One Dog Night

When they came into the room, Noah Galloway looked at his watch.

It made no sense; he knew that as he was doing it. Noah had waited for them to arrive for six years, three months, and twenty-one days, and it was of no consequence what time of day it was when he finally saw them. Nor did he have any doubt who they were and why they were there. They might as well have been carrying a sign.

What mattered was that life as he knew it was over.

The audience giggled a little when he checked his watch; it’s not the kind of thing you do during a speech. It makes it look like you’re either bored, or anxious for it to end, or both. Noah remembered that the first President Bush got in political trouble when he did it during a debate with Clinton and Perot. But Noah was now in that kind of trouble times a thousand.

He was glad he was near the end of the speech, with only about a page and a half left. It was going to be hard to concentrate on the rest, but he’d muddle through. No sense cutting short the last speech he would ever give.

What remained of his ego also forced him to finish. While at that moment no one considered the speech in any way important, Noah knew that it would be replayed over and over on television, and would go viral within minutes. He didn’t want to seem flustered, or panicked.

He would go down with what little was left of his dignity. He owed that much to Becky and Adam.

The four men had stopped, two on the left and two on the right, on each side of the stage. They were all dressed in dark grey suits, with apparently identical blue shirts and grey ties. They looked like a semiformal bowling team, waiting to receive their championship trophy.

“The battlefield extends farther than the streets of Detroit, the harbor in Miami, and the border with Mexico. It extends around the world; drugs are a global epidemic and all of us are facing the scourge together.

“Tomorrow, as most of you know, I will have the privilege of flying to Istanbul, where I will meet with representatives of fifty-one nations. I am not going there to dictate policy, to tell anyone it’s ‘our way or the highway.’ I am going there to convey our President’s message, and I am going there to listen.”

Noah saw no reason to change the basic text of the speech; no one would care about the words anyway. He knew full well he was no longer going to Istanbul, and within minutes the world would know that his transgressions were a lot more serious than an inaccurate speech.

“Much in our modern world can be seen in both black and white; it seems as if everything comes with a ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ attached. Airplanes let us travel quickly across the planet, but the skies are much dirtier and louder for it. The Internet brings lightning-fast information, but that information is often abused and incorrect. Social networks let us connect with thousands of people, but the word ‘friend’ is devalued in the process.”

“But the abuse of drugs offers no such choice, no inherent dichotomy. There is no upside to it, no rationalization we can make. It destroys and it debases all that it touches, with nothing positive left in its wake.”

Noah paused and looked around the auditorium. He was at the same time sorry and glad that Becky was not there, that she was taking Adam to the nursery-school parents’ visiting day. It would be a horrible thing for her to witness; he could imagine the shock on her face, the outrage that would over time turn to devastation and, ultimately, acceptance.

But he knew that he would have to face her eventually, and that would be just as awful. He had let her down even before he knew her; let her down in a way that was horrible and unforgivable.

“So there are some who say we are in a war, and some who would not use that terminology. But it is certain that we are in a battle, a battle to reach our full potential as human beings. The good news is that the enemy is not hiding. He does not plant IEDs, or shoot from a covered position.

“This is an enemy we know, one which we can and will control, because the enemy is ourselves.”

The applause was polite and restrained, which was to be expected. The platitudes he’d given them were nothing they hadn’t heard for many years from many officials, and bitter experience had told everyone that actions would speak much louder than words. And over time those actions had not spoken very loudly at all.

Noah understood that, just as he understood he would not be taking any more actions, ever again.

Noah smiled, turned, and left the stage. Out of the corners of his eyes he noticed the four men rise at the same time, and move to where they would approach him. He walked to the right to meet two of them in a place that would be out of the sightline of the audience.

“Mr. Galloway, Special Agent Joseph Scarlett, Federal Bureau of Investigation.” As the man talked, he took out and showed his identification to Noah, providing visual confirmation of his words.

Noah didn’t say anything, but was conscious of the other two men coming up behind him, to prevent him from trying to escape. Their presence wasn’t necessary; Noah was not going to cause any trouble.

Agent Scarlett proceeded to tell him that he was under arrest, and he read him his rights. Noah was only half listening; he was in a bit of a daze, trying to process the fact that after all these years, his horrible secret was not a secret any longer.

Scarlett was finished speaking, and seemed surprised that Noah was not responding, not even asking why he was being arrested. “Is there a statement you would like to make, sir?”

Noah paused a moment before saying, “No.” Then, “Take me away.”

“I don’t understand tailgating,” I say, as Laurie Collins rolls her eyes.

I’m finding that people roll their eyes a lot around me these days. Since Laurie and I live and spend a great deal of time together, it happens to be her eyes that do the bulk of the rolling.

We’re on Route 3, heading toward Giants Stadium, stuck in game traffic even though the game will not actually start for four and a half hours.

“Here we go,” she says, frowning, as she addresses the empty backseat. “Ladies and gentlemen, presenting classic Andy Carpenter.”

Since she thinks I’m going to launch into one of my negative rants, I decide to surprise her and gain the upper hand by not doing so. Instead, I’m going to drop the subject.

Except I can’t.

“You mean you like tailgating?” I ask.

She nods. “I do, Andy. It’s fun, the food is usually good, and I like the people.”

I point across the highway and say, “See that place? That’s a sports bar. It also has fun, good food, and likable people. You know what else it has? It has heat.”

“Cold weather doesn’t bother me.”

“How could that be? It’s supposed to bother you. It’s bothered people for thousands of years. It’s the reason they invented indoors.”

Laurie decides not to continue the debate, and instead looks up ahead at the approaching exit and says, “We’re looking for parking lot ‘Blue 11.’”

“It will be all the way around on the opposite side of the stadium.”

“Why do you say that?” she asks.

“Because the place I’m going is always on the opposite side. That’s how they design these stadiums.”

We pay for the parking, though when I ask where Blue 11 is, the person taking the money motions that we should talk to the attendant up ahead. We drive up to the attendant, whose sole function seems to be waving a small baton, directing people to keep driving forward. It’s lucky they planted him here, otherwise people might decide to drive backward away from the stadium.

I roll down the window, letting in the frigid air again. “We’re looking for Blue 11.”

“Other side of the stadium, buddy.”

I smile at Laurie. “I rest my case.”

We drive around to Blue 11, a trip which takes slightly longer than it took Lewis and Clark to go wherever the hell it was that Lewis and Clark went. That’s mainly because they didn’t have thousands of cars to contend with, or idiots throwing footballs and trying to pretend they didn’t lose their athletic ability during the Carter administration.

When we finally get there, we can’t find a place to park, since tailgate parties take up about five parking spaces for each party. We find a spot in Blue 6, right next to a line of more than twenty portable toilet sheds, each one with a line of at least ten beer-filled tailgaters waiting to use it.

We walk over to Blue 11. That doesn’t mean we’ve found our group; it merely means that we’re in the right neighborhood.

“Andy… Laurie… over here!”

I look over and see Pete Stanton standing in front of a van, its back door open. There are trays of food in the back of the van, adjacent to three small barbecues and two coolers, no doubt filled with soda and beer.

Surrounding all this sustenance are a dozen men and four women, all bundled in parkas and assorted “Giants” outdoor weather gear. Everybody looks frozen, which is no great surprise, since it’s twenty-two degrees and windy out here.

Pete is one of my best friends, a fact I currently regret, as that friendship is the reason I’m in the process of freezing my ass off. A while back I successfully defended the Giants starting running back, Kenny Schilling, when he was on trial for murder. Kenny has since been inviting me to stand on the sidelines during a game, an invitation that includes my bringing two guests.

I’ve been declining for years now, preferring the comfort of Charlie’s sports bar, but I recently made the mistake of mentioning the possibility to Pete. He went nuts, and convinced me to accept Kenny’s offer. Pete would, of course, join me, rather than sit in the nosebleed seat he usually occupies.

Laurie thought it would be fun, and chose to come with us. She is one of those life-half-full people. In fact, I think she’s the only one I’ve ever met that I don’t hate.

To show his gratitude, Pete made matters worse by inviting Laurie and me to join him and his buddies in their traditional tailgate ritual. Pete’s a lieutenant in the Paterson Police Department, and his buddies are all cops. Since I’m a defense attorney, I expect they would rather Pete had invited a Philadelphia Eagle.

Laurie, who occupies the dual role of love of my life and my private investigator, started her career in the Paterson Police Department, so she knows most of our fellow tailgaters. She spends at least five minutes hugging everybody there, with the notable exception of me.

It’s the second time in three weeks that I’ve spent time with this group of people. I attended a funeral service with Laurie for two young officers, Kyle Holmes and Carla Harvin, who were killed in the line of duty. They responded to a domestic-violence 911 call, and walked into a barrage of gunfire.

The officers are believed to have been lured there for the purpose of killing them, and the murders are seen as executions. The killers fled the scene, and no one has been arrested.

One of the reasons I agreed to do this today is that Pete has been particularly down since the tragedy, perhaps because Kyle was someone he had taken under his wing since his arrival from the police academy. It clearly brings home the danger, in a manner that is impossible for any denial mechanism to cope with, of just what it is that these people face every day.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I want Laurie to spend half the day hugging them, and it seems to take forever before she’s finished with the ritual, She then comes over, not to hug me, but to point to an adjacent van, also open at the back and apparently part of our party.

“Look, Andy, a television.”

There in the back of the van is a small TV, with rabbit ears for an antenna, and wavy lines where a clear picture is supposed to be. “Now that’s more like it,” I say. “Lucky we didn’t go to that sports bar with fifty flat-screen TVs; that could have set off my plasma allergy.”

“It’s possible you may not be fully into the spirit of this,” she says.

Pete comes over. “What’s the matter?” he asks. “You look miserable.”

“Apparently you can tell a book by its cover,” Laurie says.

“I am not miserable,” I protest. “Sitting at Charlie’s, drinking beer and eating one of those thick burgers with crisp french fries… that would be miserable. Plus, it’s so damn hot in there; it’s gotta be seventy degrees. And you can have that indoor plumbing; I’d rather stand on line to piss into a plastic hole any day of the week.”

Pete punches me lightly in the arm, then says. “Come on, man, this is part of the game.”

“Really? Who’s winning?”

I decide to give up and pretend to be enjoying myself, and before too long I actually am enjoying myself. It would be more fun if it weren’t so cold that I can’t feel my feet, but feet-feeling is overrated, and by the fourth beer I don’t care much either way.

About an hour before the actual game is to start, I tell Pete and Laurie that we have to head into the stadium; there’s a member of the Giants publicity department that is going to meet us and escort us down to the field.

Pete is only too anxious to get there, and as we depart he tells his friends, “If you losers are looking for me later, check out the fifty-yard line.”

We start walking toward the stadium, but stop when we hear, “Hey, Pete, look at this.”

It’s one of Pete’s fellow officers, pointing toward something on the TV in the back of the van. “Not now, man,” Pete says. “We got better things to do.”

But the officer is insistent, so we walk over. On the television is a press conference, with a breaking-news banner across the bottom.

“FBI: Arrest made in Hamilton Village arson murders.”

Pete stares at the screen, and I would know what was going through his mind even if I didn’t see the look on his face. I let him deal with it for a full minute, during which time he never takes his eyes off the screen, and doesn’t even seem to blink. Laurie knows what is happening as well, so she doesn’t say anything either.

Finally, “Come on, Pete,” I say. “We’re going to be late.”

“Go ahead without me,” he says. “Enjoy the game.”

The game is proving tough to enjoy.

There are a number of reasons for this, the first being that the temperature here on the sidelines makes the parking lot feel like Cancún. My hands are so cold that if I were Eli Manning I wouldn’t even be able to grip the football.

Which brings me to the second reason I’m miserable; Manning has thrown three interceptions and Kenny Schilling, our host, has fumbled twice, once inside the Eagle five-yard line. The Giants are losing 21-3.

They’re probably pleased that the game is only in the early third quarter. I’m not.

Laurie seems to be enjoying herself, so I don’t want to suggest we leave. I keep inching over toward the heaters behind the Giants bench, but the equipment manager is giving me dirty looks.

At least people in the stands can turn to alcohol to keep warm; on the field it’s prohibited. If I had some I’d drink it anyway; the worst that could happen is they’d throw me out or send me to a warm jail. Either result would be fine with me.

I instinctively feel that if I can keep my mind active, it will prevent it from freezing. So while the Eagles continue what will no doubt be another time-consuming touchdown drive, I think about Pete, and the news report we saw in the parking lot.

The Hamilton Village murders date back six years, and it was one of Pete’s first cases after achieving lieutenant status. It was a fire, quickly determined to be arson, in a small apartment building in a low- to middle-class Paterson neighborhood.

The fire started just past midnight on a winter morning, and the building was quickly engulfed in flames. By the time the fire department arrived there was nothing they could do, except listen to the last of the screams of the people inside.

There was no way to be sure how many of them might have escaped, had the exit doors not been locked and bolted from the outside. Twenty-six people died that day, including six children, and their death was ensured by the arsonist. It was not done to destroy a building; it was designed to destroy the inhabitants of that building.

Newspaper reports at the time quoted fire officials as saying that certain chemicals were used in setting the blaze that made it the most intense fire they had ever had to combat.

Pete quickly determined that one of the apartments had been used as a base from which to sell drugs, and therefore the theory was that those people were the targets, while everyone else had the misfortune to live in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But there was no way to confirm that theory, because despite an enormous police effort, the killers were never found.

They say that every homicide cop has at least one unsolved case that haunts him. The Hamilton Village case is Pete’s, and it’s twenty-six for the price of one.

“You’re thinking about Pete?” Laurie has just come over, though I hadn’t noticed.

“How did you know?”

“The Giants just got a pick-six, and you didn’t even look up.”

Among the great things about Laurie is the fact that she knows a “pick-six” is an interception returned for a touchdown. Having said that, it’s not her best quality. Not even close.

“I tried to look, but my neck was frozen.”

“It will be a weight off of him,” she says.

“But he wanted to solve it himself.”

She nods. “I know. But this is better than nothing. Way better; it puts the slime who did it off the streets.”

“The alleged slime.”

She smiles. “Even in your frozen state you remain a defense attorney.”

The Giants recover a fumble on the kickoff, and Kenny runs twenty-one yards for a touchdown. Then with thirty-one seconds on the clock, Manning hits Steve Smith in the end zone for the game-winning touchdown.

By this time I’m no longer cold; I’m screaming as loud as anyone in the stadium. And when it’s over, Kenny comes over and gives me the ball he scored the touchdown with.

He expresses his gratefulness for probably the fifty-thousandth time for my proving his innocence and keeping him out of jail. Then he signs the ball, “To Andy Carpenter, the reason I’m here.” It’s a poignant, heartfelt moment, and my eyes fill with ice chips.

I don’t think about Pete or the murders again until we’re on the way home and listening to the radio. The arrest is all over the news, and for the first time I hear the accused’s name.

Noah Galloway.

Noah-Goddamn-Galloway.

Noah Galloway broke into my house almost seven years ago.

Actually that may be overstating it. He didn’t actually get into the house, but he tried to. Fortunately, he was so filled with prescription medication that he passed out at the rear door of the house.

I was married to Nicole at the time, though we were approaching our first separation. She was from an incredibly wealthy family, a woman of privilege who for some bizarre reason married me, a guy who represented people she felt belonged on another planet altogether, in special colonies.

Noah Galloway was the last straw, or at least he was the last straw until we reconciled the following year, at which point there was no shortage of straws. But Nicole believed that Noah and the break-in were somehow connected to my defense-attorney practice, and it both frightened and infuriated her.

Noah was arrested, and my curiosity led me to check into his life. He was a graduate of Stanford, with the unlikely educational résumé of holding a Ph.D. in chemical engineering and a master’s in sociology. He also had been a walk-on defensive back as a sophomore for the football team, but in his third game he hurt his back.

Three operations and years of agony later, he was addicted to prescription pain medication, and his life unraveled. He had no family to lose, only a sister who tried to stand by him, but there was really no one to cushion his fall. And he fell to the bottom.

The night I told Nicole that I wasn’t pressing charges against Noah was the night we decided to separate. It started as a screaming match, prompted by Nicole’s certainty that once he was freed, he would come back and break into our house, this time successfully, and murder us.

“Nicole,” I said patiently, “this is a guy whose life has fallen apart. He’s a Stanford graduate, a brilliant guy. This is a first offense. I just think Noah Galloway deserves another chance.”

“I DON’T CARE ABOUT NOAH-GODDAMN-GALLOWAY!” It was a stunning sentence, if not eloquent, simply because for Nicole the word “goddamn” was the equivalent of a barrage of profanity from anyone else.

So Nicole went off to live in one of her family’s homes, and Noah Galloway went free. I checked up on him a couple of times from a distance. He left the New York/New Jersey area, and when he came back I heard he had licked the disease, and in fact had become a drug counselor.

Within a couple of years he was running an antidrug program for the city, and gaining significant recognition for his innovative techniques. He was being consulted by other cities for his expertise, and I had heard he was taking a job with the federal government.

I was glad that I had played a small part in helping the man I knew as “Noah-Goddamn-Galloway.”

Until today.

“That’s the guy?” Laurie asked.

I nodded. “That’s the guy. I don’t remember exactly when the fire was, but I think it was after we found him at the back door.”

“Don’t go there, Andy. This has nothing to do with you.”

She thinks I’m blaming myself for allowing him to be out on the street, and being available to murder those people. She knows me better than I know me.

“Maybe.”

“What do you think? If you had pressed charges on a first-degree trespassing that he would be sent away for life? He didn’t even get in the house.”

“Laurie, I know I didn’t light the match, all right? But things might have been different, who knows?”

The truth is, I’m not exactly racked with guilt, at least not yet. I need much more information before I’ll get there. But I am very capable of getting there.

“So look into it if you have to,” Laurie says. “Talk to Pete; he’ll find out everything about this. Maybe it happened before the break-in, and then you’ll let yourself off the hook.”

“Good idea.”

“Just don’t find out too much about Galloway. You’ll wind up defending him.”

“No chance. Nohow.”

“Good,” she says. “That wouldn’t go over too well with Pete.”

“It isn’t possible, Noah. It simply isn’t possible.”

Noah knew that she would react this way, by vehemently denying what was right in front of her. She would get angry, not at him, but at the injustice. It was a coping mechanism, made stronger by the fact that she truly could not believe him capable of such an atrocity.

“It’s true, Becky. Believe me, I wish more than anything it wasn’t.”

She flinched at his confession, which he had just made for at least the fifth time since she had arrived at the prison meeting room. Becky was not concerned that they would be overheard; she had registered as his attorney, so there would be no microphones or cameras eavesdropping on them.

“Have you said that to anyone else?”

He shook his head. “No, but I’m going to. I’ve known for years that I needed to be punished; I’m just sorry you and Adam have to go through this as well.” When he mentioned Adam he started to choke up, but quickly stifled it. Noah was going to be strong for her; he was going to be a strong, despicable mass murderer.

“Please, Noah. Don’t talk to anyone; do that for me.” Becky’s law practice dealt with family matters-divorce, custody, adoption, etc.-but she was more than confident in her admonition for him to remain silent to all but her.

He nodded. “Okay. For now.”

Then they were quiet for a while, and she tried to come to terms with what was going on and where they were. But it was beyond surreal; this man that she loved, this wonderful man who would never hurt anyone, was sitting in a drab, barren room, handcuffed to a metal table.

“We have to get you a top criminal attorney,” she said.

“Becky, you need to face what this is. Perry Mason or Clarence Darrow couldn’t help me. They shouldn’t help me.”

“Noah, you tell me that you did this.”

“Yes.”

“Then tell me why.”

“Because I had no money, and the people that were selling me drugs refused to do so,” he said. “It was revenge. Pathetic, sick, horrifying revenge.”

“But you have no recollection of actually setting the fire?”

“No, but there’s plenty of things I have no recollection of in those days. The evidence was there, so I ran.”

“Have they indicated what evidence they have?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No.”

She thought for a few moments, an idea forming in her mind. She knew what his reaction would be, but she decided to go ahead with it. She wasn’t going to let him go down this way.

“I’m going to talk to Andy Carpenter.”

He laughed, a more derisive laugh than she deserved, and he immediately regretted it. “Come on, Becky. No. There’s no way.”

“He’s as good as they come.”

“No one is good enough to help me,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“And why should he do it? We don’t have enough money to pay him, and what we do have is going to stay with you and Adam.”

“Because of Hannah,” she said.

“Becky, come on. This is a time where we need to be realistic. This is not going to have a happy ending, and you are going to have to walk away sooner or later. And the sooner you do it the better.”

“I’m going to talk to him.”

He couldn’t talk her out of it, but it didn’t really matter. Her conversation with Carpenter would give her a needed dose of reality, the first of many to follow.

And at some point, he knew she would realize that nothing she said or did was going to matter.

And then she and Adam would start a life without him.

It isn’t the best of nights at Charlie’s.

The greatest of all sports bars is at its least great on Monday nights during the NFL season. The burgers are just as thick, the fries just as crisp, the beer just as cold, and the televisions just as plentiful and prominent, so it’s not any of that. The problem on Monday nights is the crowd.

I come here and sit at our regular table with Pete Stanton and Vince Sanders three or four nights a week. Sometimes Laurie joins us, the only outsider that Pete and Vince, or I for that matter, would consider tolerating.

Usually most tables are taken, primarily by regulars, but the atmosphere is low-key and reasonably quiet. The patrons are knowledgeable sports fans, there to watch the games while enjoying the food and drink.

But on Monday nights in the fall, the place turns into a zoo, with a standing-room crowd that seems to consider it proper sports bar etiquette to scream and go nuts at every play, no matter how insignificant. There are even times that cringeworthy chants of “Defense! Defense!” erupt, as if the players in Dallas can hear them.

Pathetic.

Most offended by these displays is Vince. Vince is the editor of the local newspaper, a well-respected newsman with the best contacts of anybody I have ever met. He is also the most disagreeable person on the planet, and though we consider each other close friends, I have never seen him in a good mood. Were Vince to interview Osama bin Laden, within five minutes Osama would be whispering to an aide, “What’s his problem?”

The Jets are playing the Cowboys tonight, and Pete is late in arriving. I’m hoping he shows up, because I want to ask him about the Noah Galloway arrest, but mainly because I don’t want to be alone with Vince. Even surrounded by two hundred cheering maniacs, I don’t want to be alone with Vince.

There’s a guy, maybe mid-forties, who is pacing around the place, wearing a Cowboys hat and Tony Romo jersey, screaming at whichever TV screen he is nearest. He is shouting instructions to the players, predicting which play will be called, and constantly saying things like, “Time to step up! Time to step up and make a play!”

Sports fans who are not knowledgeable, and even some of the weaker TV analysts, seem to feel that all deficiencies are due to a lack of effort, and “stepping up” is the all-encompassing solution to all competitive problems.

This particular guy is driving Vince nuts, because of his antics, but especially because he’s a Cowboys fan. “If I smash this asshole over the head with a beer bottle, what are my chances of getting off?” he asks.

“Depends if the judge is a Jets fan, but I would say twenty percent.”

“That’s if you were defending me,” he says. “But what if I had a decent lawyer?”

Before I have a chance to answer, Pete mercifully shows up. He takes one look at the TV, sees the Jets are down 7-0, and says, “Shit.”

Vince says, “You got that right.”

We are an eloquent group.

By halftime the Jets are down 14-3, and I ask Pete what is going on with the Galloway arrest.

“Why? You going to represent the son of a bitch?”

“No chance,” I say. I’m independently wealthy from a large inheritance and some big cases, and since I basically don’t like to work, I haven’t taken on a client in months. I also insist on only representing those accused that I consider innocent, and there are not many of them around. “How’d they get him?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. The Feds are too important to confide in us locals.”

There is a constant friction between federal and local authorities, and information is only passed between the two when it’s in the interest of both sides to do so. Clearly this is not one of those cases. “Why are they involved at all?” I ask.

“Interstate commerce.”

His meaning is clear. The FBI has long used the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution to involve themselves in pretty much anything they want. As long as they can demonstrate that the criminal activity has even incidentally crossed state borders, they’re in. In drug cases, since the drugs have clearly not originated in the opium fields of Passaic, the burden of proof is particularly low.

“Why now?” I ask, since the crime took place so long ago.

Pete looks annoyed with the question. “Did I mention the fact that they’re not telling us shit?”

“Had you been working on it? Was there anything new that they could have picked up on?”

“I’ve been working on it since the day it happened. I thought we were on to something recently, but it turns out it was in the wrong direction.”

“‘Dumbass cop says he’s been going in the wrong direction,’” Vince says. “That’s my headline for tomorrow’s paper.”

“That will get you strangled,” Pete says.

Vince points to the Cowboys fan. “You’d strangle me and let that asshole live?”

Pete disregards Vince, which is pretty much the only sane way to handle him, and continues talking about Galloway. He admits that, while he’s glad to see Galloway go down, in fact he’d “strap the guy into the chair” himself, he would much prefer to have made the arrest. It’s understandable; the perpetrator of this crime has been Pete’s “white whale” for years.

That is the limit of Pete’s self-reflection on this subject, at least for the moment. The second half starts, and we all turn back to the game.

Never let it be said we don’t have our priorities straight.

For Danny Butler, it was the turning point.

It wasn’t his first; he’d had a series of momentous moments in his life, moments which dictated his direction for at least a few years to follow. The difference was that this time he was pointed in an upward direction.

Danny had been hooked on prescription drugs, on and off but mostly on, for almost twenty-one years. Like so many other cases of this kind of addiction, it began with debilitating neck pain, the kind that required months of bed rest and three surgeries.

The difference here was that it wasn’t Danny whose neck was in pain; it was his father’s. But the poor guy was so drugged up, and filled so many prescriptions, that it was easy for Danny to take more than his share. And for a seventeen-year-old already on a constant diet of alcohol and marijuana, that was the promised land.

There had been four trips to the “bottom” since then, followed by four rehabs. The longest any of the rehabs worked was fourteen months, but none of the failures was a particular surprise to Danny.

The problem, as he figured it, was that he had nothing to fall back on, and “nothing” included money and a good job. His family had long ago discarded him, he dropped out of high school, and his one serious girlfriend had braces the last time he saw her. So using drugs, Danny introspectively reasoned, was his fall-back position, for lack of anything else.

But this time was going to be different, which was why it was clearly a turning point. This time he would have more money than he ever had before, and a good job. Women wouldn’t be far behind.

Things were pointing upward.

They showed up at Danny’s apartment almost a month ago, though he had no idea how they knew where he lived. It wasn’t even an apartment, just a room without so much as a kitchen, that he rented by the week. That was only his second week there, and he certainly never told anyone about it. Who was there to tell?

So they must have been following him.

They gave their last names, Loney and Camby, and described themselves as concerned citizens. He was sure the latter part was true; it’s what they were really concerned about that remained a mystery.

Loney was obviously in charge, and he was the one who presented the proposition. Danny was to go to the FBI and tell them that when he was in a homeless shelter, the one in Clifton almost six years ago, he became friendly with Noah Galloway.

That much was actually almost true; he remembered Galloway and some of the talks they had together. Galloway was easily as screwed up as Danny was, but he talked to Danny like he was trying to help him, like he was his father or something. It pissed Danny off something fierce.

In one of their little chats, Danny was to report, Galloway had confided in him that he had set the Hamilton Village fire. He swore Danny to secrecy, but it had bothered Danny ever since. Now Danny was fully sober, and he was setting the record straight on everything, including Noah’s confession.

The payment for this was one hundred thousand dollars, in cash. Fifty would be paid when Danny agreed to do it, and the other fifty after Galloway was arrested.

Additionally, Danny would be given a job as a driver for Loney, at a salary of eighty thousand dollars per year, plus overtime. The only condition was that Danny stay completely sober, since Loney’s family would occasionally be among his passengers.

Danny would have done what they were asking for half of what was offered, but since the conversation with Galloway never actually happened, he instinctively felt like he should pretend to have some reservations about lying.

“Did he really set the fire?” Danny asked.

“Absolutely,” Loney said. “And there is evidence that can prove it.”

“So what do you need me for?” Danny asked, and then immediately regretted it. He was afraid he was coming on too strong, and the last thing he wanted was to convince these guys that they didn’t need him.

Loney nodded, as if the question were perfectly reasonable. “Because the evidence can only be uncovered with a search warrant. And there’s no probable cause for one to be issued.”

“You know what ‘probable cause’ is?” Camby asked, and Danny thought he saw Loney look over at him, as if he was annoyed that Camby asked the question. In fact he didn’t get the feeling that Loney had much use for Camby at all.

Danny nodded, even though he wouldn’t know probable cause if it walked into the room and bit him on the ass. “Sure. Makes sense.”

“Good,” Loney said. “Because once the evidence is found, a mass murderer will pay for his crimes. And you’ll be well compensated. It’s a win-win for everyone.”

Danny had to that point lived a life with very few wins, so a “win-win” sounded really good. He spent twelve hours over the next few days rehearsing exactly what he would tell the FBI, and the exact manner in which he would tell it. Lying was not exactly new ground for Danny, and he had no doubt he could pull it off.

And he did. Once they paid him the fifty thousand, half in hundreds and half in twenties, he made an appointment with an FBI agent named Neil Mulcahy, and told him everything. It went off like clockwork, and over the next week Mulcahy had him repeat the tale four times, to at least six other agents.

For a while Danny heard nothing, until he saw on the news that Galloway was arrested. Then he waited for Loney’s call. He wasn’t fearful that his benefactors would renege; they would be afraid that he could recant his testimony and implicate them in the bribe.

In fact, Danny thought he might be able to hold them up for more money, in return for his silence. That would certainly be preferable to a crummy job as a driver.

He would play it by ear and decide just how to take the most advantage of the turning point.

I need to be entertained.

I’ve never been into quiet, reflective thinking, or meditation, or introspection, or any of that stuff.

I can be alone; that’s no problem at all. But if I am I want the TV on, or a book to read, or someone to talk to, or something, anything, to do. My best thinking comes when I’m doing something other than thinking.

But the time I am absolutely at my most comfortable, when I don’t need or want outside diversions at all, is when I’m walking Tara. It’s my version of yoga, but without the bending and chanting.

Tara is a golden retriever. I don’t say she’s my golden retriever, because that would reduce her to a possession, and I don’t think of her in those terms. She is my partner, my friend, and the greatest living creature on the face of the earth, bar none.

I’m over the top about dogs, that’s pretty much a given among everyone I know. My ex-client Willie Miller and I run the Tara Foundation, through which we rescue dogs and place them in good homes. It takes up most of Willie’s time and much of mine, as well as a decent amount of money, but we love it.

I also have frequently handled cases involving dogs, some of which have been my clients. The fact that I’ve been successful at them has done little to reduce the sarcasm and ridicule I receive in the community. Nor has that reaction in any way deterred me.

But Tara is on an entirely different plane, even from other great dogs. I rescued her from the animal shelter at two years old. She’s getting up there in age now, with white showing in her face, and I have been thankful for every day I have had with her. And today is no different.

We plan to head out for our walk at eight in the morning, like always. That gives me time to watch the first hour of The Today Show, which is when they cram in the real news of the day. It’s a perfect time for me to watch TV while getting in my exercise on the treadmill, and some day I’m actually going to get a treadmill to try out the theory.

Of course, the show would have more time for news if they’d leave out the fake “good mornings.” Matt or Meredith start the show by teasing the upcoming stories, then they turn to Anne Curry at the news desk, always including a “good morning, Anne.” She responds with “good morning, Matt, good morning, Meredith,” and then launches into her news recap.

Now, it’s not like the news desk is in Iowa; it seems to be maybe fifteen feet away from the anchor desks, in the same studio. Are we to believe that these people have been beamed into place an instant before going on the air, without having had the opportunity to wish each other a good morning? Or is it at all possible that the “good mornings” are in fact contrived by some TV executive, who has decided it would be appealing to the audience to see the warmth and politeness between these talking heads?

The mystery is always solved when the show comes back from the seven-thirty break, and everybody goes through the same “good morning” routine again. I wonder if I’m the only one who is annoyed by this. Perhaps they have market research that shows that the rest of the audience has their collective eyes filled with tears at these heartwarming exchanges.

After they wish Al Roker a heartfelt “good morning” and he gives the weather, the first story is not surprisingly about the arrest of Noah Galloway. Unfortunately, since the FBI is being typically tight-lipped about details, there is little of substance that is added, and it’s basically a rehash of the fire and its devastating and tragic effects. Substantial attention is given to what is known about Galloway, and the potentially serious political ramifications for an administration that was about to place an apparent mass murderer in a position of power and influence.

Dylan Campbell, a county prosecutor that I detest, is shown on camera saying that he is confident the case against Noah is strong. I’m not surprised that the Feds are letting the case be tried locally, and I’m also not surprised that Dylan angled to get the assignment. He would relish the publicity.

While I am not that interested in the skimpy report, Tara seems quite taken with it, barking and moving around in an animated, excited fashion. More likely she is anxious to get started on the walk, so we start out twenty minutes early.

We have three possible routes that we take through Eastside Park and then around to Broadway, where we eat bagels at an outside table, no matter how cold it is. I put butter on my bagel; she eats hers plain. I get coffee; she gets water.

A few people either nod or say hello to me, but everybody stops to pet Tara. She accepts the petting with a smile and a wag of her tail, and has the good manners to stop chewing during the process.

I’m not sure why, but I do my best thinking during these walks, and much of my trial strategy is planned that way. But today thinking is not a priority; I have no current clients, and no desire to get any.

We get back around nine-thirty, and I’m mildly surprised to see a car in front of the house. It’s the only car parked on the street; there’s an ordinance that during the night all cars must be in driveways or garages. The fact that this one is parked in front of my house leads me to the possibility that someone is visiting me, or Laurie, or Tara. Or not.

I am Andy Carpenter, deducer supreme.

Tara and I walk in the front door and immediately see Laurie in the kitchen with a woman, once again validating my intuitive powers. We walk toward them, Tara leading the way.

The woman gets down on one knee to vigorously pet her, and says something which is hard for me to make out. It sounds something like “henner.”

When I reach them, Laurie says, “Andy, I’d like you to meet-”

The woman interrupts, holds out her hand, and says, “Becky.”

“Hi, Becky,” is my clever retort. Never let it be said that Andy Carpenter doesn’t keep a conversation humming.

“Becky has a story to tell you,” Laurie says, in a way which leads me to think this is not going to be just any story.

“I love a good story,” I say, though I’m not sure I’m looking forward to hearing this one. When strangers tell me stories I usually wind up with clients, and when I wind up with clients it means I wind up doing work.

“Then you’re in for a treat,” Laurie says.

“So you’ve heard the story?” I ask.

She nods. “Just now. You want some coffee?”

I say that I do, though at this point I think I’d prefer scotch on the rocks, or an arsenic spritzer. I’ve got a feeling I should have prolonged the walk with Tara, like until August.

We settle down with our coffees, and Becky starts telling me what she already told Laurie. “I’ve been married for four years, and I met my husband a year before that,” she says. “So what I’m going to tell you is what he’s told me over the years.

“He’s led a very difficult life. I won’t bore you with the details, at least right now, but some of those difficulties have been of his own making, though most have not. He reached his personal bottom, as they call it, about six years ago.”

The way she says “personal bottom” causes me to ask, “Drugs?”

She nods. “Yes. And alcohol. And anything else that can take away one’s connection to life.”

I’m trying hard not to cringe; is this woman asking me to somehow defend her husband on some resurrected drug infraction? I doubt that’s where this is going, because Laurie has reacted strangely to the visit. It’s somewhere between a gleam in her eye and a worry about what might come next.

Becky continues. “About a year and a half prior to that, in an effort to bring some normalcy to his life, he had gotten a dog.”

There is a two-by-four bearing down on my head, but I don’t have time to duck. “This dog,” she says, petting Tara. “Her original name was Hannah.”

I don’t know what to say, and I want her to get through this story as quickly as possible so I can find out where it’s going. Wherever it’s going, Tara is not going anywhere.

“My husband came to understand that with his problems, and his complete lack of sobriety, he couldn’t care for her. He loved her very much, and he was afraid for her safety.”

“So he dumped her in a shelter?” I ask. I have always felt that the person who did that to Tara had to be the lowest sort of vermin on earth.

“He had nothing else to do, or at least that’s what he believed. He had lost all his friends, and his newer acquaintances were certainly not likely to give her the home she deserved.

“So he took her to the shelter, and then he went back there every day, to make sure that nothing bad happened to her. If her stay there was prolonged, he would have taken her back rather than subject her to the cruelties of the system.”

She is obviously referring to the fact that dogs not adopted after a period of time are put down, usually because of overcrowding.

“It was only three days later that you came and adopted her. He was there at the time, and he followed you home from a distance. He wanted to see where she was going to live.”

“Why didn’t he introduce himself to me?” I ask. “He could have told me things about her.”

She shrugs. “I don’t know. Hopefully you can ask him that. But for a period of time after you took Hannah… Tara… he watched you with her, to make sure you were treating her well. On one occasion, when the drugs made him careless, he entered your property and tried to peer into your house.”

All of a sudden I know where she is going, and I have a pit in my stomach the size of Bolivia.

“Noah Galloway,” I say.

This has disaster written all over it.

If what Becky Galloway is saying is true, that Noah was Tara’s original owner, then it’s a secret that they have kept for seven years. The fact that she’s making the revelation now, when he’s just been arrested, is no coincidence.

And the fact that I am a defense attorney who doesn’t want a new client, especially this one, is where the disaster potential comes in.

I’m trying to remember if Tara’s strange, excited behavior before our walk this morning was connected to footage of Galloway on the news, but I just can’t be sure. I hope it wasn’t, because she certainly seemed happy, and if there was a growl involved, I didn’t hear it.

“Would the fact that you’re choosing to reveal this now be in any way related to the fact that I’m a criminal attorney?”

She nods, without apparent embarrassment. “Very much so. I’m hoping you’ll consider representing Noah.”

“Because he used to own Tara?” I ask.

“Yes. Because you both love her. It’s a connection that I’m trying to use,” she says. “I’ll do whatever I can to help my husband.”

“He put her in a shelter,” I say. It’s a fact that I simply will never be able to get over.

She nods. “I know; he says that it was the hardest thing he had ever done. But he used every penny he had to get her the leg operation, and at the same time he felt powerless against the drugs. He couldn’t take care of himself; and therefore he couldn’t take care of her. He knew she would be better off.” She looks around the room, then pets Tara’s head. “And she is.”

“How did she hurt her leg?” I ask. Tara has a plate in her leg, which was always a mystery to me. The operation would have been expensive, and I don’t often see shelter dogs that had received such good care. It’s inconsistent for an owner to spend that kind of money on a pet, and then to throw them away like that.

“I’ll let Noah tell you all that; he knows all the details. Will you at least meet with him?”

I look over at Laurie, but she’s not providing any relief. “Becky, I’m really sorry about your situation. And I’m sure your husband is innocent, but-”

She interrupts me. “He says he did it.”

The surprises are coming in rapid-fire here. “He does? Is that how he’s going to plead?”

“I’m not sure what he’ll do. But he didn’t do it, Andy. No matter what he says.”

I nod, trying to digest this. It doesn’t sound like it will go to trial, so Galloway’s lawyer might simply be called upon to plea-bargain. Less time, less effort, but I still don’t want to get near it. We’re talking about twenty-six people locked in a burning building.

“He says he did it, but you say he didn’t?” I ask, my incredulity showing.

“He believes he did it; he doesn’t specifically remember it. But there is no chance that he did.”

“How do you know that?”

“Could you believe Laurie burned twenty-six people to death?”

“No.” I could point out that I wouldn’t believe Laurie spent years strung out on drugs either, but I don’t. I just want this to go away.

“Maybe I could speak with him, maybe with Hike,” Laurie volunteers. “And get some more information, to help you decide.”

Laurie’s talking about the other lawyer in my two-person firm, “Hike” Lynch. I’m sure Laurie is aware that I’ve already decided against getting involved, so her saying that means she’s on Becky’s side in this one. Or at the very least she’s saying, what’s the harm in talking to the guy?

Of course, there is no harm in it, other than the disappointment Becky would feel when I tell her I’m not taking the case. “Becky, if it means that much to you I’ll talk to him. But I want to be really clear; I don’t want to take on any new clients.”

“I understand,” she says.

“I can recommend other lawyers that are terrific.”

She nods. “Let’s talk after you and Noah meet.”

I turn to Tara. “That work for you?”

She doesn’t answer, remaining her normal noncommittal self. I’ll have to ply her with biscuits to find out what she really thinks.

These guys did what they said they would do.

That’s a pretty terrific quality, Danny figured, especially when it belonged to guys who promised to pay him money.

The morning after Noah Galloway was arrested, Loney was at his apartment with the payment of the other fifty thousand, again in cash. He was alone this time, without Camby.

Danny had decided that while he might strong-arm them with threats to reveal their role to the police, there was no hurry for that. The trial was a long way off, and he could come forward at any time before then.

Loney did throw him a bit of a curve ball, though. The job as driver for him and his family was still his for the asking, but it was in Vegas, not New Jersey. That was where Loney was going to be for at least the next six months, and the increased cost of living that Danny would face there would be recognized with an increase of twenty thousand in the agreed-upon salary.

This was getting better all the time. Danny had only been to Vegas once, almost fifteen years ago. On his thirtieth birthday. It probably would qualify as his favorite place on earth, but it was a city you didn’t want to be in if you had no money.

Which was okay, because Danny had plenty of money.

Loney gave Danny a plane ticket, one way, to leave that night. The fact that it was a coach fare was slightly annoying, but at least it was an aisle seat.

“You can leave tonight?” Loney asked.

Danny smiled and made a hand motion to show Loney the room he was standing in. “Why not?”

Loney said that a car would pick Danny up at five o’clock, to take him to Newark for the eight o’clock flight. “Don’t get too comfortable out there,” he said. “You’re coming back here for the trial.”

“No problem. One day on the stand is all it will take.”

Loney nodded. “But that’s an important day. We’re going to rehearse you for it.”

“Piece of cake,” Danny said. “So when I get there, where do I go?”

“A driver will take you to the Mirage; you’ve got a prepaid reservation there for two weeks. During that time you’re going to need to get an apartment.”

Danny said that he thought that was a really good idea, though at that point apartment hunting was the last thing on his mind. He had a hundred grand and two weeks at the Mirage, and he was going to enjoy every minute of it.

“Don’t blow this, Danny,” Loney said, possibly reading his mind.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” Danny said.

“Okay. See you in Vegas.”

“You going to be there?”

Loney smiled. “See you in Vegas.”

“Who are you guys?” Danny asked. “Come on, level with me.”

“Concerned citizens.”

“Connected concerned citizens?”

Loney didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Danny was smart enough to know that these guys were not people to mess with, and he immediately discarded the idea of holding them up for more money. Instead he was going to make himself indispensable to them, until they brought him into the club.

The flight out to Vegas was pretty comfortable, considering Danny was in coach. The seat next to him was empty, and Danny utilized the tray in front of the empty seat to rest his bloody marys. He had six of them, and only stopped when the good-looking flight attendant told him he had had enough.

He could have told her there was never enough.

A driver met Danny at baggage claim. He called Danny “Mr. Butler,” and asked how his flight was, and a lot of other meaningless kind of stuff. Danny kept up his side of the conversation as best he could, but his mind was on the bar at the Mirage.

The driver took Danny’s bags and led him out to the curb. He then spoke into a walkie-talkie kind of device, and Danny realized that this wasn’t the driver, that he was only calling for the car. These guys had their act together.

The car pulled up, and they loaded Danny’s bags into the trunk. Danny half climbed, half fell into the backseat, as the actual driver welcomed “Mr. Butler” to Vegas.

They drove off, and Danny was asleep before they got out of the airport. He woke up a short time later, as the parking attendant at the Mirage opened the door.

Except it wasn’t the parking attendant at the Mirage; it was somebody else, who got into the backseat next to Danny. And Danny barely had time to realize that they weren’t at the hotel at all, they were on a dark street, in front of what looked like a vacant warehouse.

Within three seconds the man had a device around Danny’s neck, but it took almost thirty seconds to make sure he was dead.

After which they drove off again.

I decide to take Hike with me to the jail.

On one level, it seems to make perfect sense. It’s a depressing place, colored grey and filled with people who have for the most part moved past desperate into hopeless. Hike is a depressing person, an incurable pessimist who himself sees the world through grey-colored glasses.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes an offer on a cell, maybe with a watch-tower view.

“So you owned the same dog?” Hike asks, moments after he gets in the car.

“Yes.”

“That’s it?” he asks.

I nod. “That’s it.”

“I’m not missing anything?”

“Nope.”

“Why do you care about that?” he asks.

“Hike, you don’t have a dog, right?”

“No way. I’d wind up with the mange, and I’d break out in rash pimples, filled with pus. I hate pus.”

“Really?” I asked. “I love pus. But the thing is, him owning Tara creates sort of a curiosity, like a bond in some way. It’s like if you were married, and you met your wife’s first husband, you’d be curious, right?”

“No.”

Hike has a law degree from Yale, and an M.B.A. from Harvard, but curiosity is not his thing. He figures that the more he finds out about something, the more depressed it will make him. He’s probably right.

Once we get to the county jail, it takes about twenty minutes to get through security, and we spend another twenty waiting in a small visiting attorneys room for Galloway to be brought in.

I’ve seen him on television a couple of times, but he looks taller and thinner in person. He also wasn’t handcuffed in those TV appearances, but he certainly is now.

“Mr. Carpenter, I’m sorry about this,” is the first thing he says.

“About what?”

“My wife asking you to come down here. I didn’t want her to do that.”

“She’s trying to help you,” I say. “This is my associate, Eddie Lynch.”

“Hike,” is how he corrects me. “How’s the food here?”

Galloway shrugs. “It’s okay.”

“Watch out for bugs in the salad. I accidentally ate a couple of bugs once, I think at a rest stop off the Jersey Turnpike. They wound up taking a stand in my gut; I couldn’t get rid of them. They turned my intestines into the goddamn Alamo.”

“Thanks for sharing that, Hike,” I say, and then turn back to Galloway. “So what can I do for you?”

“Not much.”

“Do you have an attorney?” I ask.

“They assigned the public defender to me for the purposes of the arraignment. He seemed to handle it well enough.”

The sense I get from Galloway is very different from every other recently arrested person I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. Usually they are afraid, especially those who’ve been arrested for the first time. They don’t know what is ahead of them, but they know it’s going to be awful.

Some of them, the more experienced ones, are angry. Angry at themselves for getting caught, and angry at the authorities for catching them.

A lot of people claim to be able to judge someone’s emotional state by looking in their eyes. I don’t make eye contact, so it’s a talent I’ve never perfected. When I talk to people, I generally look at their mouth, so while I can’t judge emotions, I’m pretty good at identifying cavities.

But there is no mistaking the vibes that Noah Galloway is giving off. He is tired, maybe even a little relieved, and wearily resigned to his fate. It’s depressing, and being in a room with Galloway and Hike, in a prison no less, is about as dreary as it gets.

I want to get out of here as fast as possible, so I quickly make a verbal agreement with Galloway that, for the sum of one dollar, Hike and I will serve as his lawyers for the next two hours. I’m hoping that two hours from now I’ll be home walking Tara, but I use it as an outside amount of time. Galloway has no money on him, so I accept his promise to pay. We do all this so that anything he tells us will be covered by attorney-client privilege, though he seems unconcerned by it either way.

Once that’s accomplished, he quickly tells us that he has always known that he set the fire, but that he has no recollection of doing so. It comes as no surprise, since Becky had said the exact same thing. But it still makes very little sense, so I ask him to explain his feelings of guilt.

“I had hit bottom,” he says. “Except I didn’t bounce off the bottom; I stuck to it. My entire world revolved around drugs, pretty much every dollar I had went to pay for them. And I didn’t have many dollars.

“I would have blackout periods, sometimes lasting for a day or more. When I would wake up, I had no idea what I had done, or how I had gotten to the physical place I was in. It was scary, but not as scary as you would think.”

“Why not?” Hike asks.

“Because I really didn’t care that much if I lived or died, so there was nothing to be scared of. And if I did live, dealing with blackouts was not important; getting drugs was the first and only priority.”

Galloway is saying all this in a fairly dispassionate way, with no apparent embarrassment, or emotion. It seems he has long ago come to terms with what he was in those days.

He continues. “So I woke up one day from a two-day binge, in my apartment. The drugs hadn’t worn off, not even close, but it was the pain that brought me out of it.”

“What kind of pain?”

“I had burns on both of my arms. Chemical burns.”

For the first time, I’m seeing emotion in Galloway as he gets closer to talking about the fire that killed all those people. I don’t want to ask him anything yet; I find that when a story is pouring out voluntarily, questions can be a distraction.

He goes on to describe how the people in one of the apartments on the first floor of the incinerated building were his suppliers, and how they had cut off his credit, little as it was, earlier in that week. Though he doesn’t know where, he says he must have gotten the drugs elsewhere, but they were likely of lower quality, and he reacted badly to them.

“I was terribly angry at them for doing that; I had been buying from them for over a year, and they knew how badly I needed it…” He shakes his head at the memory. “There’s no doubt I wanted them dead. I wanted them worse than dead.”

He goes silent for about twenty seconds. Silent time in a prison interview room is interminable, treadmill time zips along by comparison. I obviously need to get him back on track. “You mentioned chemical burns, as if that were significant,” I say.

He nods. “I have a graduate degree in chemical engineering. The mixture that was reported to have caused the fire is something I am very familiar with. Most people aren’t.”

I ask Galloway if he knows what the police uncovered so many years after the fact to lead to his arrest, but he professes to have no idea.

“Whatever it was,” he says, “I feel glad it finally happened. It was long overdue.”

This is the kind of stuff they should include in the orientation.

That’s what Senator Ben Ryan thought about as he sat at the bar, and it brought a smile to his face. The rest of the night, he knew, would bring quite a few more smiles.

Incoming freshman members of Congress are subjected to long, boring meetings about what life in the halls of power is like, and how to successfully navigate this “new world.” The focus is on understanding the rules, whether they be legal, political, financial, or ethical, and dealing with the press and constituents.

That was all fine, and Ben had heard it, internalized it, and used it to his advantage in the eleven years since. But what he never learned back then, and which he felt should be required, was anything about places like Chumley’s.

It was his third time at Chumley’s, a bar in the lobby of the Newcastle Hotel in Amsterdam. Ben wasn’t staying at the Newcastle, he was staying at the much nicer Plaza Victoria, with the rest of the delegation. There was a meeting scheduled for the next morning at ten A.M. and he’d make it, but not by much.

The orientations, Ben felt, should have included long sessions on delegation trips, and the value of them. Not value to the government or the people, since most of them were boondoggles. But rather value to the elected representative, in this case none other than Ben himself. It had taken him a while, but he had learned where the value was, and how to find it.

The key was in getting on the right committee, and he had certainly accomplished that. He was the ranking minority member on the Europe subcommittee in the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. It was aptly named, though in Ben’s case he thought Committee on Foreign One-Night Stands would have been even more on point.

Ryan was also the ranking minority member on the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which provided different opportunities. The travel was less, but those energy companies certainly knew how to provide campaign cash.

He’d been looking forward to this night for a while. His two previous times at Chumley’s had more than lived up to expectations, and there was no reason to think this time would be any different. He knew the drill, and the great-looking woman at the other end of the bar, the one who had been staring at him, knew it even better.

It was showtime.

He walked over to her and sat down, then asked if he could buy her a drink.

She smiled and shook her head. “No.”

“No?” This was a turn of events he didn’t expect.

She pointed to her drink, sitting mostly full in front of her. “I’ve already got one, and there are plenty more in the minibar in my room upstairs. Besides, you’ve got better things to do with your money. Much better.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said.

“What’s your name?”

There was obviously no way he would ever use his real name in this situation, and fortunately his face was not even widely recognized back in the U.S. “Harrison Ford.”

She smiled and stood up. “Nice to meet you, Harrison. Let’s go.”

“Why don’t we negotiate the terms first?” he asked.

“How about you get a look at what you’re buying first?”

There was certainly no harm in that, and he went with her up to her room. He had no way of knowing if anyone else had been there with her that night, but he knew for sure that he would be the last one. Once he got going, there was no stopping him.

The woman turned out to be right; showing him the “merchandise” was her best way of negotiating a good deal. As was the custom, that merchandise also included premium-grade cocaine. Ryan eagerly agreed, and as also was the custom, paid her half in advance, with a promise to pay the rest when the “session” had concluded.

It proved to be by far the best time he had ever had on one of these trips, and when it was over he vowed to be back soon. Our European relations, he figured, needed much more hands-on attention from dedicated senators like himself.

He was a country-first kind of guy.

He was dressed by eight o’clock in the morning, giving him just enough time to get back to his hotel, shower, and grab some coffee. He gave the woman the remaining cash, and told her to look for him in a couple of months.

It was obvious to the woman that he was not on the Intelligence Committee, because he had never noticed, or looked for, any of the five tiny hidden video cameras and microphones that had recorded every moment of his stay in the room.

Once he was out the door, the woman picked up her cell phone and dialed a number. When the call was answered, she simply said, “Done.”

“Why did you put Tara in a shelter?” I ask.

I’ve gotten all the information Galloway seems to have about the arson and arrest, and I’m not anxious for the conversation to move into the area of his legal representation, so I might as well satisfy my curiosity.

“Because I loved her,” he says, “and it was the best I could do for her. She was the greatest thing in my life; in some ways she was the only connection I had to the world. But she deserved so much better than me, so I had to give her a chance to get it.”

“She could have been killed.”

“No, I would have prevented that if it came to it.” He doesn’t seem sure about anything else, but his commitment to protecting Tara he is certain about.

I ask him a bunch of questions about Tara as a puppy, and with each question I can hear Hike unsuccessfully try to stifle a moan. I enjoy hearing about it, but it’s the opposite of what I had pictured.

“Where was she born?” I ask.

“I don’t know. I found her lying on the side of a two-lane highway outside of Dayton, Ohio. She had obviously been hit by a car, and her leg was broken. She didn’t have a collar on, and there was no way to tell who she belonged to.”

This qualifies as stunning news to me; the image of Tara lying on the side of the road, badly injured, is one I will have trouble getting out of my mind.

He continues. “I put her in my car and took her to a shelter nearby, but they told me that with her leg like that, she’d never get adopted, and they’d wind up putting her down. So I worked out a deal with a vet, and he did the surgery for less money. Nice guy…”

He continues talking about how, when he descended further into his drug use, Tara had been his crutch. It’s funny, but my hope had always been that Tara had been well taken care of, until some perverse twist of fate had led her to her temporary imprisonment in the shelter. The truth now is that her life nearly ended early, and once she was rescued, it turned out that she had been the caretaker. It was a task she is well suited for.

“You know,” Galloway says, “on my good days I would go to that coffee place on Broadway, because I knew that you and Tara would stop there for a bagel during your walk.”

“Did you ever come over to us?”

He shakes his head. “No, I stayed off to the side so she wouldn’t see me. I didn’t think that would be fair to her.”

Hike is pacing; he wants to get the hell out of here. But I’m starting to enjoy myself; here’s a guy who understands and loves Tara. In fact, of all the mass murderers I have ever met, I think I like Noah Galloway the best.

But this is a prison, so I finally and reluctantly get back to the matter at hand. “I’ve got to be honest with you, Noah. I’m not inclined to take on a murder trial right now.”

He nods. “I understand, but this is not going to trial.”

“They’ll only plea-bargain if they have weaknesses in their case.”

“That’s okay; I’m not bargaining. There’s no way I’m going to see the light of day again. I just want this over with; the less Becky has to go through… the less Adam has to hear as he grows up…” He starts to choke up, and stops speaking.

“Why did you plead ‘not guilty’ at the arraignment?” I ask.

“The public defender said it was a formality. That it was best to do it that way, even if I was going to change my plea.”

The PD was right, and I tell Noah that. Then, “Would you like me to talk to the prosecutor on your behalf?”

He nods. “I would appreciate that very much.”

“Okay. I’ll do what I can.”

“Just make this go away,” he says. “Make me go away.”

If you asked my assistant, Edna, what is the greatest invention ever, she would say, “Caller ID.”

Of course, in order to ask her the question, you’d have to be able to get her on the phone, which is almost impossible. If her office is her castle, then caller ID is her moat.

It’s not that Edna doesn’t like people; she has an extended list of family and friends that is miles long. When any of their numbers pop up, she happily takes the call. It’s that she likes work even less than I do, and any unfamiliar number that she answers is a potential assignment.

My cell phone number is one of the chosen few, and she answers on the fourth ring. “We’ve got a client,” I tell her, and I can feel her physically recoil through the phone.

“Really?”

“Really. His name is Noah Galloway.”

“Noah Galloway? The Noah Galloway on TV? The mass murderer?”

“The very one.”

For most people, cringing is a physical act. For Edna it is verbal; I can hear it in her voice. “Do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I do.”

“Well… okay… but you know I have a vacation planned.”

Edna spends seventy percent of every day doing crossword puzzles, and she is an unmatched genius in that area. The other thirty percent she spends planning vacations with her family that they never take. When she adds up all the nieces, cousins, and the like, there are seventy-two people, and they won’t go away until all of them can make it. Suffice it to say that seventy-two schedules don’t ever match up that perfectly.

“Where are you going?”

“Either on a cruise to the Caribbean or Mount Rushmore,” she says.

“Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

I ask Edna to call Dylan’s office and make an appointment for me to see him regarding Noah’s case. How quickly he sees me will be a sure indicator as to how strong he considers his position. Fast means he’s confident, slow means he doesn’t completely have his act together, and there are holes to be plugged.

Edna calls me back five minutes later, to tell me that Dylan is available now if I’m so inclined. I’m not at all inclined, but I suck it up and tell her to advise him that I’m on the way.

There is pretty much nothing I like about Dylan Campbell. For one thing, he’s at least six foot two, maybe two hundred pounds, and in outstanding shape. He probably gets up at three-thirty in the morning to do calisthenics and eat wheat germ.

He was a quarterback at Duke, which is why I bet against them every chance I get. Unfortunately, this childishness extends to my betting against their basketball team, not a very profitable thing to do.

He’s got one of those cleft-things in his chin, which I’ve never trusted. Even his teeth, which I would like to knock out of his mouth, are pure white and perfectly spaced.

To my knowledge, only two things really bother Dylan. One is that his ambition has been at least temporarily thwarted. He has always seen his job as prosecutor as a stepping stone for his political career, and even made noise about running for Congress last year. His party establishment chose a different candidate, and Dylan was said to be livid about it.

The other source of pain for Dylan is the fact that he has faced me in two major cases and lost both times. This not only damaged his reputation, but particularly galled him because he hates me. Most prosecutors hate me, but Dylan’s hatred rises above the others’.

The distressing topper to all of this is that Dylan is smart and tough. He comes in prepared and focused, not a good combination for us inhabitants of the defense table.

Dylan is of course all fake smiles when I arrive, and he comes out to the corridor to greet me. He shakes my hand with a powerful grip and says, “Andy, good to see you. It’s been too long… way too long.”

“Really? You think? I thought it felt just right.”

He laughs, as if I’m kidding, though he knows I’m not. I silently admonish myself; for Noah’s sake I need to be on my best behavior, since Dylan holds all the cards.

He brings me into his office, and he gets right to the point. “You’ve got a tough one here, Andy.”

“Not the way I see it.”

“Then you’re not looking too carefully. This guy is going down with a thud.”

“What have you got?” I’m going to see what he has in detail when I get the discovery documents; I’m just looking for a preview now.

“Twice as much as we need, including a confession.”

“He allowed himself to be interrogated?”

Dylan shakes his head. “No. But we’ve got someone he confessed to a few weeks after the crime.”

“Who might that be?” I ask, cringing.

“A friend of his at the time. Galloway told him chapter and verse how he did it. The chemicals he used, how he set it off, locked the doors, and who he was after.”

A key part of lawyering, both in and out of the courtroom, is to never look surprised. It’s even better never to actually be surprised, but if that’s impossible, then appearance will have to do. What Dylan has just said is stunning to me and makes little sense. How could Noah have remembered something in such detail then, but have no recollection of it now? Could it be a result of his drug-taking?

“When will I get discovery?” I ask.

He shrugs. “Day or so. We’re putting it together.”

“Can I get the documents relating to this witness now? Seems like it would be an important piece in deciding which direction to go with this.”

“No problem.” He picks up the phone and gives directions to his assistant to copy those particular documents right away.

All kinds of theories are going through my mind, but I put them on hold to finish this conversation. There is still information to be gathered, and impressions to be left.

“So what are you looking for on this?” I ask.

He smiles an annoying smile. “Justice.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Andy, twenty-six people died a horrible death. The guy who did it is never going to see the sun again. Life… no parole.”

It is exactly what I expected, but I don’t tell him that. I also don’t tell him that Noah would be fine with that outcome. There’s nothing for me to say until I see the witness statement.

Dylan’s assistant brings in a folder with the statement documents in it, and I thank him, make some noises about talking to my client about all this, and leave.

Your mother was wrong, Brett Fowler would tell you.

Breakfast is not the most important meal of the day.

Lunch is where the action is. It’s where deals are brokered, alliances are forged, careers are made, lies are told, backs are stabbed, and lives are ruined.

And then it’s time to get the check.

Fowler was not someone who would be considered to be at the center of the political world. He wasn’t an elected representative; he never ran for office, introduced a bill, or voted on an amendment. He was an outlier, an appendage who contributed to the process, and certainly profited from it.

He was a political consultant.

Political consultants, especially in Washington, D.C., have gotten a bad name as a group. Not quite as bad as lobbyists, or lawyers, or politicians themselves, but pretty bad nonetheless.

The truth is there are few things one can be in Washington and still have a good name, since the city itself has become the subject of scorn. Politicians who’ve served in Washington for twenty years try to reinvent themselves as “outsiders,” and they go home to give speeches that decry “Washington politics.”

So the bad-mouthing that was done of political consultants didn’t bother Brett much. In fact, it didn’t bother him at all.

The trend in political consulting was toward large firms, but Brett had long ago decided he would never go that route. He believed in operating on his own, no restrictions. If was better for himself and for his clients. Especially for himself.

Of course, that was when political consulting was his main occupation, when helping people succeed was his stock-in-trade. That was before he became an executive in another operation, which also helped people, but which then owned and used them from that time forward.

Almost everybody, even the wealthy or powerful, reached a point in their lives when they needed or wanted something that they couldn’t get. Very often accomplishing that goal would be very embarrassing, very illegal, and nearly impossible. So Fowler’s “team” provided the money or the muscle necessary to make it happen.

And from that moment they owned that person, as surely as anyone can own anything.

It reminded Fowler of that line from The Godfather, which he considered the best movie ever made. Don Corleone had done a favor for a man, an undertaker, and he said to the grateful man, “Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.”

That is how Fowler saw his own situation, with one difference.

That day always came.

Lunch that day was with Joseph Chesney, congressman from the Fourteenth District in Central Kansas, one of Brett’s second-tier clients. Chesney was mulling a run for the Senate the following year. At least that’s the story he was putting out in the press; the truth was he was doing far more than “mulling.” He had already made the decision to go full speed ahead.

It was not an easy call. Chesney’s district was a safe one, and he probably could have remained in Congress for many, many years to come. But in the class system that is the U.S. government, the Senate is on a much higher level than the House, and that’s where Chesney wanted to be.

The problem for Chesney was that the incumbent senator that he would have to take on in the general election was Ben Ryan. Ryan was finishing his second term, and if anything his star was on the rise. He won his last election five years ago with an unheard-of seventy-one percent of the vote, and polls showed him at least as popular now.

Chesney’s own private polls showed him getting swamped in a proposed matchup with Ryan, and most people would consider his entry into the race to be political suicide.

Which is why he hired Brett Fowler.

The purpose of the lunch was for Brett to provide a report on “campaign operations,” but instead Chesney had to endure an hour of conversation, consisting mostly of political gossip about what was happening in Washington. Mostly it was a recitation of who was up and who was down, and the two always evened out. Washington is a zero-sum city.

It wasn’t until Brett asked for and received the check that he addressed himself to the one thing that Chesney wanted to hear. “Your senator just got back from Amsterdam yesterday. Another example of his tireless efforts to help the people of Kansas.”

Chesney was immediately on alert. “And how did his trip go?”

“Apparently he had a wonderful time,” Brett said. “I didn’t talk to him directly, but I spoke to a friend of a friend of his.”

Chesney cast a wary glance at the other people in the restaurant, in the unlikely event that this apparently bland conversation was being overheard. Satisfied that what they were saying was private, he asked, “So it went well?”

Brett looked at Chesney, who thought he was in the process of cementing a bright future. He had no idea that he was just a backup, to be used only in case Plan A went very wrong. Which didn’t bode well for him, since a Plan A in this operation never went wrong.

Brett just smiled and raised his water glass. “It went fine, Senator.”

The Tara Foundation is how I want to spend my declining years.

Which is just as well, since my body started declining a while ago, and it’s not like it started from that high a peak.

When I don’t have any clients to take up my time, I spend much of my day at the foundation building, located in Haledon. But I never put in the effort that Willie Miller, and his wife, Sondra, do. It is their sole focus, and for them it’s a total commitment and a labor of love.

We’ve been doing it for five years, and in that time have placed close to three thousand dogs in homes. It would have been more, but Willie has rather rigorous criteria for what constitutes a home worthy of having one of our dogs. I’m strict about it, but Willie is over the top.

The operation costs us a lot of money, but that is not exactly a major problem. I am the undeserving beneficiary of a very large inheritance, plus a few enormous financial victories on behalf of clients. Willie is also very well off, since he was one of those clients, earning ten million in a wrongful-imprisonment lawsuit. It’s a lot of money, but not worth his spending seven years on death row for a murder he didn’t commit.

Outside factors have caused Willie’s time commitment to the foundation to waver lately. Being a national hero can be a time drain, and that is what Willie has been for the last four months.

It was part of a case that I was working on. Willie insisted on helping out, and I reluctantly gave him minor assignments, since Willie can be a bit of a loose cannon. Not only did he wind up catching the bad guys, but he heroically thwarted what would have been a devastating terrorist attack on a natural-gas tanker.

Willie’s resulting national celebrity was very much deserved, and he became the target of every interviewer in America. If he turned one down, I’m not at this point aware of it.

I was supposed to be here this morning to spend the day working and hanging out with the dogs, but my involvement with Noah and his case prevented it. I characteristically forgot to call Willie and tell him, and I know he will just as characteristically think nothing of it.

Sondra is in the reception area when I get there. “Sorry,” I say, “I got tied up with some work stuff.”

She smiles. “No problem. It’s been slow here today anyway.”

“Thanks, Sondra. Willie here?”

“In the back. He’s anxious to talk to you about something.”

“What is it?”

“I’ll let him tell you. But after he does, please talk him out of it.”

Willie is somewhat volatile, and more than somewhat impetuous, so this could be anything from wanting to remodel the foundation offices to enrolling in astronaut school. I’m not going to know until I know.

When I get into the back, which is where the dogs are, I find Willie in his normal position, rolling around on the ground, playing with six of them. I love dogs in a way that most people consider well north of eccentric, but Willie makes me look normal.

When he sees me, he jumps up, gives each dog a chewie to occupy them, and heads over to me. “Big news,” he says.

“I’m ready.”

“They want me to write a book.”

“Who does?”

The question throws him. “I don’t know… some book guy.”

This is already not going well. “A book guy? That’s all you know about him? Was he a big book guy? An old book guy?”

“Hold on a second,” he says, and walks over to his desk, opening the drawer. “He gave me his card.”

Willie hands me the card, which was given to him by Mr. Alexander Downey, the managing editor at a publishing house in New York. It seems legit, but who knows.

“So what exactly did he say?”

“That I should write a book, like my life story, and they’d put it out there. You know, print it out and stuff.”

“Anything else?”

“That they’d give me a lot of money. And I’d get it as soon as I say I’ll do it, before I even write the thing. But if I don’t write it, I have to give the money back. He wants me to have my agent call him.”

“Who’s your agent?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“You.”

“Willie, are you up for writing a book?”

“Sure. What’s the big deal?”

“Well, just to make sure, maybe you should read one first, so you’ll know what you’re getting into.” The only reading I’ve ever seen Willie do are his own press clippings.

“Come on, Andy, I told you a million times, I can’t do that. I get bored real easily; I read a ketchup bottle and I fall asleep.”

“It’s a big deal, Willie, a lot of work.”

“They said they’ll give me somebody to help. He’s helped other, you know, writers… like me.”

“I’m sure they will.”

“Hey, I’m gonna need some pens, and a lot of paper. You think maybe the helper guy will get me all that?”

I hold up the card. “Why don’t I call this guy, and then we’ll go from there.”

He nods. “Good idea. Hey, how many words are there in a book?”

“I don’t know, maybe eighty, a hundred thousand, or so.”

“How many words have we said? You know, since you got here and we’ve been talking.”

“Maybe a few hundred,” I say.

He’s clearly not pleased by my answer. “That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

He ponders this for a few moments. “Make sure they give me a good helper.”

“Do you know a man named Daniel Butler? People seem to call him Danny.”

Noah’s face shows no hint of recognition, and certainly no concern about my reason for asking the question.

“No, I don’t think so,” he says. “Should I?”

“Danny Butler is the reason you were arrested.”

He shakes his head. “I’m the reason I was arrested. But who is he?”

“He went to the FBI and told them that you confessed setting the fire to him. The conversation supposedly took place a few weeks after the fire.”

“That’s not possible.”

“How can you be sure of that? Maybe it was during one of your blackout periods?”

He shakes his head, more firmly this time, as if adamant. “No, when I realized what I had done, I went cold turkey. I still lived in homeless shelters for a while, but I have not put a drug into my system since that day.”

“So you don’t know him at all? He claims that he had breakfast with you at a homeless shelter, and that you were bragging about it.”

“I had breakfast with plenty of people at homeless shelters, but I never talked about the fire with anyone, at any time, until I got arrested and told Becky. And then you.”

I believe Noah is telling the truth. For one thing, he sounds sincere, though that is not terribly important. Plenty of sincere-sounding people have lied to me through their teeth. More significantly, he has no reason to lie. He’s already planning to admit his guilt and plead accordingly, so he gains nothing by denying his connection to Danny Butler.

“In his deposition, Butler goes on to say that you told him exactly how you had done it, where you set the fires, and the kind of chemicals you used. He said-”

“He’s lying, Andy.” For the first time, I hear something other than resignation in Noah’s voice. I hear a little anger.

“Why would he be lying?”

“I don’t know, but he’s lying. I’ve never had the slightest recollection of anything from that day. There is no possible way I accurately described to him what happened.”

“His story matches up with the forensic investigation.”

He thinks for a moment, frustration evident on his face. “I don’t know what to say.”

I hesitate before I continue. I’m crossing a bridge, and when I get to the other side and turn around, the bridge is going to be gone, and there won’t be any going back. And the problem is, I don’t want to get to the other side at all, and I absolutely dread getting stuck there.

“Noah, it’s important that you think about the implications of this. Let’s assume that you’re right, that you never had this incriminating conversation with Danny Butler.”

“I’m definitely right about that,” he says.

“Okay. Then how did he know the details? You couldn’t have had an accomplice, could you?”

He shakes his head. “No.”

“So somebody else told Butler everything that happened, or he set the fire himself.”

“I set the fire.”

“You think that you did, I know that,” I say. “And maybe it’s true. But how did Butler find out about it? And why did he wait six years to come forward?”

Noah thinks about it and comes up with an explanation that is not completely out of left field. “You said his statement matched the forensics report. Well, maybe someone gave him the report. He read it, and attributed the information to me.”

“So he read it, and then framed someone he never met, you, while you were coincidentally hiding a belief in your own guilt.”

By now I’m pacing around the room, trying to make sense out of this. I’m sure Noah would be pacing as well, if he were not handcuffed to the metal table.

“Where does this leave us, Andy?”

“Well, I’m sorry, but what I should have already told you is that the prosecutor will not settle for anything other than life without the possibility of parole.”

He nods; it’s exactly what he expected, and probably what he wants. “I understand.”

“So there’s no rush to pleading guilty,” I say. “It’s not going to change your sentence.”

“I told you, I don’t want a trial.”

“Noah, in any negotiation, even one in which you hold no cards of any value, there is always time to make a bad deal.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means at any point you can interrupt the process and plead guilty, and that will put a stop to everything, and you’ll go away for the rest of your life. But I’m suggesting you hold off for a while, at least until we can explain what’s behind this Danny Butler situation.”

“You’re going to do that?” He rattles his handcuffs. “Because I’m sort of tied up.”

I nod. “I’ve got some free time.”

“You might regret that choice of words. Because I have no money to pay you.”

“You gave me Tara. I owe you one.”

“How do I get myself into these situations?”

Laurie and I are in bed; she’s reading, and I’m watching a Seinfeld rerun. I don’t actually have to “watch” Seinfeld, since once I hear a single sentence of any episode, it triggers my memory bank, and I know everything that is going to happen from that moment on. So this way I’m able to enjoy the show and obsess about life simultaneously.

Tara lies in the corner, on a large, puffy dog bed. She used to sleep in bed with us, but now prefers to be able to stretch out by herself.

“Which situation might that be?” Laurie asks.

“I have absolutely no desire to have a client, and I’d rather have a root canal without Novocain than take on a trial, much less a murder trial. So I accept a client for no reason at all-”

Laurie interrupts, pointing to Tara. “You did it as a favor to her.”

That doesn’t seem worthy of a response, so I don’t give her one. Instead, I continue. “But I catch a break. This client doesn’t want to go to trial; he wants to confess to anyone who will listen. So what do I do? I talk him out of pleading guilty, so that maybe we can have a trial.”

“Andy, you did the right thing. Now if you are finished beating yourself up, I’m trying to read this book.”

“How many words are in it?”

“How many words are in what? This book?”

“Yes, a publishing house wants Willie to write a book, but he’s afraid it’s going to take too many words.”

“God help us,” she says.

“Let’s get back to my situation,” I say. “Do I now have to investigate this thing?”

“You know you do.”

“Full scale, or a sweep-under-the-rug job?”

“Full scale,” she says.

“Will you help?”

“Now?”

“You know what I mean.” Laurie is an ex-cop, who when she’s not teaching college-level criminology, serves as my lead investigator. That’s obviously only when I have a client, but because I’m an idiot, I seem to have one now.

“Of course I will,” she says. “Now can I finish my book? I’ll count the words later; it might be distracting to do it as I read.”

“What are you reading?” I can’t tell, because she’s got one of those e-book readers.

“ War and Peace, by Willie Miller,” she says.

I want to get back to obsessing about Noah’s case, so I say, “I’ll call a meeting of the team for tomorrow morning. With any luck we can find out that Noah is guilty as hell by the end of the day.”

“Mmmm,” Laurie says, not really listening because she’s started reading again.

“You know, we’re at an impasse here,” I say.

“How is that?”

“Well, you’re reading, and I want to have a conversation.”

She puts the book device down. “That is quite an impasse. How about a third choice? We could make love.”

“Sex?” I ask, not quite believing what I just heard.

She nods. “I believe there will be some sex involved. Consider it a reward for doing the right thing and helping Noah and Becky Galloway.”

“I see injustice and I need to right the wrong. That’s just who I am.” I’m undressing as I talk, to cut down on the time Laurie has to change her mind. It doesn’t seem like she will, because she has her clothes off faster than I do.

“Here’s to winning the trial,” she says.

“Don’t kill the mood.”

It’s been a while since the team has assembled.

Not as long as I’d like, but right now I don’t seem to have a choice. Any slight hope I had of backing out ended with my acceptance of Laurie’s “reward” last night. Not only wouldn’t I have given it back, but my intention is to perform just as nobly in the future, so as to get more rewards.

Present at this meeting, in addition to Laurie, Hike, Edna, and myself are Sam Willis and Marcus Clark. Sam is my accountant, but that is not his role here, especially since our client can’t afford to pay us. He is here because of his talent as computer hacker supreme. If we need to find out anything at all about anything at all, Sam can find it, so long as it resides in some computer, somewhere. Which is good, because pretty much everything in recorded history is in some computer, somewhere. The fact that much of the information is illegally obtained is something that has never kept either Sam or I awake at night.

Marcus Clark is an outstanding investigator, and an even better bodyguard. To perform both functions, he takes full advantage of the fact that he is the scariest and toughest human being on the planet.

He hardly ever talks, and when he does Laurie is the only one who can understand what he is grunting. But occasionally he seems to listen, so the goal is not to say anything that might make him angry.

In fact, no one in Marcus’s presence wants to even look at him; it seems the safest way to stay alive. So everybody just acts nonchalant, as if no one is terrified. It’s as if Godzilla walked through the streets of Tokyo, and the citizens just sauntered along, whistling and chatting amiably, as if nothing was amiss.

I grab some coffee and come into the room. Hike is telling Sam how the world is soon to end from an asteroid strike. “There are more asteroids out there than we have grains of sand on our beaches,” he says. “We’re like in a shooting gallery.”

“We’re not getting hit,” Sam says. He is the optimistic opposite of Hike.

“That’s what the dinosaurs said. You see any of them on the bus coming in this morning?”

“So you’re saying we’re all going to die?”

Hike nods solemnly. “If not this week, then next. Law of averages.”

I call the meeting to order. “We’ve got a client,” I say. “His name is Noah Galloway. We haven’t received the discovery yet, but Edna will pass out copies of the information we have so far.”

Edna looks stunned. “I was supposed to make copies?”

I nod. “Now that you say so, that’s probably a good way to do it. That way we’ll each have our own.”

She stands, folder in hand, and makes the trudge to the copy room. When she’s finished, we are going to have one exhausted Edna on our hands.

I give them the basic outline, which they can supplement by reading the documents, should Edna succeed in copying them. Then I lay out the individual assignments.

“Hike and I will go through the discovery, which I’m told we’ll have by close of business today. Sam, you should focus on digging up all available information on the fire, the victims, and Danny Butler.”

He seems disappointed. “That’s it? Did I mention I got a gun permit?”

“Yes, I believe you did. And if we need to shoot anyone, you’re our man.” Sam feels inhibited by being assigned only computer work; he wants to be out on the street gunning down bad guys.

“Laurie, you’ll be in charge of the investigation itself, and Marcus will work with you.” I briefly look over at Marcus to see if he has any reaction, but he doesn’t. He likes Laurie, so I use her as a buffer whenever I can.

Edna comes back into the room and announces, with obvious relief in her voice, that the copier is out of toner. I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to rectify that technical a problem, so Sam says he’ll reload it when the meeting is over.

“We don’t have a lot of time on this,” I say, trying to get things back on track. “If it goes on too long, our client is going to preempt us and plead guilty.”

“Is he guilty?” Sam asks.

“He thinks so, but I’m not so sure.” I take a few minutes to explain my doubts. “If we find out he’s right, he pleads guilty and we ride out of town.”

The phone rings, and everybody looks at Edna, waiting for her to answer it. By the third ring, she gets the idea and reluctantly picks it up. After a brief hello, she holds the phone toward me. “It’s Pete Stanton.”

“Tell him I’ll call him back,” I say, partially because we’re in the middle of a meeting, but mostly because I’m afraid to talk to him. He may have found out that I am representing Noah already. I had planned to tell him personally, but hadn’t yet summoned up the guts. I was thinking three years from Tuesday might be a good time to do it.

Edna gets back on the phone, repeats what I said, and listens for a few moments. She then holds out the phone to me again. “He said that if you don’t take the call, whatever you are doing will be the last thing you ever do.”

I nod and turn to the others in the room. “Maybe I should take this.”

They get up and start to leave, with the exception of Laurie. I pick up the phone and say, “Hey, Pete old buddy, what’s going on?”

“Tell me why,” he says.

That sounds like a song lyric to me, and I’m feverishly searching for a joke to tell about it, something to lighten the mood. But this mood probably shouldn’t be lightened, so I hit it head-on.

“Two reasons, least important first. He saved Tara’s life.”

“The second one better be a beauty,” he says.

“There is very substantial doubt in my mind that he is guilty.”

“What a surprise, a defendant who claims he is innocent.” Pete has what I would call a healthy disrespect for defense attorneys, which is no great surprise. But I’m not hearing bitterness or intense anger in his voice yet, which surprises me.

I do realize that I’ve got to be careful here; I can’t say anything that Noah told me, including his own belief that he committed the crime. It would be an obvious violation of attorney-client privilege.

“I’m talking about in my mind, Pete. What I have seen so far doesn’t add up.”

“Depends on who is doing the math. And whether they’re using lawyer-math.”

“I’ll make you a promise,” I say. “If I think he’s probably guilty when we’re done with the investigation, I won’t take it to trial.”

It’s an easy promise for me to make, since Noah doesn’t want to go to trial anyway, but I’m sure it comes as a surprise to Pete.

He doesn’t say anything for maybe twenty seconds, probably trying to figure out what to make of it. Then, “That works.”

“It does?” I ask, unable to conceal my surprise.

“But I’ll make you a promise,” he says. “If you wind up getting a guilty party off the hook, you will wish you had been in that fire yourself.”

Click.

I hang up the phone and Laurie asks, “What did he say?”

“He threatened to burn me alive.”

“That’s it?” she asks. “I’ve heard him threaten worse than that fifty times at Charlie’s. How angry was he?”

I nod. “That’s the weird part. I know Pete really well, and I don’t think he was angry at all. I think he wants me to do this.”

You would never know that twenty-six people died here.

It’s a vacant lot now, actually cleaner than some of the other vacant lots in this neighborhood. I guess when rubble includes a lot of charred bodies, the city pays more attention to the cleanup. Generally, a dead-end street like this would not get much attention, and the other vacant lots are evidence of that.

Laurie and I are on Chapman Street in Paterson, not far from Eastside High School, which is my alma mater. The area was rundown then, and is worse now. It’s late afternoon, so students are walking home, regarding us curiously but not overly so.

We like to start a case by going to the scene of the crime, but the value is certainly limited in this case. The crime itself, to say nothing of the years since, has literally wiped away the scene.

The discovery documents started coming in a few hours before we came here, and I took the time to look at the ones relating to the scene, so I’ve seen contemporaneous pictures, and read a few witness reports. I’ll go over them in far more detail later, but doing the little that I did helps me to understand what we’re looking at.

“Certainly wasn’t a random crime,” Laurie says. “They chose the house to hit.”

“How do you know that?”

“Random criminals generally pick targets that allow for an easy getaway. It’s why there are more drive-by shootings than walk-by ones.”

I know what she’s getting at, but I don’t interrupt.

She points. “This is the seventh lot in on a dead-end street. Even allowing for wanting privacy in the commission of the crime, which might therefore eliminate the corner house and maybe the one next to it, there is no reason they would have come this far down the block. Not unless they were targeting this particular house.”

“I agree, but it doesn’t help us,” I say. “The allegation is that Noah was targeting his drug suppliers, and had been to this house before to purchase his drugs. So he certainly would have bypassed the first six houses and gone after this one.”

“Do they think he drove here?”

“I don’t know what they think, but I can’t imagine he did. He had lost everything, so I doubt he had a car.”

She nods, and walks toward one of the other buildings. We stare at it, and I wait until she tells me what I’m supposed to be thinking.

“Three floors, maybe three apartments to a floor? Maybe an average of at least three people per apartment?”

I nod. “Sounds right That’s twenty-seven people, close to the number that died.”

“Fifteen buildings on the street, both sides, so maybe four hundred people living on this street. What time was the fire?”

“Just after midnight,” I say

“And it happened in the summer, right?”

“July fourteenth.”

“We need to check the weather that evening,” she says. “If it was a hot night and not raining, some people might have been outside, even at that hour. Someone should have seen something.”

“And it was a chemical fire. The perp would have had to be carrying the materials to start it. Might have made them stand out some. We’ll have to canvass the neighborhood, and identify people that have moved away.”

“The perp?” she asks, mimicking me.

I nod. “It stands for ‘perpetrator,’ which means bad guy. It’s crime talk; sorry, I sometimes lapse into my native tongue.”

I’m trying to find some humor in this, but it’s hard, because it’s not going to be fun. It’s going to be a long, painstaking investigation, essentially duplicating Pete’s failed one. And he and his colleagues had the advantage of working when the crime was fresh.

And when it’s all over, one of two things will happen. Either a guy I like will go to prison for the rest of his life, or I’ll be devoting months of my own life to something I have absolutely no desire to do. Or both.

We head back to the office, and I call Hike on the way, asking him to head down there, so that we can go over the discovery documents. It’s a difficult process; by definition it will show the odds to be heavily stacked against the defendant, which is why they arrested him in the first place.

Hike agrees to meet me at the office; he would agree to meet me in a swamp in the Everglades if he could bill by the hour. “None of my business,” he asks, “but are you getting paid for this?” He knows that I have taken a few cases in recent years with clients that had no money.

“No.”

“Let me put it another way. Am I getting paid for this?”

“Yes.”

“You cut a lot of classes in law school? Maybe the ones where they went over compensation and client billing?”

I’ve just realized that as dismal as this looked a few minutes ago, it’s actually worse. I’m doing all of this for nothing, and I’m doing it with Hike.

The most important courtroom in America, at least for financial matters, is in Delaware.

Most people are surprised to hear that, since Delaware has never been confused with Wall Street as a center of high finance.

It’s called the Delaware Chancery Court, and it has been home to some of the most significant financial trials in American business history. Many of them have gone completely unnoticed by those outside the business community, but the verdicts have on some level affected everyone.

Delaware’s achieving preeminence in this area was the result of design. Favorable state tax laws attracted companies from all over the country, not to make Delaware their corporate headquarters, but rather to make it the state in which they incorporated. So when those same companies are involved in lawsuits, that is naturally where those suits are tried.

Over time, the court has also come to be known for its competence. It is a place where decisions are rendered by its judges strictly according to the law. Lawyers don’t have to worry about renegade judges making unsupported decisions, and surprises are a rarity. And lawyers hate surprises.

This outstanding legal reputation frequently brings “business” into Delaware by mutual agreement of companies that are not even incorporated there. When these companies enter into contracts with each other, they often agree in advance that if they eventually have a dispute, it will be settled in Delaware.

So Judge Walter Holland, chief judge of the Chancery Court, had a very important job, and he took that job very seriously. Blessed with an outstanding legal mind, and having earned a reputation for impeccable integrity, he had long been considered a lawyer’s judge. That is, he would decide cases strictly according to the law, and he possessed a keen understanding of that law.

No surprises.

On this day Judge Holland sat in his courtroom moments before he was to hear opening arguments in a dispute concerning an attempted takeover of Milgram Oil and Gas. In his position as chief judge, it was easy for him to arrange to hear the case himself, and that’s what he did.

As companies in the energy field go, Milgram was a relative pygmy, with a market capitalization of less than a billion and a half dollars. The company attempting the takeover was Entech Industries, a smallish energy firm, based in Philadelphia and run by CEO Alex Bauer. Entech Industries had owned about three percent of Milgram, but then suddenly bought another fifteen percent.

Milgram, correctly anticipating a takeover move by Entech, adopted what is known as a poison pill defense. Simply put, the measure said that if any outside investor bought enough shares to own in excess of twenty percent of the company, then all existing shareholders had the right to buy more shares at a discount.

This maneuver would have the effect of diluting Entech’s shares, and making an ultimate takeover difficult, if not impossible. So Bauer and Entech sued, claiming the poison pill defense in this case was illegal.

It was a fairly complicated case; Judge Holland knew that from his reading of the submitted briefs. But complicated cases were nothing new to him; he faced that every day.

It was also a typical case, in that it was not even close to the public consciousness. Mentions could be found of it on the financial pages, but they focused mainly on the impact that the case would have on the stock of the parties involved.

The lawyers representing the companies were from the finest firms in the country, and Holland knew that they were worth the exorbitant fees they charged. They would prepare meticulously, and they would know every single fact and element of the law that might bear on the outcome.

But Judge Walter Holland knew certain things that the lawyers did not.

He knew that it was not important how well the lawyers were prepared, or how persuasive they would be. None of that would matter, for one simple reason.

Judge Holland already knew who was going to win.

And he knew that twenty-six people had burned to death to ensure it.

Alexander Downey is going to regret his decision.

He’s the vice president and assistant managing editor of Henderson Publishing, and after trading a few phone calls, we set up a meeting to talk about the possibility of Willie Miller writing a book about his heroic exploits.

I’m too busy with trial preparation to go to his midtown Manhattan office, and I suggested we have our discussion over the phone. But Downey wanted to meet in person, and offered to come to my office. That’s the part he’s likely to regret.

My office is located on the second floor of a three-story building on Van Houten Avenue in Paterson. Directly below us is Sofia Hernandez’s fruit stand, which is sort of the community center of the neighborhood. People from surrounding blocks come there to squeeze cantaloupes and discuss the pressing issues of the day.

Downey arrives and climbs the twenty-two creaking stairs to the office. Once inside, he runs into Edna, who reluctantly puts down her crossword puzzle to usher him into my office. She doesn’t offer him coffee, probably because if he said yes, she’d have to make some.

Downey is wearing a dark, pin-striped suit, which, if he auctioned it off, could pay our rent until the end of hockey season. He introduces himself with, “Mr. Carpenter, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m a longtime admirer.” This guy is no dummy.

I offer him a seat, and he picks the cleanest one and sits down. We exchange small talk for a while, an easy thing to do once I learn he’s a Giants fan.

I need to move this along, since I’ve got a lot of work to do, so I say, “I understand you want Willie Miller to write a book for you.”

He nods. “Very much. He’s got an amazing story to tell, and I’m sure he will tell it colorfully. He has a unique voice.”

“That he does. Until now, I’m sure you understand, that voice has been verbal. This would be Willie’s first book.”

Downey smiles. “Not a problem, we understand that he is not an established writer. We want him to speak from the heart, in his own words.”

“In his own words…” I repeat, wondering if he’s actually heard any of Willie’s words.

“Mr. Carpenter-”

“Andy.”

“Thank you, Andy,” he says. “We… I… understand Willie’s capabilities as a wordsmith. When I told him I wanted his story told truthfully and unembellished, that there was no need for anything fallacious, he said, ‘ ’Course not, man, I’m married.’”

I can’t help laughing at this recounting, and Downey joins in. From there the conversation goes smoothly, and Downey claims to have the perfect person to serve as Willie’s ghostwriter.

When I ask about compensation, he gives me a piece of paper he has prepared as a proposal, and suggests that I study it. “It calls for an advance of five hundred thousand,” he says, “but I’m confident that with royalties he will earn considerably more than that.”

We reach a basic agreement; the money is obviously good, and since Willie wants to do it, I see no reason to stand in his way. Downey says that he will prepare the contracts and send them to me. We shake hands on it, but it appears that the meeting is not yet over. He tells me that he’d like me to write a book as well.

“Willie knows much more about what happened than I do. He was there.”

“I’m not talking about that case, at least not specifically,” Downey says. “You’ve been part of quite a few high-profile cases, including Galloway. This could be the story of your life, and especially your career.”

“I don’t think so,” I say.

“There would be a substantial audience for it. We do a lot of these books, some written by the subject, some not. Some authorized, some not.”

I think the only thing I would dislike more than work is writing about work, so I say, “Let’s focus on Willie for now.”

He smiles. “Fine.”

“Thanks for coming all the way here,” I say.

“Happy to do it. I think I’ll pick up a watermelon downstairs as a remembrance.”

What if they gave a town and nobody came?

That’s what the residents of Jean, Nevada, would be asking themselves, if there were any residents of Jean, Nevada. But there are none, not a single one.

Another thing Jean obviously does not have is a city planner. Set up to be a gambling community, it stands on Highway 15, on the route into Vegas from Los Angeles. That might ordinarily be a good place to be, the theory being that anxious gamblers from L.A. might stop there to get a blackjack fix before driving on to Vegas.

The problem with that is that Primm, Nevada, is located just over the state line between California and Nevada. In fact, the original name of Primm was Stateline. Primm’s casinos are larger than Jean’s, which is just as well, since people actually go there. If they want to gamble before getting to Vegas, they stop at Primm. If not, they go on to Vegas. Either way, there’s no reason to stop at Jean.

None of this deterred Billy Klayman from making a one-o’clock-in-the-morning stop at the Gold Strike Casino in Jean. Having lost almost all of his money in a disastrous two-day trip to Vegas, Billy was driving back to his home in Anaheim a broke and hungry man. The broke part was going to be tough to solve, but the hungry part he could deal with. That’s because the sign in front of the Gold Strike was advertising “24 hour all you can eat-$6.99.” At least one of Billy’s credit cards should be able to deal with that.

So Billy parked his car in the nearly deserted lot and went in to the Gold Strike. It was a “serve yourself” buffet, utilizing small plates and difficult-to-reach entrees to deter patrons from overdoing it.

None of that had any effect on Billy, nor did the fact that the food had very little taste. He had arrived starved, and he was going to leave stuffed.

It took Billy forty-five minutes to have the meal, which included nine trips back to the buffet line. So full that he could barely get out of the chair, he left the restaurant, made a stop in the men’s room, and then another one in the bar adjacent to the casino.

He could only afford one beer, so that’s the exact number that he bought. He lingered over it for a half hour, not anxious to get back onto the road for the rest of the dreary ride home. Once he got there, he would have to explain to his wife where the rent money went, a conversation he did not relish at all.

Billy briefly considered taking a room in the hotel, but rejected the idea when he realized that it would cost money to do it. So instead he waddled out to the parking lot, and headed for his car. He was still depressed and miserable, but he was no longer hungry.

It was only about a hundred yards from the hotel entrance to Billy’s car, and Billy later remembered noticing how dark it was, and thinking that someone who left the casino flush with cash could be an easy target for a predator. Then he laughed to himself at the concept of someone leaving the Gold Strike Casino flush with cash.

Billy unlocked the driver’s side door and got in the car. More accurately, he tried to get in the car, but was stopped by the fact that there was already someone in the driver’s seat.

In the dim interior light of the car, Billy saw that it was a man’s body, wrapped tightly in what seemed like cellophane, but with an empty space where the head was supposed to be. The body rolled back and forth from the impact of Billy’s jostling it, then fell to the left and out of the car and onto the asphalt. In the process, it covered up the note that was taped to the body’s chest.

And then Billy screamed, loud enough to wake the residents of Jean, Nevada, if there were any.

Discovery documents are the New York Yankees of the criminal justice system.

Before the baseball season, all the experts look at the various rosters of the teams, and say that the Yankees are by far the best, and that there’s no way they should lose. And then supporters of the other teams bravely say that everyone should just wait until the season is played, and that although the Yankees may have the best team on paper, the season isn’t played on paper.

Discovery documents are the prosecutor’s version of events, and they chronicle in excruciating detail the results of what are usually intensive investigations by law enforcement. Obviously it is all incriminating to the accused, since it all resulted in the poor sucker getting arrested.

So as evidence “rosters” go, the discovery always shows that the prosecution’s is by far the best. Of course, in this case it’s a two-team league, which leaves the defense in second, meaning last, place.

But, like baseball games, trials are not “played on paper”; they are won or lost in the courtroom. Unfortunately, once they get off the paper and into that courtroom, the evidence included in discovery usually carries the day, and the prosecution winds up winning.

Just like the Yankees.

Considering the fact that this case was at least partially put together six years after the crime, the evidence-gathering against Noah has been impressive.

A number of neighbors identified Noah as a frequent presence in the area, and it was understood that he was purchasing drugs from the people in one of the first-floor apartments. He was also seen and heard earlier that evening engaged in an angry dispute with those same pushers, no doubt over their refusal to extend him credit.

It gets worse from there. Soon after the fire a paint can had been found in a trash can three blocks from the burned house. Testing showed it to have contained residue from the chemical compound identified as having caused the fire. There was DNA on the can, including a tiny piece of charred skin.

Noah’s DNA.

Noah’s skin.

Of course, the trigger that set this whole process in motion was the deposition given by Danny Butler. It makes for a devastating read, if you happen to be Noah’s defense attorney, which unfortunately I am, at least for the time being.

Hike and I go through the material together, exchanging documents when we’re through with them. I can hear him audibly moaning as he reads, which is not terribly significant, since Hike spends most of every day moaning.

When we’re finished, he says, “Well, at least we’ve got a client we can believe. When he says he did it, he did it.”

“So says the prosecution.”

“So says the evidence. Come on, Andy, that paint can is the goddamn murder weapon, and Galloway’s DNA is on it. The only thing they don’t have is a deposition from God saying Galloway set the fire. And they’d probably have that by the time we went to trial.”

“We haven’t developed our own evidence yet,” I say lamely.

“What are you talking about?” he asks. “We’ve already got the key piece. He saved your dog. All we have to do is present studies proving that dog-savers do not burn down houses.”

Hike is annoying me by not playing the game. A defense attorney is supposed to disbelieve and discount everything the prosecution says. “Have you ever read discovery that didn’t make it look like your client was guilty?”

“No, but my clients are always guilty.”

“And maybe this one is also, but we start by assuming he’s not, and we try to make the pieces fit. Maybe the real killer set him up to take the fall.”

Hike frowns, which is what he does when he’s not moaning, though he is able to do both simultaneously. “Interesting frame. They plant the evidence, and then wait six years to bring it to light. We’re dealing with some very patient framers.”

Hike is right, of course, but the more he talks, the more obstinate I feel. The problem is that my obstinate feelings have nothing to do with whether Noah will spend the rest of his life in jail.

The phone rings, and since Edna is either not in the office or hiding, I pick it up. A woman’s voice says, “Mr. Carpenter?” and I confirm that it’s me. She then tells me to hold for Mr. Campbell.

Dylan picks up moments later. “Andy, glad I got you,” he says. “There’s been a new development in the case, which is obviously not included in the discovery yet. It’s pretty important, so I thought I should tell you right away.”

Based on Dylan’s calling me like this, and the upbeat tone of his voice, the chance that this is bad news for Noah is exactly one hundred percent.

I don’t ask Dylan what it is, because he’s going to tell me anyway, and I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. So without prodding, he continues. “A body was found in a parking lot in Jean, Nevada, just outside of Vegas. The deceased is Danny Butler.”

“Cause of death?”

“Well, the autopsy hasn’t been done yet, but it shouldn’t be too difficult. Butler was decapitated, and the head hasn’t been found.”

“That’s it?” I ask.

“That’s it.”

“Nice chatting with you, Dylan.”

“Damn, I forgot, there’s one more thing. They found a note on the body. It says, ‘Talkers die.’”

The death of Danny Butler is a major problem for Noah.

Not as big a problem as it is for Danny Butler, but it’s a serious blow, at least if Noah’s case goes to trial. No trial, then no harm, no foul.

The damage is on two levels. First of all, the timing of the murder, along with the note on the body, makes it look like it is a revenge killing for Danny’s squealing on Noah. While Noah’s presence in jail obviously disqualifies him as the actual killer, his possible connection to criminal elements in the drug world would suggest that he could have requested it be done.

At the very least, it suggests that perhaps Noah has substantial influence with, and connection to, murderers. That is never a good thing for a murder defendant to have on his résumé.

Even more serious than that is the potential legal impact. If there is a trial, there will be a legal battle, and I’ll be arguing that the statement Butler gave to the police should not be admitted.

I will cite the Confrontation Clause in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, which states that the accused “shall enjoy the right… to be confronted with the witnesses against him.” Though I certainly would not agree with the use of the word “enjoy,” it’s a crucial part of our legal system.

It insures that everything comes to light, and most importantly, that a defendant’s lawyer has the right to cross-examine the witness. We lawyers think we can break witnesses down, and reduce the impact of the negative things they have to say about our clients.

In Danny’s case, we would have had a minor advantage, in that everything he had to say was committed to a statement, which he signed. If I could have gotten him to deviate in any way from that statement, and I almost always can do that, then the jury might tend to disbelieve him.

So I would make all these arguments, citing the Constitution, and I would lose. Because over time, judges and lawyers have carved some holes in that document, and Noah is about to fall into a big one. In fact, two of them.

There are two reasons the judge will admit Butler’s statement. First of all, it represents a confession. Not by Butler, of course, but Butler was reporting Noah’s alleged confession. That is admissible, and represents an exception to the Confrontation Clause, as well as to the hearsay rule.

The other factor insuring our legal defeat is that the law says that witnesses can be exempt from testifying, with their prior statements being admissible, if that witness is legitimately unavailable.

When you’re wrapped in cellophane and missing your head, that’s about as unavailable as it gets.

Hike and I discuss this new development. As big a pain in the ass as Hike can be, he’s got a brilliant legal mind, and I’m hoping that he can come up with something we can use.

“Anything at all you can think of?” I ask.

“Nope.”

Thanks, Hike.

The more I think about it, the more I see a silver lining, albeit not in any legal cloud. The only reason I opened this investigation at all was that I believed Noah when he said he didn’t confess the arson to Butler, and wouldn’t have been able to supply the details of the crime even if he wanted to.

So, assuming Butler didn’t wake up one day and decide for no reason to randomly pick Noah as the person to lie about, then he was put up to it.

His subsequent murder, which I refuse to believe is a coincidence, confirms the existence of an evil third party here. The people that used Butler decided they didn’t need him anymore, and that his knowledge of their involvement could be risky for them. Killing him put another nail in Noah’s legal coffin, and shut Butler up in the process.

A twofer, wrapped in cellophane.

I call Becky Galloway. It’s easier to get in touch with her than with Noah, since Noah is behind bars, which are in turn behind walls.

“Has Noah ever been to Vegas?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“Why of course?”

“He was born there. That’s where he grew up.”

I’m talking to Becky, but I can hear Dylan salivating. He’s going to talk about how Noah knows people there, people with whom he learned to do drugs, and they killed Danny Butler at their friend Noah’s behest.

He won’t have any evidence of it, or at least I hope he won’t, but he’ll have one advantage. It will sound true, and the jury will think it makes logical sense that it’s true.

And unfortunately, as trials go, that’s all that matters. Because the idea that trials are a search for the truth is just a myth. Trials are a search for that which the jury will believe is the truth.

“Senator Ryan, this is Brett Fowler. Thank you for taking my call.”

“You told my assistant it was urgent,” Ryan said, though the truth was he would have taken the call anyway. Fowler was very well connected in Washington, and though Ryan never used him in his role as consultant, he was always worth talking to.

“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” Fowler said. “I’m afraid it is.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Well, please understand that I am simply acting as an intermediary here, but I have some instructions for you.”

“Is that right?” Even though Ryan was worried about where this could be going, he wasn’t about to let a political flack start issuing instructions to a senator of his stature.

“Yes, sir. When you leave the office tonight, you’ll find a package on the passenger seat of your car. Don’t open it until you get home, but when you do please examine it carefully.”

“What is it?” Ryan asked. “What the hell is this about?”

“Please, Senator, just do as I say. Believe me, it’s better for both of us if you do. After you are familiar with the contents of the package, we will need to meet.”

“I don’t like this,” Ryan said. “I don’t like the mystery, and I don’t like the way you’re talking to me.”

“Senator, it is what it is. You’ll see that soon enough. Just call me when you are ready to meet.”

The package was waiting in the car, just as Fowler had said. But Ryan was not about to wait until he got home to open it, and he did so before he even pulled out of the parking lot.

It was a DVD, unmarked, and the thought of what might be on it made Ryan sick to his stomach. And with no DVD player in the car, all he could do was as he was told-to go home and play it.

When he arrived home, he realized that he had forgotten that his daughter and future son-in-law were over for dinner. After saying hello to them and his wife, Linda, he said that he had to make an important call.

He went into his office, locked the door, and watched as his worst fears were realized. There he was, in the Amsterdam hotel, having sex with a prostitute and ingesting cocaine. He was looking at the end of his career, his marriage, and life as he knew it.

He called Fowler, who answered the phone with a calm, “Hello, Senator. Thanks for calling.”

“You stinking son of a bitch.”

“I see no reason for name-calling, Senator. For instance, I didn’t address you as a cheating, cocaine-snorting pervert, even though the evidence certainly would support such a characterization.”

“What do you want?” Ryan asked.

“I’ll tell you at breakfast tomorrow. Believe me, it won’t be nearly as bad as you think. By next week this can all be behind you.”

They met at the restaurant in the Madison Hotel, on Fifteenth Street Northwest, a perfectly normal spot for a senator to be having breakfast. Fowler was already there when Ryan arrived, which was to be expected considering their relative status.

An outside observer would never have thought there was anything wrong, or that Ryan was not in charge of the meeting. But of course to Ryan something was very wrong, and he most definitely was not in charge.

Fowler tried to make small talk at first but Ryan was having none of it. “Just tell me what you want,” he said.

“It’s not what I want, Senator. But the people I represent do have a request.”

“Who are those people?”

Fowler laughed. “I’m afraid that’s privileged, Senator. Very, very privileged.”

“I’m waiting,” Ryan said.

“You have a bill coming out of your committee this week. I believe it is number D427967, regulating certain mining activities. It is not a terribly significant piece of legislation, and is expected to be passed easily by both houses and signed by the President. No controversy at all, which in this political climate is remarkable, don’t you think?”

Ryan obviously knew of the legislation, and knew that Fowler was characterizing its certain passage accurately. “What about it?”

“Certain amendments, also enjoying widespread support, will be added in the next two days. There is an additional amendment that you will add in your capacity as ranking minority member. It will seem insignificant, and in fact is of little importance, and should sail through by acclamation.”

“And what if I don’t?”

Fowler shook his head, as if saddened. “Senator, please… don’t embarrass yourself.”

“Then what if I do as you ask?”

“When you do,” Fowler said, leaving no doubt that “if” was not the correct word for this situation, “then the content of the video will never be disseminated, and you will not be called upon in this manner again. You have my word; I work for honorable people.”

“What is the amendment?”

Fowler took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to him. “It’s in here.”

Ryan did not want to wait to see what was in there, so he opened the envelope and took out the piece of paper. It was four paragraphs of legislative language, so he read it closely and carefully. Then he turned to Fowler.

“Done,” he said.

Sam Willis has spent three days online learning as much as he can about the victims.

In my experience, three days is enough time for Sam to fully chronicle every event that has happened in the history of the world, with special attention to New Jersey.

But as research projects go, this one is proving very difficult. That’s because for the most part the people who died lived on the fringe of society, many not in the workforce, and had done little to document their impact on the world.

We know how they died, but the challenge we face is finding out how they lived.

“Twenty-six people,” Sam says. “Twelve men, eight women, six kids, four of them boys. One survivor, a twelve-year-old boy who jumped out a window. He lost three family members that day.”

The images that my mind conjures about that fire are horrible, and obviously the jury will feel the same way. They will also want to be able to assign blame, to at least partially right the wrong. And Noah will be the one sitting in the crosshairs.

I look quickly through the information that Sam has assembled, long enough to know it won’t help us, and I say, “This isn’t enough. I’ve got to know more about them.”

“There’s very little out there about these people, Andy. We’re not talking about CEOs, you know? Even the ones that I could find out where they were employed, some of them had given fake documentation.”

“What about other family members, friends, friends of friends? I need to know these people, Sam, so I can know if they could have been the targets.”

“I’m trying, Andy, but so far it’s not there. I don’t even have three names.”

“What do you mean?”

“Three of the victims were never identified. No one came forward to say who they were, and the cops assumed they were transients. They figured the targets were the guys in 1-C, and they were probably right.”

I agree with Sam; the police probably were correct about that. But once again we butt up against the reality of courtroom life; it doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if the jury buys it.

“We’re going to need to get out in the field for this, Andy. Pound the pavement. Shoe-leather time.”

“Shoe-leather time?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Yes, I do, and you’re probably right. But that’s why we have Laurie, and it’s especially why we have Marcus. They go out in the field and get information.”

“You don’t think I can do that?” he asks.

“Absolutely,” I lie. The image of Sam loose on the streets with his gun is not a pretty one. “But your special gift is to get information by working a computer keyboard. Fingertip time.”

I finally get Sam to leave, and I call Pete. He’s not in, so I try him on his cell. When he answers, I can hear street noises in the background.

“Hey, Pete, what’s going on?”

“What’s going on? You calling to chitchat? I’m out arresting lowlifes and criminals, so you can put them back on the street.”

“Always happy to help. I’ve got a question about the Galloway case.”

A few moments of silence, and then, “Yeah?”

“Danny Butler knew all the facts behind the arson, stuff that forensics confirmed.”

“So?”

“So I want to know if he could have gotten a look at the police documents, the murder book.” The investigatory record that detectives keep when investigating a homicide is called the “murder book.”

“You want to know if a slimeball like Danny Butler saw my murder book?” Pete asks, obviously insulted by the question.

“Yes.”

“Definitely. We posted it on scumbag.com so Danny and his friends could familiarize themselves with it.”

“So it’s not possible?” I ask, knowing his answer but still needing to hear it.

“No, it’s not possible. For the last two years that book has been in my wall safe at home. It’s been bedtime reading. You think Butler broke into my house? Or you think he read it, and then waited two years to talk about it?”

“I don’t suppose you have any idea how Butler found out the details?”

“Maybe your client told him.”

“He didn’t,” I say. “I’m sure of it.”

“So prove it.”

“I’m trying to, but I’m six years late to the party. You’ve been there all this time, dancing and drinking the punch. I need a road map, or at least a place to start.”

Pete is quiet for a few moments, then seems to make a decision. “Start with ‘Double J.’”

“Who is ‘Double J,’ and why should I talk to him? Or her.”

“You’ll find him, but you’ll need Marcus to talk to him.”

“Why?”

“Just take my word for it. If you deal with this guy, make sure Marcus is there. No matter what. You send him a letter, have Marcus mail it. Am I making myself clear?”

Pete is insulting my manhood, fragile as that may be. “You don’t think I can handle myself?”

“Andy, you so much as ask this guy what time it is without Marcus around, and Laurie will be going to singles bars.”

Neither Laurie nor Marcus has ever heard of the guy Pete called “Double J.”

So Laurie instructs Marcus to ask around, a process which works slightly more than ninety-nine percent of the time. When Marcus wants anything, especially answers, people have a tendency to want to accommodate him. It’s called a “self-preservation instinct.”

So I’m not surprised when Laurie reports six hours later that Marcus has not only found Double J, he’s already learned quite a bit about him. He’s a drug dealer whose base of operations six years ago was the ill-fated house which was burned to the ground.

Apparently Double J has stepped up in the world, because he now lives and works in the big city, New York. He’s located in the Bronx on Andrews Avenue, an area that will never be confused with Park Avenue.

I need to talk to him, even though I don’t quite know why. Pete implied that he had information that was helpful, or at least relevant, to Noah’s case, and I’m sure that must be true. Pete also described him as extremely dangerous, and Pete’s a pretty good authority on that kind of stuff.

“I need to ask him some questions,” I tell Laurie. “I don’t suppose Marcus got his e-mail address?”

“No, I don’t suppose he did,” she says. “You’re going to have to go see him, and I’m going with you.”

“Pete said I needed to bring Marcus.”

“Of course we’ll bring Marcus.”

Laurie asks Marcus when the best time would be to go, and he says Double J is apparently always there at around eight P.M., before he goes off to do whatever it is that comprises his nightly ritual.

The idea of barging in on a dangerous drug dealer at night in that neighborhood runs counter to every instinct I have. “It’s dark at night,” I say.

“Wow,” Laurie says. “You don’t miss a thing.”

We head off at seven o’clock in my car, with Laurie in the passenger seat and Marcus in the back. It’s about an hour’s drive, and Marcus doesn’t say a word. If we drove to New Zealand, Marcus wouldn’t say a word.

This is a very rundown, very tough area of the city. Vacant lots abound, strewn with rubble, and some of the houses are boarded up and unoccupied. If there are streetlights, they’re not working, and the moonlight is not doing the trick.

If Marcus were not with us, I wouldn’t get out of the car if it was on fire.

I park in front of the house that Marcus identifies as Double J’s. If there are any lights on inside, they’re not visible from the street. Just as I’m getting out of the car, I realize too late that I should have written out questions for Marcus to have given Double J, sort of like an essay test. Then he could have brought it home to me, and I could have graded it.

Marcus leads the way along the concrete path to the house. Laurie and I stay a few steps behind, and I notice that her right hand is at her side, slightly behind her leg. I think, but I’m not sure, that she’s holding a weapon there.

I hope she is. I hope it’s a bazooka.

We reach the front door, and Marcus opts not to knock or ring a bell. Instead he opens it and goes in. He doesn’t hesitate; it’s as if he’s just come from the office and has headed home to the little woman for a home-cooked meal.

Marcus is amazingly quiet for a man his size. Laurie and I follow his lead and are quiet as well, though I’m afraid that whoever is in the house can hear my heart pounding. When I set out to become a lawyer, I never imagined myself in a situation like this, and suffice it to say I’m not going to run into any of my law school buddies in this house.

“Should we wait out here?” I whisper to Laurie.

“No,” she says, in a tone that indicates the issue is not really debatable.

So we follow Marcus through the now open door. I don’t close it behind me; there is not enough money in the world to make me do anything that would impede my escape route out of here.

There is a staircase directly in front of us, and a source of very dim light coming from near the top of it. On the entry floor seems to be a hallway with a few closed apartment doors, though there is no light coming from underneath them.

Marcus still seems to know where he is going, and that is up the stairs. Laurie and I start to follow him, though it’s too narrow for us to walk side by side. I graciously allow her to go first.

Suddenly there is a noise from above, and the sound of an angry, unfamiliar voice. I can’t make out the words, but from the tone, I don’t think it’s “Make my home your home.”

I’m straining unsuccessfully to see what’s happening, but I can’t do it. I sense some quick motion above us, and I hear the word “Hey!” Then there is a thumping sound, a shriek of pain, and something seems to come out of the darkness, heading down toward us.

Actually, it is flying above us, so high that we don’t even have to duck to get out of the way. It’s very large and it’s making a disgusting noise, so I think it’s a body. I also feel a slight spray of liquid, and I don’t even want to guess what that might be.

It lands with a sickening thud on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, and doesn’t move.

“What the hell-”

My question is cut off by what seems like another human missile fired from the top of the stairs. It’s pretty much the same as the first, but mercifully without the spray. It doesn’t go quite as far, and seems to land on the first step. Marcus must be getting tired. Maybe he threw some bodies a few days ago, and he’s pitching on only three days’ rest.

“Marcus, are you all right?” It’s Laurie’s voice, probably confirming that Marcus was not one of the flying bodies.

“Yuh,” Marcus says, always at his most eloquent in a crisis.

“I’ll stay down here and watch them. You want Andy to come with you?”

“Yuh.”

Just because Marcus said “Yuh,” it doesn’t mean I have to obey. I take orders from no one; I dance to my own drummer. I have never been accused of being a “Yuh-man.”

On the other hand, if I stay down here and send Laurie up, I’ll be in the dark, watching over two enormous goons who are going to be rather pissed if and when they wake up. If I go up the stairs, at least I’m under Marcus’s rather large protective umbrella.

While I’m deciding, Laurie says, “Andy, are you going up?”

“Yuh,” I say, always at my most eloquent in a crisis.

I trudge up the steps, feeling my way along the railing in the dark.

When I’m about three quarters of the way there, I hear a click and turn around. Laurie has snapped on a small flashlight, the kind that might go on a key ring. She is shining it on the two motionless masses at the bottom of the stairs, and holding a gun on them in case they move.

I have no idea whether they are alive or dead, and I’m not going to spend much time worrying about it.

As I near the top of the steps, I hear a crashing noise, and I think that Marcus must have broken down a door. Sure enough, down the hall there is an apartment with no door, and light emanating from inside. I hear scuffling noises and grunts coming from that direction, and then silence.

“Marcus?” Before I walk through that door, I want to know that Marcus prevailed. If he didn’t, there’s no way I could.

“Yuh.”

I take a deep breath, walk to the open door and enter the apartment. It is completely unlike what I expected. It’s a nicely decorated, very comfortable living room, complete with trinkets on the tables and pictures on the walls. The furniture is comfortable and welcoming; this could have been the living room in Leave It to Beaver . Add some stockings, a tree, and seventy-two chairs, and Edna could invite her extended family here for the holidays.

There is a large sofa, complete with throw pillows, and Marcus sits at one end of it. He looks at ease and comfortable; the only thing missing is slippers and a pipe.

Double J is nowhere to be found, although the gasping noises I hear make me believe that Marcus has hidden him somewhere. I scan the room, and sure enough, a head that I assume belongs to Double J sticks out from under the couch, on the side where Marcus is sitting. I further assume the rest of him is under the couch, though I could be wrong.

Double J’s face shows his obvious panic over the fact that he is not able to get any air into his lungs, so I say, “Marcus, get up. He’s gonna die.”

Marcus thinks about it for a moment, as if weighing the pros and cons, and then gets up. He turns and lifts the couch off its captive, as if it were a toy. He then picks Double J off the floor by his collar, and puts him on the couch, in the same place that Marcus was sitting.

I wait a few minutes while Double J keeps gasping and writhing. Feeling more secure, I call down to Laurie to make sure she’s okay, and she assures me she’s fine.

Finally, Double J is able to speak, and he croaks, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m a lawyer,” I say, and then I point to Marcus, who is sitting on what looks like a dining room table. “He’s an intern in my office. Helps out with collating, copying, that sort of thing.”

He just looks at me, not knowing what the hell I’m talking about, so I continue. “I want to talk to you about the fire in Paterson, six years ago.”

“What about it?”

“I’m trying to find the guilty party, and I have reason to believe you have information that could be helpful to me.”

He looks incredulous. “That’s it?”

I nod. “That’s it.”

“Are you shitting me? That’s what this is about?”

“Yes.”

“So why did you come in like the goddamn Marines?” he asks, pointing at Marcus as well. “And why the hell did you have to bring the Incredible Hulk?”

“Your associates weren’t welcoming enough. So am I to assume you’re willing to talk to me about the fire?”

“Shit, I’ll talk to anybody about the damn fire. Three of my people died in that thing, man. I was out, or I would have been charcoal-broiled myself. You think I don’t want to find the son of a bitch that did it?”

“So help me find the guilty party.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” he says, glancing over at Marcus to make sure he’s not offended by the name-calling. He doesn’t seem to be. “If I knew anything, I’d have caught the prick myself. And he’d have been dead ten minutes later.”

“Do you know Noah Galloway?”

He laughs derisively. “You mean the guy they just arrested? Yeah, I knew him. He was a customer, the little shit.”

“Could he have done it?”

He shakes his head. “No chance.”

“Why not?”

“First of all, he wouldn’t have had the balls, and if he did have the balls, he was always wasted. No way he could have pulled it off.”

“It was a can of fluid and a match,” I say. “He couldn’t have done that?”

He looks at me like I’m an idiot, then points at Marcus. “You needed him to get in here, and this ain’t where I work, you know? Where I work, nobody gets in. I got more to protect.”

“Somebody got in,” I point out.

“Maybe.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I think it was somebody that was already inside; that’s the only way,” he says.

“But you don’t know who.”

He nods. “Lucky for whoever did it.”

“You haven’t convinced me it’s not Galloway.”

“You think I give a shit if you’re convinced?”

I seem to have gotten all I can get out of Double J, which isn’t much.

“Why do they call you Double J?”

“’Cause my name’s Jesse Jackson. I got sick of the ‘Reverend’ jokes.”

“That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense. Let’s go, Marcus.”

But Double J is not finished. Despite his claim that he doesn’t care if I’m convinced, he takes another shot at it. “You like money?” he asks.

“Why?”

“Just tell me, you like money?”

“I’ve got more than I need.”

He stifles a moan. “Damn, you’re a pain in the ass. If you liked money, more than anything else in the world, and a whole shitload of it was sitting on this table, would you set fire to it? Or would you take it?”

I see where he’s going with this, and not only does it make perfect sense, but it’s something I should have seen long ago. Maybe I should hire Double J to write my closing arguments. “So there were drugs in that house?”

“Enough to keep Galloway wasted for a hundred years.”

“And he would have known that?” I ask.

“Absolutely. And there’s nothing he wouldn’t have done to get it. He would have burned the house down, but to get the shit, not to destroy it.”

“So who could have done it? Who were your enemies?”

“They weren’t after us,” he says. “We were what you assholes call ‘innocent bystanders.’”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I ran my own little investigation, you know? It wasn’t nobody after us. No way.”

“Maybe you didn’t investigate that well,” I say.

He frowns. “I’m the top guy in my operation, you understand? It starts and ends with me. If there was somebody out to get us, they wouldn’t have done it when I wasn’t there. If someone was pissed off, I’d be the guy they were after. And if they left me alive, they’d know they’d be in deep shit.”

The argument makes sense, though of course the arsonist might have believed Double J was in the apartment. In any event, while his logic is surprisingly compelling, it’s nothing that advances the ball for me, and certainly nothing I can use in court.

Marcus and I leave and head back downstairs, where Laurie is still watching over the two unconscious morons who messed with Marcus.

“They’re both breathing,” she says.

“Is that meant to be good news?” I ask. “You think they might come after us?”

“Nunh,” Marcus says.

Well put.

I’ve never been on a jury.

Since I vote in every election, I’ve been called for jury duty a bunch of times, but I’ve never made it on to a panel. There is more chance they would take an admitted Islamic terrorist than a defense attorney.

One time I went through voir dire on a DUI case, and the defense attorney pronounced that I was acceptable to their side. The prosecutor, a friend of mine named Norman Trell, said that he was rejecting me “for cause.” When the judge asked him to state the cause, Norman laughed and said, “’Cause he’s a defense attorney!”

But at this moment I know how jurors feel, because it’s verdict time in the Noah Galloway trial that’s been taking place in my mind. For me to take the case, or at least to try and convince Noah to plead not guilty, I have to be able to find reasonable doubt in my own mind, which is pretty much what juries have to do in order to acquit.

Of course, in this case I can impanel whoever I want as my fellow juror, and since I’m thinking about this in bed, the logical candidate is the woman I sleep with, Laurie Collins. As a former police officer, she’s generally more of a prosecution-favoring witness, but if I don’t use her, there’s no alternate to choose from, since I’m monogamous.

Laurie and I go over what we’ve learned about the case so far. Within ten minutes she says, “I’ve got doubts. I think you should go to trial.”

“That was quick. I was hoping we could deliberate a while longer, maybe even sequester ourselves.”

“No reason,” she says. “I’m sure.”

“How can that be?”

“Beam yourself,” she says.

Laurie often employs a rather unique decision-making technique. She imagines beaming herself into a future situation that will result from her decision. She goes on to imagine how she will feel, and if it is intolerable, then she’ll beam herself a second time, with the decision variable reversed. Often the second beaming results in a more palatable situation.

“I don’t think I’m in a beaming mood,” I say.

“Try it. It’ll clear things up.”

“Okay. Where am I beaming myself?”

“The courtroom. You’ve just watched Noah enter a guilty plea, and the judge is in the process of sentencing him. He’s calling him the perpetrator of an unbelievably heinous act, and he takes pleasure in sentencing him to a maximum security prison for the rest of his natural life.”

I’m going along with this, imagining myself in that situation, and it truly does feel awful. But beaming myself into months of a difficult, probably futile murder trial doesn’t brighten my mood either.

“Let me speak to juror number three,” I say, and I get out of bed and walk over to the corner of the room, where Tara is sound asleep on a bed of her own. She has a contented smile on her face; maybe she’s beaming herself to the biscuit aisle at Petsmart.

I wake her by petting her head and saying, “Bark if you think I should take this to trial.”

Stunningly, shockingly, she sits up and barks. I turn around in amazement to see if Laurie has seen this, and Laurie is grinning and holding up a rawhide chewie where Tara can see it. The prospect of chewies gets her to bark one hundred percent of the time.

I get up and head back to bed. “Doesn’t matter what Tara thinks; Galloway saved her life, so she’s biased. I’m rejecting her for cause.”

Laurie goes over to give Tara the chewie, and says to her, “Don’t listen to him. You can be the jury forewoman.”

Visiting Noah in jail is unlike visiting any client I’ve ever had.

The trappings are the same… the security routine upon entry, the dreary grey room with the metal table, the sullen guards, and the strict attention to routine. The change begins when Noah is brought in.

He seems genuinely happy to see me. He even seems happy to see Hike, as counterintuitive a reaction as I can imagine. But that in itself is not unusual. The incarcerated, especially those who haven’t been convicted, always like it when their lawyers show up. The reason for this, simply put, is that there is always the possibility they are bringing good news.

Noah doesn’t really seem to care what kind of news we’re bringing, if any. He has accepted his fate, and considers it just and fitting. He welcomes our arrival not because we might change that fate, but rather because he’s looking forward to a conversation with people he regards as new friends.

I’m about to shake up his world, and I’m not sure I should.

We exchange pleasantries, though pleasantries with Hike are fairly difficult to achieve. Noah mentions that he has a cold, which sends Hike off on a diatribe about attracting diseases in close quarters.

“That’s the problem with airplanes,” he says. “You’re in a close area, sucking down everybody’s germs. And cruise ships, they’re the worst. If you take a plane to a cruise ship, your chances of winding up in a hospital with tubes down your throat are like eighty percent.”

Noah is not quite sure how to respond to this, so he makes a joke and says, “Maybe I should try and get into the prison hospital. It’s probably nicer in there.”

Hike practically snorts his disagreement. “Yeah, I’m sure it’s great. You probably have to cut through the bacteria with a machete and a blowtorch.”

“Maybe we should talk about your case,” I say to Noah.

“Sure. Have you talked to the prosecutor again?”

“No, we’ve been doing more background work about the fire, and your potential involvement in it.”

“Potential involvement?”

“Right. I told you that I wasn’t comfortable with where we were, that Danny Butler’s detailed knowledge of the crime didn’t seem to fit with the theory that you set it.”

He nods. “Right. I guess I thought we’d be past that by now.”

“Noah, I can’t get past it. At least not yet.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I, Hike and I, have real doubts that you did this at all. So unless you have anything more to add, I can’t help you plead guilty. If I’m to be your lawyer, we’re going to trial.”

“Andy, you know how I feel about this,” he says.

I nod. “I do, and I respect that. And obviously you know that you can give in and not fight this. We just won’t be here to watch.”

“The public defender could guide me through it?” he asks.

“Absolutely.”

“I can’t put Becky through a trial.”

“A trial is what Becky wants.”

He doesn’t answer for a minute or so, so I plunge ahead. “Noah, when you were using drugs, when it was really bad, how important was it for you to get them?”

“I hope you never understand how important it was,” he says. “Getting what I needed became everything. Every day was an urgent day.”

“And that room, in that house, was where you would get your drugs?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“And there were always drugs in that room?”

“To my knowledge, yes.”

“So you set fire to it?”

He seems to recoil from the jolt. It was right there in front of us, him and me, but neither of us had seen it.

Finally, “Nothing could have made me do that. Nothing in the world.”

I smile. “Then let’s get to work.”

The key to finding this killer could be learning who he meant to kill.

That’s not usually the case, and it’s a sign of how dismal our situation is. Usually the intended murder victim is obvious; he’s the one in the wooden box.

Not this time.

So we need to learn everything we can about who was in the house that night, and what they were doing there. Of course, we can’t ask them, because murder victims are notoriously tight-lipped.

Sam has provided us with as many details as he can about the occupants of the house, but they’re sketchy, as evidenced by the fact that three of the victims remain unknown to this day. I assign him the equally difficult task of finding friends and relatives of the deceased so that we can interview them.

In the meantime, I need to speak to the one person who escaped the house that night. His name is Antonio Esperanza, and he was twelve years old at the time of the fire. I’m particularly interested in talking to him, not only because he’s the sole survivor, but because he lived on the third floor.

The fire department reports show that the chemical mixture was spread on the first and third floors. The first floor makes sense, because the fire obviously burns up. Setting it on the third floor would not really have been necessary, since with the intensity level and heat of the blaze, the upper floors would have quickly collapsed anyway. It leads me to wonder if someone or something on the third floor could have been a target.

Antonio had jumped from a window and fractured both his legs, but lived to tell about it. Hopefully he’ll tell us about it. He proves easy to find, mainly because his last known address is listed in the police reports. He doesn’t live there anymore, but it provides a simple way for Sam to track him down.

Antonio, who Sam learns is not surprisingly called “Tony,” lives in Clifton but works at a Taco Bell in Elmwood Park. I decide that I’ll talk to him at work, since if I go to his home I’ll have less chance of having a steak quesadilla after the interview.

Laurie insists on going with me for another reason, though she is also a major Taco Bell fan. She thinks that whenever I go off to interview a witness it could be dangerous, and she has no confidence whatsoever in my ability to deal with danger. It doesn’t matter who the prospective witness is; I could be questioning Mother Teresa, and Laurie would fear for my safety.

Laurie and I arrive at the Taco Bell, which has recently added a small Pizza Hut menu, apparently for diversity. “See, I don’t approve of that,” I say.

“Why not?”

“Because tacos are tacos and pizza is pizza.”

“Wow, that is profound,” she says. “Have you got a pen? I want to write that down.”

We’ve gotten here at ten-thirty in the morning, the time that they open, to reduce the likelihood that Tony would be too busy to talk to us. There is one car in the drive-thru lane, but we are the only ones in the restaurant itself.

We ask the young woman behind the register if we could speak to Tony, but she doesn’t take the time to respond. All she does is immediately yell out, “Tony!” It’s obviously a fast-talk, as well as fast-food, establishment.

A young man comes out from the back, and says, “What’s up?” The young woman, perhaps afraid she’s going to use up her word quota for the day, simply points to us. So Tony comes over to us and asks, “What’s up?”-a phrase he has apparently mastered.

“My name is Andy Carpenter,” I say. “This is Laurie Collins We’re investigating the fire.”

Tony physically pulls back from the words. “Oh, man, again? I told that cop everything I knew. All of a sudden everybody wants to talk to me.”

“I’m sorry, but someone has been arrested, and we need to determine if they have the right person.” I’m skirting the issue, trying not to identify myself as Noah’s attorney. Since three of Tony’s relatives were killed in the fire, and he himself was injured, he might not be too inclined to talk to someone on Noah’s side.

“It may not be him?” Tony asks.

“We’re just trying to make sure,” I say.

We go over to a table near the window, and I ask Tony to tell us whatever he remembers about that night.

He takes a deep breath and says, “I was asleep; it was after midnight. This really loud noise woke me up; it sounded like I was in a wind tunnel, or something. Or maybe one of those big storms, like a tornado.

“But when I looked around, everything seemed to be okay. I thought I heard yelling over the noise, but I couldn’t be sure. So I went to open the door, and the handle… the doorknob… burned my hand. But it was too late, the door opened just a little bit, and all these flames and air came flooding into the room. I think the air was hotter than the flames.

“I wanted to go through the door, my mother and two sisters were in there, but there was no way I could. I swear, there was no way. By then my room was on fire; there were flames everywhere. So all I could do was jump out the window, and hope they had made it out okay.

“They didn’t.”

He says all this without much apparent emotion, almost as if he’s reading the words from a script. Some self-preservation instinct has enabled him to deal with this and continue to function in society.

“We’re so very sorry,” Laurie says, and I echo those sentiments. It’s almost impossible to imagine what this young man has been through.

“Did you know a lot of people in that building?” I ask.

“No… not too many. A lot of people would move in and out, and then there were some people my mother warned my sisters and me to stay away from.”

“Who were they?” Laurie asks.

“There were two apartments on the first floor; my mother said they were drug dealers.”

“Do you think they were the targets of the fire?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I guess. No way for me to really know.”

“Who did you know?”

“There was a kid my age on the second floor… I forget his name-maybe William something. I was in his apartment a few times. I met his mother, but I don’t think he had a father, at least not one that lived there.”

“Anyone else?”

“Not really. I met the lady who lived across the hall a couple of times. You know, just to say hello in the hallway. She only lived there about a year. Once she had the baby, I didn’t see that much of her. But people came to see her, sometimes they were dressed in suits.”

“Do you know her name, or what the people wanted?” I ask.

“No. And then there was a lady on the second floor, Charisse. My mother warned me about her too. I didn’t know why at the time, but now that I know more…” He looks at Laurie, as if trying to decide to continue. “I think she was probably a hooker, you know? Maybe the lady across the hall was as well.”

“Is there anything you can think of, anything at all, that would lead you to believe that someone in the apartment building had terrible enemies who might have done this?”

“No. I’m sorry, but no.”

“Where did you go after the fire, Tony?” Laurie asks.

“Well, I was in the hospital for a while, maybe a month, and then I went to live with my aunt.”

“Are you still with her?”

“I’m in her apartment. She died a couple of months ago.”

“I’m sorry.” Laurie and I both say it simultaneously. We could say we’re sorry to Tony for the next ten years, and it wouldn’t cover it. Nor would it help him any.

“Andy, make a right into that 7-Eleven.”

“Why? What do you need?” I ask, but Laurie doesn’t answer. She seems to be focused on something in the mirror.

“Laurie?”

She still doesn’t answer, at least not right away, and I pull into the strip mall parking lot and turn off the car.

“Go in and buy something. Take your time about it.”

“What am I supposed to buy?” I ask, more confused than normal.

“Doesn’t matter. I think we’re being followed, and I want to make sure.”

I get out of the car and go into the store, and I notice that Laurie is starting to make a call on her cell phone. Once inside, I start to wander the aisles, pretending to be looking for something. Since there are only two aisles, and since I’m the only person in the store, the cashier starts to look at me a little strangely.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

I give her my most charming smile, for which there is no known defense. “Just browsing; everything looks so good.” The fact that I’m standing in front of laundry detergent and bleach may be one reason why she doesn’t return the smile or seem at all captivated. Instead, she stays silent and keeps watching me.

I look through the window and see that Laurie is off the phone. She and I make eye contact, and she shakes her head slightly, telling me she’s not ready for me to come back to the car.

I’m not feeling too significant to this process, but there’s really nothing I can do about it right now. I take a bottle of bleach and a loaf of whole wheat bread, and bring it to the cashier. “How’s it going?” I ask, pulling out all the conversational stops.

“That it?” is her response, referring to the two items I’m getting.

“You know something, give me a minute. I should get some sodas… to wash down the bread.” I leave my items there and head back to the refrigerator case filled with drinks. I pretend to agonize over them, but don’t take any because Laurie finally nods to me that it’s okay for me to come out. I go back to the cashier, pay for the original items, and leave.

When I get back in the car, Laurie says, “What did you get?”

“Bread and a bottle of bleach. You mind telling me what’s going on?”

“There’s somebody following us; the car is parked diagonally across the street… don’t look in that direction. I think it’s just one male in the car, but I can’t be positive.”

“Are you sure about this?” I ask.

“Andy…” is how she admonishes me. She has spent most of her life as a police officer; this is her area of expertise.

“Okay, I believe you. What are we going to do about it?”

“It’s already done. Marcus just got here; he’s going to follow the guy following us. And then he’ll learn whatever there is to learn.”

“How?”

“By being Marcus,” she says.

“So I should just drive home?”

“Yes. Normal speed. Don’t look in the rearview mirror any more than you normally would.”

“It’s under control,” I say. “You can count on me.”

“We really didn’t need any more bleach.”

“I was under a lot of pressure.”

It takes us another fifteen minutes to get home, during which time I don’t see any sign of the car following us or Marcus. Neither Laurie nor I can think of any reason why we’d be under surveillance by anyone.

“But it’s got to be related to the Galloway case,” I say. “That’s the advantage of having only one client; it’s easy to narrow these things down.”

Once we get into the house, Laurie peeks through the window to see if our stalker is on the street, but if he is, he’s nowhere to be found.

Now all that there is left to do is wait for Marcus to call. I’m anxious for him to do so, but not so anxious that I’m going to answer the phone when it rings. One thing I don’t need now is a conversation with Marcus, during which he utters undecipherable one-word grunts.

I’ll leave that to Laurie.

Loney got lucky.

He was uncharacteristically late in arriving at the motel for the meeting with Camby, and therefore was able to see Carpenter’s investigator enter the room. The guy didn’t knock, or pick the lock; he just lowered his shoulder and almost casually forced the door open. As someone who had bashed in a few doors himself, Loney was impressed.

But more than lucky, Loney was smart. He was smart enough to have researched Carpenter and his team thoroughly, and he knew all about Marcus Clark. And one thing he knew for sure; Ray Camby was not going to stand up to him.

Recruiting Camby was a mistake; Loney had felt that from the moment he met him. But Camby had been recommended, and he did have some virtues. He would do what he was told, he had no hesitancy whatsoever to break the law, and most important, he was expendable.

Loney could see through the window, and it was easy to tell that Camby was scared. Clark was going to force him to talk, and the problem was that Camby had plenty to say. At the top of that list were the dealings that he and Loney had had with Danny Butler.

Loney had the ability to remain calm and think clearly in a crisis, and it served him well here. His first idea was to shoot Clark; he had a clear view into the room, and a weapon that could easily bridge the distance.

But Clark seemed to be smart enough to stay out of the line of sight, and Loney could only get brief glimpses of him. Also, killing Clark would attract a lot of unwanted attention to Carpenter and the Galloway case.

The other option was to kill Camby before he could talk. Camby was visible through the window and Loney could pick him off with ease. Certainly, Camby’s death would not be a significant loss to the operation, especially since his identity was now compromised.

The other key factor that Loney considered was that he was soon going to have to kill Camby anyway. He knew far too much, and when the ultimate task was accomplished, it would be far too risky to let him live. A lot of people would be dying, and Camby was to be one of many.

Now he would lead the way.

Once he had made the decision, Loney didn’t hesitate. He took out his gun and in one smooth motion aimed and fired. The bullet made surprisingly little noise as it went through the motel room window, and it hit Camby square in the chest. The unnecessary second bullet went through his skull, and he went straight back and down.

Loney didn’t see Clark after the shooting; he was obviously taking cover in anticipation of more shots. Loney retreated to a position farther from the motel, from where he would be able to see Clark’s car leave, without being seen himself.

It was only three or four minutes before the car went by. Loney had not detected any other commotion; it seemed likely that the shooting had gone unnoticed.

Loney headed back to Camby’s room for what would be a cleanup operation. He was not unhappy with how things turned out, and recognized the element of luck that had helped in the process.

But he also knew that intelligence and resourcefulness were the qualities that had prevailed. They would continue to do so, right up to the time that the goal was reached, and everyone in the way was dead.

We wait almost five hours for Marcus to call us.

I’m so bored that I actually go on Facebook, something I probably haven’t done in six months.

I understand that it’s a social network, and that people feel it brings them together, but I just don’t get it. People fill it with boring, uneventful moments in their day, I assume believing that other people care about it.

Why should I care if Sylvia Swathouse is “having a cup of tea”? But as dreary as that stuff is, the responses are even worse, and completely cloying. “Oh, Sylvia, that sounds so warm and wonderful.” Or, “Is it chamomile, Syl? That’s my favorite.”

But everybody is doing it, even Hike. Though last time I looked, I was his only friend.

Laurie answers when Marcus finally calls, and for the next three or four minutes, just listens, not saying a word. Since I know from past experience that Marcus is not exactly verbose, it’s possible that the line has gone dead and neither of them knows it.

Finally, Laurie says, “Marcus, are you all right?”

Another minute goes by, and she says, “Okay. Right away,” before she hangs up.

“The situation has taken a somewhat surprising turn,” she says.

“Surprising good, or surprising bad?”

“You can make up your own mind about that. The guy tailing us waited down the block from here for about an hour, probably making sure we weren’t going to leave. Finally he left, and made some stops around town, with Marcus following him all the way.”

“Not too surprising thus far,” I say.

“I’m getting there. Eventually he stopped at a motel on Route 4, where he apparently was staying. Marcus decided to intercept him at that point, and he entered the guy’s room to question him.”

“The guy let him in, or he broke the door down?” I ask

“I don’t know, but one way or the other he got in. He was conducting an interrogation when two bullets came through the window and hit the man. Marcus took evasive action and was unharmed, and the sniper apparently fled the scene.”

“Dead?” I ask.

She nods. “Very much so. Marcus was quite impressed with the killer’s marksmanship.”

“So what did Marcus do?”

“He grabbed some of the deceased’s stuff, and then left. The room was in the back, and there was significant noise from the highway. The bullets went smoothly through the window, and no one seemed to notice. Marcus said there was no sign of the police being called.”

“Where is Marcus now?”

“On the way here.”

I suppose if I had normal human emotions, I would be reflecting on the tragic loss of life I just heard about. Fortunately, I’m not burdened with them, and I’m going to assume for the time being that the loss will be something that society can successfully recover from.

Instead I’m worried about Marcus, and whether he left traces of himself in the dead man’s room. Those traces could be fingerprints, DNA, or a witness who saw him enter the room. I don’t want to have to defend Marcus in a murder trial; juries would take one look at him and decide this is a person who should be taken off the streets. The trick would be to try and get twelve wardens on the jury, all of whom would greatly prefer Marcus stay on those streets and out of their jails.

Marcus arrives at the house, and indicates that he wants to talk to us in the kitchen. This allows him to be close to the refrigerator, which he clearly intends to empty. Marcus has the most amazing capacity to eat of anyone I’ve ever seen, and he’s going to demonstrate it now.

If Marcus is shaken by today’s events, he’s hiding it well. The stress of the ordeal has him babbling at the rate of one word every few minutes, and his relating of the story takes what seems like a couple of days, with extra time for chewing.

Marcus is positive that he left no trace of himself at the scene, and seems slightly put off that I would suggest such a thing. Since Marcus is the person in the world I least want mad at me, I resist asking, “Are you sure?” If he’s wrong, we’ll find out soon enough anyway.

Marcus had looked around the room before he left for papers that might identify the dead man, but could find none. The guy was also not carrying a wallet; obviously his identity was to be kept a secret.

Marcus took the man’s cell phone, which he places on our kitchen table, since that gives us the opportunity to know who he has been in touch with. He also took an empty beer bottle that was in the room for possible fingerprints. Marcus’s mother did not raise a stupid child.

The man was carrying two handguns, which Marcus left at the scene. It scares the hell out of me that a heavily armed person was following Laurie and me, but it doesn’t seem to bother her. To Laurie and Marcus, this is just another day at the office. I was clearly born with a defective courage gene.

With nothing left to tell, and absolutely nothing left to eat, Marcus leaves to go wherever it is that Marcus goes. I call Sam Willis and ask him to come over right away.

“What’s going on?” he asks, probably wondering if he should pack his gun.

“I need your help tracing some phone records.” Sam has amazing ways, none of which could possibly be legal, of finding out information like this on the computer.

“Oh.”

Sam is at the house in fifteen minutes, and I give him the cell phone. “I want to know everyone he’s called, and everyone who has called him.”

“Going back how far?”

“The Revolutionary War.” I also give Sam the motel name and room number and ask if he can check what calls were made from that room.

He nods. “Going out, but not coming in. They would come in to the main switchboard, and there’s no way to know where they’re directed from there. It’s not like the motel was going to bill him for incoming calls.”

“Sam, it’s very important that you don’t leave any trace of yourself in this.”

“Of course not. Why?”

“Because the person who owned this phone and stayed in that room was murdered today.”

Sam lights up like a little boy who’s just been given a lollipop. “He was? Was he a bad guy or a good guy?”

“A bad guy.”

“That is so cool… did you kill him?”

“Of course not.”

“Did Marcus?”

“No.”

He nods. “Cool. I’m on the case.”

Once Sam leaves, my next call is to Pete. “I talked to Double J,” I say.

“Good for you.”

“He doesn’t think Noah did it.”

“Maybe you should try and get him on the jury,” he says. “Are we nearing the point of this call?”

“I need your help.”

“That is the sole reason for my existence.”

“I have a beer bottle. I need it dusted for fingerprints, and then run through the computer for a match.”

Pete is going to give me a very hard time about this, and I considered getting the information from a few other sources available to Laurie and me. But Pete is the only one I trust to do it quickly and discreetly, so I’m willing to endure the abuse.

“Does this relate to the Galloway case?” he asks.

“It does.”

“Give me the beer bottle at Charlie’s tonight,” he says. I wasn’t planning to go, but now I will. “You can give it to me in the parking lot, but keep it separate from the cases.”

“What cases?”

“The two cases of beer you’re going to give me for doing this for you. American beer, none of that stick-your-pinkie-out-when-you-drink stuff.”

“You’re demanding a payoff?” I ask.

“I am.”

“I thought all you cared about was getting to the truth.”

He pauses for a moment. “I see nothing about receiving beer that is inconsistent with the search for the truth.”

“I’ll see you at Charlie’s,” I say.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

For the first time in the entire operation, Loney was worried.

He had made a couple of mistakes, and made some tough decisions, and they seemed likely to come back to haunt him.

His first mistake was hiring Camby, and then having him follow Carpenter. He had no respect for Camby’s smarts or ability, and should have realized that Carpenter would realize he was being followed. Beyond that, there was little value in watching Carpenter at all, and certainly not enough to justify the risk.

Mistake number two, and a much bigger one, was in giving Camby a cell phone, and letting him use it to call Loney. Once Marcus Clark had left, Loney had gone into the motel room and done a quick search. Camby’s phone was missing, and Loney assumed that Clark had taken it with him. That was a real problem.

Loney didn’t feel in any personal jeopardy, at least not from the police and certainly not from Carpenter. Nor was he worried about the people who ran the operation; they were businessmen and weren’t personally dangerous. They hired people to be dangerous for them, which was why Loney wound up in their employ.

No, the man Loney was worried about was his real boss, Carmine Ricci. Carmine provided the muscle for the operation; Loney was the prime example of that. Loney didn’t know if Carmine got a piece of the action, or just a healthy fee, and it really wasn’t Loney’s business.

But whatever the arrangement, it was all predicated on Carmine being kept well out of it. Anything that came back to him personally, or caused him a moment of worry, was something that Loney was not to have happen.

This situation with Camby and the cell phone, while a couple of layers removed from Carmine, was still a cause for concern. And the first decision Loney had to make was whether to tell Carmine about it.

If he didn’t tell him, there was always the chance that the phone records could lead to Loney’s phone, and then eventually to Carmine, or people close to him.

But Loney knew something about the law, and he knew that Carpenter did not have subpoena power. Therefore the phone records would be difficult, if not impossible, to obtain, and in any event the process would be very time-consuming.

Loney decided that it was a risk worth taking not to tell anyone, at least for the moment. He would be alert to problems as they came up, and he’d handle them the way he always handled problems.

By killing the people who created them.

But at the moment he had something else to do. He had a trial to stop.

Judge Anthony De Luca is the judicial version of me.

Just as I’m a lawyer who doesn’t like lawyering, Judge De Luca is a judge who avoids judging whenever he can. I can respect that.

The way De Luca does it is to call the parties to the dispute before him, and ominously warn that a settlement is in their best interest. Since most cases result in a winner and a loser, it’s a testament to De Luca’s persuasiveness that he can make each side panic and feel their interests are in great peril. He served as an officer in army intelligence in his younger days, which may be where he acquired some of his talent for making people cave.

Of course, De Luca’s tactics are more effective in civil cases than criminal ones, but while he used to operate mostly in that area, in recent years he has moved to almost exclusively handle criminal matters.

The reason for that is simple. De Luca comes from a very prominent local family, and they have long been fixtures in the legal and business communities. There have been Judge De Lucas as far back as the eighteen hundreds, and those De Lucas who haven’t been judges have been practicing lawyers and leading businessmen. There are few major law or business schools in the country that haven’t graduated a De Luca.

The problem with that is the fact that with their enormous extended family, it seemed like some De Luca, somewhere, had an interest in most civil matters that came before the court. Either a De Luca lawyer was representing one of the parties or a De Luca businessman was suing or getting sued.

If you stand in front of the courthouse and throw a dart, you’ll hit a De Luca.

All this meant that Judge Anthony De Luca was constantly having to recuse himself, which on one level fit in with the deficient work ethic that he and I share. But it was getting embarrassing, so he switched to criminal court. There were far fewer De Lucas to be found there.

He still tries to intimidate the lawyers into settling their cases without a trial, but has far less success in criminal court. Most resistant to his strong-arm tactics are cases which are very public and in which there are political considerations.

Both of those things are very prevalent in the Galloway case, so it is unlikely that the hearing he has convened today will have any effect. Of course, Dylan doesn’t know that, and he probably still believes we may cave and avoid a trial.

I bring Hike with me, since for all his personality issues, he’s as smart an attorney as I’ve ever met. Dylan brings four lawyers from his office, all young and fresh-faced and carrying identical briefcases. They represent the cream of the crop from the law school at Cookie Cutter U, but I’d bet Hike could wipe the legal floor with them.

The gallery is empty, because De Luca has dictated that the hearing was to be closed. He is planning to cajole or intimidate, whatever is necessary, and he wants to do it in private.

There are a lot of press gathered outside, which is very unusual for a pretrial hearing with a defendant not named Simpson. It’s a sign of what will be intense interest in the actual trial.

Once we’re all seated, Judge De Luca asks, “Where are we, gentlemen?”

Dylan just about jumps to his feet. “The state is ready to proceed at whatever trial date Your Honor sets.” He’s acting like he’s hoping for a positive report on “parent-teacher night.”

De Luca turns to me. “Mr. Carpenter?”

“We’re ready as well, Your Honor,” I lie. “The sooner the better.”

I can see a flash of surprise in Dylan’s face, which quickly turns into a confident smile.

In any event, Judge De Luca is not smiling. “Have you had settlement discussions?”

“We’ve talked,” Dylan says. “I was waiting to hear whether the defense wanted to proceed to trial.”

“Well, now you’ve heard,” I say. “Your Honor, an innocent man is sitting in prison, waiting for his vindication. The sooner the truth comes out in this case, the better.”

“It sounds like you’re playing to the jury, Mr. Carpenter, but I don’t see one here.”

I smile. “I’m practicing, Your Honor.”

“Do it on your own time.”

“Yes, Your Honor. But there is no chance that we will accept any arrangement that leaves Mr. Galloway incarcerated. We would, however, support a motion by Mr. Campbell to dismiss the charges, provided it were accompanied with a gracious apology.”

De Luca pushes and prods a bit more, but even he can see there is no room for compromise here. Dylan has no intention of making a deal, and with his evidence, he shouldn’t. I won’t make a deal because there’s no way I’m going to allow a client to plead guilty when I don’t believe it to be the case. Noah would have to find another lawyer for that, and right now he doesn’t want to.

Dylan must be surprised that I’ve exercised our right to a speedy trial. It’s counterintuitive; the defense usually seeks as many delays as possible. But Noah’s deal with me is that we move quickly, due to a probably misguided belief that it would be easier on Becky. What would actually be best for Becky is for Noah to be acquitted.