why not just leave it at the scene, or throw it into any garbage can between Paterson and New York? Or throw it into the Passaic River? Or leave it anywhere except in his own loft?”

“I can’t know what was in his mind.”

“Then can you read the anonymous caller’s mind? Did he say how he knew where the gun was?”

“No.”

“Or why he called now?”

“No.”

“But he knew which piece of furniture it was hidden in?”

“He said the leg on the large table.”

“Does it bother you at all that you found the gun this way?”

To Manning’s credit, he doesn’t duck the question. “It would not be my first choice.”

I nod. “Thank you for that. Would you say that the anonymous caller, whoever he might be, wants Steven Timmerman to be found guilty in this trial?”

“It would seem so,” Manning says.

“That’s quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”

“What do you mean?”

“The person who wants Steven to spend the rest of his life in jail just happens to be the person whom Steven told exactly where he hid the gun.”

I check my cell phone messages when court adjourns, and there is one from Sam telling me that he has found the DNA expert to end all DNA experts. He’s a college professor, specializing in genetics. He teaches classes all day and does research at night, so he’s going to bring him to the house early Monday morning before court, and I should call him if that doesn’t work. It works fine, so I don’t bother calling.

When I get home, Laurie is on the phone talking and laughing with a friend from back in Findlay. That is happening with increasing frequency, and I can’t say I’m thrilled with it. Pretty soon she’s going to want to talk and laugh with those creeps face-to-face, which means she will leave here. That is a day I’m not looking forward to.

We decide to have pizza tonight, and because the smell of pizza always brings Marcus out into the light, I order five large pies. More accurately, I let Laurie do the ordering, since on her pie she always wants a long list of toppings, all of which are healthy. On the other side of the scale, Kevin can have no toppings at all, because every one ever invented sets off his allergies.

I overhear Laurie doing the ordering, and to my horror I actually hear her get artichoke on her pizza. I believe in live and let live, but there should absolutely be a law against artichoke pizza.

Kevin arrives at the same time as the pizza delivery man, and Marcus shows up thirty seconds later. We decide to postpone our trial-day rehash until after dinner, and we dig right in on the pizza.

Marcus eating pizza is a sight to behold. He takes three slices at a time and lays one on top of the other, face-to-face, with the third one in the middle. Then he eats it as a pizza sandwich, in maybe three bites.

Laurie, Kevin, and I don’t eat the crusts; instead we feed them to Tara and Waggy. But of course we wouldn’t dare suggest that to Marcus. At least I wouldn’t.

After Marcus has had four such sandwiches, he stands up, a strange look on his face, and walks toward the back of the house. He doesn’t say a word, which is not exactly a news event where Marcus is concerned.

“Where’s he going?” asks Kevin.

“Maybe he’s going hunting for more pizzas,” I say. “They’re in season.”

The three of us continue eating the cheese portion of the pizza and feeding the crusts to Tara and Waggy. Waggy tries to butt in and get every piece, which clearly annoys Tara, but she’s too lady-like to do anything about it. She leaves it to us to make sure she gets her fair share.

Marcus comes back holding what appears to be a hamburger in his hand. “Where’d you get that?” Laurie asks.

“I don’t think hamburger hunting season starts until September,” I say to Marcus. “I hope the game warden didn’t see you.”

Marcus puts the hamburger at the edge of the table. “Yard,” he says, which I assume means he found it in the yard. It takes a moment for the significance of this to hit me, and during that same moment Waggy moves toward the burger.

“NNNNNNOOOOO!” I scream, as loud as I can, and I make a dive toward Waggy and the table. Waggy, forced to decide whether to keep moving toward the hamburger, or to get out of the way of this screaming, middle-aged lunatic, makes the wise choice. He backs away, huddled down toward the floor, fearful.

I grab the hamburger and, without thinking, run into the kitchen and throw it into the sink. By this time, everyone has followed me into the kitchen, no doubt amazed at behavior that is bizarre, even by my standards.

“What is going on?” Laurie asks.

For the first time in my memory, I am more interested in talking to Marcus than Laurie. “That was in the yard?” I ask. “Just lying there?”

He nods. “Yuh.”

“Did you hear anything? Is that what made you go outside?”

“Yuh,” he repeats. This conversation is moving right along.

“You think somebody threw it there?” Laurie asks, as it starts to dawn on her. “You think it could be poison?”

“You’d be amazed at how few hamburgers are thrown into my yard at night,” I say, which is another way for me to say yes.

“We need to get it tested,” Kevin says.

I call Pete Stanton, tell him that I am reporting a possible crime, and ask him to come out with a forensics team.

“What happened?” he asks.

“Somebody threw a hamburger into my backyard.”

“Those bastards,” he says. “I’m sending out a SWAT team, and I’ll tell them to bring ketchup.”

“I think they were trying to poison Waggy,” I say.

“Who the hell is Waggy?”

“Walter Timmerman’s dog. Trust me on this one, Pete. There are some things I haven’t told you about the Timmerman murder and Jimmy Childs.”

“Are you going to tell me when I get there?”

“If I have to.”

“If you don’t, I’m not going to get there.”

I agree to tell him the story, and he’s there within twenty minutes with two officers and a forensics expert. Within fifteen minutes, only Pete remains, and the hamburger has been taken away for a rush test.

“Okay,” Pete says after they’ve left. “Let’s hear it.”

I’m not sure why I haven’t told Pete that Childs had killed the Timmermans and been targeting Waggy; I guess it’s just a habit for me to err on the side of not sharing information with anyone not on the defense team. But there’s nothing about any of it that causes any additional jeopardy for Steven, and I’m not breaking a confidence, so I bring Pete up to date.

“Marcus is sure about this?” Pete says, directing the question at me even though Marcus is in the room. Pete has as much trouble talking to Marcus as I do.

“Marcus is not involved in this in any way,” I say. “The anonymous caller who told me Childs was in the river sounded quite sure, though.”

“But he didn’t say why Childs killed the Timmermans, or why he wanted to kill their dog?”

I shake my head. “No, he didn’t mention that.”

“Have you used your tremendous investigating skills to uncover the reason?”

“Not quite.”

He pauses a few moments to take this all in. “So your client is on trial for two murders, and not only do you know he’s innocent, but you know who actually did it.”

“Yes,” I say.

“And you can’t do shit about it.”

“Not yet.”

He shakes his head in amazement at my predicament. “You know, I never thought I’d say this, but I actually feel sorry for you.”

“That’s a great comfort.”

Laurie, Kevin, Pete, and I kick it around for another half an hour, accomplishing absolutely nothing. Pete’s cell phone rings, and he answers it. “Stanton.”

He listens for a while, says “thanks,” and disconnects the call.

“Two ounces of pure arsenic. If the dog had eaten that, he’d have been dead inside of a minute.”

“Hatchet better rule in our favor,” I say. “We cannot let this dog leave this house.” I look over at the dog in question, Waggy, who is chewing on a toy and doesn’t seem distressed by the goings-on.

But I sure as hell am.

IT DOESN’T TAKE LONG for my worry to prove justified. Even though it is Saturday, Hatchet issues a ruling on the court Web site directing me to turn Waggy over to Robinson immediately. Robinson is hereby named Waggy’s custodian, though the ruling is deemed temporary, and can be revisited at the conclusion of the Timmerman trial. Hatchet does not promise to reconsider his decision in the event Steven is acquitted; he merely retains the right to do so.

Hatchet also directs that Waggy be housed at Pam Potter’s training facility for the first month, to be evaluated as to his promise as a show dog. It seems to be a concession to me, but the ruling as a whole is a disaster.

Hatchet’s ruling also makes it clear that an appeal will be of no avail. He will not stay his ruling, which means that Waggy will be with Robinson while the appeal is considered. This won’t exactly be a high-priority case for an appeals court, and a decision could take months. With the danger Waggy is in, hours could be too long.

Kevin agrees to take Waggy to Potter’s facility, since I can’t bring myself to do so, and I tell him to ask for a tour when he gets there, and to remember everything he can about the place.

“Why?” he asks.

“So that I can make sure Waggy’s well taken care of and safe,” I lie.

I go upstairs, where Waggy is hanging out with Tara. “Waggy,” I say, “you’re going somewhere with Kevin, but you won’t be there long.”

Waggy seems happy enough about the turn of events, smiling all the while. Tara, however, is significantly wiser, and she stares at me. It is not a trusting look.

“I’m telling you, it won’t be long.” If Tara is mollified, you can’t tell it by her stare. “What, you don’t believe me?”

She walks over and licks Waggy’s head, which I take as her way of telling me that Waggy is her friend, and nobody screws around with Tara’s friend.

I have known Tara for eight years and have never lied to her, and right now, right this minute, she thinks I’m full of shit.

“Tara, he will be back here tomorrow night.”

“I’M NOT GOING TO KIDNAP WAGGY,”

I say to Laurie, Kevin, and Marcus.

“You called us here on Sunday morning to tell us that?” Kevin asks.

“Yes, but I would like to discuss, purely on a hypothetical basis, how it could be done if someone wanted to do it.”

“Hypothetically,” Laurie says.

I nod. “Yes. Perhaps we could then take the information and provide it to his new owner as a guide to how he can protect him better.”

“It’s good that it’s hypothetical,” Kevin says, “because if you were really to kidnap him, you would be committing a felony and could face prison time, to say nothing of the loss of your license to practice law.”

Everybody in the room knows I am serious about this, and everybody also knows that Kevin is right. Taking Waggy will not be fun and games; it is a serious crime that I am considering.

On the other hand, two attempts have been made on Waggy’s young life, and he is now very possibly also in the control of the man who has ordered those attempts. My desire not to break the law is strong, but not quite as strong as my desire to prevent this dog from being killed.

“You’re certainly right about that,” I say. “So let’s leave it as a hypothetical, and let’s start by you describing the training facility where Waggy is being kept. Take your time, and do it as completely as you can.”

Kevin describes the place in extraordinary detail. It is a large indoor facility about twenty yards from Potter’s house. It has twenty holding areas, larger than normal dog runs but too small to be called rooms, and each has an entrance accessible from outside. Unfortunately, he has no idea which one Waggy will be kept in.

Once Kevin is finished, I suggest that he leave. Kevin is far too dedicated to the law to participate in a crime, no matter how worthy he considers its purpose. He seems grateful for the opportunity to get out now, but cautions me to be very careful.

Once Kevin is gone, I ask, “If I were to announce a change in this from hypothetical to real, would either of you want to leave?” I’ve already talked to Laurie about this, and she has great reservations. She’s a police officer, but she’s a dog lover, and at this moment I don’t know what she’ll decide.

“I’m staying,” she says.

“Marcus?” I ask.

He nods. “We get the dog.”

“Good. I thank you, and Waggy thanks you.”

We spend the next few hours planning the operation, and though it seems like a solid approach, I’m feeling very uncomfortable about it. I’m going to be crossing a line I’ve never crossed before, and it is a very disconcerting feeling.

Laurie will have no active part in the kidnapping; it will just be Marcus and me. Getting in and out would ordinarily not present a major problem, but it will be complicated by the dogs barking like crazy when we arrive on the scene. This will no doubt be exacerbated by the fact that we will have to search room by room until we happen upon Waggy.

The plan is to bring Waggy back here, at least until we can figure out something else to do with him. I don’t want to involve more people in this, so asking Willie to take him is out. For the time being he can stay inside, with quick walks out to a small secluded yard on one side near the back of the house, and Marcus will stay around to ward off any intruders.

But first we have to get him, and we wait until cover of darkness to do so. It is Marcus’s idea to bring Tara with us; it’s possible that her sense of smell will lead us to Waggy’s room, so that the operation can be done much more quickly.

The three of us get to the house at almost midnight. It is in an isolated area of Mahwah, and there is little doubt that Potter chose this secluded setting so that there would not be neighbors for her barking dogs to annoy. Obviously, the lack of neighbors works very much in our favor.

We all had different ideas for how to pull this off, but Laurie came up with the best one. We park about two hundred yards away, and both put on gloves. Marcus gets out by himself and throws a few rocks close enough so that the dogs can hear them. They start to bark in unison, and within two minutes lights go on in Pam Potter’s house.

From my vantage point at the car, I can see her go out to the dog compound and look around, trying to see what set them off. When she can’t find any obvious disturbance, she goes back into her house. Within another minute, the lights go back off in the house.

Tara and I start walking toward the compound, with Tara on a leash. I assume Marcus is executing the next part of the plan, which is to place devices on the front and back doors of the house that will prevent those doors from being opened from the inside. If Potter gets up again to check on what is happening with the dogs, she’ll find she can’t get out of her house. By the time she realizes it and calls 911, we hope to be long gone with Waggy.

Marcus meets us about fifty yards from the house. “Did you lock her in?” I whisper.

“Yuh.”

“Let’s go.” We move toward the compound with the dogs in it. In the moonlight, it appears to be exactly as Kevin described it.

“Tara, we need you to find Waggy. Find Waggy.” As I say it, I cringe with some embarrassment; I feel like Timmy talking to Lassie. But Tara wags her tail, and we head for the dogs.

We’re about fifteen yards from the compound when the dogs sense our presence and start to bark. Tara leads us down a long row of rooms, and I’m afraid she’s just checking out the place, not Waggy-hunting. But suddenly she stops, and there’s Waggy, tail pounding and reveling in the excitement of it all.

Marcus takes out a device and breaks the lock, then steps in and slaps a leash on Waggy. As he does so, I can see the lights go on in the house again. Within moments Potter is going to find out that she’s a prisoner, and will call 911. It suddenly strikes me as a mistake that we didn’t cut the phone line; I assume that Marcus could have easily accomplished that.

Within seconds we’re running to the car, and we get in and drive away, with Marcus and me in the front seat, and Tara and Waggy in the back. I’m exhilarated by what we have accomplished; there’s a Bonnie-and-Clyde feeling to it. The only problem is that I want to be Clyde, but Marcus would be rather miscast for the role of Bonnie.

I listen intently for sirens all the way home, but there are none. When we get there, Laurie is waiting anxiously for us. We update her on how flawlessly her plan went, and then Marcus and Waggy head down to their hiding place in the basement, while Laurie, Tara, and I go upstairs to bed.

I lie in bed for an hour, unable to sleep. What we did tonight almost seems surreal. But it wasn’t. In fact, the justice system has some very real terms for it, like “breaking and entering,” and “grand larceny.”

Laurie wakes up and sees me with my eyes open. “Can’t sleep?”

“No,” I say. “Not so far.”

“Does the fact that you’re now a felon have anything to do with it?”

“No. I’m just planning my next job. I’m thinking maybe a bank.”

“Good night, Andy.” “Good night, Bonnie.”

THEY’RE GROWING A STRANGE CROP of college professors these days, and Dr. Stanley McCarty is as strange as they come. First of all, he looks like he’s about seventeen years old, with hair halfway down to his shoulders. He is wearing jeans and sneakers, with a white buttondown shirt that is buttoned all the way to the neck.

When Sam introduces him to me, he doesn’t make any gesture to shake hands, but instead says “hey” and walks past me into the house. He goes to the large-screen TV on the wall in the den and spends about three minutes examining it, even seeming to caress it. Then he says, “Very cool,” and comes back to Sam and me.

I’ve got a feeling that if I bring him in as an expert witness, Hatchet will hold him in contempt before he even opens his mouth.

“So my man here says you need to talk to me,” McCarty says, and I have to assume that Sam has earned the designation “my man” in record time.

“I do,” I say. “Thanks for coming over.”

“No prob.”

“You work with DNA?” I ask.

He smiles. “The whole world works with DNA.”

“But it’s your specialty?”

“Hey, I never thought of myself as having a specialty, but let’s go with genetics.”

“Did you know Walter Timmerman?” I ask.

“Met him once. Didn’t really know him, which is okay, because he didn’t know me, either.”

By this point in the conversation, Sam and I have made eye contact at least a dozen times. If malicious eye contact could kill, Sam’s song-talking days would be over for good.

“I need to find out what Timmerman was working on when he died,” I say.

“You got his notes?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“What do you have?”

“Pretty much nothing.”

“Nothing?” he asks.

“Basically. At least no real facts.”

McCarty looks at Sam, as if I’m the lunatic in the room. He may be right. Then he turns back to me. “You see the problem here, right?”

I nod as I hand him a copy of the e-mail that Robert Jacoby sent to Timmerman, expressing surprise that he had sent him his own DNA to test. “Take a look at this.”

McCarty takes the e-mail and reads it. He’s either the slowest reader in America, or he’s reading it a number of times. Finally, he nods. “Okay. What else?”

“The FBI had an entire task force assigned to Timmerman, all because of what he was working on. They said it was important to national security.”

McCarty just nods, silently, so I go on. “And I believe that Timmerman was murdered because of that same work.”

“Keep talking,” he says.

“The same people that killed Timmerman are trying to kill his dog; somehow the dog represents a danger to them.”

“What kind of dog?”

“Bernese mountain dog.”

He nods. “I love those dogs; the markings are amazing. Can I see him?”

“He’s not here,” I lie. “At this point he’s missing.”

“That’s the dog I saw on television this morning? The one who was kidnapped?”

“Yes. Is any of this making any sense? Maybe ringing a bell?”

He’s still quiet for a few moments, hopefully thinking. “You know anything about DNA?”

“No.”

“You got a pen and a piece of paper?”

“In my desk.”

“I’ll get it,” says Sam, and he goes off to do that. He’s back quickly and hands the pen and paper to McCarty, who sits down and starts writing on it. When he’s finished, he shows me a drawing of what I take to be a strand of DNA.

“This is nature,” he says. “Everything comes from this. You control this, you control the world.”

“How can you control DNA?” I ask, not understanding this at all.

“By creating it. Timmerman was creating synthetic DNA. There were rumors that he was, and now I’d bet anything on it.”

“Is that known to be possible?”

He nods. “Sure, everybody’s trying it, and some think they’re making good progress. But right now it’s just a theory. A damn good one, but just a theory.”

“What could you do with it?”

“Anything you want. See, if you can create DNA, then you program it however you want. Then you inject it into a cell, and once it gets inside, it’s like it boots itself up. Like a computer program, you know? Then it gets the cell to do whatever it wants it to do. Whatever you want it to do.”

“Give me an example,” I say.

“You’re not getting it,” he says, and truer words were never spoken. “Everything is an example. You can duplicate life-forms, or you can create completely new ones.”

“So it’s cloning?”

He smiles. “Cloning is yesterday’s news. If Timmerman pulled this off, it’s no wonder somebody killed him for it. Shit, I’d kill him for it.”

It’s starting to dawn on me. “So Waggy… the Bernese…”

“Came from the lab” is how he finishes my sentence. “Did Timmerman own the dog’s father or mother?”

I nod. “Father. He was a champion.”

“So he took the father’s DNA…”

I interrupt. “Isn’t that cloning?”

He shakes his head. “No, because I’ll bet Timmerman didn’t use the father’s DNA. He copied it; he created new, synthetic DNA just like it.”

“Why?”

“Just to prove to himself that he could. Like a test.”

“So why would someone then want to kill Waggy?”

“Maybe to keep anyone from knowing what Timmerman was doing,” he says. “There must be something about the DNA that identifies it as synthetic.”

I nod. “Which is why Timmerman sent his own DNA in to be tested. It must have been a copy as well, and he wanted to see if the lab would pick up on it.”

“Now you’re getting it,” he says, as I feel myself beaming at the approval. “But the lab missed it, because they didn’t know what they were looking for. It’s completely understandable.”

“But if he proved he could synthetically produce his own DNA, why did he have to use the process to create the dog?”

“Because copying DNA is one thing, but creating a living thing with it is far more complicated. And to exactly copy a champion show dog, that’s about as good as it gets.”

“So why would the FBI be watching Timmerman? What would they be afraid of?”

McCarty shakes his head as if disappointed. “Maybe you’re not getting it after all. This is the ticket to creating anything… a new life-form, fuel, anything. For instance, you could create bacteria and viruses that we don’t know how to deal with; you think the government might be interested in that?”

“Holy shit,” Sam says, an appropriate comment considering the circumstances.

“Did you say fuel?” I ask. “This stuff can create fuel?”

He nods. “Sure, that’s probably the main reason companies are pursuing it. You can tell cells to make biofuels. If Timmerman could figure out a way to do it cost-effectively, you know what that would be worth?”

“I can imagine,” I say, though I’m not sure I can. “One thing I didn’t mention. I think that there might have been a secondary explosion that took place in Timmerman’s laboratory.”

McCarty smiles and says, “Fuels have a tendency to do that.”

I DON’T HAVE TIME TO CONSIDER the staggering implication of what McCarty had to say. I’m in danger of being late for court, and I’m aware that Hatchet would strangle me, DNA strand by DNA strand, for that offense. On the way in, I get a call from a local TV reporter asking me if I’ve heard that Waggy was stolen last night, and that Charles Robinson is out making statements accusing me of being behind the theft. He is threatening to go to the police and file charges, an empty threat since he has no evidence. At least I hope he has no evidence.

Since it’s been all over the news this morning, I acknowledge that I’ve heard about it, and am outraged by Robinson’s accusations. I deny any involvement; once I’ve committed a serious felony, lying to a reporter seems easy by comparison.

I tell the reporter that I will have more of a comment later, after court, but I manage to find the time to accuse Robinson of not adequately providing for Waggy’s security, and I further threaten a lawsuit against Robinson on Steven’s behalf if Waggy is not quickly found, safe and sound.

I make it to court with only ten minutes to spare, and I can see that Kevin was getting nervous that he might have to take over. We don’t talk about the events of last night, but he obviously knows what happened.

I wish I didn’t have to be here; it requires my total concentration, and I’d much rather be thinking about what I learned this morning. McCarty was credible. It may turn out to be a lunatic theory, but it had the ring of truth to it, and his confidence in what he was saying was contagious.

Hatchet makes no mention of the Waggy kidnapping; he probably doesn’t care much either way, as long as it doesn’t involve him.

Richard calls Philip Sandler, Walter Timmerman’s attorney. He is there to testify about his preparation of Walter’s will, and Steven’s connection to that.

Sandler says that Timmerman called him three weeks before his death and mentioned that he was considering disinheriting Steven.

“Did he say why?” Richard asks.

“He had a contentious relationship with Steven, and he was particularly upset with him at that point.”

“Did he share with you what he was upset about?”

“He felt that Steven was mistreating his stepmother, Diana. His view was that Steven never accepted her into the family.”

“What happened after that phone call?” Richard asks.

“About a week later, he called and said that he and Steven had argued about it, and he definitely wanted to disinherit Steven.”

“So he was taken out of the will entirely?” Richard asks.

“No, but he would only receive money if Diana were also not alive when the will was settled.”

When Richard turns the witness over to me, my first question is, “Mr. Sandler, you said that Walter and Steven Timmerman had a contentious relationship. Would you say they never got along?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that. It was up and down. Sometimes things were good, sometimes they weren’t.”

“And sometimes Steven was in the will, and sometimes he wasn’t?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“How many times did Walter Timmerman instruct you to take Steven out of the will?”

“Probably twenty times.”

“And did you do so each time?” I ask.

“No, on a number of those occasions he called and told me he had changed his mind before I had a chance to do it.”

“How many times did you actually do it?”

“Nine.”

“And the first eight of those times, he subsequently instructed you to put his son back into the will?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ever say that Steven had threatened him, or that he was afraid for his life if he kept Steven disinherited?”

“No.”

“And as far as you know, Steven never physically assaulted his father?”

“I am not aware of any such thing.”

I excuse the witness, and then catch a break when Hatchet announces that he has received a note that one of the jurors is feeling ill. That will give us some time without having to listen to, and try to deflect, the mounting evidence against Steven.

I go home and decide to take Tara for a long walk. I haven’t done it for a while, because I didn’t have the heart to leave Waggy at home alone. But now that Waggy is in the basement with Marcus, Tara and I are free to be on our way. Walking Tara is the thing I do that for some reason most allows me to think clearly, and clear thinking is what is need right now.

Before I leave I go down to the basement to check on the unlikely duo. Marcus is throwing a tennis ball, and having Waggy chase it. What he does is run after the ball, often skidding to a hilarious stop on the slippery floor. Then he mouths it for a while, but neglects to bring it back to the person who threw it in the first place. Instead he looks up hopefully, as if wanting the person, in this case Marcus, to once again throw the ball that he does not have. It is up to Marcus to walk over and retrieve the ball before tossing it again.

Marcus is laughing at Waggy’s antics, which brings to a total of one the number of times I’ve seen Marcus laugh. I ask him if everything is okay, and he nods and throws the ball again. This is working out better than I thought.

I realize that I haven’t even mentioned to Waggy yet that he may be a creation of science rather than sex, but I think I should. I don’t want him learning it from some stranger later in life.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a happier dog than Tara as we set out. I’m not sure if it’s that we’re going on the walk, or if it’s that she finally will get some time away from her lunatic companion. But away we go, Tara’s tail wagging and her nose sniffing, and me thinking.

There are two parallel tracks to this case. One is the trial itself, and the other is our investigation into whatever it was that Walter Timmerman was doing before he died. I am willing to believe that his work in some fashion caused the death of himself and his wife, mainly because it makes sense and it doesn’t help me to believe otherwise.

If this becomes purely a matter of defending Steven, we are in deep trouble. Richard is presenting the jury with some very compelling evidence. Though I am poking some holes in that evidence and questioning its authenticity, it is basically me asking the jury whether they want to believe me or “their own lying eyes.”

It still makes very little sense to me that Steven is in this position at all. If I believe that Walter was working on some powerful force that could have an international impact, and he was killed by some sinister entity intent on possessing or stifling that force, then where does Steven fit in? Why was it necessary to frame him? It was not an easy thing to do, and the process of doing it necessarily included the danger of detection.

I never thought I would say this after initially meeting Stanley McCarty, but I definitely believe he knew what he was talking about. His words were compelling, and he spoke them with an easy confidence. It also doesn’t help me not to believe him; the area of investigation it opens is also the only one I have worth pursuing.

My instincts, which place Charles Robinson somewhere near the center of this, might well be confirmed by what McCarty had to say. As a trader of energy with international contacts, he would have been the logical person for his friend Walter Timmerman to turn to with his discovery.

But once Timmerman approached him, Robinson would have looked at him as a cash cow, the possible key to untold wealth and power. Why then, would he have killed him? Had they had a dispute over the direction they should take? Had Timmerman ultimately betrayed him and gone elsewhere?

As my father would say, “I’m not going to know until I know. And maybe not even then.”

But one thing I do know: On the investigative track of this case, the time for playing defense is over. I cannot sit back and watch Steven go down the tube, or wait for someone to successfully kill Waggy. It’s time to go on the offense, which means Charles Robinson’s world is about to be shaken.

WHEN I GET BACK TO THE HOUSE, Pete Stanton is waiting for me.

Robinson has demanded an investigation into the Waggy kidnapping, and Pete has internally maneuvered to be the one to conduct an interview with me. Laurie is with us when he questions me.

“Do you have a search warrant?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “No, not enough probable cause. I am here to interview you, which I know you’ll consent to, because you are a citizen concerned with justice and the American way.”

“That is beautiful. For the first time I feel understood.”

“Did you steal the dog?” he asks.

“Is this off the record?” I ask.

“Off the record? Who do I look like, Bob Woodward? I’m a cop; nothing is ever off the record.”

“I did not steal that poor animal, and I only hope you can find him and return him safely to Mr. Robinson. You and he are in my prayers.”

“Where were you last night at around eleven o’clock?”

“Home and in bed with the police chief of Findlay, Wisconsin.”

“We were snuggling,” Laurie adds.

“Do you have any idea where the dog is?” he asks.

“No, but I’m considering hiring a team of investigators to help in the hunt. Any information we get will be turned over to you immediately. This heartless criminal must be brought to justice.”

“You know what I think?” he asks. “I think you kidnapped the dog and he’s down in the basement right now.”

“But you didn’t bring a search warrant?”

“No.”

“And you aren’t going to get one?”

“No.”

“You policemen are relentless, you know that?”

Pete leaves, knowing full well what the truth is, and having no intention of attempting to expose it. I deeply appreciate that, and someday will tell him so.

Once he’s gone, I call Cindy Spodek. I call her rather than Agent Corvallis mainly because on Friday evening if would be difficult to reach him, and I have Cindy’s cell and home phone numbers. I also think it’s probably best that she approach him on my behalf, because she’ll lie and say that I’m credible and reliable.

Obviously she has caller ID, because she answers the phone with, “So, did you kidnap the dog?”

“That’s how you answer your phone? By accusing your old friend of committing a felony?”

“Knowing you and what a dog lunatic you are, I would say there’s a ninety-five percent chance you did it.”

“I just want you to know that I’m deeply hurt, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’m going to move past that.”

“My cup runneth over,” she says. “What can I do for you, old friend?”

“I want you to set up a meeting with Corvallis about the Timmerman case.”

“Aren’t we into a ‘been there, done that’ situation?”

“I believe we are.”

“It was a fascinating meeting, Andy, really it was. But I think I’m going to need a little more to get Corvallis in a room with you again.”

“I’m going to give you Charles Robinson.”

“The guy you stole the dog from? Why would I want him?” she asks.

“You wouldn’t, but Corvallis would,” I say, and then it dawns on me that she may not know anything about all this. She is not a member of the task force assigned to Timmerman, and may be on the outside of a need-to-know situation.

I ask her straight-out if she knows what is going on, and she admits that while she has some suspicions, she is basically in the dark.

“Would you like to be brought into the light?” I ask.

“I would.”

“And can I count on you to keep everything I tell you in confidence, except the parts you don’t have to keep in confidence?”

“Not knowing what the hell you are talking about, I’ll say yes.”

I proceed to tell her everything I know, and everything I suspect, about the Timmerman case. I’m glad to do so, because I’m pretty far out on a limb here, and Cindy is really smart. If she thinks I’m way off base, she’ll tell me so and show me how.

She doesn’t. Instead she just says, “You could be right about this, Andy. I’ll call Corvallis; when do you want to meet?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow is Saturday,” she says.

“Boy, you FBI people are really sharp. Cindy, I would like to get moving on this before the jury delivers a verdict.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back.”

When I get off the phone, I update Laurie on what she said, and my request for a meeting tomorrow.

“If you get the meeting, I want to go with you,” she says.

“Why?”

“You’re starting to get into potentially dangerous territory, and dealing with danger is not exactly your forte.”

“Danger is my middle name,” I say.

“Robert is your middle name.”

“No, I changed it while you were in Wisconsin. I thought Danger would be more appealing to chicks.”

“I knew there was something exciting about you, I just couldn’t place it.”

I finally agree to let Laurie come with me to the meeting, because she’s smart and I value her opinion. Also, because I really hate saying no to Laurie. At least I think I would; I’ve never actually tried it.

Laurie tells me that she taught Waggy a trick, which she wants to show me. We go down to the basement, and she tells me to get him excited, which I do by throwing a tennis ball. He is firmly into his nut-job routine when she demonstrates the trick.

She puts her hand toward the floor, palm-down, and says, “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”

He doesn’t even bother to look up, just continues to roll around with the ball, in wild excitement.

Laurie makes her voice even sterner. “Quiet time, Waggy. Quiet time.”

Waggy yelps a few times as the ball rolls away from him, and then leaps on it, grabbing it in his mouth and violently shaking it and his head from side to side.

“It’s a great trick,” I say. “But you might want to perfect it before you do it on stage.”

“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asks, ignoring the dig.

“Did you teach Waggy to load a DVD also?”

“That’s for tomorrow,” she says.

We go back upstairs and watch The Natural, one of Laurie’s favorite movies. She’s not a big sports fan, but for some reason she loves sports movies. We watch the flick, and drink some wine, and pet Tara. It is perhaps my favorite way to spend time, not counting the NFL.

When we’re finished we go upstairs and make love, which on second thought is my favorite way to spend time, including the NFL.

Afterward Laurie looks at me, probably surprised that I haven’t fallen asleep within eight seconds. “What are you thinking?” she asks.

“That I want you to move back here and marry me.” These are words that I’ve said a thousand times, but they’re usually in my head, and never actually come out through my mouth. This time I involuntarily speak them, loud and clear, and even Tara looks over in surprise.

“Excuse me?” Laurie asks, meaning she didn’t hear me the first time or she wants to give me an easy out to pretend I never said it.

Since I have no way of retreating, I push ahead, rephrasing it as a question. “Will you move back here and marry me?”

Ten seconds that feel like ten years go by before she answers. “Is it all or nothing?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if I wanted to, could I choose one without the other?”

Is it possible she’s considering this? Or even taking it seriously? “I don’t know; I didn’t think it through. But let’s see… you can choose one, but only if it’s the moving-back-here one.”

“Can I think about this?”

“Sure. I’ll go downstairs and have a sandwich.”

“I don’t mean think for a few minutes, Andy. I mean think it through.”

“Sure. No problem,” I say. “How long do you think it will take? Are we talking hours, or months?”

“Andy… ,” she admonishes.

“Okay, sorry. I don’t want to blow this. But if we meet with the FBI agent, can I introduce you as my fiancée?”

“No.”

“Laurie, he’s an FBI agent. We can’t just tell him that we’re sleeping together.”

“Then we’ll stop sleeping together,” she says.

“On the other hand, what business is it of his? What is he, the sex police? I’m sick of government intruding in the bedrooms of private citizens like us.”

“Andy…”

“What?”

“I love you. And thank you for asking me to marry you. Nobody’s ever asked me that before.”

“I’ve tried to a bunch of times, but I could never quite get up the nerve. I always assumed you’d say no.”

“Maybe I will,” she says, softly.

“And maybe you won’t.”

CINDY CALLS ME at eight AM to tell me that Corvallis will see me this afternoon.

She will not be joining us, possibly because Corvallis knows we’ll be talking specifics, and she isn’t on the case. If she is upset or offended about it, she hides it well. It is simply how the bureau functions. I promise her that I’ll tell her everything that goes on.

Laurie still wants to go with me, and we agree that I will introduce her as my investigator, without mentioning that she is a law enforcement officer in Wisconsin. That might complicate matters for Corvallis, so there’s no point even going there.

This time Corvallis is all business. He seems to understand from last time that he can’t push me around or intimidate me, and he makes no effort to do so. He seems fine with Laurie being there, but he does not have any of his staff sit in with us.

“You’ve got the floor,” he says.

“Okay. Part of what I’m going to say I know for a fact, and part is what I believe. Just so you’ll know, regardless of what you do, I’m going to act as if what I believe is absolutely true. It’s the only way I can defend my client.”

I continue, “Walter Timmerman was working to develop synthetic DNA, which is why you were watching him so carefully. The implications of what he was doing were enormous, for reasons I don’t have to tell you.”

Corvallis doesn’t react at all to what I am saying; he just stares impassively and listens.

“He went to Charles Robinson, a friend of his, to help him benefit from his discovery. My assumption is that Robinson was going to use his connections in the energy industry to capitalize on what could be an incredible new source of energy, one that could have a real impact on the geopolitical balance in the world.

“I don’t know if Charles Robinson had Walter Timmerman killed. I doubt that he did, though it’s possible they had a falling-out; perhaps one of them felt that he was being betrayed by the other. It’s also possible that another party, perhaps one with an interest in maintaining the energy status quo, decided to remove Timmerman from the picture before he could complete his work.

“Once Timmerman was dead, the killers for some reason wanted all evidence of his work destroyed, so no one else could get it. That is why they blew up the house, and that is why they tried to kill the dog. Because the dog is a product of this invention”-I can’t help but smile-“and has a high energy level of his own.

“So I’m not sure of Robinson’s role in the murders, though the fact that he wanted possession of the dog is incriminating. He could well have planned to kill the dog, or at the very least see to it that his DNA was never tested. But the dog was taken from him, and at this point his whereabouts are unknown.”

Corvallis speaks for the first time. “So what are you proposing?” he asks.

“I believe that whether or not Robinson is a murderer, he is at the center of this. I believe I can scare him with what I’ve learned, and maybe shake him into admitting something that both of us can use.”

“How?”

“By meeting with him and confronting him. You can fit me with a wire, and you can be near the scene if things go bad.”

He turns to Laurie, who to this point has not said a word. “And you’d be there as well?”

She shakes her head. “No, Robinson would be more likely to deal if it’s just Andy. But I’ll be with you, nearby, just in case.”

He shakes his head. “We work alone.”

“Not this time you don’t,” I say. “Ms. Collins has my full confidence, which at this point I can’t quite say for you.”

He thinks for a few moments. “Okay… I’ll be in touch.”

“When?” I ask.

“I have people I need to clear this with.”

I nod. “And I have a client I need to defend, so put a rush on it.”

Laurie and I leave, and once we get in the car she says, “He’ll go for it.”

I nod. “I think so, too. And if I was wrong about my theory, he’d have thrown us out of the office.”

She nods her agreement.

“You were quiet in there,” I say. “What were you doing… thinking about what we talked about last night?”

“Andy…”

“Because there’s a lot to think about,” I say. “Flower girls, bridesmaids, showers, shit like that. I think I’m going to have Tara give me away.”

“No one has to give the man away.”

“Oh.”

“Andy, are you going to keep bringing this up?”

“Probably.”

“Then I’m going to check into a hotel.”

“Bring what up?”

RICHARD CALLS A STRING OF WITNESSES who are so boring, the jury has trouble staying awake.

First up is Patrolman Marty Harris, who gave Steven’s car a parking ticket on the street outside Mario’s restaurant in Paterson on the night of the murder. The restaurant is located just two blocks from the exact spot where the murder took place, a fact that Richard uses twenty minutes and two maps to demonstrate.

The ticket was written at nine thirty-seven, as noted by Patrolman Harris on his ticket. This fits in quite well with the estimated time of death, which was around ten o’clock, a connection that Richard makes sure the jury understands.

When he turns him over to me after about an hour of tedium, there’s really nothing about what he said for me to question. So I decide to question him about what he didn’t say.

“Patrolman Harris, where was Steven Timmerman while you were writing the ticket?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are most people who park in that space usually in the restaurant, since that’s the only place open on that street at night?” I ask.

“I would assume so.”

“So you didn’t see Steven Timmerman, before or after writing the ticket?”

“No.”

“Did you see his father, Walter Timmerman?”

“No.”

“Mr. Wallace showed a map, pointing out where the car was parked and where the body was found. Are you familiar with that area? Have you ever driven or walked by there?”

“Yes. Many times.”

“The body was found behind a convenience store. If I asked you to drive to that store tonight, could you find it?”

“Of course,” he says.

“Where would you park?”

I can see his mind racing as he contemplates the mistake that many witnesses make. He has said nothing wrong, but he believes that his next truthful answer will hurt the prosecution’s side, so he tries to think of a way out. Of course, he should not be trying to manipulate matters, he should just tell the truth.

Which ultimately he does. “I would park in front of the convenience store.”

“Not at Mario’s restaurant, two blocks away?” I ask.

“No.”

“Let me present you with a hypothetical. Suppose you were going to murder someone who was in your car, and you were planning to commit the murder behind the convenience store. Obviously you wouldn’t want to be seen with that person, since that would make you a likely suspect after the body was found. Would that make you more or less likely to part two blocks away and walk with him?”

“I would park near the convenience store,” he says.

“Thank you. Me too.”

Next up is a clerk from the phone company named Nina Alvarez, who testifies about the phone call from Walter Timmerman to Steven on the night of the murder. Steven had also told me about the call, but we could not find it in Walter’s records. The explanation for that, as Ms. Alvarez quickly points out, is that it was not made from Timmerman’s private cell phone, but rather from his business cell phone, listed under the account of Timco.

Through Richard’s lens, Alvarez’s testimony comes off as damning. The implication is that whatever was said between the two men, it resulted in a confrontation and murder two hours later. Richard’s contention is that it was the trigger that ultimately resulted in Walter Timmerman’s death.

In my cross-examination I ask Alvarez, “Do you know what Walter and Steven Timmerman talked about that night?”

“No, sir,” she says.

“Could it have been about the Mets game the night before?”

“I can’t say.”

“Do you know that they talked at all?”

“I know that the call was answered and lasted twenty-four seconds.”

“Could a friend of Steven’s, or maybe a housekeeper, have answered the phone and taken a message?”

She nods. “It’s possible, sir.”

“Could the answering machine have answered, and Walter left a message?”

“It’s possible, sir.”

I hate to end the cross-examination, because I like being called “sir.” It doesn’t happen that often. But other than asking Ms. Alvarez her favorite color, there’s nothing more for me to get from her, so I let her off the stand.

When court finally adjourns, I check my cell phone and listen to a message from Agent Corvallis agreeing to participate in my plan as it relates to Charles Robinson, and telling me that I should call him.

I call him immediately, and he says that I need to give them twenty-four hours’ notice before any meeting, so as to give them time to set things up. We also talk about possible locations for the meeting, and how I should position things with Robinson.

Corvallis, now that he is on board, comes off as helpful and smart, qualities I am going to need to call on before this is over.

CHARLES ROBINSON TAKES MY CALL, but he doesn’t seem his old jovial self. “You decide to give up the dog? Because otherwise you’re going to jail,” is the first thing out of his mouth.

“The dog is what I wanted to talk to you about,” I say.

“So talk.”

“I think we should meet in person.”

“Why? You can say what you’ve got to say now.”

“What I’ve got to say concerns not only the dog, but also Walter Timmerman, and synthetic DNA.”

There is silence for a few moments from Robinson. If the first words out of his mouth aren’t What the hell are you talking about? then I’ll have final confirmation that I’m right.

Those are not his first words. His actual first words are, “You think you can keep screwing around with me?” I can see him snarling through the phone.

“I think we can help each other,” I say. “I think we can help each other a lot.”

“You don’t know what you’re messing with,” he says.

“If you don’t meet with me, I’ll be messing with the FBI by this time tomorrow.”

He tells me to come over to his house in Closter, a town about half an hour from me, tonight. Corvallis had anticipated that, and told me it was fine, that the FBI could comfortably set up there. My guess is that means they’ve had previous surveillance on Robinson’s house, but it’s only a guess.

However, there is no way I’m going there tonight. I tell him I’ll meet him at eight tomorrow night, and he reluctantly agrees. He has gone from surly and confrontational to nervous and anxious to meet me. It’s a transformation that certainly works in my favor.

Once I’m off the phone, I call Corvallis and tell him what transpired. He’s fine with it, and we pick a place to meet two hours before I’m to be at Robinson’s. At that point I’ll be fitted with the wire, and we’ll go over final arrangements.

It is terrific for me to have Laurie here to discuss these things with, and she and I spend a few hours kicking around exactly what I should say to Robinson. I’m nervous about it, though of course I would never admit it to her.

“Andy,” she says, “I know you realize this could be dangerous. Robinson could have been the one to hire Jimmy Childs, and he could see you as a danger to be eliminated.”

“You just trying to cheer me up?”

“No, I’m trying to make you aware. Your safety is far and away the most important thing. If at any point your instincts tell you that you are in the slightest jeopardy, you get out of there immediately. Okay?”

I agree, though I neglect to mention that I have absolutely no faith in my instincts, at least not in this situation. In a courtroom, yes. When it comes to physical danger, no. If I bailed out of every situation in which I was physically fearful, I’d never leave the house.

Laurie points out another negative when she says, “I’m afraid there’s no place for Marcus in this.”

I nod. “I know. The FBI wouldn’t let him within half a mile of the place. It’s their show; I hope they know what they’re doing.”

“I’ll be there with them,” she says.

“Then I hope you know what you’re doing,” I say with a nervous smile. “You know, we could go down to city hall tomorrow at lunchtime, and if anything goes wrong tomorrow night, you could be the rich Widow Carpenter.”

“You’re an incorrigible idiot,” she says.

“I’m aware of that,” I say, and then turn serious for what I hope will be a brief moment. I tell her that she needs to know that she is the beneficiary of my will, and that Kevin drew it up and has the document itself. “You get everything, including and especially Tara.”

“Andy, nothing is going to happen. I only brought it up because I want you to be careful.”

“I know. I’ve been meaning to tell you about the will since I did it.”

“When did you do it?”

“About three years ago,” I say.

“Before I went to Wisconsin?”

I nod. “Yup.”

“Did you take me out of the will when we were apart and not seeing each other?”

“Nope.”

“We weren’t even talking, and I was the beneficiary of your will?”

“Yup.”

“You’re a lunatic, you know that?”

“Yup.”

TODAY IS CHARACTER DAY AT THE TRIAL. It is standard procedure; the prosecutor calls a series of witnesses for basically no other reason than to testify as to what a terrific person the victim was. In this case it will take twice as long, because there are two victims.

I barely cross-examine most of these witnesses, for two reasons. First of all, I have basically nothing to get from them, and by not questioning them I hope to decrease their importance. Second, I don’t want to look as if I’m attacking the victims and their memory; juries don’t look very fondly on that.

The only witness I spend any time at all with is Robert Jacoby, the head of the DNA lab. Richard has called him as a friend of Walter’s, and he mouths every platitude there is on behalf of his dear friend’s memory.

When I get to examine him, I ask, “Mr. Jacoby, did you receive an unusual request from Walter Timmerman a couple of months ago?”

“Yes. He sent me a DNA sample to test, and it turned out to be his own DNA.”

“Did you ask him why he did that?”

“Yes, but he never responded.”

I then get Jacoby to admit that Walter had been secretive about his research in recent months, and I let him off the stand. Maybe his answers will come in handy later, or maybe not.

I’m glad that today is such an insignificant court day, because my mind is very much focused on my meeting with Robinson tonight. It sure as hell is much more important than any of these witnesses.

All of this takes the entire morning, and after lunch Richard embarks on phase two, which involves calling witnesses to testify that Steven and the victims did not get along. The first witness he calls is an uncomfortable-looking Martha Wyndham.

“Ms. Wyndham, you worked for the Timmermans, did you not?” Richard asks.

“I did.”

“In what capacity?”

“I was Walter Timmerman’s executive assistant for six months until he died, at which point I began working for Diana Timmerman.”

Since two bosses died on her within six months, Martha Timmerman is not exactly a good-luck charm, but Richard neglects to point that out. Instead he asks, “You worked out of their home?”

She nods. “I did.”

“Do you know the defendant, Steven Timmerman?”

Martha looks over at Steven and says, “I do.”

“Did you have occasion to see Steven when he was in the company of Walter Timmerman, or Diana Timmerman, or both?”

“Many times.”

His questions force her to focus on those times when Steven argued with Walter, and she concedes that it happened fairly frequently. She glances occasionally at Steven, as if distressed that she has to be doing this to him.

She tries to repair the damage by saying, “Sometimes they got along very well. Walter could be difficult, especially with Steven. He had very specific expectations for him.”

“And if they were not met?” Richard asks.

“He expressed his displeasure in very strong terms.”

“And how did Steven respond?”

“He would get angry.”

“Would he ever storm out?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever see him throw things in anger?”

She glances at Steven again. “Yes, he broke a lamp against a wall once.”

Richard now gets Martha to turn to Steven’s relationship with Diana, and even though she tries to couch it, it is obvious their interactions were a disaster.

“Did Steven ever tell you that he hated his stepmother?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say about her effect on his father?”

“That she was destroying him, and that as smart as he was, he still couldn’t see through it.”

When it’s my turn, I ask Martha, “Do you have any knowledge as to whether these problems between Steven and his father, as well as his stepmother, started before your arrival?”

“Oh, yes, they all said that. It had been going on much longer than that.”

“Did Steven ever attack his father?”

She shakes her head. “I don’t believe so.”

“Did he ever attack his stepmother?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

“Have you ever seen him commit or attempt to commit a violent act?”

“No.”

“Thank you, no further questions.”

The last witness for the day is Thomas Sykes, Timco’s CEO by day, and Diana Timmerman’s Hamilton Hotel lover by night. He doesn’t have much to say, simply confirming the stormy relationships that Steven had with his father and mother.

I could question Sykes about his affair with Diana Timmerman, but I’m not sure what it gets me at this point. Instead, I basically ask Sykes the same questions I asked Martha Wyndham, and get the same responses, most notably the one about never having seen Steven commit a violent act.

“I have no further questions for this witness, Your Honor, but I do reserve the right to call him back to the stand as part of the defense case.”

Hatchet is fine with that, and I let Sykes off the stand. I haven’t embarrassed him with a revelation of the affair, but I’m not above doing so later.

In court, there’s actually very little that I’m above.

WHY DO I GET MYSELF into these situations? I’m about to go into a meeting alone with a man whom the FBI and Laurie both think might try to kill me.

There’s something wrong with this picture. I’m a lawyer, the person who is supposed to get involved after the violence, not during. There were no self-defense classes in law school, and we were never taught how to deal with a dangerous criminal while wearing a wire. The only time the word “wire” came up was when we were told that international corporate clients might pay our fees by “wire” transfer.

But here I am, in an FBI van at a rest stop off the Palisades Interstate Parkway, having a wire taped to my chest. I’m sweating so much that I’m afraid it will electrocute me. Laurie is watching all of this with an impassive stare, which I am sure masks very significant worry, if not outright dread. The only confrontations I can handle are verbal. If you wanted to buy a foxhole, I could handle the closing for you, but you wouldn’t want me in there with you if things got dangerous.

My plan is not exactly well thought out. I want to get Robinson on record admitting that my theory about the synthetic DNA is correct. I don’t expect him to admit to any murders; I still don’t know if he committed or planned any. But I, and certainly Corvallis, would like to get him to implicate others.

Whether I accomplish this by threats or an inference that Robinson and I can turn this into a mutually profitable situation, I can’t yet say. I’m going to play it by ear and take the conversation in the direction I deem most fertile in the moment. That is an area in which I feel comfortable.

Corvallis will be in the van with four other agents, two of whom work the technical equipment, and Laurie. Other agents will be spread out on the grounds near the house, ready to move in if I am in danger. I also will have a small panic button attached to my belt, a signal for them to storm the house and save the lawyer.

Once we are all set, and the various electronics are attached to me, I exit the van and get into my car. I wait ten minutes for the FBI people to go ahead and get in position, and then I drive to the house myself.

As I pull up to a house and property just a notch below that of Walter Timmerman’s, I don’t see the van or any agents. I hope that they are just good at concealment, because if they’re not there I could be in major trouble. I feel like Michael Corleone before his meeting in the restaurant with Solozzo, depending on the gun to have been planted in the bathroom.

I park, take a deep breath, and go to the front door, which is wide open. This doesn’t feel like a good sign, and it’s not the only one. Coming through the open door is a stench that is unlike anything I have ever experienced.

In every movie I have ever seen where this situation occurs, there is a dead body waiting to be discovered by the hero. The only thing missing here is the hero, because if it’s me then I’m miscast.

I turn and look around, hoping to see Corvallis or someone who will provide guidance. Seeing no one, I softly say, “The door is open and it smells awful.” I’m sure they can hear me in the van, but the communication is only one way, so they can’t answer me, and it does me no good.

I decide to go in, because not to do so is to leave and therefore make no progress. Besides, while the stench may mean a dead body, it also would mean the body has been dead for a while. Therefore, if someone murdered that body, he has had plenty of chance to leave already.

I walk through the foyer and living room, covering my nose with my sleeve and ridiculously calling out “hello!”-as if Robinson were going to come walking out saying, Andy, welcome. I was cooking us fried horse manure for dinner. Smells delicious, doesn’t it?

When I get to the kitchen, I come upon what is easily the most disgusting sight I have ever seen… the most disgusting sight anyone has ever seen. What used to be Charles Robinson sits at the kitchen table, but he is no longer human. It is as if his enormous body has melted from the inside out, and he is covered with disgusting blotches of ooze and blood. Much of it has dripped to the floor.

I once saw the decapitated, burned body of a corrupt cop, and I later saw his head wrapped in plastic. Those were disgusting sights, but compared with this they were like a field of daffodils.

I start to run from the kitchen, simultaneously pressing the panic button and screaming, “Get in here! Get in here!” The words don’t come out quite as clearly as I would like, because my vomit gets in the way.

When I reach the outside, I literally fall to the ground and gasp for air. Agents rush to me, no doubt thinking that I’m hurt, but I motion for them to go in. Corvallis then comes running to me with two agents and Laurie, and I gasp what has happened.

Laurie stays with me as everyone else goes inside. I’m still on the ground, gasping, trying to keep the remainder of my last twelve meals down. It is not my finest moment, but right now I can’t worry about that. I just have to get control and figure out how not to be haunted the rest of my life by what I’ve just seen.

Within fifteen minutes, there are so many vehicles at the Robinson house you’d think the Yankees were playing the Red Sox in the backyard. I’m sure every FBI agent in the tristate area has been summoned, and I can see a bunch of people with forensics equipment.

Corvallis comes out and greets one of the arriving men as “Doctor,” and he brings him into the house. If this guy can do anything for Robinson, I am going to make him my personal physician for life.

Crime scenes take forever, and as the closest thing to a witness, I know that I am going to have to wait around to be questioned. Two hours go by, during which Laurie and I stroll around the grounds. I tell her in detail what I saw, and the act of walking in the fresh air and being with her makes me feel considerably better.

Finally, Corvallis comes over to talk to me. “We need a statement,” he says.

I just nod my understanding.

“You okay?” he asks, showing more concern than I expected. “It is pretty rough in there.”

“What happened to him?” I ask.

“Let’s do the statement first, okay?”

“Okay.” This is the correct procedure; if he were to tell me anything that they learned, it could be viewed as prejudicing my statement.

I basically have little to say about the actual scene; all I did was walk in and discover the body. Everyone who followed saw exactly the same thing as I did, and I’m sure by now it has been memorialized by hundreds of pictures. But I do insist on including in the statement the reason that I was there in the first place; it will serve me well if I can ever get evidence of all this into the trial.

The statement is verbal and taped, and I promise to sign a transcript of it when they have it ready. I request that I see it before court tomorrow, and Corvallis says that will not be a problem. Then I renew my question to Corvallis. “What happened to Robinson?”

“It looks like iridium.”

That’s a little cryptic for me, so I ask him to elaborate.

“It’s a poison, a favorite in international circles. The KGB had a particular preference for it, but others have used it as well. You don’t want to know the details of what it does; you’ve gotten a firsthand look.”

“How long was he dead?”

“We don’t have a firm time on that yet. He was eating a meal, I assume the poison was in the food. The amount that would fit on the head of a pin would kill someone in forty-five seconds.”

“Not a pleasant forty-five seconds,” I say.

“Yeah. You guys okay getting home?” he says.

“Yes. You know I’m going to try to use all this at trial.”

He smiles. “And the relevance?” He is pointing out that I’m going to have a tough time connecting Robinson’s death to Steven’s trial in a way to get Hatchet to admit it.

“I’m working on it, but it’ll come in.”

“We may be on different pages on that,” he says, and then walks off.

He’s probably right, but I’d know better if I knew what the hell page I was on.

ON THE WAY HOME I call Kevin and ask him to come over. That way, he, Laurie, and I can discuss at length the impact of tonight’s events on our case, and the strategy we should employ to make the most of it.

The potential benefits are obvious. Walter Timmerman’s work involved him with very rough people, so rough that the person he was in a form of partnership with was poisoned to death. This couldn’t help but create the credible thought in a jury’s mind that the perpetrator might have killed Walter as well.

Diana’s death is more problematic, in that we have no evidence she was involved with Walter’s work. However, the manner in which she died helps us. It also blew up Walter’s lab, and could easily have killed Waggy, both of which fit into our theory.

Unfortunately, while this all makes sense to us, it is unlikely to impress the jury, because the jury is very unlikely to ever hear about it. We have no real way to connect Robinson to Walter’s DNA work except our theory. We can’t even factually prove that Walter was working in the weeks before his death, no less on something momentous.

We are going to have to try to get Corvallis to testify. He’ll refuse; he already as much as said so tonight. But Hatchet can compel his testimony, albeit with assurances that he does not have to reveal classified, national security information. It’s by no means definite that we can get Hatchet to go along, since we have little to advance as an offer of proof.

But we’ll certainly try, and Kevin goes off to prepare a legal brief to present. Kevin is far better at this aspect of the law than I am, which is damning him with faint praise. The truth is, he’s pretty much the best at it of anyone I’ve ever been around.

Among the things about this that bother me, and one that has bothered me from the beginning, is why such a great effort was made to frame Steven. These were murders that seem to have been committed from a distance by powerful entities, and it’s hard to picture them as having been solved. For example, I would strongly doubt that an arrest will be made in the Robinson murder; nor do I believe that anyone will be framed for it. Why pick on Steven?

I also can’t quite pin down Robinson’s role in all this. It seems logical that he was Timmerman’s way to connect to the type of people who would pay huge dollars for the right to use the synthetic DNA, probably to make biofuels. But Robinson would have made a fortune as well, so it seems unlikely he would have killed Walter.

More to the point, why would anybody have murdered Walter? If his work was the golden goose, why kill it? The only thing that comes to mind is an entity that was threatened by that work, perhaps someone who did not want the energy status quo threatened. But we are light-years away from making that connection in the real world, and the trial is winding down.

I call Richard and inform him of what happened at Robinson’s house, and of my intention to try to get Corvallis to testify. The call is a courtesy similar to those he’s extended to me in the past, but it in no way has a negative impact on our position. If I sprang the issue on him in court, he would just ask for a delay to prepare a response, and Hatchet would undoubtedly give it to him.

“Have you decided what to do about Waggy?” Kevin asks.

“Nothing for the time being,” I say. “With Robinson gone the pressure is off, but if Waggy ‘shows up’ again, Hatchet could get on my back.”

Once Kevin leaves I sit down in the den and do what I frequently do during a trial. I take the discovery documents and reread them. There are often things that I find that I’ve missed in previous readings, but that’s not the main reason I do it. It keeps my mind alert to the details, so that if something comes up during court, I can remember it instantly and react.

I usually do it in segments; each night I’ll read everything related to one particular area of evidence. Tonight I pore through everything about the night of Walter Timmerman’s murder, including the forensics on the scene, the phone call Walter made to Steven, the location of Steven’s car, et cetera.

Almost every time I do this I am bothered by the sensation that I am missing something, but in fact I rarely am. Tonight I have the same feeling, though the information is fairly dry and straightforward.

The Mets are playing the Dodgers on the West Coast tonight, and I turn on the game while I continue to read. The next thing I know Laurie is waking me, and a glance at the TV shows it to be the eighth inning. I slept through the first seven, and since fourteen runs have been scored, those seven innings couldn’t have been very quickly played. Unfortunately, the Dodgers scored eleven of the runs.

Laurie leads me into the bedroom, and within five minutes we’re both back asleep. She hasn’t even decided what to do, and already we’re an old married couple.

I get to court early and bring Steven up to date on everything that has transpired. Since he doesn’t have access to the media in his cell, he has not heard about Robinson’s death, and he is stunned.

When my meeting with Steven is over, an FBI agent, as promised, is waiting for me with a typed copy of my statement from last night for me to sign. I do so, and then make him wait while I have the court clerk make a Xerox of it for me.

Before the morning session begins, Richard informs me that he will be finishing his case today. That case is basically done, and the witnesses he calls will simply dot his I’s and cross his T’s.

His first witness is a prime example. A representative of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority named Helene Markowitz, she is merely there to testify that Steven’s car went through the Lincoln Tunnel at seven forty-five that evening, thirty minutes after he received the phone call from his father.

“How can you be so precise about the time?” Richard asks.

“He has an E-ZPass chip on his car, so that tolls are automatically paid by his credit card without his having to stop. It records the time he goes through the tollbooth.”

For some reason, her answer causes me to think of something I hadn’t registered before. I quickly write a note and slide the paper over to Kevin. It says, “How did Walter Timmerman get to the murder scene?”

Kevin looks confused by the question and writes back, “The killer drove him there.”

That is most likely true, especially since Walter Timmerman’s Lexus was destroyed at the house. But something bothers me about Kevin’s answer, something I can’t quite place and don’t have time to wonder about now.

Richard calls two more uneventful witnesses and then announces that the prosecution rests. I immediately request a meeting in chambers with Hatchet and Richard, so that I can present our request to have Corvallis come in and testify.

I lay out the entire situation for Hatchet, making my point that I need to be able to do the same for the jury. If I can demonstrate that Walter Timmerman was involved with very dangerous people, and in fact those people killed his friend and partner, Robinson, the jury would very likely find reasonable doubt as to Steven’s guilt.

“Mr. Wallace,” Hatchet says, “I assume you don’t agree?”

“We certainly do not, Your Honor. It is a classic fishing expedition.” Richard then goes on to give a response that is predictable and mostly correct. He points out that I have made no tangible offer of proof; instead I have presented a series of suppositions and theories. Even the one fact I can cite, Robinson’s murder and my tangential role in it, is not relevant to this case, since I can make no real connection between that murder and Timmerman’s.

“Your Honor,” I say, “Mr. Wallace would be correct if I were arguing to take the information I currently have before the jury. I agree that I am not ready to do that, and I am not asking you to allow it. What I am simply asking is that you direct the FBI to testify to these facts, and to detail how their own, separate investigation relates to this trial. Then, if the relevance is proven, I would call him before the jury.”

I take out the copy of my signed statement. “Here is a statement I gave to the FBI about last night’s events. I signed it, and as you certainly know, if I was untruthful in this statement then I have committed a felony. It includes the negotiations I had with the FBI leading up to my visit to the Robinson house last night. The operation was conducted under their supervision, and certainly should be enough to compel their testimony.”

Hatchet and Richard read the statement, which in typewritten form is six pages. When they are finished, Hatchet says, “Mr. Wallace?”

“Your Honor, this is an interesting story that changes nothing.”

“With respect,” I say, “it changes everything. And I would submit that your calling Agent Corvallis to court for a closed hearing presents absolutely no risk. If he testifies under oath that I’m delusional, then all you’ve done is waste a few minutes of the court’s time. But if I’m correct, then my client has a right for the jury to hear what he has to say.”

I expect Hatchet to take the matter under advisement, but instead he says, “I will order that Agent Corvallis appear before this court at the earliest possible time, hopefully tomorrow morning. At that point I will decide whether or not to compel his testimony.”

THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION of any trial is getting close. That, of course, is whether to have the defendant testify on his own behalf. While it is a crucial decision, it is usually an easy one for a lawyer to make. I can’t remember the last time I wanted a client to testify in his own defense. Too many things can go wrong, even when the defendant is innocent.

But it is also the one decision that the client must absolutely make on his own, albeit with advice from his attorney. If he decides not to testify, the judge will go so far as to question him in open court as to whether he was presented with the option, and declined voluntarily.

Kevin and I arrange to meet with Steven in an anteroom. Before we can even talk about his possible testimony, I tell him of our success in getting Corvallis into court.

“Will he tell the truth?” Steven asks.

“He won’t lie. Whether we can get him to tell the truth is another matter. He will try not to say anything at all.”

I bring up the matter of Steven testifying, and like most clients, he wants to do so. This is that rare time that I am leaning in the same direction. He is really the only person who can testify about his actions the night of his father’s death. He can also talk about their relationship, and he comes off as likable and credible.

The other reason I am inclined to support his decision to testify is that the way this trial has gone, we need a Hail Mary pass. We have to do something to shake things up, or we are going to lose. Juries generally want to hear a defendant testify, and this might be the time to give them what they want.

Kevin tells Steven that he agrees as well, which is a surprise to me, since we haven’t talked about it. I can’t ever remember Kevin being in favor of a client testifying in his own behalf, and it’s a sign that he thinks the situation is as dire as I do.

“But we don’t have to decide this now,” I say. “If you take the stand, you’ll be the last one to do so, and a lot is going to happen before then.”

“Are we losing?” Steven asks.

“We haven’t had our turn at bat yet.”

“I had this fantasy that the prosecution was going to present their case, and it would be so weak the judge would just end the trial right there.”

“It’s called a motion to dismiss,” I say. “I’m going to make one tomorrow morning, but the judge will turn us down. We need to make our case.”

“And can we effectively do that?”

“I don’t know.”

He smiles, but it’s not exactly a happy smile. “I was hoping you’d tell me what I wanted to hear. You should learn to bullshit more, you know?”

“I know,” I say, “it’s one of my weaknesses.”

Kevin and I head home to finish preparations for our defense case. We need to go over every detail, even though we’ve been over the same ground many times before, so that we are completely prepared for any eventuality.

It’s basically an issue of confidence for me. If I feel completely sure of the subject, then I can more comfortably freewheel, and thus be more effective. If I am in any way unsure of the details, I have a tendency to get more conservative.

Conservative is not what we need now.

The focus of the evening is altered when the court clerk calls to say that Agent Corvallis will be in court tomorrow morning at nine. We now have to turn our full attention to that argument, since if we fail we have no real hope of getting anything about Walter’s work or Robinson’s murder before the jury. And without that, we are in deep trouble.

So we work until midnight, pausing only to have dinner with Laurie. She’s made my favorite, pasta amatriciana, and in the face of that, preparation will have to wait. I have my priorities.

I arrive at court at eight thirty in the morning, and I learn that Hatchet has summoned Richard and me into his chambers for a pre-hearing chat.

“I have been told by FBI attorneys that there are serious national security implications involved in what Agent Corvallis is doing. I have turned down their request to withdraw my order for him to appear, but I have agreed that the hearing this morning will be closed, and the transcript will be held under seal,” he says.

“That’s fine with me, Your Honor.” I say.

“I’m so relieved,” Hatchet says. “You know how I covet your approval. Mr. Wallace?”

“Obviously we believe that Agent Corvallis should not be compelled to testify at all, but since we have for the moment lost that argument, we have no problem with it being closed and the transcript kept under seal.”

When we get back into the courtroom, Agent Corvallis has already arrived with four FBI attorneys. He gives me a big smile and handshake when he sees me, then introduces me to the smiling attorneys. Everybody’s so happy; you’d never know they were there to try to bury Steven Timmerman.

Steven is brought in, since defendants have the right to be present for every aspect of their trial. Hatchet then enters and convenes the hearing, spending a few minutes setting the ground rules. I will question Agent Corvallis first, and Richard will follow.

I am in an unusual situation here: The truth is I know very little about the FBI’s investigation of Walter Timmerman. I have theories, many of which have been mostly confirmed, but I don’t know the meat and potatoes of it. Thus, I can wind up doing that which lawyers religiously try to avoid, asking questions I don’t know the answer to.

“Agent Corvallis, have you been leading an FBI investigation focused on Walter Timmerman?”

“Yes.”

“When did that investigation begin?”

“About six months ago,” he says.

“What motivated it?”

“Walter Timmerman was doing some work that was potentially significant to the national security of the United States.”

“What was the nature of that work?” I ask.

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Are you aware if he enlisted the help of his friend Charles Robinson in connection with that work?”

“Yes. He did.”

I ask Corvallis to confirm that I approached him with my suspicions about Timmerman and Robinson, and he acknowledges that I did.

“Did I tell you the kind of work I thought Walter Timmerman was doing?”