Play Dead

Copyright

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

ACCLAIM FOR DAVID ROSENFELT’S NOVELS

PLAY DEAD

“Riveting… No shaggy dog story, this puppy’s alive with reliable Rosenfelt wit and heart.”

– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“There is no way you can read this novel without becoming completely caught up in the story. As always, Andy’s offbeat, outspoken personality shines on every page, and the balance of humor and mystery is dead-on.”

– Booklist (starred review)

“Enjoyable… Carpenter continues to amuse and engage.”

– Library Journal

“The customary humor abounds in this entertaining novel.”

– Midwest Book Review

“A steadily absorbing journey through layers and layers of deceit.”

– Kirkus Reviews

“A fun mystery novel… entertaining.”

– TheMysterySite.com

DEAD CENTER

“Entertaining… witty… perfect.”

– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Enjoyable… entertaining.”

– Portland Tribune

“Rosenfelt is a very funny guy who’s got the gift of glib.”

– Kingston Observer (MA)

“Rosenfelt adroitly mixes drama with humor… Those who like the added complexity of character-driven mysteries will find much to enjoy in this award-winning series.”

– Booklist

“Written with flair and humor… If there aren’t any real-life lawyers as entertaining, as witty, and as willing to tilt at windmills as Andy Carpenter, Edgar^®-finalist Rosenfelt’s engaging hero, then there should be.”

– Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A terrific tale… Fans of the series will enjoy Dead Center.”

– Midwest Book Review

“Witty… cleverly plotted… very enjoyable.”

– About Books

SUDDEN DEATH

“The author handles the material deftly, mixing humor and whodunit but never letting the comedy overwhelm the mystery.”

– Booklist

“Another touchdown!”

– Publishers Weekly

BURY THE LEAD

A TODAY SHOW BOOK CLUB PICK

“Absolute fun… Anyone who likes the Plum books will love this book.”

– JANET EVANOVICH

“A clever plot and breezy style… absorbing.”

– Boston Globe

“Exudes charm and offbeat humor, sophistication, and personable characters.”

– Dallas Morning News

FIRST DEGREE

SELECTED AS ONE OF THE BEST MYSTERIES OF 2003 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Entertaining… fast paced… sophisticated.”

– MARILYN STASIO, New York Times Book Review

“Suspense just where you want it and humor just where you need it.”

– Entertainment Weekly

“Entertaining.”

– Cleveland Plain Dealer

OPEN AND SHUT

EDGAR^® AWARD NOMINEE

“Very assured… packed with cleverly sarcastic wit.”

– New York Times

“Splendid… intricate plotting.”

– Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A great book… one part gripping legal thriller, one part smart-mouth wise-guy detective story, and all-around terrific.”

– HARLAN COBEN, author of

No Second Chance

“Engaging and likable… The action is brisk.”

– San Francisco Chronicle

Also by David Rosenfelt

New Tricks

Dead Center

Bury the Lead

Sudden Death

First Degree

Open and Shut

For Mike, whom I could never beat

at anything…

And for Rick, whom no one would

ever want to beat at anything.

Acknowledgments

I’m not a big fan of acknowledgment pages; most of the time I refuse to even acknowledge them. I especially hate when authors drop names of famous people as a way to impress the readers, and then go on to tell heartwarming little anecdotes to show how tight the author is with those bigshots.

Not me; that’s not what I’m about. I make my acknowledgments short and to the point, and I don’t go scrounging around for impressive names. I let my literary achievements do my showing off for me. If someone has been helpful or inspirational, I thank them… if not, I don’t. No one gets a free pass.

So, in no particular order, I would like to acknowledge…

Michael Jordan Bill Clinton

Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower Debbie Myers

Jonas Salk

Britney Spears

Clarence and Marlo Thomas Bob Castillo

Babe Ruth

Wolf Blitzer

Wolfman Jack

Stacy Alesi

Gandhi

Jessica and Homer Simpson Little Anthony and the Imperials Derek Jeter

Susan Richman

Wayne and Fig Newton Puff Daddy

My Daddy

My Mommy

Alex Trebek

Various Rosenfelts Golda Meir

The Barbara sisters: Bush, Streisand and Walters Nelson Mandela

Ozzie Nelson

Ozzy Osbourne

Les Pockell

Kevin Costner

Kevin Federline Robin Rue

George Costanza Joe Montana

The entire state of Montana David Divine

Bruce Springsteen Walter Cronkite Norman Schwarzkopf Tony Blair

Tony Gwynn

Tony Soprano

Kristin Weber

Bialystock and Bloom Ralph and Alice Kramden Bobby and Gladys Knight Doug Burns

George Burns

Henry Kissinger Trixie and Ed Norton June Peralta

The Taylors: Lawrence and Elizabeth Cal Ripken

Paris and Conrad Hilton Tokyo Rose

Al and Nancy Sarnoff The Bird Brothers: Larry, Charlie and Big Warren G. Harding Stephanie Allen Celia Johnson

Magic Johnson

Andrew Johnson

Johnson amp; Johnson Norman Trell

Gracie Allen

Ernest Hemingway The Jacksons-Michael, Stonewall and Phil Simon amp; Garfunkel Scott and Heidi Ryder Joe Frazier

Christopher Columbus Christopher Cross Sandy Weinberg

Sam and Whitney Houston Anthony, Bernard and Johns Hopkins Muhammad Ali

John and Carol Antonaccio The Rogers: Kenny, Roy and Ginger Rocky Balboa

Geraldo, Chita and Mariano Rivera George Kentris

Abbott amp; Costello Chief Justice John, Julia and Robin Roberts Michael, Sonny and Don Corleone I apologize if I left anyone out.

On a serious note, please e-mail me at dr27712@aol.com with any feedback on the book. Many people have done so in the past, and I very much appreciate it.

“ANDY, YOU’RE NOT going to believe this.”

This is the type of sentence that, when said in a vacuum, doesn’t reveal much. Whatever it is that I am not going to believe might be very positive or very negative, and there would be no way to know until I see it.

Unfortunately, this particular sentence is not said in a vacuum; it’s said in the Passaic County Animal Shelter. Which means that “positive” is no longer one of the possibilities.

The person speaking the words is Fred Brandenberger, whose job as shelter manager is an impossibly difficult one. There are far more dogs that come through his doors than potential adopters, and he therefore must helplessly supervise the euthanasia of those that are not taken. I know it drives Fred crazy; he’s been in the job for two years, and my guess is he’s not going to last much longer.

It bothers me to come here, and I rarely do. I leave this job to my former legal client, Willie Miller, who is my partner in the Tara Foundation, a dog rescue operation. We rescue a lot of dogs, over a thousand a year, but there are many more worthy ones that we simply do not have room for. I hate making the life-or-death decisions on which ones we will take, and Willie has been shouldering that responsibility.

Unfortunately, Willie and his wife, Sondra, are in Atlantic City for a few days, and we’ve got some openings for new dogs, so here I am. I’ve been dreading it, and based on what Fred has just said to me, I fear that dread has been warranted.

Fred leads me back to the quarantine room, which houses dogs who are sick or are unavailable to be adopted for other reasons. The other reason is usually that the dog has bitten someone; in that case they are held for ten days to make sure they don’t have rabies, and then put down. “Put down” is shelter talk for “killed.”

Fred points to a cage in the back of the quarantine room, and I walk toward it, cringing as I do. What is there turns out to be far worse than expected; it’s one of the most beautiful golden retrievers I’ve ever seen.

Golden retrievers do not belong in cages. Ever. No exceptions. The dog I’m looking at is maybe seven years old, with more dignity in his eyes than I could accumulate in seven hundred years. Those eyes are saying, “I don’t belong in here,” and truer eye words were never spoken.

I can feel myself getting angry at this obvious injustice. “What the hell is this about?” I ask as Fred walks over.

“He bit his owner. Eleven stitches,” Fred says. “Not that I blame him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, for one thing, the owner is an asshole. And for another, he might not even be the owner.”

“Tell me everything you know,” I say.

It turns out that Fred doesn’t know that much. A man named Warren Shaheen, who had just come home from the hospital, called him to a house in Hawthorne. He said he had been bitten by his dog, Yogi, for no reason whatsoever. He wanted the dog taken to the shelter and put down.

As Fred and Yogi were leaving the house, a young boy who claimed to live next door approached. He said that Warren was always kicking the dog, and he was sure that the dog bit him in retaliation. Further, he claimed that Warren had found the dog wandering on the street less than three weeks ago and apparently made no effort to find the real owner.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

Fred shrugged. “You know the drill. After ten days, we put him down. We’re not allowed to adopt him out.”

I ask Fred if he’ll open the cage and let me take the dog out. He knows he shouldn’t, but does so anyway.

I take Yogi into a small room where potential adopters go to get to know the dogs they might take. I sit in the chair, and Yogi comes over to me. He has cut marks on his face, clearly visible in this light. They look old, perhaps remnants from some long-ago abuse. It’s likely that Yogi has not had the best life.

He puts his paw up on my knee, a signal from goldens that they want their chest scratched. I do so, and then he rests his head on my thigh as I pet it.

Fred comes over to the room, looks in and sees me petting Yogi in this position. “Pretty amazing, huh?”

“Fred, I’m aware of the regulations, but there’s something you should know.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing bad is going to happen to this dog.”

* * * * *

I HAVE COME to the conclusion that the entire “work ethic” concept is a scam.

Hardworking people are to be admired, we’re told, though no one mentions that the very act of working is contrary to the natural order of things. It falls to me, Andy Carpenter, philosopher extraordinaire, to set the record straight.

I believe that humans have an “enjoyment drive,” which supersedes all others. Everything we do is in the pursuit of that enjoyment. We eat because it’s more enjoyable to be full than hungry; we sleep because it’s more enjoyable to be rested than tired; we have sex because… I assume you get the picture.

We work simply to make money, because money makes our lives more enjoyable in many ways. If you take money out of the equation, the work system falls apart. Without the desire for cash, who is going to say, “I think I’ll spend ten hours a day for my entire life selling plumbing supplies”? Or waiting tables? Or repairing vacuum cleaners?

There are people, I will concede, who would pursue certain occupations independent of money. For example, artists, politicians, or perhaps entertainers might do what they do for the creative satisfaction or the power or the acclaim. But that’s only because they enjoy creative satisfaction, power, and acclaim.

Which brings me to me. I am work-ethically challenged. Simply put, I’m a lawyer who has never been terribly fond of lawyering. Since I inherited twenty-two million dollars a few years ago, money has ceased to be a driving force, which means I don’t exactly have a busy work life.

There are exceptions to my aversion to plying my craft, which fit neatly under my drive for enjoyment. I’ve handled a number of major, challenging cases in the past few years, most of which became big media events. The key for me is to treat them as sport, as a challenge to be relished, and that’s what I did.

But those cases were as important to me personally as they were professionally, which elevated the stakes and made them that much more enjoyable and exciting. They ignited my competitive fire. If I were representing some stranger in a divorce or suing an insurance company over an auto accident, I’d rather stay home.

Right now I can feel my juices starting to flow as I head for the office. On the way there I call my associate, Kevin Randall, on his cell phone.

His “Hello” is spoken in a hushed whisper.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

“I’m at my urologist,” he says.

Kevin is the biggest hypochondriac in the Western Hemisphere, and five out of every ten times I might call him he’s at the doctor. “You have your own urologist?” I ask. “That’s pretty impressive.”

Kevin knows I am unable to resist making fun of his devotion to his perceived illnesses, but he is equally unable to resist talking about them. “You don’t? Who do you see for urology issues?”

“I have no tolerance for urology issues,” I say. “I piss on urology issues.”

He doesn’t like the way this conversation is going, which makes him sane. “Why are you calling me, Andy?”

“To ask if you could meet me in the office. When you’re finished at the urologist.”

“Why?” he asks. Since we haven’t taken on a case in a few months, it’s a reasonable question to pose.

“We’ve got client issues,” I say.

“We have a client?” He’s not successfully masking his incredulity.

“Yes.”

“Who is it?”

“His name is Yogi,” I say.

“Yogi? Is that a first name or a last name?” Kevin knows nothing about sports, so he is apparently not familiar with Yogi Berra. However, I would have thought he’d know Yogi Bear.

“Actually, it’s his only name, and probably not his real one at that. Listen, Kevin, I’m pretty sure he can’t pay our fee. Are you okay with that?”

“Of course.” I gave Kevin half of a huge commission we made on a case a while back, so money is not a major issue for him, either. Additionally, he owns the Law-dromat, a thriving establishment at which he dispenses free legal advice to customers who bring in their clothes to be washed and dried. “What is he accused of?”

“Assault,” I say.

“Where is he now?”

“On death row.”

“Andy, I sense there’s something unusual about this case.”

“You got that right.”

* * * * *

“WHAT ARE YOU doing here?”

This is the greeting I get from Edna, who for fifteen years has been my secretary but who now insists on being called my “administrative assistant.” In neither role has Edna ever done any actual work, but as an administrative assistant she can do nothing with considerably more dignity.

Like all of us, Edna strives to satisfy her enjoyment drive, and she does so by doing crossword puzzles. She is the greatest crossword puzzler I have ever seen, and possibly the greatest who has ever lived. Just as art collectors seem to discover DaVincis or Picassos at flea markets or in somebody’s garage every month, in three hundred years crossword puzzle devotees will be finding long-lost Ednas and selling them for fortunes.

She is polishing off today’s New York Times puzzle when I walk in, and her surprise at seeing me is justified. I haven’t been here in at least a week.

“We’ve got a client,” I say.

“How did that happen?”

Her tone is somewhere between baffled and annoyed. “I was in the right place at the right time. Come in with Kevin when he gets here.”

I head back to my private office with a window overlooking the finest fruit stand on Van Houten Avenue in Paterson, New Jersey. If I ever blow my money, it’s not going to be on office space.

I use the time to look through some law books and browse on the computer, finding out as much as I can about dog law in New Jersey. What I learn is not encouraging; if there’s a dog lover in the state legislature, he or she has been in hiding.

I’m fifteen minutes into finding absolutely no protections for canines under the law, when Kevin and Edna walk in. As soon as they sit down, I start in.

“Our client is a dog named Yogi, who is currently at the shelter. He’s scheduled to be put down the day after tomorrow.”

“Why?” Kevin asks.

“He’s alleged to have bitten his owner.”

Kevin shakes his head. “No, I mean why is he our client?”

I shrug. “Apparently, no other lawyer would take his case, probably because he sheds. What do you know about dog law?”

“Nothing,” Kevin says.

“Then you take the computer and I’ll take the books.”

“Do I have to do anything?” Edna asks, openly cringing at the prospect.

I nod. “You might want to get some biscuits. We’ll need them when we meet with our client.”

Edna goes out, and I explain the details of Yogi’s situation to Kevin. We then spend the next hour and a half researching the law. Kevin is far better at this than I am, and my hope is that he’ll come up with something.

He doesn’t. “Yogi’s got big problems,” he says.

He explains that the animal control system’s regulations prohibit them from letting anyone adopt a dog who has bitten someone. It is considered a matter of public safety, not reviewable under any statute. Under certain conditions the owner can take the dog back, but Yogi’s owner doesn’t want him. Nor would we want Yogi to go back to someone who was kicking him.

“Andy,” Kevin says, “are we sure the dog isn’t really dangerous?”

I nod. “I’m sure. I looked into his eyes.”

“You always told me you never make eye contact,” he says.

“I was talking about with people.”

“Oh. Then, are we sure the dog actually bit the guy?”

I nod again. “Apparently so. The neighbor said the guy was kicking him, so…”

Kevin notices my pause. “So…?” he prompts.

“So… it was self-defense.” I’m starting to get excited by what is forming in my mind. “Yogi was a victim of domestic violence.”

“Andy, come on…”

There’s no stopping me now. “Come on, the dog was being abused. He couldn’t call 911, so he defended himself. If he was the guy’s wife, NOW would be throwing him a cocktail party.”

Kevin is not getting it. “If the male dog was the guy’s wife?”

“Don’t focus on the sex part,” I say. “We’ve got a classic abuse-excuse defense here.” I’m referring to the traditional defense used by abused wives who finally and justifiably turn violently against their husbands.

Kevin thinks about it for a moment, then can’t hold back a grin. “It could be fun.”

“The hell with fun,” I say. “We’re going to win.”

Now with a strategy to work with, we spend another couple of hours plotting how to execute it. This defense, when the client is a dog, is obviously not something the justice system or the legislature has contemplated, so there is little for us to sink our teeth into. We’re heading into uncharted territory with few bullets in our legal guns.

Kevin heads down to the courthouse to file for injunctive relief on Yogi’s behalf, which essentially amounts to a request for a stay of execution. The court does not have to see merit in our position to grant it; it need only recognize that not granting it would result in Yogi’s death, which would in effect be ruling against our overall case before we’ve had a chance to present it. Pleading self-defense on behalf of a dead client is not a terribly productive use of anyone’s time.

After his stop at the courthouse, Kevin is going to attempt to interview Warren Shaheen, the man with Yogi’s teeth marks in his legs. Kevin will get his side of the story and try to persuade him to see the merit of our position. Shaheen may well not want to get taken through the torture I’ve got planned for him, and Kevin is going to suggest some alternatives that we’ve come up with.

The first hurdle we’ll have to overcome is to get a judge to consider our request tomorrow, the scheduled last day of Yogi’s life. I head home to think about that problem in the way that my mind functions most clearly. I take my own golden retriever, Tara, for a walk in Eastside Park.

Tara’s official name has changed a few times over the years. Right now it is Tara, the Greatest Creature on This or Any Other Planet and if You Can’t See That You’re an Idiot, Carpenter. It’s a little long, but apt.

I rescued Tara more than eight years ago from the same shelter that currently houses Yogi. Just looking at her now, enjoying the sights and smells as we walk through the park, easily reaffirms my commitment that I will never let another golden die in a shelter, not if it takes every dollar I have. Fortunately, it doesn’t.

Tara and I pass a number of our “dog friends” as we walk. These are the same people, walking their dogs, that we meet almost every time we’re in the park. I don’t know any of the people’s names, and we merely exchange pleasantries and minor canine chitchat, yet we have a common bond through our love of our dogs.

Each one of these people would be horrified to know of Yogi’s plight, and I don’t share it with them. At least not now. But I do come to the realization that my only hope lies in sharing it with all of them.

Yogi is about to become famous.

I call my friend Vince Sanders, editor of the local newspaper and the most disagreeable human being I have ever met. As a terrific journalist, he will take a heartwarming story and run with it, despite not having the slightest idea why it is heartwarming.

Vince’s long-suffering assistant, Linda, answers the phone. “Hey, Linda, it’s Andy. What kind of mood is he in?”

“Same as always,” she says.

“Sorry to hear that,” I say, and she tells him I’m on the phone.

“Yeah?” Vince says when he picks up. “Hello” and “good-bye” are not part of his verbal repertoire.

“I’ve got a big story for you,” I say.

“Hold on while I try to come to terms with my excitement,” is his deadpan answer.

I tell him to get a photographer and meet me at the animal shelter. He doesn’t want to, but he trusts me a little from past stories, so he considers it. I close the deal by promising to buy the burgers and beer the next time we go to Charlie’s, our favorite sports bar.

I drop Tara off at home and then go down to the shelter. Vince hasn’t arrived yet, so I use the time to bring Fred up to date on the situation. I think he likes what he’s hearing, because every few sentences he claps his hands and smacks me on the back.

When I’m finished, he says, “You think you can pull this off?”

I nod. “I’m most worried about the timing.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve got to get the judge to move much more quickly than judges like to move. I don’t want anything to happen to Yogi in the meantime.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Fred says. “I’ve got a hunch I’m not going to be able to find my syringes.”

He’s telling me that he won’t put Yogi down on schedule, at least not until he’s heard from me. He’s taking a risk, particularly since this will be a well-publicized case, and I appreciate it. As will Yogi when he hears about it.

Vince and his photographer arrive, and I explain the situation to them. When I’m finished, I take them back to the quarantine area. “This is him?” Vince asks. “This is the big story?”

“It’s a human interest story, Vince. Which means that if you were an actual human, you’d have an interest in it.”

Fortunately, Vince’s photographer is a dog lover, and he eagerly gets to work. I make sure that all the pictures are taken through the bars of the cage; I want Yogi’s miserable situation to be completely clear in each photograph.

When he’s finished, he shows Vince the picture he thinks is best, and we both agree. It captures Yogi perfectly and dramatizes the injustice of his plight.

Tomorrow that picture will be everywhere, because Yogi is about to become America’s dog.

* * * * *

SOMETIMES THINGS COME together perfectly.

It doesn’t happen often; usually something can be counted on to go wrong. Murphy didn’t become famous by passing a bum law. But when everything goes right, when a plan is executed to perfection, it is something to be cherished.

The voracious twenty-four-hour cable, Internet, blogging media is onto Yogi’s story before Vince’s paper even physically hits the newsstands. The idea of a dog taking refuge in the abuse-excuse defense is just the kind of thing to push more significant news to the side, and it certainly does exactly that here.

I wake up at six a.m. and turn the television on. There on CNN is Yogi’s beautiful, pathetic mug, with the graphic across the bottom asking “Stay of Execution?” Their details are sketchy but accurate, having already gleaned from Vince’s story the main facts, including our legal actions.

The phone starts ringing, as I knew it would, and I find myself fielding calls from what seems like every media outlet in the free world. My standard response is that I will have a great deal to say on this later, and I arrange late morning interviews to take place at the animal shelter with the main cable networks. I have appeared on all of them as a celebrity legal commentator at various times during the past two years, so my involvement with this case provides a level of comfort for them to cover it.

I finally make it into the shower, and I spend the endless minute waiting for the conditioner to sink in, by happily reflecting on how perfectly this is going. In less than a day, I’ve made an entire country, or at least the media of an entire country, sit up and take notice.

I am Andy, the all-powerful.

The phone rings as I’m turning the water off, and I decide to ignore it. I’ve already done enough to reach saturation coverage, and I’m not going to have time for any more.

I let the machine pick up, and after a few seconds I hear a woman’s voice. “Andy, it’s Rita.”

The caller is Rita Gordon, the clerk at the Passaic County Courthouse, and the only reason that venerable institution operates with any efficiency at all. I once had an affair with Rita that could be characterized as brief, since it lasted only about forty-five minutes. But those were forty-five great minutes.

I pick up the phone. “Rita, sorry I screened the call. I thought you were Katie Couric.”

I don’t think Rita and I have ever engaged in a conversation that was not dominated by banter of some sort. Until now. “Andy, Hatchet wants to see you right away.”

That one sentence renders obsolete all my gloating about the perfection of my legal and public relations effort. “Hatchet was assigned this case? Is that what you’re telling me?” I ask.

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

Judge Henry Henderson has been called “Hatchet” for as long as I can remember. One doesn’t get nicknames by accident, and they are generally quite revealing. You won’t find demure librarians named Darla “the Sledgehammer” Smiley, or nannies dubbed Mary “the Exterminator” Poppins. And there won’t be many professional wrestlers with names like Brutus “Little Kitten” Rockingham.

Legend goes that Hatchet got his name by chopping off the testicles of lawyers who annoyed him. My belief is that this is just urban myth, but that doesn’t mean that if given the opportunity I would want to rummage through his desk drawers.

“How pissed is he?” I ask.

“I would say somewhere between very and totally.”

“When should I come in?” I ask.

“Let’s put it this way. If you’re not here by the time I finish this sentence, you’re late.”

By that standard, I’m late for my meeting with Hatchet, but not by much. I’m down at the courthouse and ushered into his chambers within a half hour of receiving the call. Since the courthouse is twenty minutes from my house, that’s pretty good.

Hatchet keeps his office very dark; the drapes are closed, and only a small lamp on his desk provides any light at all. If it’s meant to disconcert and intimidate attorneys, it achieves its goal. Yet if the stories I hear are true, I am less afraid of Hatchet than are most of my colleagues. For example, I haven’t pissed in my pants yet.

Hatchet etiquette requires letting him speak first, so I just stand there waiting for the barrage. Finally, after about thirty seconds that feel like three thousand, he looks up. “Do you know what time it is?” he asks.

I look at my watch. “Eight forty-five. I got here as soon as I-”

He interrupts. “Do you know how long I’ve been up?”

“I’m sorry, Your Honor, but I have no idea.”

“Four hours. My wife woke me at four forty-five.”

This is a stunning piece of news. Not that Hatchet has been up since early this morning, but that he has a wife. Someone actually sleeps with this man. I find myself picturing a female leaning over in bed and saying, “Hatchet, dear, it’s almost five a.m.-time to get up.” It’s not a pretty image.

“I assume this is somehow my fault?” I ask.

“She woke me to say that I cannot kill some poor dog. I assumed she was talking about an attorney, until she showed me what she was watching on the television.”

“She sounds like a very compassionate person, who doesn’t sleep much,” I say.

Hatchet takes off his glasses and peers at me. “Are you trying to turn my court into a circus? A sideshow?”

“No, sir. Never. Definitely not. No way.”

“Then why are you representing a dog?”

“Because if I don’t, he’ll be killed. And that would be unjust. And it would make many people unhappy, including me and Mrs. Hatch-Henderson.”

If he is going to kill me, this is the moment. He doesn’t say anything for about thirty seconds; it’s possible he’s so angry that he’s unable to unclench his teeth. He finally speaks, more softly and calmly than I would have expected. “I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but I’m going to issue a stay of execution. I am scheduling a hearing in this court tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. It is a hearing that I do not want to take more than one hour, and I will be conveying that view to certain city officials. Is that understood?”

It’s completely understood, and I say so. I leave Hatchet’s office, my dignity and testicles intact, and head down to the shelter to conduct the television interviews.

This won’t be officially resolved until tomorrow, but I now know one thing with total certainty: Yogi and I have already won.

I say this because we have surmounted the only serious obstacle that was in front of us. Mostly through the use of media pressure, along with a creative defense, we have gotten the legal system to give us our day in court. In a normal situation, we would now have to defeat our legal adversaries.

But the reason we’ve already won is that we don’t have any real legal adversaries. Simply put, we want to win, and there’s no one who will want us to lose. Nobody gains if Yogi is killed in so public a fashion, and there isn’t a politician in Paterson, in New Jersey, in America, or on the planet Earth who would want to be responsible for it.

The afternoon media interviews are a slam dunk; I’m not exactly bombarded with difficult questions. This makes for a great story, and the press will willingly help me promote it. Besides, all I have to do is keep pointing to Yogi and asking as plaintively as I can why anyone would want to end his life.

The most interesting piece of information comes from one of the reporters, who asks if I’ve heard the news that the mayor of Paterson is at that moment meeting with his director of Animal Services to discuss this matter. I would imagine the “discussion” consists of the mayor screaming at the director to find a way out of this.

I’m not going to get overconfident and let up, but my guess is that by tomorrow, Yogi will be dining on biscuits at my house.

I wonder how Tara is going to feel about that.

* * * * *

KEVIN MEETS ME at the diner for breakfast to go over our strategy.

He also brings me up to date on his conversation with Warren Shaheen, the alleged owner and victim of the vicious Yogi. Shaheen told Kevin that he has been asked to be at court today by the animal control people, but Kevin doubts he’ll show. Mr. Shaheen is apparently not enjoying his fifteen minutes of fame, and was clearly frightened when Kevin told him that when I latch on to his leg in court, it’s going to hurt a lot more than when Yogi did it. Faced with that prospect, he was more than happy to go along with whatever Kevin said was necessary to make it end.

We head for the courthouse early, and it’s lucky we do, because the media crush adds ten minutes to the time it takes to get inside. We still get to our seats at the defense table fifteen minutes before the scheduled start of the hearing. My testicle-preservation instinct is not about to let me show up late in Hatchet’s court. I plan to make sure that my client remains the only neutered member of the defense team.

A young city attorney named Roger Wagner puts his briefcase on the prosecution table and comes over to shake my hand. He smiles. “Any chance we can make a deal?”

“What do you have in mind?” I ask.

“We keep Yogi and we trade you a German shepherd, a beagle, and a Maltese to be named later.”

I laugh. “I don’t think so.”

I sit back down. It’s an unusual feeling not to have my client present at a court proceeding, and I had briefly considered asking that Yogi be allowed to attend. The determining factor in my not doing so was my uncertainty whether Yogi was house-trained, or in this case court-trained. Taking a dump in Hatchet’s court would not be a productive legal maneuver.

Hatchet starts the proceedings by laying out the ground rules. The city will get to call witnesses, which I can then cross-examine. I can follow with my own witnesses, should I so choose, and then we will adjourn. There will be no opening or closing arguments.

“And there will be no theatrics,” he says, staring directly at me.

Wagner calls Stephen Billick, the Passaic County director of Animal Control. He starts to ask him about his education, work experience, and general qualifications for the job, but he barely gets two sentences out before Hatchet cuts him off. “That isn’t necessary. Mr. Carpenter will stipulate as to the witness’s experience and expertise. Isn’t that right, Mr. Carpenter?”

I had no intention of so stipulating, but I have even less intention of arguing with Hatchet. “Your Honor, that’s uncanny. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

Wagner proceeds with his questioning, which basically elicits from Billick the rationale for the policy of putting down dogs with a history of biting humans. It’s a public safety issue and one that is consistent in localities across the country. It would be irresponsible to send a dog like that back into civilized society, because of the likelihood that he could strike again.

Hatchet offers me the opportunity for a “brief” cross-examination, and I begin with “Mr. Billick, what happens if a dog bites someone, but the owner does not bring it to a shelter to be put down?”

“If someone reports being bitten and is treated by a doctor or a hospital emergency room, then the dog is quarantined either at a shelter or a veterinarian’s office for ten days, in order to make sure the dog does not have rabies.”

“So let’s say I had a dog that bit someone. I could keep the dog at my vet for the ten days?”

“Yes.”

“And after the ten days are up?” I ask.

“Assuming he didn’t have rabies, you could bring him home.”

“Wouldn’t that put the public at risk of the dog biting again?”

He nods. “It would. But you would have signed a document accepting future responsibility.”

“So I as the owner can have the dog back, simply by accepting responsibility for his future actions?”

“That is correct,” he says.

“What does it mean to be the owner of a dog?” I ask.

“I don’t understand.”

“I mean, in the eyes of the animal control system, if I buy a dog, I then own it?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“And then that ownership means I have responsibility for it?”

“Yes.”

“What if I sell it?” I ask.

Hatchet cuts in. “Mr. Carpenter, do you remember my use of the word ‘brief’?”

I nod. “I do, Your Honor. I committed it to memory. I’m almost finished here.”

He lets me continue, so I repeat the question for Billick. “And if I sell the dog? Who owns it then?”

He seems confused. “Well, the person you sell it to.”

I walk over to the defense table, and Kevin hands me two pieces of paper. I then bring them over to the bench. “Your Honor, I would like to submit these two documents as defense exhibits one and two.”

“What is their substance?” Hatchet asks.

“Number one is a bill of sale, confirming that Warren Shaheen sold me the dog referred to as ‘Yogi’ yesterday afternoon for the sum of fifty dollars. Number two is my declaration of ownership and my intention to take full responsibility for Yogi as his sole owner.”

“So you are now the dog’s owner?” Hatchet asks.

“Yes, Your Honor. Under the terms of ownership as Mr. Billick has just defined them.”

Hatchet thinks for a moment, then turns to Billick. “Give the man his dog.”

“Yes, Your Honor.” Billick says, smiling himself as the gallery breaks out in applause.

We’ve won, but I can’t help myself. “Your Honor, a dog’s honor was besmirched here. I would like to call a trainer to the witness stand, to testify that Yogi is a sweet and loving dog.”

“Mr. Carpenter…,” Hatchet says. He usually doesn’t have to say any more, but I’m having fun with this, so I continue.

“Your Honor, Yogi now has his freedom, but where does he go to get back his reputation?”

“Perhaps it would help if I held his lawyer in contempt,” Hatchet says. I’m not sure, but I actually may see a twinkle in his eye.

“Have a lovely day, Your Honor.”

With that, he slams down his gavel. “This hearing is concluded.”

* * * * *

IT HAS TAKEN a while, but I finally understand the joy of sex, and I am now prepared to reveal it to the world.

The purest joy of sex comes from not having to think about it.

About a year ago the person who filled the double role of private investigator and undisputed love of my life, Laurie Collins, left to become the chief of police of Findlay, Wisconsin, her hometown.

We had no contact whatsoever for the next four and a half months, as I tried to convince myself that I hated her. It worked until she called me and asked me to come to Wisconsin to take on a case of a young man accused of a double homicide but whom she considered innocent.

I spent four months in the frozen tundra, won the case, ate a lot of bratwurst, and reconnected with Laurie. When it was time to leave, neither of us could bear the prospect of splitting up again, so we agreed to maintain a long-distance relationship, seeing each other whenever either of us could get away. It’s worked fairly well; since then I’ve gone to Wisconsin three times, and she’s come to Paterson once.

The point of all this is that I no longer have to think about sex or wonder if and when I’m going to have it. When I see Laurie, I’m going to, and when we’re apart, I’m not. It’s incredibly freeing, and pretty much the first time since high school that I’ve spent no time at all wondering whether sex was imminent or possible.

There are other, side benefits as well. For instance, I save gallons of water by cutting back on showers. I always want to be clean, but I don’t have to be “naked in bed with someone” clean, when there’s no chance that’s going to happen. I don’t have to wash the sheets as often; my mouthwash frequency is cut by at least 30 percent… The positives go on and on.

I haven’t talked to Laurie since the Yogi thing began. We usually try to speak every night, but she’s at a police convention in Chicago, and I’ve been pretty busy, so we’ve traded phone messages. I’m not the most sociable guy in the world, and most of the time when I call people I hope their machine answers. This is not the case with Laurie.

The phone is ringing as I walk in after returning from court, and when I pick up I hear her voice. It’s amazing how comforting, how welcoming, how knowing one voice can be. Think Patsy Cline with a New Jersey accent.

I admit it. I may be a little over the top about Laurie.

“Congratulations,” she says. “I just missed a panel on the use of Taser guns watching you on television.”

“I’m sure it was stunning,” I say.

“You were great. I was proud of you.”

“I meant the Taser gun panel must have been stunning. It was a Taser gun joke.”

“Now I’m a little less proud. What are you going to do with Yogi?” she asks.

“Find him a good home. He can stay here until I do, although I haven’t quite discussed it with Tara yet.”

“You think she’ll mind?”

“I think I’ll have to give her an entire box of biscuits as a payoff, but she’ll be okay with it.”

“When do you get him?” she asks.

“I’m supposed to be back at the shelter at three o’clock.”

“Seriously, Andy, I thought what you did was great.”

I shrug off the compliment, and we talk about when we are going to see each other. She has two weeks vacation owed to her, and she’s coming in at the end of the month. It’ll mean showering more, but it’s a small price to pay.

After speaking to Laurie, I do a couple of radio interviews about our victory in court and then head to the shelter to secure my client’s freedom. There is a large media contingent staking out the place, and it takes me ten minutes to get inside.

Fred is waiting for me, a big smile on his face. There aren’t too many happy stories in his job, and he’s obviously relishing this one. “I gave him a bath,” Fred says. “Wait till you see how great he looks.”

We go back to the quarantine section, and he gives me the honor of taking Yogi out of the cage. Yogi does, in fact, look great, freshly scrubbed and wagging his tail at the prospect of imminent freedom.

Yogi and I leave, having once again to go through the media throng to get to the car. I’ve said all I have to say, and Yogi doesn’t even bother barking a “no comment.” We both just want to get the hell out of here.

When we get home I lead Yogi directly into the backyard. I then go into the house and bring Tara back there as well, feeling that somehow the meeting will go better outside. It goes amazingly well; Tara doesn’t seem to show any jealousy at all. My guess is, I’ll hear about it later when we’re alone, but right now she’s the gracious hostess.

I grab a pair of leashes, planning to take them for a walk in Eastside Park, which is about five blocks from my house. We’re halfway down the block, walking at a leisurely pace, when I hear a voice.

“Reggie!”

Suddenly, instead of holding two leashes, I’m only holding one, Tara’s. Yogi has taken off like a track star exploding out of the blocks, surprising me and breaking out of my grip on his leash.

I panic for a moment, fearful that he will run into the street and get hit by a car. I turn to see that he is still on the sidewalk, running in the other direction toward a young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. The woman is down on one knee, waiting for Yogi to arrive. She doesn’t have to wait long; for a middle aged dog, Yogi can really motor.

Yogi takes off about five feet from her, flying and landing on her. She rolls back, laughing, with him on top of her. They roll and hug for about fifteen seconds; I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a happier human or dog.

Tara and I walk back to them; Tara seems as surprised by this turn of events as I am. As we reach them, the woman is struggling to get to her feet, no easy job since Yogi is still draped all over her.

“I have a hunch you two know each other,” I say, displaying my gift for understatement.

She is giggling and, apparently, incredibly excited. “We sure do. We sure do. God, do we ever!”

“I’m Andy Carpenter,” I say.

She nods again. “I know. I saw you and Reggie on television,” she gushes. “I followed you here from the shelter. I’m Karen Evans.”

“His real name is Reggie?” I ask.

“Yup. He was my brother’s dog. My brother is Richard Evans.”

She says the name as if it’s supposed to mean something to me. “How can you be sure it’s him?” I ask, though from Yogi’s-or Reggie’s-reaction I have little doubt that she’s telling the truth.

“The cut marks. My brother rescued him from a shelter when he was a year old. He had the marks then, and the vet had said that his previous owner had wired his jaw shut, maybe to stop him from barking. Is that the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?”

“How would the vet know that?” I ask.

“If you look, you’ll see that there are faint cut marks under his mouth as well. It’s from the wire being wrapped around.”

I hadn’t noticed that, but I look under his mouth, and sure enough, there they are. If there was any doubt she was telling the truth, that doubt has now been eliminated.

The Golden Retriever Formerly Known as Yogi starts tapping Karen with his paw, in an effort to get her to resume petting him. She starts laughing again and obliges. “Mr. Carpenter-”

“Andy.”

“Andy, do you realize how unbelievably amazing this is?”

“It really is,” I say, though that seems to be a little strong. She seems like the type who finds a lot of things to be unbelievably amazing.

“It’s a miracle,” she proclaims.

“Hmmm,” I say cleverly, not quite wanting to sign on to the “miracle” description.

She looks at me strangely. “You don’t know what’s going on, do you?” she asks as she realizes that, in fact, I don’t know what’s going on.

“Maybe not,” I say.

“My brother is Richard Evans. This is his dog.”

“I understand that,” I say.

“Mr. Carpenter… Andy… the State of New Jersey says that this dog has been dead for five years.”

* * * * *

ONCE WE’RE IN my house, Karen reminds me why I should remember Richard Evans.

He was a U.S. Customs inspector, working at the Port of Newark, who kept his own small private boat at a pier near there. One evening more than five and a half years ago he went out on that boat off the Jersey coast with his fiancée, Stacy Harriman, and his dog, Reggie.

At about nine o’clock a significant storm was coming in, and word went out to the private boats in the area to get to shore. All of them did except for Richard’s, which was off the coast near Asbury Park, and the Coast Guard sent out a cutter to escort it in.

When the Coast Guard arrived, no one on the boat responded to their calls, and they decided to board it. They found Richard alone and unconscious on the floor of the deck below, an empty bottle of sleeping pills nearby. There was no sign of a suicide note, and the coastguardsmen had no way to know that anyone else had been on board.

Richard spent three days in a coma while the police investigated the circumstances. Long before he regained consciousness, they were aware that Stacy and the dog had been on the boat when it sailed, and they had found traces of blood on the floor and railing of the boat. He was immediately arrested and taken into custody.

Three weeks later a woman’s decomposed body washed ashore, soon identified by DNA as that of Stacy Harriman. Richard was tried for the murder. The scenario the prosecution posed was a murder-suicide, and there was no way for the defense to counter it effectively. The case was not a huge media event, but as a local defense attorney I had some awareness of it.

The dog’s body was never found.

“This is the dog,” Karen says. “Reggie. You saw how he reacted to me. There’s no doubt about it.”

“It certainly seems like it,” I agree.

“So will you help me?” she asks.

“How?”

“Get my brother out of prison. You’re a lawyer, right? Isn’t that what you do?”

Even though I am Andy Carpenter, crack defense attorney, I can’t see how she can go from Reggie’s survival to her brother’s innocence. “How would you suggest I do that?” I ask.

“Look, you don’t know Richard. There’s no way he could have hurt anybody.”

“The people to convince of that would have been the members of the jury.”

“But if Reggie is alive, then he wasn’t thrown overboard. Then neither was Stacy.”

“But they found her body. And her blood on the railing.” It gives me no pleasure to point this out, but it does seem time for a reality check.

It doesn’t seem to faze her. “I know. But Richard didn’t kill her. Just like he didn’t kill Reggie. If the jury was wrong about one thing, why couldn’t they be wrong about another?”

“Karen, goldens are great swimmers. Isn’t it possible that he swam back to shore?”

She shakes her head. “No, they were too far out. And there was a big storm; that’s why the Coast Guard was out there.”

She can see I’m not at all convinced, so she presses her case. “Andy, Richard loved this dog more than anything in the world.” She points to Tara. “You love her, right? Could you throw her overboard to drown?”

Clarence Darrow never gave a better closing argument than Karen just did. “I’ll look into it. But your hopes are way too high.”

“Thank you. And it’s okay. I’ve spent the last five years with no hope, so this feels pretty good.”

We agree that I’ll keep Reggie in my house, and I promise that until this is all resolved I won’t do anything about finding him a permanent home. She thinks his permanent home will be with her brother Richard, as soon as I convince the justice system of his innocence.

As for me, this is not that big a deal, and pretty much a no-lose proposition. In the unlikely event that she’s right, I will be attempting to help an innocent man get his freedom. If she’s wrong, then I’ll get the pleasure of seeing someone who could throw a golden into the ocean rot in prison.

Besides, what else do I have to do?

* * * * *

POLICE OFFICERS, WITH the notable exception of Laurie, can’t stand me.

This is partly due to the natural antipathy between cops and defense attorneys, though it is also true that I am disliked by people of many occupations.

Actually, I do have one buddy in the Paterson Police Department, Lieutenant Pete Stanton. He’s a pretty good friend, which means we drink a lot of beer together while watching TV sports, and when we call each other “shithead” we don’t mean it personally. Professionally, ever since I helped his brother out on a legal matter about five years ago, it’s become a one-way street. I often call on him for favors, and after endless grumbling he obliges.

This time I call him to see if he can set up a meeting for me with someone in the Asbury Park Police Department. I tell him that in a perfect world it would be with someone who was involved in the Richard Evans murder case five years ago.

“You’re representing Evans?” he asks, with evident surprise.

“Not yet. For now I’m looking into it for a friend.”

“What’s the matter?” he asks. “You run out of scumbag murderers to help in North Jersey?”

“Only because of your inability to arrest any.”

“You call for a favor and then insult me?” he asks.

“You know, I have some friends who would do me a favor without first putting me through the wringer.”

“Is that right?” he asks. “Then why don’t you call one of them?”

He finally agrees to make a phone call to a detective he knows down there, and within fifteen minutes he calls me back. “You’re set up to see Lieutenant Siegle of Asbury Park PD tomorrow morning at ten.”

“Does he know about the case?”

“She.”

“Does she know about the case?”

“She ran the investigation.”

“Did you tell her I was representing Evans?” It’s something I wouldn’t want Siegle to think; it might make her reluctant to be straight with me.

“All I told her was that you were an asshole,” he says. “I figured that was okay, since if she was smart enough to make lieutenant, she’d figure that out anyway.”

I’m on the road by eight in the morning for the drive down to Asbury Park. It’s about sixty miles on the Garden State Parkway and, with traffic, can take almost two hours. In the summer it can be even worse.

Asbury Park has long been a key city on the shore, which is how those of us from New Jersey refer to the beach. If you ever suspect that a person is posing as a Jersey-ite, ask him to describe the area where the ocean hits land. If he says “beach,” he’s an impostor. Of course, I have no idea why someone would fake New Jersey credentials, but it’s important to be alert.

The drive invariably brings back memories of my misspent youth. My lack of success with girls throughout high school was just about one hundred percent, but at least I had a few “almosts” at the shore. An official “almost” occurred when one of my friends or I would get a girl to talk to us for fifteen minutes without saying, “Get lost, jerk.”

Asbury has changed markedly over the years, and, I’m sorry to say, not for the better. It used to be a fun place, with restaurants, bars, and amusement rides and games, sort of a mini Coney Island. It has slipped into very substantial decline, and it makes me feel a little older and sadder to see it.

I arrive at the police station fifteen minutes early, and Lieutenant Siegle is out on a call. She arrives promptly at ten o’clock, and the desk sergeant points to me waiting in a chair at the end of the lobby.

She walks over to me, a smile on her face and her hand outstretched. “Andy Carpenter? Michele Siegle.”

She’s an attractive woman, about my age, and it flashes across my mind that she could have been one of the girls I got nowhere with back in my high school days. “Thanks for seeing me.”

“I’ve actually followed many of your cases,” she says, then notes the surprised look on my face. “I’m going to Seton Hall Law School at night.”

“Really… That’s terrific,” I say. “Crossing over to the other side?”

“Not quite. I’m hoping to be a prosecutor.” She smiles. “We need somebody to make sure evil golden retrievers aren’t out roaming the streets.”

She takes me back to her office, and as soon as we get there, she gets right to it. “So you want to talk about the Evans case?”

I nod. “I do.”

“Are you representing anyone involved?”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever, but a lot will depend on what you tell me.”

She nods. “Shoot.”

“How far from land was the boat when the Coast Guard boarded it?”

“About four miles.”

“Did you ever determine the route it took?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I’m trying to figure out how close the boat came to shore before it was boarded. Especially when it was in the area that the body washed up.”

“Various people had sighted it along the way. It was always pretty far out there.”

“And it was stormy that night?” I ask.

She nods. “Yes. That’s why it was boarded in the first place. If not for that, Evans would have died from the pills he took.”

“And the theory was that he threw the dog into the ocean at the same point he threw his fiancée?”

“That was the theory, although it was never that important to the case. If anything, it got in the way.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Everybody who knew him talked about how much he loved the dog. Killing him therefore didn’t make much sense.”

“So how was it explained away?”

She shrugs. “This was a murder-suicide. Not the most rational of acts.”

“Was the dog’s body ever discovered?” I ask.

“Not that I know of.”

I decide it’s time to pose the key question. “Is there any likelihood that the dog, once it was thrown overboard, could have swum to shore?”

She thinks about it for a moment, considering the possibility. “No,” she says. “No chance. Not from half that distance, not in that weather.”

I don’t respond for a moment, and she says, “You think the dog is alive?”

I turn the question back at her. “What if it was?”

She thinks again. “Then that would be a very interesting development.”

Yes, it would.

* * * * *

FOR EVERY LAWYER, in every case, there comes the time to make a key decision.

It’s usually strategic: how to plead, the thrust of the defense, or perhaps whether to have the defendant testify. Because of my bank account, and my aforementioned work-ethic deficiency, my key moment always comes much earlier. It’s when I decide whether to take the case.

I think about this on the way home from Asbury Park. At the moment it’s premature, since I don’t know enough about the case, have never met the defendant, and, obviously, he has not sought my help. All that is keeping me interested is a devoted sister and a golden retriever.

For now that’s plenty.

I call Kevin and ask him to assemble all the information and material he can find, and once again I’m pleased to learn that he is way ahead of me. He’s already gotten his hands on the transcript of the trial, as well as the contemporaneous news reports. We don’t yet have standing to get discovery information, but for now this will do fine.

Kevin meets me at my house with the material, and we go into the den to go through it. Tara sits with me on the couch, and Reggie sits at Kevin’s feet under the desk. I have taken to calling the dog Reggie instead of Yogi, which reflects my confidence that Karen Evans was telling the truth.

A couple of the tabloids around the time of the murder have pictures of the dog, and the distinctive cut marks are very much in evidence. There is much less white in his face, which goldens accumulate as they get older, but the dog certainly looks like the one snuggling against Kevin’s leg.

The newspaper stories at the time were informative but not terribly lengthy. This was not a murder that captured the public consciousness as a select few do. Ironically, the facts as stated were somewhat similar to the Scott Peterson case, yet that one became a media obsession, while this one stayed basically under the radar.

Richard Evans had met Stacy Harriman almost a year before the fateful night. She had just arrived on the East Coast from her Minnesota home, though there is no mention about why she had moved. At the time of her death, she and Richard had been engaged and living together for six months.

Most of the neighbors, when questioned by the local newspaper reporters, did not have any knowledge of problems between the couple. Of course, the most collectively oblivious group of people in the world are neighbors. “Gee… I had no idea he was a serial killer. He was always so quiet… All I ever heard from his house was the chain saw…”

One neighbor did testify that Stacy had confided in her that she and Richard were having some problems and that she was a little worried about his temper. It was damaging testimony, but not the evidence that carried the day for the prosecution.

The transcript of the trial provides little help. Evans was competently defended; his lawyer was simply up against too much evidence. He had no way to explain away Evans’s suicide attempt, the bloodstains, or Stacy Harriman’s body washing up on shore.

The prosecutor did not spend too much time talking about Reggie except in his opening and closing arguments, when he used him to portray Evans as particularly heartless. The point was clear: No matter what might have been the cause of the violence between Evans and his fiancée, the dog was certainly an innocent. Killing the dog, he pointed out, was gratuitous and indicative of the callous nature of the defendant.

Once we finish going through all the documents, we spend some time discussing what we’ve learned and where we are. The only thing that is in any way unusual is the fact that Reggie is very much alive, despite the certainty of Lieutenant Siegle that he could not have swum to shore. If she is wrong in that assessment, or if this dog and Evans’s dog are not one and the same, then Evans has absolutely nothing going for him.

Looking at this from the other side presents a bunch of questions that we are nowhere near ready to answer. If Evans is not guilty, why try to commit suicide? And who murdered Stacy? If it was somehow an elaborate scam to fake her own death, she didn’t do that great a job, since she wound up dying.

We don’t have Evans’s answer to any of these questions, since he did not testify at trial in his own defense. It was probably a wise decision.

So for now all we have is Reggie and the absolute impossibility, at least in my mind, that a dog lover could have thrown him into the ocean.

I find myself staring at Reggie until I realize that Kevin is staring at me as I do so. “So what do you think?” I ask.

Kevin smiles. “It doesn’t matter what I think. You’re going to keep going after this.”

“Why is that?” I ask.

“Because of the dog.”

“But I want to know what you think.”

“I think there’s nothing here, Andy. It’s as airtight as you’re going to find. But I don’t see anything wrong with pursuing it a little further. What the hell else do we have to do?”

“That’s a good point. I’ll call Karen Evans.”

“To tell her the good news?”

I nod. “And to tell her I want to talk to her brother.”

* * * * *

PRISONS AND HOSPITALS feel the same to me.

When I say “hospitals,” I’m not talking about the maternity ward, the tonsillectomy section, or even the emergency room. I’m talking about the cancer ward or the intensive care unit, the places where hope is scarce and resignation and sadness are for the most part the order of the day.

That same feeling exists in every prison I’ve ever visited; it’s a dreary world in which there is a tangible, ever-present feeling of life ebbing away. The surroundings, the people, the conversations are all etched in shades of gray, as if living in a black-and-white movie.

I am therefore not looking at all forward to this morning’s visit to Rahway State Prison. Not too much good can come out of it. I’ll likely determine that I can’t or don’t want to help Richard Evans, in which case I’ll be delivering crushing news to Karen. Or I’ll sink deeper into the quicksand that is sure to be this case, and I’ll spend six months of frustration futilely trying to reunite Reggie with his owner.

I pick up Karen at her house on Morlot Avenue in Fair Lawn, and if she shares my pessimism and dread, she’s hiding it really well. She is waiting for me at the curb and just about jumps into the car; if the window were open I don’t think she’d bother opening the door.

I try to start a normal conversation with Karen, asking her what she does for a living.

“I design dresses,” she says. “Then I make them myself and sell them to stores.”

“That’s great,” I say. “Which stores?”

She seems uncomfortable with the conversation. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather talk about Richard.”

“You don’t like to talk about yourself?”

“There isn’t any myself,” she says. “There hasn’t been one for five years… ever since they put Richard in that cage.”

“You think it helps him to deprive yourself of a life?”

“I checked you out a lot,” she says. “I know you defended your girlfriend, Laurie, when she was on trial for murder. What if you had lost? You think you’d have much of a life right now?”

Point to Karen, fifteen-love. If Laurie were in prison, my life would be a miserable, unbearable wreck. “We won because she was innocent, and we were able to demonstrate it.”

“And you’re going to do it again.” She smiles. “So can we talk about Richard?”

“If that’s what you want. But right now I know very little.”

“I know… That’s cool,” she says. “I spoke to Richard yesterday. I didn’t tell him anything about you. He thinks I’m coming to visit like I always do.”

“Why?” I ask.

“I want him to be surprised. Boy, is he going to be surprised.”

“Karen, these things are by definition long shots.”

“But they happen, right? Didn’t it happen with you and Willie Miller?”

She certainly has “checked me out” and is aware that I successfully got Willie a new trial and an acquittal after he spent seven years on death row for a murder he did not commit. “They happen rarely, but far more often nothing can be done.”

“I believe in you,” she says. “And I believe in Richard. This is gonna happen.”

There’s nothing for me to say to that, so I keep my mouth shut and drive. I’m not going to be able to dampen her optimism now, and I’d rather try and borrow some. It could even make the next couple of hours more bearable.

We arrive at the prison and go through the rather lengthy process of signing in and being searched. The reception area guards all know Karen; they greet each other easily and with smiles. She’s obviously been here a lot, and she brings an enthusiasm and energy that is much needed in here, and probably much appreciated as well.

We finally make it into the visitors’ room, which is like every visitors’ room in every prison movie ever made. We sit in chairs alongside other visitors, facing a glass barrier that looks into the prisoners’ side. Prisoners are brought in once their visitors are seated, and conversations take place through phones on the wall. In our case there’s only one phone on the visitor side, so we’ll have to take turns.

Richard comes out, and it’s no surprise that he looks considerably older than the pictures I have seen of him. They were taken five years ago, but those five years were spent in prison. Prison aging is at least two to one.

Richard brightens considerably when he sees Karen, then looks surprised when he realizes she is not alone. He picks up his phone and Karen does the same. I can’t hear Richard, but I can tell that he says how great it is to see her. Then he says, “Who’s that?” referring to me.

“His name is Andy Carpenter,” she says. “He’s a famous lawyer who’s going to help you.” It’s exactly what I didn’t want her to say, but I’m not calling the shots here.

In response to something Richard says that I can’t make out, Karen says, “I will, but I want to show you something first. Wait’ll you see this; you’re not going to believe it.”

She opens her purse and takes out the picture of Reggie, but for the moment holding it facedown so that he can’t see it. “Are you ready?” she asks.

He nods, and she holds the picture up to the window. “He’s alive,” she says. “I swear, he’s alive.”

You can fill an entire library with what I don’t know about human emotion, so I can’t begin to accurately read the look on Richard’s face. It seems to be some combination of pain and joy and hope and bewilderment that form the most amazingly intense expression I’ve ever seen on anyone.

Within five seconds Richard is crying, bawling unashamedly, and Karen joins in. Soon they’re both laughing and crying, and I feel like an intruder. Unfortunately, Karen hands the intruder the phone.

“Richard, I’m Andy Carpenter,” I say, not exactly the most enlightening thing I could have come up with. He wants to know what the hell is going on, and here I am telling him the one thing he already knows.

He composes himself and says, “Please tell me what this is all about.”

I nod. “I rescued a dog… the dog in this picture. Karen found out about it and came to see me. She said it’s Reggie… your dog.”

He closes his eyes for a moment and then nods. “It is; I’m sure of it.”

“Is there any way you can prove it?” I ask.

“To who?”

“To me, so that I can prove it to the authorities,” I say. “At this point I need to be completely positive.”

“And then what?” he asks.

“Then I’ll try and help you. If you want me to.”

“Can you bring Reggie here?”

I think about this for a few moments, though the possibility has occurred to me before. “I’m not sure if I could arrange it,” I say. “But even if I could, it would take a while.”

“Then how can I prove it to you?” he says, exasperation in his voice. “Karen knows him… She can tell you.”

I nod. “She has.”

“Wait a minute,” he says. “Let me talk to Karen for a second.”

I hand Karen the phone, and Richard talks to her briefly. Whatever he says is enough to make her light up. “I forgot about that! Will he do it for me?”

Richard answers her, nodding his head as he does so. She then hands the phone back to me, and Richard says, “Karen should be able to prove it. Then what happens?”

“Then you hire me, if that’s what you want. What about the lawyer who handled your trial-”

He interrupts. “Forget about him.”

“I read the transcript,” I say. “He did not do a bad job.”

He frowns. “I’m here, aren’t I?” It’s a point that’s hard to counter.

“Okay. After that, I come back here and interview you, and I learn everything about your case. Then we figure out how to proceed, if we proceed.”

“You think we have a chance?” he asks.

It’s important that I be straight with him. “Right now we have absolutely nothing. Zero. But if you’re innocent, then it means there’s something out there to be discovered. Which is what we have to do.”

“I’m innocent,” he says; then he smiles. “Everyone in here is.”

A sense of humor in his situation is a good sign, and he’s going to need it. I tell him that he’ll have to sign a retainer hiring me as his attorney, with the disclaimer that it could be a short-term hire, depending on what I find out.

“I don’t have much money to pay you,” he says.

“Let’s not focus on that now.”

“Karen got some money from the sale of the house. We never got the boat back, but the cabin is worth something, and-”

“We can worry about that some other time, or never,” I say, getting up to leave. “I’ll be back to talk to you soon.”

“The sooner the better.”

Karen asks me to take her back to my house so she can prove to me that Reggie is, in fact, Richard’s dog. She doesn’t want to tell me exactly how she is going to do that, and I don’t press her. I’ve got other things to think about.

I learned a long time ago that I can’t judge a person’s guilt or innocence based on a first-or even tenth- impression. I’ve got a fairly well developed bullshit detector, but it’s far from foolproof, and my conversation with Richard Evans wasn’t nearly long enough or substantive enough.

But the truth is that I liked him and that I may have done him a disservice by showing up this way. He would have to be super-human not to be feeling a surge of hope, and at this point any confidence would by definition be overconfidence. I could have-should have-learned much more about the case before springing it on him. That way, if I thought it was not worth pursuing, he wouldn’t have the letdown he surely will have.

“How well did you know Stacy Harriman?” I ask.

“Pretty well,” Karen says. “She and Richard only were together for less than a year, but I saw them a lot. Richard really loved her.”

“What do you know about her background?”

“She was from Montana, or Minnesota, or something. She didn’t talk about it much, and she didn’t have any family. Her parents died in a car accident when she was in high school, so I guess there wasn’t much to keep her there.”

“What did she do?” I ask.

“She lived with Richard.”

“I mean for a living.”

“She lived with Richard,” she repeats, and I think I detect some annoyance or bitterness or something.

“And you’re not aware of any problems between them?” I ask.

“No,” she says, a little too quickly.

“Karen, I’m going to try and learn everything I can about what happened to Richard and Stacy. It is the only way I have any chance of accomplishing anything. If you know something, anything, that you don’t share with me, you’re hurting your brother.”

“I don’t know anything,” she says. “They just didn’t seem to fit together.”

“How so?”

“Richard is a ‘what you see is what you get’ kind of person. He always lets people inside, sometimes before he should. But that is just his way.”

“And Stacy?” I ask.

Karen shrugs. “I couldn’t read her. It’s like she had a wall up. I mean, she was friendly and pleasant, and she seemed to care about Richard, but-”

“But something didn’t fit,” I say.

She nods. “Right. I kept waiting for a phone call saying they were splitting up. They were engaged, but I just had a feeling they wouldn’t be together long-term.” She shakes her head sadly. “But I sure never figured it would end this way.”

If there’s one common denominator among everybody that a defense attorney meets in the course of handling a murder case, it’s that no one “figured it would end this way.” But it always does.

“Richard mentioned a house, a boat, and a cabin. Did he have a lot of money back then?”

“No. Our parents left the house and cabin to us; they weren’t worth that much.”

“Where were they?”

“The house was in Hawthorne; we sold that to pay for his defense. The cabin is in upstate New York, near Monticello. We kept it, but I never go there.”

“Why not?”

“I’m waiting for Richard to go with me,” she says.

“And the boat?” I ask.

“Richard bought that. It was his favorite thing in the world… except for Reggie.”

Karen asks if I’ll stop and get a pizza on the way home, the type of request that I basically will grant 100 percent of the time. She orders it with thick crust; it’s not my favorite, but pizza is pizza.

Tara and Reggie are there to greet us when we arrive home. I think Tara is enjoying the company, though she would never admit it. She’s used the situation to extract extra biscuits out of me, but I’m still grateful that she’s being a good sport.

We eat the pizza, and I notice that Karen does not eat the crust, instead tearing pieces off and putting them to the side. It surprises me because I always do the same, since Tara loves the crusts. She tells me that she’s saving her pieces for Reggie, but asks if we can delay giving out these baked treats for a few minutes.

Karen lets me know that she is about to prove Richard’s ownership of Reggie. She seems nervous about it and prefaces it with a disclaimer that what she is about to get him to do, he has only done for Richard. Karen expresses the hope I won’t read any possible failure as evidence that she and Richard are wrong.

She grabs the empty pizza box and takes Reggie out the front door, and then comes back in without him or the box, closing the door behind her. She leads me over to a window from where we can see him sitting patiently on the porch, just outside the door.

Suddenly, Karen loudly calls out, “Pizza dog’s here!”

As I watch, Reggie hears this as well, and he stands on his back legs, rocking forward to the door. He puts his paw up and rings the doorbell, then goes back to all fours. He picks up the pizza box in his teeth and waits patiently for the door to open. Karen laughs with delight that Reggie remembered his cue. She lets him back in, and then he and Tara dine on the crusts.

It’s a good trick-not brilliant, but it totally supports Karen and Richard’s claim. Reggie is Richard’s dog, I have no doubt about that.

Now it’s time to try to reunite them.

* * * * *

THE WAY THIS works is, I take new evidence to a judge, and if we convince him, he then orders a hearing to be held on whether Richard should get a new trial. It’s generally an orderly process, though in this case it’s complicated by the fact that we have no new evidence.

In addition to all the other obstacles we face, there is the additional hurdle presented by the case being five years old. It’s not an eternity, but neither will it be fresh in the minds of the people we are going to have to talk with. We are new to the case, but for everyone else it’s old news.

There’s a whole section of New Jersey that has an identity crisis; it’s not sure whether it’s a suburb of New York or of Philadelphia. It occupies the area on the way to the shore and basically has little reason for being, other than to provide housing for long-range commuters.

The houses are pleasant enough, though indistinguishable from each other. Block after block is the same; it’s suburbia run amok. I feel as if I am trapped in summer reruns of The Truman Show.

I am venturing out here today to meet Richard Evans’s former lawyer, Lawrence Koppell. His office is in Matawan, a community that seems to fit the dictionary definition of the word “sprawling.”

Koppell’s office is in a two-story building that, according to the directory, is inhabited exclusively by lawyers. His office is in suite 206, though that doesn’t distinguish him in any fashion, as all the offices are labeled suites.

I enter the small reception area, which contains a desk, two chairs, and an absolutely beautiful young woman-maybe twenty-five, with black, curly hair and a wide, perfect smile. She finishes typing something with incredible speed, then turns and welcomes me, offering me my choice of coffee, tea, a soft drink, or water.

This is a woman with whom Edna has absolutely nothing in common.

“Do you do crossword puzzles?” I ask, just to make sure.

She shakes her head while maintaining the smile. “No, I really don’t have the time. Any free time I have, I go surfing or hiking or skiing-in the winter, of course.”

“Of course,” I say, trying to picture Edna on a surfboard. Once I successfully picture it, I wish I hadn’t tried.

She leads me into Koppell’s office, which isn’t that much larger than hers. He is on the phone but signals for me to sit down and then holds up one finger, which I take to mean he’ll be off the phone in a moment.

“I’m sure he is a good boy, Mr. Givens,” he says into the phone. “But the problem, as I told you, is that in the eyes of the law he is not a boy. He became a man two weeks ago, on his eighteenth birthday. Which makes the marijuana possession more difficult to deal with.”

He listens for a moment and then says, “I didn’t say impossible; I said difficult.”

He concludes by setting a date for the man to come in with his son so they can discuss his legal options. It is a case that will be boring and of very little consequence, and I’m sure Koppell must handle a hundred of them every year.

I don’t, which makes me one lucky lawyer.

Once he’s off the phone, Koppell turns to me and says, “So I hear I’m out of a job.” Then he smiles and says, “Not that it’s been a full-time job.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

“You’re representing Richard Evans.”

“He told you that?” I’m surprised; prison inmates don’t have that much access to outside communication, and I don’t know why he would have bothered to call Koppell.

“No, I heard about it on the radio coming in today. They said that you had registered with the court as his lawyer, and that you would likely be seeking a new trial.”

It’s amazing that this could be considered news. All I did was register, and the reporter must have assumed I would be seeking a new trial, since what other purpose could there be for me taking him on as a client? The media had barely covered the murder and the trial, and a lawyer change qualifies as a news event? I shake my head. “Must be a slow news day.”

“Hey, man, you’re a star. Tom Cruise gets headlines when he changes breakfast cereals.”

I make a mental note to mention to Laurie that I’ve been compared to Tom Cruise, even if it’s by a middle-aged, overweight male lawyer.

“Anyway, yes, Richard has hired me. I’m sorry you had to hear it on the radio.”

He shrugs. “No problem. You didn’t come all the way down here to tell me that, did you?”

“No, I wanted to talk to you about the case and to get access to your files.”

“They’ll be in storage, but I’ll have them sent here, and then I’ll send them on to you.”

“Thanks. Did you see anything on television about the case I handled recently? Where I defended the dog?”

He smiles. “I thought that was great. I’m thinking of hanging around the local shelter to get clients.”

“That was Richard Evans’s dog,” I say.

His surprise is obvious. “Are you serious?”

I nod. “There’s no doubt about it.”

He thinks for a moment. “Then that changes a lot. If I remember correctly, two witnesses saw the dog with Evans when he boarded the boat.”

“That’s the kind of information I need.”

“It’ll all be in the files,” he says. “Damn, how the hell could that dog be alive?”

“That’s what I need to find out. But things apparently did not happen on that boat the way the prosecution claimed.”

“I’m going to be straight with you,” he says. “There was nothing, not a shred, that pointed to Richard’s innocence. I worked my ass off trying to find something.”

“You think there was anything there to find?” I ask.

“I did when it started, but I didn’t by the end.”

“What about the forensics?” I ask.

He shrugs. “They seemed solid, but we didn’t have much money to hire experts. That’s an area you could pursue.” He pauses, then shakes his head in amazement. “Damn, that dog is really alive?”

“Definitely.”

“You know, I never could figure out why he killed the dog. I mean, everybody said how much he loved it, and what would have been the harm in letting it live? What the hell could he have been afraid of, that it would be an eyewitness? It just didn’t make any sense.”

I have been wrestling with this from the beginning; it’s one of the major reasons I took the case. If Richard was planning to kill his fiancée, he would have left Reggie at home. That’s what I would have done if I were a murderer. And suicidal. And engaged. And had a boat.

Koppell promises to get the files to me as soon as he has them, and I thank him and leave. I make some wrong turns on the way out, and I feel trapped in a suburban maze. It takes me a half hour to reach the Garden State Parkway and the safety of a huge traffic jam.

I finally make it back home, though I’m there only long enough to get Reggie and put him in the car. We drive to the Teaneck office of Dr. Erin Ruff, as perfect a name for a veterinarian as you’re going to find.

Karen Evans had told me that Dr. Ruff used to be Reggie’s vet, and when I made an appointment, I explained that I was Richard’s lawyer and I wanted to talk about the case. I asked her to have Reggie’s medical records available, but I did not mention that Reggie might be alive.

When I get to Dr. Ruff’s office, the receptionist is properly surprised when I have a dog with me, since I had said I was just coming in to talk. She asks his name, and I say, “Yogi.”

“And what are we seeing Yogi for today?” she asks.

“Just a checkup.”

I’m ushered into a small room to wait for the doctor. It’s pretty much like every small doctor’s room I’ve ever been in, though this time I get to keep my pants on.

In about five minutes, the door opens and Dr. Ruff comes in, a smile on her face and a folder in her left hand. She reaches out her right hand to shake mine, when she sees Reggie.

“Oh, my God,” she says. She looks as if she’d seen a ghost, and in a way she has. “That can’t be…”

“That’s what I’m here to find out.”

She’s not getting it. “Those cut marks… He’s supposed to be dead.”

I nod. “And someday he will be, but not yet.”

I explain that the reason we are here is to find out if there is anything in Reggie’s five-year-old records that would help identify him today.

“Is he the dog who was on the news the other day? The one you went to court about?”

“Yes. He’s had his fifteen minutes of fame, but if he’s Richard Evans’s dog, he’s going to get another dose.”

Dr. Ruff goes over and pets Reggie, who wags his tail in appreciation. She gently lifts his head and looks to see if the marks are also under his chin, which, of course, they are. “It’s as I remember it,” she says.

I ask her if there are other factors she can point to that can help identify him, and she starts to look through his records. “We’re in luck,” she says. “When Richard rescued him, he had three bad teeth, probably from chewing on rocks. I extracted them.”

She walks over to Reggie and opens his mouth. He obliges, probably because he thinks she’ll fill that mouth with a biscuit. She looks into the mouth, then looks at the records again, then back in his mouth.

“This is Reggie,” she says. “There’s another thing I want to check-with an X-ray-but this is him.”

“Are you sure?”

“Well, it’s not DNA, but there’s no doubt in my mind. The cut marks, the same three teeth missing… The coincidence would be overwhelming. But Reggie had a broken leg, and a surgeon put a metal plate in it. If that’s in the X-ray, then you can be absolutely certain.”

She takes Reggie to be x-rayed and brings him back about fifteen minutes later. “It’s there,” she says. “Between the cut marks, the teeth, and the X-ray, it’s one hundred percent.”

“You’d testify to that?”

“With pleasure.”

She still has a bunch of questions about how Reggie survived whatever his ordeal had been, but I don’t have the answers. Not now. Maybe not ever.

* * * * *

I PLACE A call to Sam Willis as soon as I get home.

Sam is my accountant, a role that took on an increased importance when I inherited my money. He’s also a computer hacking genius, able to get pretty much any information at any time from anywhere. He sometimes crosses the cyber-line between legal and illegal information gathering, and I once helped him when he was caught doing so.

Sam has become a key investigator for me, using his computer prowess to get me answers that I might never be able to get on my own. It is in that role that I’m calling on him now; I need more answers than I have questions.

I call him on his cell phone, since that is the only phone he owns and uses. He cannot believe that I still use a landline in my home and office, likening it to someone tooling around Paterson in a horse and buggy. Wireless is everything, according to Sam, but the truth is, I’m barely starting to get comfortable with cordless.

I can hear a loud public address announcer as Sam is talking, and he explains that he’s at Logan Airport in Boston. He’s a Red Sox fanatic, a rarity in the New York area, and he goes up there about five times a year to see games. This time he’s been there for almost a week.

His flight lands in an hour and a half, and I tell him that I’ll pick him up at the airport because I want to talk to him about a job.

“On a case?” he asks, hopefully, since he loves this kind of investigatory work.

“On a case.”

For some reason, I’ve always been a person who picks other people up at airports. I know that when I land I like someone to be there, even if it’s just a driver. It’s depressing to arrive and see all these people holding up signs with names on them, and none says “Carpenter.” It makes me feel as if I have my own sign on my forehead-“Loser.”

Sam flies into Newark rather than LaGuardia, which is where most Boston flights arrive. I share Sam’s dislike for LaGuardia; it’s tiny and old and so close to the city it feels as though the plane were landing on East Eighty-fourth Street. Newark is far more accessible and feels like a real airport.

Newark is far more accessible and feels like a real airport.

Sam is outside and in my car within five minutes of landing, because he did not check a bag. Sam wouldn’t check a bag if he were going away for six months; he doesn’t think it’s something a real man should do.

Sam has some mental issues.

As Sam gets in the car, I realize I haven’t prepared for the song talking game that dominates our relationship. The trick is to work song lyrics smoothly into the conversation, and Sam has so outdistanced me in his ability to do this that he has taken to adjusting the rules so he won’t be bored. Now he will sometimes do movie dialogue instead of song lyrics, and I never know which it’s going to be. Unfortunately, I have not prepared for either.

The good news is that Sam is so interested in finding out about the upcoming investigation that song or movie talking doesn’t seem to be on his mind.

I brief him on what I know, and “brief” is the proper word, since I know very little. “For now I want you to focus on the victim, Stacy Harriman,” I say. “There is very little about her in the record.”

“You know where she’s from, age, that kind of thing?” he asks.

“Some. What I don’t have I’ll get.”

“Is this a rush?”

I nod. “Evans sits in jail until we can get him out. So it’s a rush.”

“I’ll get right on it,” he says.

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

He shrugs that off. “No problem. Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me.”

He’s doing Brando from The Godfather. It’s a movie I know very well, so there’s a chance I can compete, but right now my mind is a blank. “Sam, I want you to be careful, okay?” I say this because two people in my life have died because of material they have uncovered in this kind of investigation. One of the victims was Sam’s former assistant.

“Right,” Sam says, shrugging off the warning.

“I mean it, Sam. You’ve got to take this stuff more seriously. We could be dealing with dangerous people.”

He looks wounded. “What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you’d come to me in friendship, then these people would be suffering this very day. And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, they would become my enemies. And they would fear you.”

He is incorrigible. “Thank you, Godfather,” I say. “You want to work out of my office?”

He frowns. “You must be kidding. On your computer? It would take me a year.”

“I can set up whatever system you want,” I say.

He shakes his head. “No, I’ll work at home… I’ve got wireless and a cable modem.” Then all of a sudden he’s yelling, “At my home! Where my wife sleeps! Where my children come to play with their toys!”

“Sam, can we finish this before you start making me offers I can’t refuse?”

“Sure. What else is there?”

I’m about to answer when I hear a loud crashing noise and then feel a sudden rush of warm air.

“Holy shit!” Sam screams, and I realize that there is no longer a side window; it has just seemed to disappear. “Andy! To your left!”

I look over and see a car alongside us, with two men in the front seat. The man closest to us, not the driver, is pointing a gun at my head. He looks to be around forty, heavyset and very serious-looking. In an instant the thought flashes in my mind that he looks like a man on a mission, not a joyride. There have been some random highway shootings in the past few years, but I instinctively feel that this is not one of them.

I duck and hit the brakes just as I hear a loud noise, probably another shot. It doesn’t seem to hit anything in the car, but I can take only momentary comfort in this. My fear-induced desire is to burrow under the seat, but I realize that my car isn’t equipped with autopilot, and if I don’t sit up and look at the road, we’re in deep trouble.

I sit up and get the car out of a mini skid, staying on the road. The car containing the shooter is now ahead of us, and I start to think how I can get over to the side and off the road.

Sam has other ideas. “Get behind them! Get behind them!”

“You want me to get closer to people that are shooting at us? Why would I do that?”

“Come on, Andy, you can’t just let them get away! Get behind them and put your brights on! We’ve got to get their license number.”

Sam seems as if he knows what he’s doing, and since I know that I don’t, I do as he says, getting in behind the other car and putting the brights on. I get close behind, and then they speed up. There is no sign that they will or can shoot at us from this position. My heart is pounding so loudly that I can’t hear myself think, although I’m too scared to think.

“We’re on the New Jersey Turnpike, heading north about a mile past the Newark Airport exit. Two men in a black Acura have just fired a handgun at us and hit our car. Their license plate number is VSE 621.” Sam is talking into his cell phone, apparently having called 911. “Yes, that’s right. In the left lane, going approximately seventy-five miles per hour. Yes, that’s right.”

“What did they say?” I ask, when he stops talking. He still has the cell phone to his ear.

“They want me to hold on.”

“But what did they say?”

“They said to hold on.”

I’m not getting anywhere with this line of questioning, so I concentrate on driving. I’m now doing almost eighty and they’re pulling away. Since I don’t want to get killed by either a bullet or a crash, I don’t speed up any more.

Moments later, we hear the sound of sirens, and police cars with flashing lights go flying by us as if we are standing still. “Holy shit, will you look at that!” Sam marvels.

It isn’t long before the car we’re chasing and the police cars are all out of sight, but I keep driving because I don’t know what else to do. Sam has lost his cell phone connection with 911, so we’re pretty much in the dark.

“Man, that was amazing!” Sam says. He seems invigorated; this is a side of him I haven’t seen before, and he certainly does not seem shaken by the fact that a window inches from his face was shot out. Am I the only coward in America?

We drive for a few more miles, turning on the radio to hear if anything is being said about the incident. I’m aware that I need to report this in person to the police, but my preference is to drive to the Paterson Police Department and tell my story to Pete Stanton.

“What’s that?” Sam asks, and when I look ahead I see what he is talking about. There’s a large glow, far ahead and off to the right, which turns out to be the flashing lights of at least a dozen police cars. As we approach, there is no doubt that a car has been demolished, and another car is also damaged at the side of the road. The police are surrounding the smashed vehicle, which I believe is the one that had contained the shooters, but not seeming to take any action.

Two ambulances pull up as well, and paramedics jump out. If there is anyone in the car, it will be up to the paramedics to help them. Good luck; they haven’t invented the paramedics who could help people in that car. It looks like a metallic quesadilla.

I pull over, resigned to speaking to the cops on the scene rather than to Pete. I park a couple of hundred yards away and turn off the car.

“We getting out?” Sam asks.

I nod. “We’re getting out. Leave your carry-on and take the cannolis.”

* * * * *

WE GET AS close as we can to the crash scene, which isn’t very close at all. The police have set up a perimeter at least a hundred yards away and are in the process of closing all but the left lane of the highway to traffic. This is going to be a long night for drivers heading north to the city.

Sam and I approach one of the officers in charge of keeping people away. “That’s as far as you can go,” he says. “Nothing to see here.”

“We’re the ones who made the call to 911,” I say. “They shot out a window in our car.”

“Who did?” the officer asks. He probably is not even aware that there was a prior incident on the road; to him this must just be a crash scene.

“The two guys in that car,” I say. “They shot at us, we called it in, and they must have crashed in the pursuit.”

The officer considers this a moment. “Stay right here,” he says, and then goes toward the crash scene to check with his superiors. A few moments later he comes back and says, “Follow me.”

We do so, and as we get close to the crash, it looks as if the car containing the shooters smashed into a car parked along the side of the highway. It then flipped over, perhaps more than once, and came to rest as a complete wreck.

There is no doubt in my mind that no one in that car could have survived. The police have already set up a trailer, where they will spend the night as they investigate what they will consider a crime scene.

The officer takes us toward the trailer, and just before we get there, I whisper to Sam, “Do not say anything about the Evans case.”

He nods. “Gotcha.” Then, “This is so cool.”

“Sam, you might want to get some professional mental help. On an urgent basis.”

“You mean see a shrink?”

“No, I mean as an inpatient. A locked-in patient.”

We are led inside the trailer, and I can’t stifle a groan when I see that the officer in charge is Captain Dessens of the New Jersey State Police. I have had a couple of run-ins with Dessens on previous cases, and it would be accurate to say that we can’t stand each other.

Dessens looks up, sees me, and returns the groan. “What the hell are you doing here?” He looks around. “Who let this clown in?”

The officer who brought us in says, “These guys are the ones I told you about.”

Dessens shakes his head. “Well, so much for motive.”

The officer standing next to him says, “What do you mean?”

“That’s Andy Carpenter, the lawyer. I don’t know anybody who wouldn’t want to take a shot at him.”

“Is the shooter dead?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll still find a way to screw up the arrest.”

Dessens starts an angry response and then seems to think better of it. He motions for us to sit down, then questions us on the details of what happened. Sam lets me do most of the talking; he just seems happy and content to be a part of it.

After we’ve given our statements, Dessens asks if I think the shooting was random or if I might have an idea who could be after me.

“Everybody loves me,” I say.

Sam nods. “Me, too.”

Dessens asks a few more questions and then tells us that they will want to check out my car and that an officer will drive us home.

“Did you ID the dead guys?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer and instead calls out to one of the other officers, asking him to take us outside. He’s apparently not into sharing.

It’s not until I get home and have a glass of wine that I really think about what just happened. Word got out today that I was taking Richard Evans’s case, and somebody tried to kill me tonight.

I don’t believe in coincidences, and it wouldn’t be productive to start now. I have to believe that the shooting is connected to Evans, even though I would much rather not. If somebody could react this quickly and this violently to my simply taking on Evans as a client, then he’s got some very determined and deadly enemies.

Which means I now have them as well.

Laurie calls just as I’m about to get into bed, and I tell her the entire story. She believes in coincidences even less than I do, and I can hear the worry in her voice. Laurie is one of the toughest people I know, but she’s well aware that toughness is a trait she and I don’t share.

She’s frustrated that she can’t get away from her job to come back east until the end of the month, and cautions me to be extra careful. She also has one other piece of advice, the one I expected.

“Get Marcus.”

* * * * *

MARCUS CLARK IS a terrific investigator, but that is not what initially comes to mind when one thinks of him. Focusing on his investigating talents first would be like somebody asking for your view of Pamela Anderson, only to have you respond that you hear she’s a pretty good bowler. It may or may not be true, but it’s not “top of mind.”

Marcus is the scariest person I have ever seen, and there is no one in second place. He is cast in bronze iron, impervious to fear or pain, and possesses a stare that makes me want to carry around a piece of kryptonite, just in case.

He has been one of my key investigators since even before Laurie went to Wisconsin, and has displayed an uncanny knack for getting people to reveal information. They confide in him, operating under the assumption that they can talk or die. I, for example, would tell Marcus whatever he wanted to know, whenever he wanted to know it. And I would thank him for the opportunity.

Because I seem to have an involuntary knack for pissing off dangerous people, I sometimes employ Marcus as a protector, a bodyguard, rather than an investigator. That’s why I’ve called him into the office this morning. I’ll probably have a need for him to gather information at some point, but right now that takes a backseat to my need to stay alive.

I stop on the way in to drop my car off so that they can replace the window that’s been shot out. They drive me to my office and promise to bring me the repaired car before the day is out.

I’ve had Kevin come in for this meeting as well. When I meet with Marcus, I like as many other people in the room as possible. It makes me feel safer, although if Marcus wanted to do me harm, the Third Infantry on their best day couldn’t help me.

All I really need to tell Marcus is that some people tried to shoot me and that for whatever reason, it’s very possible that I am a target. His job is to keep me safe and alive, pure and simple. But because I have respect for Marcus’s investigative skills, and because I think he should have as much information as possible about whom he might be dealing with, I tell him all I know about the Richard Evans case.

My recitation of the facts takes about ten minutes, and Marcus is either silently attentive or asleep the entire time. His eyes are open, but that doesn’t really mean anything one way or the other. Kevin sits as far away from Marcus as is possible while remaining in the same room.

When I’m finished, I wait for him to comment, and after twenty long seconds it’s obvious that is not going to happen. I prompt him with “So that’s it. Any questions?”

“Unhh,” says Marcus. Marcus is a man of very few words, most of which are not actually words.

“Will you need anything from me?” I ask.

“Unhh.”

“Can you get started right away?”

“Yunhh.”

I don’t quite know how to end this, so I turn to Kevin. “Kev, you got anything you want to add?”

He shakes his head a little too quickly. “Not me. Not a thing. Nope.”

Marcus gets up to leave, without my asking him how he will perform his protective functions. I’ve learned long ago that he will be there if I need him, and I won’t see him if I don’t. It’s comforting to me, though I’ll certainly miss our little chitchats.

As he reaches the door, it opens from the other side, and Karen Evans is standing there. She is one of the most talkative people I know, but the sight of Marcus stuns her into silence. Her eyes widen, and her mouth opens, but nothing comes out.

“Oh, my God…,” she says, once Marcus has left. “Is he on our side?”

I nod. “He is.”

She breaks into a wide smile and smacks her hands together, generating more of her infectious enthusiasm. “This is gonna be great!”

I had not asked Karen to come to the office, and I’m not a big fan of unannounced visits. “What are you doing here, Karen?”

“I don’t know… I’m just real nervous, and excited… and I thought I could hang around and help. You know, run errands, get coffee… I spoke to Edna and she was okay with it.”

“Edna was willing to give up running errands and making coffee? You must be quite the persuader.”

I tell her that she can hang around now but that she should call before coming by in the future. I understand her excitement, and as a person who knows her brother and knew his fiancée, she can be helpful. However, I do not instantly share all information with my clients, and I can’t have her rushing to him with constant updates.

I turn on the television to follow press reports about the shooting on the highway last night, and it’s being treated as a pretty big story. They’re calling it a random shooting, though the fact that I was one of the intended victims is duly noted, as is my recent representation of Richard Evans.

“You got shot at?” Karen asks, but I don’t bother answering, since she’s just learned the answer to her question from the television.

Instead I pick up the phone and call Pete Stanton in his office. Even though the state police are handling the shooting case, I’m hoping that Pete can use his police contacts to find out what he can about the dead shooters.

When Pete hears that it’s me calling, he says, “Let me guess… You need something.”

“That’s amazing… How could you possibly have known that?”

“Well, we’re already meeting at Charlie’s tonight, so you’re not just calling to say hello. And the last one hundred and forty-seven times you’ve called me in my office it’s because you needed something.”

“Do you have any idea how much you’ve just hurt me?” I ask. “I’ve just been through a traumatic experience, actually a near-death experience, and I don’t think I’ve ever been so emotionally vulnerable.”

He’s unmoved. “Can we get to it already?”

“Well, you know I was shot at last night.”

“That’s the good news,” he says. “The bad news is, they missed.” Then, “I’ve already put in a couple of calls.”

“What does that mean?”

“To find out what I can about the shooters,” he says. “That is what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“You are a goddamned legend, and just for that, I’m buying at Charlie’s tonight.”

“You got that right.”

I send Karen out to get some doughnuts and Necco wafers, with specific instructions to try to find a package of all chocolate Neccos, which are far superior to the multicolored kinds. It’s about time to put her to the test.

I use the time for a quick strategy session with Kevin. As I see it, there are three possibilities behind this case. One is that Richard is guilty and the prosecution’s position was completely correct. While that still may be true, it doesn’t help us to consider it.

The second possibility is that whatever is behind this centers on the murder victim, Stacy Harriman. Among the problems with this is that it doesn’t make much sense that the murderers would kill her and take Reggie off to safety. If their goal was simply to kill Stacy, they would likely have just left Reggie on the boat with Richard. Even if they were somehow dog lovers, to have taken Reggie in the midst of committing the crime seems very difficult to believe.

The third possibility is that Richard was framed solely because of Richard himself. Either he had made an enemy or he knew or had something that could be dangerous to someone else. This seems to be the most fertile ground for us, especially because of his job with the Customs Service, and will first require an in-depth interview with Richard.

Karen comes back with a sack of doughnuts, jelly and cream filled, and three packages of chocolate Neccos, which she holds up triumphantly. I could send Edna out this afternoon, give her until a year from August, and she would not manage such a feat.

“Kid,” I say to Karen, “I think you’ve got a future in this business.”

* * * * *

I STOP AT home to feed and walk Tara and Reggie.

Tara really seems to like having him around, and it makes me far less guilty when I have to spend long hours away from the house. This morning I even saw them playfully tugging at opposite ends of a toy. I’m not sure how Tara will react if I get Richard Evans out of jail, so Reggie can go back to him. Of course, right now that is not exactly an imminent danger.

As we leave the house, Willie Miller pulls up in his car. I feel an instant pang of guilt on seeing him; I have recently been of no help whatsoever in our dog rescue operation. Willie and Sondra have been doing all the work.

I apologize for my uselessness, but Willie characteristically will hear none of it. “Forget it, man. You got another job to do; I don’t. And Sondra and I love it. You know that.”

He has come by to update me on the weekly events, and he does so as he walks with us. Our foundation-or, more accurately, Willie and Sondra-has placed twenty-one dogs in homes this week. We average about fifteen, so this has been a very good week.

“You did good saving Reggie,” he says.

“Thanks.”

“I hear you got shot at the other day.”

“Who told you?” I ask.

“Laurie. She’s worried about you. Getting out of the way of bullets wouldn’t be one of your strong points, you know? I told her I’d look out for you.”

“She knows I have Marcus.”

Willie nods. “And you have me if you need me. Just pick up the damn phone, and I’m there.”

“Thanks, Willie. I will.”

Willie goes off to have dinner with Sondra, and I drop off Tara and Reggie at home. I then head down to Charlie’s to meet Pete and Vince Sanders. Charlie’s is a sports bar restaurant that is truly my home away from home. Everything about it is perfect, from the large-screen TVs to the well-done french fries, to the ice-cold beer.p›

When people successfully make it through a terribly difficult emotional experience, they will sometimes credit their faith, their work, or their family for getting them through. When Laurie and I split up, Charlie’s was my crutch.

Vince and Pete are at our regular table when I arrive. This particular table was chosen because of its proximity to four different TV screens, and it’s large enough to handle the empty plates and beer bottles that often accumulate faster than the waitress can take them away.

We grunt our hellos, and they bring me up to date on the progress of the basketball games. They’ve placed bets that I’ve previously agreed to share, since I did not have time today to pick my own teams. We’re losing three out of four, but each game is in the first quarter. Since it’s the NBA, there is no way to predict how any of them will end up.

Once I’ve ordered my burger and beer, I turn to Pete. “Did you find out anything?”

He nods. “That I did. And you are not going to believe it.”

He’s piqued my interest; for Pete to say something like that means the information is going to be stunning. “Let’s hear it.”

“After you pay the check,” he says.

“Come on, you know damn well I’m gonna pay. You want to hold my credit card?”

He shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m allergic to platinum.”

Vince says, “I’ll hold it.”

“No, you won’t,” I say.

“You think I’m going to steal your identity?”

“That doesn’t worry me, Vince. What scares the shit out of me is, you’ll try and trade identities. Come on, Pete.”

Pete sighs and takes a couple of sheets of paper out of his pocket. He reads from them. “The driver was Antwan Cooper, a small-time hood from the Bronx. The shooter was Archie Durelle, ex-Army, served in the first Gulf war and Afghanistan. Hometown was Albuquerque.”

I’ve never heard of these guys; their names mean nothing to me. “So what’s the big news?” I ask.

“Well, it turns out that Durelle didn’t just serve in Afghanistan. He also died there.”

“What?” I ask, as penetrating and clever a retort as I can muster.

“His chopper went down, and all four guys on board died. He was one of them.”

“There obviously has to be a mistake.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Pete grudgingly agrees to try to find out more about Durelle, but he retaliates for the imposition by ordering the most expensive beer on the menu. It’s a small price to pay, and far smaller than the price I’ll have to pay the bookmaker, since all our bets on the NBA games lose.

I head home and call Laurie before going to sleep. She pumps me with questions about the case, mostly motivated by the close call with the highway shooter. I can hear the relief in her voice when I tell her I’ve hired Marcus.

It feels strange to wake up in the morning and go to the office, but that’s what I do. I get there at nine thirty, and waiting for me are Kevin and the files that Koppell had retrieved from storage. Edna walks in about an hour later, glancing at her watch in surprise at the fact that she’s not the first to arrive.

Kevin and I spend most of the day going through the information. There’s a huge amount to digest, and we’ll be better prepared to gauge the value after we are more familiar with the case in its entirety. There are no exculpatory bombshells, but we didn’t expect any. Koppell was looking for them, and if he’d found one, Richard wouldn’t be in jail.

By late afternoon we are feeling confident enough in our knowledge of the case to set up another interview for tomorrow morning with our client. At least now we know what questions to ask.

* * * * *

THERE IS A noticeable spring in Richard’s step when he is brought into the interview room. Since this is an official attorney’s visit, Kevin and I don’t have to talk to him through the glass in the visitors’ area. We get to talk in this private room, a risk the state is willing to take because Richard is in handcuffs and leg shackles. Should this prove insufficient, two guards are stationed outside the room, probably armed with tactical nuclear weapons.

Despite the fact that our chances for success are remote, Richard’s improved outlook is at least somewhat warranted. For the past five years he has had absolutely no reason to be hopeful; no one was working on his behalf to win his freedom or supporting his cause. Now we’re doing that, and for the first time Richard can believe that things are happening.

I introduce Kevin, and then we get right to it. I start by giving the standard speech about how we can help him only if we know everything, and that he should leave nothing out when answering our questions. Any detail, however small or insignificant it might seem, can be the crucial one.

“Tell us about that night,” I say.

“There was nothing unusual about it except for the way it ended,” he says. “It was summer, and Stacy and I would go out on the boat most weekends, at least when the weather was good. When it wasn’t, we’d go to a cabin I have in upstate New York.” He pauses a moment. “That’s the ironic thing. If we had known a storm was coming, we would probably have gone to the cabin. But it wasn’t predicted.”

“When you went out on the boat, did Reggie always go along?”

He nods. “Absolutely. Reggie went everywhere with us. Stacy loved him almost as much as I did.”

“You slept on the boat?”

He nods. “Most of the time. It was a forty-footer… slept six.”

“So there was nothing out of the ordinary about that night that you can remember?”

“Nothing. I’ve thought about it a thousand times. We went to bed at about nine o’clock. By then we had heard there was a chance of weather coming in, and I set the warning system up loud so I would definitely hear it.”

“Warning system?” Kevin asks. He knows as little about boating as I do.

Richard nods. “If there are weather warnings, a general alert is sent out. We were only about four miles out, so we’d have plenty of time to get back if we had to.”

“And you never heard a warning?” I ask.

“I never heard anything. I went to sleep and woke up in the hospital.”

“Do you remember taking the sleeping pills?” Kevin asks.

Richard shakes his head vigorously. “I never took sleeping pills. Not that night, not ever in my life. I didn’t even have any. They were not mine.”

“Were they Stacy’s?” I ask.

“I don’t believe so. If they were, she never mentioned it. I never knew her to have trouble sleeping.”

“So you have no idea how they got in your system?”

He shakes his head. “None at all.”

We talk some more about the night of the murder, but he has little else to add. While the important things were happening, he was asleep. All he remembers is a pleasant night out on the water, dinner, some wine, and an early trip to bed since he was tired from working all day.

I turn the focus to his job, that of a senior customs inspector at the Port of Newark. I ask him if there was anything about his job that could have made him a target.

“No, nothing,” he says. “It was a slow time.”

The answer is a little quick for my tastes. “Richard, I want you to understand something. You may not have committed this murder, but someone did. Someone with a reason. Now, that reason could involve you or Stacy, or the two of you together. So you need to open your mind to anyone who could have possibly hoped to gain from putting you in this position.”

“Don’t you think I’ve done nothing but think about that for five years? If someone was trying to get rid of me because I knew something, they shouldn’t have bothered, because I sure as hell don’t know that I know it. Besides, if I was a danger to someone, why not just kill me?”

It’s a good question, and one I eventually must answer. But for now I take him through a description of day-to-day life on his job. Border security in this era of terrorism has taken on an obviously extreme importance, and it was Richard’s task to make sure that the Port of Newark was as free of contraband as possible.

Finally, I turn the conversation to Stacy, and even five years later, it’s evident that his grief over her loss is still powerful. “How did you meet?” I ask.

“At a counter, having lunch. She was sitting next to me, and before I knew it we were having a conversation. We had dinner that night, and it just went from there.”

“Where was she from?” Kevin asks.

“Minnesota… a town just outside of Minneapolis. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eighteen. She worked there and then decided to move east.”

“What did she do?”

“She was a teacher, but what she really wanted was to be a chef. The things she made were incredible. She wanted to open her own restaurant.”

He talks about Stacy for a while longer, answering every question but never getting much below surface platitudes. He makes her sound so perfect she reminds me of Laurie.

“Were you in the Army?” I ask.

He nods. “National Guard. Served three months in Kuwait during the first Gulf war.”

“Do the names Archie Durelle or Antwan Cooper mean anything to you?”

His facial expression shows no recognition at all. “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “Who are they?”

I’m not ready to tell him that they took a shot at me on the highway. “Just some names I’ve heard; I’m checking out everything I can.”

The last ten minutes of our visit are devoted to the obligatory questions he has about progress we might be making and strategy we might be employing. I fend them off because basically we’re not making any progress and don’t yet have a strategy.

Once Kevin and I are in the car, I ask, “So, what do you think?”

“I find myself wanting to believe him.”

“Do you believe him?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Not yet. His version is just too full of holes. The prosecution has it locked up airtight.”

“Except for Reggie. Reggie says he’s innocent,” I say.

“He told you that?”

“Not in so many barks, but I got the message.”

I like dogs considerably more than I like humans. That doesn’t make me antihuman; there are plenty of humans I’m very fond of. But generally speaking, if I simultaneously meet a new human and a new dog, I’m going to like the dog more.

I’m certainly going to trust the dog more. They’re going to tell me what they think, straight out, and I’m not going to have to read anything into it. They are what they are, while very often humans are what they aren’t.

I say this fully aware that dogs cannot replace humans in our day-to-day lives. I have never met a competent dog airline pilot, short-order cook, quarterback, or bookmaker. These are necessary functions that we must trust humans to provide, and I recognize that. It’s not that I’m an eccentric about this.

So for now I’m going to pursue this case, even though Richard has nothing going for him.

Except for Reggie.

* * * * *

JOEL MARSHAL IS on the front lines, protecting our country.

I can’t say he looks the part. At about five eight and a hundred and fifty pounds, he’s one of the few male adults under ninety that I would be willing to get in the ring with. As a protector of the country, he is not the type you would describe as someone “you want on that wall, you need on that wall.”

Marshal is U.S. Customs director for the Port of Newark, and it’s his job to ensure that the endless flow of cargo that comes in each year does not include things like drugs, guns, anthrax, and nuclear bombs. It is a daunting task, which is why I’m surprised it was so easy to get an immediate meeting with him.

It may have been a quickly arranged meeting, but it won’t be a long one. He’s looking at his watch almost as soon as I sit down. It’s a common tactic; I think watches are more often used to demonstrate a lack of time than to tell time.

“Thanks for seeing me so soon,” I say. “I won’t take much of your time.”

“I appreciate that,” he says. “It’s a busy day today.” He glances at his watch again, though less than fifteen seconds have passed since the last time he looked. “What can I do for you?”

He says this with what seems to be a permanent smile on his face. If the smile could talk, it would say, “I am a political appointee, and this smile is government issue. It doesn’t mean I am happy or amused.”

“I’m representing Richard Evans.”

“Yes, you mentioned that,” he points out, accurately.

“I’m operating under the assumption that the evidence against Mr. Evans was deliberately faked. What I am trying to find out is why.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

I explain that one of my theories is that Richard was targeted because of something involved with his work. He could have been removed from that work because of something he knew, or possibly to get him out of the way.

“It hardly seems likely,” Marshal says. “But in any event, there’s little I can help you with. I’ve only been assigned here for one year, and I had never even met Mr. Evans.”

“So you’re not familiar with his case?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Should I be? It’s pretty much ancient history, and my understanding was that it did not involve his job. It was a personal matter.”

Murders usually are “personal matters,” but I decide not to point this out. “Who replaced him?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. Roy Chaney is in the job now, but I’m not aware if he followed Mr. Evans, or if there was somebody else in the interim.”

“Can you check?”

This prompts another look at his watch and, while not a frown, a slight weakening of the smile. Finally, he asks his assistant to get the information, but it proves to be unnecessary, as the assistant was working here five years ago. She confirms that Chaney replaced Evans.

I thank Marshal and leave. Rather than go straight to my car, I decide to display my awesome investigative prowess and walk aimlessly around the area. It’s an enormous place, with endless, cavernous warehouses starting near the water and stretching well inland.

There are not many people around, just thousands of unattended boxes and crates. Security is either nonexistent or very subtle; I get the feeling that if one of the boxes had “ANTHRAX – IF YOU ARE WITHIN TWO MILES OF THIS CRATE, YOU WILL BE DEAD IN FOUR MINUTES” printed on the side it wouldn’t attract attention.

After about twenty minutes of intensive investigating, all I’ve really managed to do is get lost, to the point that I have no idea where my car is.

I happen upon a small building that contains a few glass-enclosed offices. A woman sits behind one of the desks, so I lean in and ask if she knows where Joel Marshal’s office is, since that’s where I parked my car.

She smiles. “Just walk in the direction you were going, and after the second building make a right.”

“Thanks,” I say, and then decide to try another question. “Do you happen to know where I can find Roy Chaney?”

She smiles again, ever helpful, and calls out, “Roy! Somebody here to see you!”

All this time I thought I was lost, when in fact I was relentlessly zeroing in on Chaney’s office. Within a few moments a man I assume to be Chaney comes out of a rear office and walks toward the doorway, where I am standing. He looks as though he’s pushing 40, pushing 5'10", and has already pushed past 240 pounds. I wouldn’t want to try to sneak any contraband chocolate cupcakes or potato chips into the country with this guy around.

“What can I do for you?” he asks.

“You’re Roy Chaney?”

He nods. “Yup. Who are you?”

“My name is Andy Carpenter. I’m an attorney representing Richard Evans.”

“Is that right?” he says as he walks past me and out the door, leading me to step out as well. It was a clumsy attempt to conceal that he does not want the woman at the desk to hear the conversation.

“Yes. I understand you replaced him when he went on trial.”

“That’s right. I didn’t know him, though. I mean, we never met. When I got here he was already gone.”

I’m not that great a judge of human behavior, but Chaney seems nervous. “But you took over his responsibilities?”

“Right.”

“Was there anything unusual about any of the things he was working on? Or any of the people he was working with?”

“Unusual like what?”

“Unusual like something which would have made someone want to get him off the job and out of the way. Do you remember anything like that?”

“No.” It’s far too quick an answer; this was five years ago, and he would have had no reason to be thinking about those days until my question. This guy is hiding something and is not at all good at it.

“You didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary with his work… anything that you might have reported to your superiors?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” he says. “I just show up and do my job.” It’s an answer completely unresponsive to my question, and when I get those kinds of answers, I usually assume they are both unresponsive and untruthful.

I give him my card and tell him that he should call me if he thinks of anything. As I’m leaving, he says, “You trying to get Evans out of jail?”

I nod. “I’m doing more than trying.”

Laurie calls on my cell phone as I’m leaving the port area.

“Andy? Where are you?” is how she starts the conversation.

“Newark,” I say.

“You’re kidding,” she says.

“I am?”

“Are you serious?” she asks.

“Why would I lie about being in Newark? And why are we having this inane conversation?”

“Because I’m in Newark, also. At the airport.”

“Are you serious?” I ask.

“Why would I lie about being in Newark?” she asks, and then laughs. “I got someone to cover for me… We switched vacation times. There was a flight and I rushed to catch it; I tried your cell but it didn’t go through. Can you pick me up?”

“Gee, I sort of had plans for tonight,” I say as I race at high speed toward the airport.

“Okay, I’ll hitch a ride with the good-looking guy I sat next to on the plane.”

“Or I can change my plans.”

I’m at the terminal within ten minutes, and Laurie is waiting for me outside baggage claim.

She looks fantastic, which does not come as a major surprise. A long flight is not going to affect that; she could go through three wash cycles at Kevin’s Law-dromat and come out looking one corsage short of ready for the prom.

As I pull up, I’m faced with a choice. I can get out and help her get the suitcases into the car, or I can let her do it herself. My instinct is to get out, but it means that our hug and kiss hello will take place out in public, surrounded by travelers. If she gets in, we can do it in the car, in relative privacy.

It’s decision making like this that is the reason they pay me the big bucks.

I get out, put the suitcases in the trunk, and we do the hug and kiss routine for all Newark Airport to see. It’s not ideal, but it’s not half bad, either. In fact, it’s so not half bad that I briefly consider whether to take a room at the airport hotel.

Five minutes into our ride, Laurie says, “Is this where you got shot at?”

I was so focused on getting Laurie home that I hadn’t even noticed that. “Just up ahead.”

“Is Marcus around?”

I shrug. “You know Marcus. He’ll show up if I need him.” Then it hits me. “Wait a minute-you switched your vacation and came here early because you were worried about me. You don’t think I can take care of myself.”

She smiles. “You can’t.”

I laugh. “Then it’s good you showed up.”

We get home, and Laurie spends five minutes petting and hugging Tara, then another five meeting and petting Reggie.

“You want something to eat?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I want to get these clothes off.”

“Don’t let me stop you,” I say.

She smiles. “I was talking about your clothes.”

“Don’t let me stop you.”

* * * * *

GETTING OUT OF bed early has never been my strong point.

It usually runs counter to my enjoyment drive; the bed is comfortable, right near my television, and an easy stroll to the kitchen refrigerator. All in all, not a good place to leave.

Leaving it when Laurie is lying next to me is positively goofy, and I am simply not going to do it. Unfortunately, Tara and Reggie have a different point of view, and at six thirty their scratching on the door tells me in no uncertain terms that they are anxious to take their morning walk.

I get up and grab the leashes, resisting the impulse to leave an “I’ll be right back” sign on my side of the mattress. We walk for about twenty minutes, which is about nineteen minutes longer than I had planned. They just seem to enjoy it too much to cut it short.

Reggie has developed an interesting walking style. He keeps his nose close to the ground at all times, as if it were a metal detector. When he hears a sudden noise, like a car horn, his ears lift up but his nose stays down.

When we get back, my own ears alert me to an impending crushing disappointment. The shower is running, which means Laurie is out of bed, which in turn takes away my reason for getting back in. My day is officially starting, far too soon.

I grab a cup of coffee and head for the bedroom to get dressed. Laurie is already on the way out, in sweatshirt, sweatpants, and running shoes. It is one of her idiosyncrasies that she showers before and after exercising. “You want to go running?” she asks.

“I’d sooner go root canaling,” I say, and she leaves.

She comes back maybe ten seconds later. “Miss me?” I ask.

“Let me have your cell phone,” she says, her voice serious.

I get it off the table and hand it to her. “What is it?”

“There was a phone guy working on the line by the house. He was just leaving when I got outside, and when I called to him he drove off.”

“So?”

“So it’s seven o’clock in the morning. Has the phone company changed that much since I lived here?”

She calls a former colleague in the Paterson Police Department and asks him to send someone out to check the house for bugs. Then she says she’ll wait for him to arrive, so I have to assume he’s sending someone right away.

I think she’s overreacting to this and is being overly cautious. When she hangs up, I ask, “Do you want me to hang around? We could get back in bed.”

“Have a nice day, Andy.”

“I take it that’s a no?”

“That’s a no.”

I head for the office and an early meeting that Kevin has arranged with Dr. Gerald King, a prominent criminologist. We had sent Dr. King the photographs, toxicology, and other reports on the physical evidence that we received from Lawrence Koppell. Koppell had admitted that he didn’t have the resources to hire the top available experts to aid in the defense, so we decided to pay to get the best.

Dr. King is at least sixty years old, with degrees in everything from criminology to toxicology, to chemistry, and just about every other “y” I can think of. When I arrive he is drinking a cup of Edna’s coffee-or, more accurately, looking at it. My guess is, he’s anxious to take it back to the lab to find out what bizarre ingredients she puts into it to give it that lumpy texture and uniquely horrible taste.

I’m expecting a dry, tedious recitation of Dr. King’s findings, but that expectation lasts for about three seconds. “Events on that boat were not as the prosecution described them,” is how he begins.

Suffice it to say that he’s gotten my attention. “How were they different?”

Dr. King takes out the pictures of the inside of the boat, and those of Richard. He points to a substantial bruise on the left side of Richard’s head, which the prosecution claimed happened when Richard fell out of bed after being knocked out by the sleeping pills.

“This is not a bruise that could have been received from falling out of this bed.” He proceeds to talk about the pattern of the bruise and how it could only have been caused by a blunt, rounded instrument. Then he goes over to the couch and demonstrates that the fall from that height, and at that angle, would have had Richard land on the right side of his head, not the left.

It’s compelling but not overwhelming, and I’m hoping there’s more. There is.

He takes out the toxicology reports, which show an overdose of Amenipam, the sleeping pills that almost killed Richard. His estimate is that Richard would have been dead if the Coast Guard medics had gotten to him fifteen minutes later. “But he did not take those pills; the drug was either ingested in liquid form or, more likely, administered by injection after he was unconscious.”

This, if true and if it can be proven, is a blockbuster. “How do you know that?”

He points to a line on the toxicology report that shows Richard had traces of campene, a preservative used in test tubes. His theory is that liquid Amenipam was administered, that it was preserved in a test tube before that, and that that is why the trace was found in Richard’s blood.

“Could it have gotten there any other way?”

He nods. “Yes, which is why it didn’t attract much attention. It is found in shellfish.”

Kevin speaks for the first time. “So where does that leave us?”

“In great shape,” I say. “Richard is allergic to shellfish. I read it in the medical records.”

Dr. King smiles as if his student had just made him proud. “Exactly. And it is a severe allergy. If he wanted to commit suicide, all he would have had to do was have a shrimp cocktail.”

Dr. King leaves, and I have to restrain myself from giving Kevin a high five. This is a very substantial development and, if accurate, puts a major dent in the prosecution case. Coupled with Reggie’s existence, it could well be enough to get us a hearing. Kevin agrees and sets out to write a brief to file with the court.

My euphoria is short-lived, as Laurie shows up with Sergeant Allen Paulsen, one of the technology experts in the Paterson Police Department.

She comes right to the point. “Allen found a tap on your phone.”

He holds up a small, clear plastic bag with a device in it. “It looks new-no weather marks or anything. It could be a couple of weeks old, but based on what Laurie witnessed, my best guess is, it was installed this morning.”

“Are you here to check the office phones?”

He nods. “Right.”

“That’s not all, Andy,” she says.

I don’t like the way she said that. “It’s not?”

She turns to Paulsen, inviting him to explain.

He does, again holding up the device. “This device is state-of-the-art; I’ve never seen one like it. I would bet a month’s pay it’s government issue.”

Oh, shit. “Local, state, or federal?” I ask, in descending order of preference.

“Federal,” he says. “Definitely federal. Which agency, that I can’t tell you.”

Paulsen goes off to check the office and, after about fifteen minutes, tells me that the place is clean. He gives me the name of a guy and tells me that I should hire him to sweep my home and office for taps and bugs at least twice a week.

“They may not do it again,” he says. “Because now that we’ve removed the first tap, they’ll know you’re on to them.”

Paulsen leaves Laurie, Kevin, and me to ponder what all this means. In the brief time that I’ve been Richard’s lawyer, I’ve been shot at by two hoods, one of whom was supposed to be dead, and had my phone tapped by a government agency.

“And I don’t have a clue what the hell it’s all about.”

“It’s all about somebody wanting Richard Evans to stay in jail,” Laurie says.

I nod. “Or not wanting the case opened up. Kevin, as part of the brief you should include the attempt on my life, and the phone tap. Request that Richard be moved to a secure area of the prison, in solitary if necessary.”

“You think he’s in danger?” Kevin asks.

“If he’s dead there’s no case to open up,” Laurie points out.

“On the other hand, then there would be no reason to kill his lawyers,” I say.

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy.

* * * * *

THERE IS NOT a very high standard for getting a hearing.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, the standard for prevailing in the hearing, for being granted a new trial, is quite high. The defense needs to show that the new evidence would do more than just create reasonable doubt; it must show that an injustice is likely being committed by keeping the accused incarcerated.

Kevin’s brief is terrific, which is no surprise, since he is probably the best I have ever seen at preparing them. The question we face is whether we should submit it now, since a hearing is likely to be held quickly if granted. By submitting the brief we are saying that we are ready to proceed, when in reality we are not.

Arguing for haste are the ominous things that have been happening to me, and the very real chance that Richard could be in jeopardy in prison. Without submitting the briefs, we have no chance to get him isolated, and therefore no way to get him out of grave danger.

After weighing all the factors, we send Kevin down to submit it while I meet with Sam Willis in his office, which is just down the hall from mine, to get a report on his computer investigation of the victim, Stacy Harriman.

I’m pleasantly surprised that he comes in all business, with no song or movie talking. He has her credit history, educational background, employment history, former addresses, birth certificate-the entire picture.

“Nothing unusual, Andy. Never in a lot of debt, never a late payment, straight B average in school, paid her taxes. If she lived, she would have had a house on Normal Lane and 2.2 children.”

“Ever do any government work?” I ask.

“Not unless you consider teaching third grade to be government work.”

He takes me through some more of her history, which further confirms my feeling that this is about Richard. Stacy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“Thanks, Sam, you did a great job.”

“It’s nothing, Andy.”

“No, really. You’re terrific at it, you’re fast, and you do it right the first time. And I just want you to know how much I appreciate it. You’re a valuable member of the team.”

“Andy… you had me at ‘Hello.’”

Sam leaves, and I use this alone time to figure out what it is I know, or at least what I believe. It promises to be a short session.

I would bet that Roy Chaney was worried when I showed up. Couple that with the fact that some branch of the government was eavesdropping on me, probably operating without court authority, and it’s a decent bet that whatever it is has to do with Richard’s job with U.S. Customs.

Complicating matters is the incident on the highway. It’s clearly not the government’s style to send shooters after me like that. It’s certainly not a random shooting or a coincidence, but it’s just as certainly beyond my capacity to figure it out at this moment.

One question that will ultimately have to be answered is the one Richard raised. Why, if the bad guys wanted to get him out of the way, did they go to the trouble of killing Stacy and faking his suicide? Why not just kill him?

The only answer I can come up with is that by making the murder-suicide look to be about a personal, domestic problem, it would take the focus off Richard’s work. If he were simply murdered, the police would start searching for motive, and they might look toward his job. That would likely have been dangerous for the real killers. If it’s a suicide, there are no killers to look for, no further reasons to investigate.

When I get back to my office, I am treated, if that’s the right word, to an amazing sight. A three-way conversation is taking place between Karen Evans, Edna, and Marcus Clark. Kevin is sitting off to the side, openmouthed at what he is seeing and hearing.

Karen’s genuine enthusiasm for anything and everything has actually bridged the gap between Edna and Marcus. These are two people with absolutely nothing in common and nothing to say to each other, yet Karen has gotten them connected.

As Edna has her pencil at the ready, Karen asks Marcus, “What’s a three-letter word for ‘foreign machine gun’?”

Edna says, “Second letter is a ‘Z.’”

Marcus thinks for a moment. “Uzi.” For Marcus this is the equivalent of a Shakespearean soliloquy.

Karen practically leaps out of her chair in delight. “That’s right! That’s right!” Then she turns to Edna. “It fits, right?”

Edna smiles and writes it down. “Perfect.”

Karen turns to slap Marcus five, but he clearly isn’t familiar with the concept, and she hits him in the shoulder. He doesn’t seem to mind at all.

I can’t overstate what an immense diplomatic and personal accomplishment this is for Karen. Were I president, I would immediately appoint her secretary of state. It makes Jimmy Carter’s achievement at Camp David seem insignificant. Compared to Edna and Marcus, Arafat and Begin were blood brothers.

It’s a mesmerizing sight, and it’s with the greatest reluctance that I pull Kevin away. I’ve arranged for another interview with Richard to discuss his former job in more detail, to try to learn what it might have to do with the murder.

The unfortunate result of my departure will be that Marcus will follow close behind in his bodyguard role, thus breaking up this threesome. I’m not sure that even Karen’s wizardry can ever re-create it.

The drive out to the prison is becoming an all too familiar one, and it’s not something I enjoy. The place always looks the same, the guards always act the same, and the depressing nature of the surroundings always makes me feel the same.

But Richard looks more upbeat each time I see him. It’s understandable; he has spent five years being ignored, a ward of the system, whom nobody cared about, other than his sister. Now there is activity, his lawyers are frequently coming to talk about his case, and just that alone brightens his day.

I tell him my feeling that Roy Chaney was hiding something, but he cannot be helpful in that regard, because he never even met Chaney. He certainly hasn’t kept up with developments at the Customs Service; there would have been no reason to. Moreover, 9/11-inspired protective measures have had an evolving impact on how the customs people do their jobs, and Richard would have no way to be familiar with many of these new procedures.

Kevin asks, “Do you know anyone who still works there that we could talk to?”

Richard thinks for a moment and then nods. “You could try Keith Franklin.”

“Who is he?” I ask.

“He works down at the pier, same level as I was. I’m pretty sure he’s still there.”

“You haven’t kept in contact with him?”

Richard shakes his head. “Not for a few years. We were good friends; he and his girlfriend went out with Stacy and me a lot. But…”

“He dropped you when this all went down?” I ask.

He shrugs. “He was supportive during the trial, and then visited me on and off for a short time after that, but then he stopped coming. I can’t say as I blame him.”

“Do you have his home address or phone number?” I ask. “I’d rather not talk to him at his office.”

“Not anymore, but you could ask Karen. She knew him pretty well; she was friendly with his sister.” He smiles. “Karen, in case you haven’t guessed, is friendly with everybody.”

“I’ve picked up on that.”

“Have you picked up anything else about her?”

The question surprises me. “Just that she designs dresses and would rather talk about you than herself.”

He nods with some sadness. “She designs dresses so well that she has a standing offer to do a show in Rome. But she won’t go, because she doesn’t want to leave me. It’s the same reason she left school.”

“Where did she go to school?”

“Yale, majoring in English literature with a 3.8 average.” He notices my surprise and then continues. “Then this happened. She’s decided that if my life is going to be wasted, she’ll join the party. She thinks she’s helping me, but it makes it worse.”

These are things about Karen that I never would have guessed. “You want me to try and talk to her?”

He shakes his head. “That won’t help.”

“What will?” I ask.

“Getting me out of here.”

I nod and tell him that we have applied for a hearing and that it could take place within a couple of weeks. He is excited by the prospect, but it is tempered by concern. “What if we don’t get the hearing?”

“Then we keep digging until we turn over more evidence, and then reapply,” I say. “Nobody’s abandoning you, Richard.”

“Thank you.”

“But it may feel like that for a while. I’m concerned for your safety, so we’re requesting that they put you into a more secure area.”

“Solitary?”

I nod. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t be asking for it if I wasn’t worried.”

“Why would anybody want to go after me? I’ve been in here five years; who could I be a threat to?”

“Richard, when we answer that question, we’ll know everything.”

* * * * *

HAVING LAURIE WAITING for me at home is as good as it gets.

Her pasta sauce is simmering on the stove while she’s in the backyard playing with Tara and Reggie. I see them before they see me, and it’s such a perfect sight that I almost want to hide and watch.

I try to be as positive a person as I can, but my logical mind always forces me to see the imperfections in any situation. In this case, the fact that Laurie and I are together maybe six or eight weeks out of the year is not exactly a subtle imperfection, and it sure as hell doesn’t fully satisfy my enjoyment drive.

Laurie sees me and yells, “Daddy’s home!” and the two dogs run over to me, tails wagging, to receive the petting that is their due. We grab a couple of leashes and go for a walk in the park, and midway through, a thunderstorm hits. It’s one of those warm rains that feel great, and none of us is of a mind to let it curtail our walk. By the time we get home we’re all drenched and happy.

After dinner we sit down to watch a DVD of The Graduate. For some reason, Laurie feels about movies the way most people feel about wines, that they get better with age. The Graduate is barely forty years old and is a little current for Laurie’s taste, but she relaxes her standards because it’s so good.

We sit on the couch and drink chardonnay as we watch, and Tara and Reggie are up there with us. It’s such a wonderful moment that it’s hard for me to concentrate on the film, but I try to focus mainly because I need dialogue lines to compete with Sam Willis. Unfortunately, it’s going to be tough to get “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to seduce me?” into a conversation with Sam. Maybe I’ll just scream “Elaine! Elaine!” at him the next time I see him. That should throw him off.

When the movie is over, I realize I haven’t called Karen to ask if she can put me in touch with Keith Franklin. When I do, she says that she hasn’t seen him in a while, but still knows his sister and will do whatever is necessary to make this happen.

“I’ll get right on it,” she says. “I’m on the case.”

Laurie’s already in the bedroom, which is sufficient incentive for me to sprint there. She’s lying on the bed, writing in a journal that she keeps, recording the day’s events and her thoughts about them. Laurie has told me that she has kept a journal since she was nine years old.

If you supplied me with all the paper and time in the world and paid me in solid gold coins, I would still not keep a journal. I’m going to go back and read about my own life? To learn my own point of view? Why would I want to know what I think after the fact? I already know what I think during the fact. I’ve always felt that the purpose of reading is to find out what other people think.

Would I want to be able to refresh my memory of how miserable I was at being rejected by Linda Paige in high school? I don’t think so. Or reconnect with my feelings about giving up a game-winning home run in the Lyndhurst game? Not in a million years. Journals make retroactive denial impossible, and that happens to be one of my specialties.

Yet there Laurie is, busily chronicling whatever the hell she is chronicling. After about fifteen minutes, during which I have looked at my watch maybe two hundred times, I ask, “Must have been a busy day today, huh?”

“Mmmm,” she mumbles, not willing to be distracted from her literary efforts.

“Are you up to the late afternoon yet?”

“Mmmm,” she says.

“You want me to write some of it? To save time? For instance, I know what you had for dinner, and what movie we saw. I can jot down stuff like that.”

She puts down her pen and stares at me, an ominous sign. “Let me guess,” she says. “You think we’re going to make love tonight, and you’re impatient to get started.”

I put on a look of feigned horror. “You read my journal!”

She smiles, puts her journal on the night table, and holds out her arms to me. “Come here; I’ll give you something good to write about.”

And she proceeds to do just that, though it leaves me too tired to pick up a pen.

It also leaves me too tired to talk, and far too tired to stay awake. Regrettably, it doesn’t seem to have had that effect on Laurie.

“Andy, when I’m here with you it feels like I never left. It feels like home.”

I feel a twinge of hope through the fatigue; the possibility that Laurie will return here permanently is with me at all times. But I have recently become smart enough not to try to advance the idea myself. If she’s going to decide to come back, she’s going to reach the decision on her own.

“My home is your home,” I say with mock gallantry.

“But when I go back to Findlay, that feels like home as well. I’m totally connected there.”

So much for a seismic shift. “Why don’t we see how you feel in the morning?”

“Andy, is this working for you? I mean, how we are together… when we see each other. Are you happy with how we’re handling this?”

“It’s not my first choice, but it’s a solid second.”

She thinks about this for a few moments, then seems to nod and says, “Good night, Andy.”

Good night, Andy? Is that where we’re going to leave this? I need to have a little more insight into her thinking. “Is there something else you wanted to say, Laurie?”

“I don’t think so… maybe tomorrow. Good night, Andy.”

I could pursue this further now, or I can wait until “maybe tomorrow.” I think I’ll wait.

Tomorrow actually starts earlier than I would like, as Karen Evans calls me at six o’clock in the morning. She apologizes for calling so early, but she wanted to get me before I went to work. She must think I’m a dairy farmer.

If there’s any sleepiness in her voice, I can’t detect it; my guess is, she’s been up since four staring at the clock and resisting the urge to call. I wish she had resisted a little longer. But Karen is, in a very real way, fighting for her own life as well as her brother’s, so I understand her impatience.

“I talked to Keith Franklin,” she says. “He said he’d contact you.”

“Good. When?”

“He’ll call you at your office. He said he has to figure out the best time and place. He seemed a little nervous about it.”

I have no idea what the hell I’m doing, yet everybody is nervous about talking to me. I guess ignorance can be intimidating.

I head for the office to wait for Franklin’s call and do whatever other work I can think of doing. Hanging over our heads is the knowledge that the decision on whether to grant us a hearing can come down at any moment. If we don’t get that, we’re obviously dead in the water, and I’ll start kicking myself for having pressed for the hearing so soon. It makes me nervous every time the phone rings, which isn’t quite as bad as it sounds, because the phone hardly ever rings.

I place a call to Cindy Spodek, an FBI agent currently assigned to the Bureau’s Boston office. Cindy and I were on the same side of a crucial case a while back, and she showed immense courage by testifying against her boss. Since he was a crook and murderer, it was the right thing to do, but it caused her considerable pain.

I consider Cindy a friend, and Laurie and I have been out with her and her husband a few times. As a friend she has the honor of my repeatedly asking her for favors, which is why I’m calling her today.

Her office tells me that she is currently at a conference in New York, one of the few breaks I’ve had lately. They promise to give her the message that I called, and she thus takes her spot alongside Franklin as a caller I am anxious to hear from.

Kevin and I spend some time going over our strategy for the hearing, in case it is granted. We’ve asked for a speedy resolution, and the prosecutor has not objected, so if we get the hearing, it will happen quickly. We have to be ready.

We’re about an hour into it when Cindy Spodek returns my call. “Andy, it’s such a pleasure to hear from you. Other people, when they call once every six months, it means they only want a favor. But in your case, it means you just want to express your friendship.”

“How true that is,” I say. “And so beautifully put.”

“So how is everything?” she asks.

“Everything is fine, just wonderful,” I say. “And that’s all I wanted to say, besides expressing my friendship.”

“I’ve got to be back in a meeting in ten minutes,” Cindy says. “So this might be an appropriate time to cut the bullshit.”

“Works for me. I need some information.”

“What a surprise,” she says.

“Somebody tried to tap my phone. The government. The government you work for.”

“Are we getting paranoid, Andy?”

“It happened soon after somebody else tried to kill me.”

Her tone immediately changes and reflects both personal concern and businesslike efficiency. “Can you meet me at three o’clock in the coffee shop of the Park Central Hotel, Fifty-sixth and Seventh Avenue? I have an hour between meetings.”

“Thanks, Cindy.”

“How’s Laurie?” she asks.

“She’s great. We still have the long-distance relationship, except right now it’s not such a long distance. She’s in town.”

“Can you bring her? I’d love to see her.”

I tell her that I’ll try, and when we hang up I call Laurie. She likes Cindy a great deal and very much wants to come along. I pick her up at the house, and we drive into the city. I take the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, which always reminds me of the scene in The Godfather in which Solozzo’s driver makes a U-turn in the middle of the bridge, so as to remove the chance of being successfully followed. If I ever tried that, I’d wind up in the Hudson River.

Cindy is waiting for us when we arrive, explaining that her meeting ended a little early. It’s just as well, since the first fifteen minutes are taken up by her and Laurie talking girl talk, relationship talk, job talk, and talk talk. With a significant amount of laughing thrown in, this could go on forever.

Finally, I can’t take it anymore. “Hello, remember me?”

They look at me as if trying to place the face. “Oh, right,” Cindy says. “You’re the guy who defends the scum balls.”

I nod. “That’s me.” I take out the phone tap that was removed by Sergeant Paulsen at my house, and I hand it to her. “Ever see one of these?” I ask.

Cindy takes it and looks at it from all angles. “This was on your phone?”

“Yes.”

Cindy is no longer laughing, nor is she smiling. I’m not sure if the device is a phone tap or a mood changer. “Can I hold on to this?”

“Yes.”

She puts it in her pocket. “Maybe you should tell me what’s going on.”

I lay out the whole story, starting with Reggie, right up to the present moment. She asks some questions, particularly about the shooting on the highway, and writes down the names of the dead shooters.

Cindy knows nothing about any of this; she had not even previously heard of Richard Evans. But something is clearly bothering her. “I’ll ask around about this and get back to you as soon as I can,” she says. “But in the meantime, be careful.”

“Marcus is covering him,” Laurie says.

Cindy nods. “Good.”

“What is it you’re not telling me?” I ask.

“I’ll call you,” she says, then says a quick good-bye and heads back to her meeting.

Laurie and I talk on the way to the car about Cindy’s reaction to what I had to say. She agrees that it was strange and that Cindy seemed worried about something.

We don’t have too long to ponder it, because my cell phone rings. I can see by the caller ID that it’s my office.

“Hello?”

“Andy, its me,” says Kevin. “You want the good news or the bad news?”

“Let’s start with the good.”

“We got the hearing.”

“And the bad?”

“It’s Monday.”

* * * * *

SIX DAYS TO get ready for a hearing is not a lot of time, but in this case it’s manageable. It’s not as if we were preparing for an entire trial, and we don’t have to anticipate and refute what the prosecution is going to say. We simply have to make our own points and demonstrate why, if those points had been available to be made in the first trial, Richard might well have been acquitted.

But there’s still a lot to do, and Kevin and I have been in intense preparation for the past three days. Most of that time we’ve been at my house, which I’ve selfishly insisted on because that’s where Laurie is. Kevin has no objections, because it’s comfortable and because Laurie is cooking our meals. In fact, she has been helpful in every way, even sitting in on our strategy sessions and making suggestions.

Neither Cindy Spodek nor Keith Franklin has called, but I haven’t really had time to worry about it. The hearing is more important than anything either of them could have to say; if it doesn’t go well, then everything else is meaningless.

Half our time has been spent on witness preparation. Dr. King has come in, and we’ve gone over exactly what it is he will testify to. He is an experienced, knowledgeable witness, and I have no doubt that he will be very persuasive.

Our other main witness is more of a challenge, and a good deal of that challenge will be to get his testimony admitted at all. We are going to call Reggie to the stand, and let him testify to the fact that he is really Richard’s dog, and thus survived that night on the boat. The prosecutor will fight like crazy to limit the testimony to human witnesses, and that will be a major battle that we must be ready for.

Today is a Friday that has felt nothing like a Friday. That’s because there is no weekend coming up; tomorrow and Sunday are going to be full workdays.

Kevin leaves at seven o’clock, with a promise to be back at nine tomorrow morning. Laurie and I are going out to dinner, and we’re almost out the door when the phone rings.

Laurie answers and, after listening for a few moments, hands me the phone.

“Hello?” I say, since I’m never at a loss for snappy ways to begin conversations.

The voice is Cindy Spodek’s. “Andy, I don’t have much information, but what I’ve got is not good.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Well, I went to our expert on electronic surveillance, and he told me that the tap is either CIA or DIA.”

“What is DIA?”

“Defense Intelligence Agency. It’s run out of the Pentagon. But about six hours later the guy comes back to me and says he was wrong, that it’s just a run-of-the-mill tap, could be used by anybody.”

“You don’t believe him?” I ask.

“No, I don’t. That device wasn’t like any I had ever seen. And he hadn’t taken it; I still had it. I just don’t believe he did any research that changed his mind. I think he was instructed by someone to change his mind.”

“Okay… thanks.”

“I’m not finished,” she says. “I asked around about the Evans case. I wasn’t aware of any Bureau involvement, and the two people above me that I asked didn’t seem to know anything about it.”

“You didn’t believe them, either?”

“Actually, I did. But later in the day one of them called me into his office and grilled me on why I was asking. I told him that you were a friend, and I was curious. He told me that it wasn’t a door I should be opening, that I should not be involved in any way.”

This is stunning news; it seems that the entire United States government is conspiring to keep Richard Evans in jail. “This doesn’t fit with the facts of the case as presented at trial,” I say. “It was supposed to look like a very personal crime-a distraught man kills his fiancée and himself.”

“I don’t know where or how deep this goes, Andy. But I do know it hits a nerve. The mother lode of nerves.”

“Thanks, Cindy. I’m sorry I involved you in this.”

“No problem. Just be careful, Andy. You may be dealing with people even more powerful than Marcus.”

“Now, that is a scary thought.”

We hang up and drive to dinner, though for a moment I’m nervous about starting my car. Laurie and I generally try not to discuss business during dinner, but the phone call from Cindy has pretty much blown that out of the water.

Laurie obviously has no more idea than I do about what is going on or why the whole world seems to have lined up against me. Nevertheless, it’s important for me to come up with a theory, if only to give me something to test, to measure ideas against.

The flip side of that, however, is that once I come up with a theory, I have to guard against being married to it. I can’t look at new information only through a biased prism; I have to let it take me in any direction, not guided by my preconceptions.

The only theory we can come up with is that Richard was the victim of a plot to get him out of the way, for something having to do with his work. I don’t believe that the intent of the plot was to frame Richard for Stacy’s murder; I believe that Richard was supposed to die as a “suicide” victim. The approaching storm was unexpected, and had it not appeared, the Coast Guard would not have boarded the boat in time to resuscitate him.

I can only assume that something was being smuggled into the country, and Richard’s presence was considered a threat to the operation. If the CIA or DIA is involved in the case, then I doubt it was drugs; it was more likely something violent or military in nature. Probably a national security matter rather than a strictly criminal one. Try as I might, I cannot understand how this could still be an issue five years later, but based on the reaction to the reopening of Richard’s case, it must be.

The other thing I want Laurie’s opinion on is whether to turn the hearing into a media event. Up until now, my handling of Richard’s case has received modest coverage, nothing intense, and I’ve had no reason to change that. My involvement, and the fact that Reggie is so central to the case, can attract a great deal of attention, and I must decide if I want to go in that direction.

“There’s no jury pool out there, Andy,” Laurie says. It’s a good point; the judge is going to make the final decision, so there are no potential jurors to influence.

The judge assigned to the case is Nicholas Gordon. The original case was tried in Somerset County, so that’s where the hearing is as well. I don’t know Judge Gordon, or any other judges from that county, since that is not where I usually practice.

“Do you know Judge Gordon?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “No, but I don’t know too many judges who like excessive publicity. Or wise-ass lawyers.”

It’s another good point, even if she’s not making it particularly gently. My normal trial tactics tend toward the flamboyant, and while they often work well with a jury, they tend to piss off judges. Pissing off the decision maker, which the judge will be in this case, is not a particularly logical thing to do.

“This hearing isn’t going to be much fun,” I say.

She smiles. “I’m not so sure about that. Watching you question Reggie is going to be a blast.”

* * * * *

IT TURNS OUT that I am not Andy the all-powerful.

I had decided to keep the publicity level down, so as to dampen coverage and not annoy the judge. Unfortunately, it didn’t work; the press is out in force in front of the courthouse when Kevin and I get there. The reporters on the court beat must have gotten a tip from the bailiff or someone else inside the system about what was going on, and the word spread.

Laurie will arrive later with Karen Evans and our star witness, Reggie. I’ll be calling her when I have a better sense of when they will be needed; there’s no sense having Reggie pacing, barking, and maybe even pissing in the witness room as he nervously awaits his appearance.

We’re going to start the day in the judge’s chambers. The prosecutor, Janine Coletti, has filed a motion to prevent Reggie from “testifying.” We’ve certainly expected that and, hopefully, are prepared to defend our position successfully.

I’m not familiar with Coletti, but I’ve checked her out, and the prevailing opinion seems to be that she is tough and smart. Those are traits that I don’t like to find in prosecutors; give me a mushy, dumb one any day of the week. The only slight positive is that she is not the original prosecutor and therefore might have less of a vested interest in protecting the original outcome.

Kevin and I meet Coletti and her team in the reception area outside the judge’s chambers. We exchange pleasantries, but there is no discussion about the case. That will come soon enough.

We are led into Judge Gordon’s chambers after only a five-minute wait. He looks to be in his mid-forties, though his hair is sprinkled with gray. Actually, I think gray hair may be a requirement to take a seat on the bench; prospective judges probably have to walk through some maturity screener that rejects pure black or brown hair as frivolous.

A court stenographer is also present, and Judge Gordon explains that this session will be on the record. He wanted to hold this particular argument in chambers because of “the large media contingent on hand,” and he makes little effort to conceal the fact that he blames me for the turnout. It is particularly frustrating because this time it’s not true.

“The question before us is whether to allow the golden retriever known as Reggie to appear in court,” says the judge before turning to me. “What is the purpose behind the request?”

“We want to demonstrate that he is in fact Mr. Evans’s dog and that he did not die along with Ms. Harriman, as the prosecution claimed at trial.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” he asks.

“Through testimony by his veterinarian and by the actions of the dog as he relates to Mr. Evans. We believe it is vital to establish ownership beyond a doubt.”

The judge turns to the prosecutors. “Ms. Coletti?”

“Your Honor, as stated in our brief, the state feels that such a maneuver is completely out of bounds and likely to turn the proceedings into a circus. There is no precedent for a dog to take on the role of witness, and such testimony would be inherently unreliable.”

I shake my head. “Your Honor, the reliability of canine testimony, as demonstrated through actions, has been amply demonstrated in many court proceedings, including those of Your Honor himself.”

Judge Gordon looks surprised. “Would you care to explain that?”

I nod. “Certainly. In New Jersey v. Grantham you ruled that a search that uncovered drugs was reasonable, when the only fact presented to justify the search was the action of a DEA German shepherd who detected the drugs by his sense of smell.”

“That dog was not a witness in court,” the judge says.

“That’s true. But you affirmed his reliability by allowing the search. He was, in effect, presented through hearsay testimony. If you’d like, we could conduct our own test outside of court, with you present or through videotape. Then the reference to Grantham would be exactly on point.”

Coletti shakes her head in disagreement. “Your Honor, that dog was trained in drug detection. It is an entirely different situation.”

“No, it is exactly the same,” I say. “We will demonstrate Reggie’s training in court, training that could only have been done by Mr. Evans. And untrained dogs have testified as well, through hearsay. Even in the O. J. Simpson trial, endless testimony referenced the barking of a dog, and it was used to pinpoint the time of the murders.”

“Obviously we disagree, Your Honor,” says Coletti. “But we object just as strongly on the ground of relevance. Mr. Evans was not convicted of murdering his dog, and whether or not the dog is alive is of no consequence. He was convicted for murdering his fiancée, and her death has been confirmed by DNA.”

“Mr. Carpenter?”

“Ms. Coletti was not the prosecutor at trial, so perhaps she is unaware that Mr. Steinberg, who did prosecute, referenced the deceased dog thirty-one times. He did so in his opening and closing arguments and through witness testimony. He used it to argue the facts of the case and to demonstrate Mr. Evans’s ‘extreme callousness.’ The jury certainly considered it; he instructed them to. And this new evidence will prove that he should not have been able to reference it, and they certainly should not have considered it.”

The judge continues questioning us for another fifteen minutes. My assessment is that he does not want to allow Reggie into the courtroom but is unable to come up with an adequate legal justification to prevent it.

“Your Honor,” I say, “we think the evidence to be introduced by the dog will be compelling. But Richard Evans has not seen the dog in five years, and maybe we’ll be wrong. Maybe it will blow up in our faces. But either way, what harm can come of it?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“There’s no jury here to protect from being misled. You are the judge and jury, the sole arbiter. You can see it and assign whatever importance to it that you wish. If you think it has no value, you will ignore it. If you consider it valuable for either side, you’ll assign it the appropriate weight. It will be significant or harmless, or somewhere in between, and only you will decide which.”

The judge then asks how we would proceed, and I tell him that Karen Evans would bring Reggie in, that her presence as someone he knows would put him at ease. Then Richard would put him through some training paces, tricks that he had taught him, as a way to demonstrate familiarity.

The fact that the judge asks about process is a good sign; if he were going to disallow Reggie, then the process would not be important. Coletti seems to sense this as well, and she renews many of her objections to the testimony. I refute them, but we’re going over the same ground.

“I’m going to allow it,” the judge says, and then makes an unusual ruling. All other witnesses, for both sides, will testify before Reggie. His appearance will represent the finale. “See you in court,” he says.

We take this as our cue to leave the chambers, and I immediately head for a phone to call Laurie. I tell her what time to have Karen and Reggie here, and that I will call her back if that changes.

“You’re taking a chance,” Laurie reminds me. “Reggie could go into court and bite your client, and your case, on the ass.”

“You’re right,” I say. “You’d better ask Tara to speak to him.”

She laughs. “Will do. See you later… good luck.”

I take my place in the courtroom, and Richard Evans is brought in. I can see the nervousness etched in his face; he’s experienced the wonder of hope this past couple of weeks, and he knows that it could all come crashing down today.

“You ready?” he asks.

I nod. “Ready.”

He’s searching my face for a clue to his chances, doesn’t find anything particularly reassuring, so he finally nods. “Okay. Me, too.”

* * * * *

WHEN THE JUDGE enters the courtroom and the bailiff calls the case, I get my own butterflies. This hearing represents not only a huge hurdle but also an unfamiliar one for a defense attorney like me. Usually we only need “reasonable doubt” on our side; the prosecution has to have a slam dunk, a unanimous verdict, to win. A hung jury is generally considered a defense victory.

Here the opposite is true. Richard is presumed guilty, and we must decisively prevail to give him another chance. In this case a tie doesn’t go to the runner, and it doesn’t go to the defense. We have to win decisively, and the judge must be persuaded that we would probably win in a new trial.

The first witness I call is probably the most important human witness I’ll call all day. It’s Dr. Gerald King, here to testify on the toxicology and medical reports. I start to take him through his credentials, which are as impressive as they come. Halfway through them, Coletti belatedly offers to stipulate to him as an expert witness.

“Your Honor, I would like you to hear his entire curriculum vitae,” I say.

“It’s not necessary,” Judge Gordon says. “I’m very familiar with the doctor.”

That’s plenty good enough for me, and I don’t push the issue. Instead, I take Dr. King through his description of how the bruise could not have been on the left side of Richard’s head if he had fallen out of bed, and could only have been caused by a rounded, blunt instrument, not by the floor.

Dr. King has brought pictures and charts with him, some of which are identical to those used in the first trial and some which he has created from scratch. His presentation is reasonably compelling, and once I’m satisfied he’s made his point, I move on to the toxicology.

It only takes a few questions before I lead Dr. King into dropping the bomb that the sleeping pills had to be injected or taken in a liquid form, because of the presence of campene. I could lead him even further, but I want to save some ammunition for when the prosecution puts on its rebuttal witness.

Coletti gets up to cross-examine, and she focuses on the bruise first. “Dr. King, you say that if Mr. Evans had fallen from the bed, the bruise would have been on the right side and not the left. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you also conclude that the floor could not have caused the bruise. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Before the pills knocked Mr. Evans out, would they have made him groggy?”

“Certainly.”

“Could he perhaps have staggered around the room, walked into a cabinet or something else, and then fallen to the floor? Could he have sustained the bruise that way?”

“That was not the prosecution version at trial.”

“And there were, and are, experts and evidence to support that version. But if they were wrong, and you are right, could it have happened as I describe?”

He’s trapped; Coletti is very good. “It’s possible.”

“Thank you,” she says. “Now, to this mysterious campene. Are there other ways for campene to enter one’s system? Is it contained in shellfish, for instance?”

“Yes.”

“Could he have ingested it that way?”

I can almost see Dr. King salivate at this; maybe Coletti is not so good. “If he did, he would have been dead when the Coast Guard got there.”

“Why is that?” she asks.

Here comes a great moment, and I envy Dr. King that he gets to say it. He waits a beat; his timing is perfect. “Mr. Evans is severely allergic to shellfish; it’s in his medical records.”

Coletti flinches; she had clearly not known this. She recovers quickly and gets Dr. King to agree that the campene could have been a preservative in another drug that Richard might have taken. Dr. King points out that there were no other drugs in his system, but has to admit that some drugs leave the body faster than others.

All in all, he has been a very good witness. He won’t carry the day, but he’s moved the day along nicely.

Next up is Dr. Ruff, Reggie’s veterinarian. She shows the X-rays of the plate in his leg, as well as the missing teeth and the cut marks. Coletti establishes on cross that none of these issues could possibly be unique to Reggie, that the pulling of teeth and the repairing of broken legs in this manner are quite commonplace.

Dr. Ruff is a less accomplished witness than Dr. King, and she’s too willing to concede facts to Coletti. The truth is that the combination of health issues would represent a mind-boggling coincidence if the dog is not Reggie, but Dr. Ruff doesn’t come off as that certain.

Next up is Lieutenant Michele Siegle of the Asbury Park Police. I use her to recount the testimony of the witnesses who saw the boat at various times that night. This establishes the locations as far from the shore.

“So it’s your opinion that Mr. Evans’s dog could not successfully have swum to shore if he had been thrown from the boat?”

“That’s correct, and it’s not just my opinion. There was expert testimony to that effect during the trial.”

I introduce the expert testimony from the original trial transcript as a defense exhibit and turn the witness over to Coletti. She gives only a cursory cross-examination, designed to elicit the fact that the murder case was ironclad with or without the dog’s involvement.

Since Reggie’s “testimony” will be kept completely separate, Judge Gordon invites Coletti to bring forward any rebuttal witnesses now. She calls Dr. Nicholas Turner, a toxicologist of some renown who was not the prosecution expert during the trial.

She takes him through a point-by-point rebuttal of Dr. King’s review of the blood work. He claims that Amenipam in liquid form is very hard to find, and that the empty bottle of pills showed traces of Amenipam, lending credibility to the theory that Richard overdosed on conventional pills.

He also talks about how quickly liquid Amenipam works, and that the Coast Guard would have had to appear very quickly after any injection, or Richard would have died.

Finally, Coletti takes him through Dr. King’s testimony about the presence of campene. “Is campene used only to preserve Amenipam?” she asks.

He smiles a condescending smile. “Certainly not. It’s used very commonly with all kinds of drugs. I’ve actually never heard it used with Amenipam, though it’s possible that it would be.”

I start my cross-examination by asking Dr. Turner if he has ever done any acting.

He seems taken aback by the question. “What do you mean by acting?”

“I mean playing a role… pretending. I don’t mean professionally; have you ever been in a school play or anything?”

“In high school… once or twice,” he says.

Coletti objects, asking where this could be going. Judge Gordon tells me to get to the point.

I nod. “Okay. Dr. Turner, I’d like you to act something out for me. Imagine you’re sitting at a table, and you’ve decided to swallow a whole bottle full of pills. Show me how you would do it.”

“How I would swallow the pills?” he asks.

“Yes. Do it like you’re acting it out, or playing charades.”

Coletti objects again, but Judge Gordon lets it proceed. Dr. Turner pours some imaginary pills from the imaginary bottle into his hand, then puts them as far back in his mouth as he can. Then he takes a drink from an imaginary glass and swallows the imaginary pills.

“Very nicely done,” I say. “For the court reporter’s sake, let the record show that you pretended to take pills out of a bottle, put them in your mouth, pretended to take a drink from a glass, and swallowed them. Is that accurate?”

He nods. “Yes.”

“You weren’t undecided about how to do it, were you? That was the obvious way?”

“It was the obvious way,” he agrees.

“Except there was no glass,” I say, taking some papers from Kevin. “Your Honor, here is an inventory of the boat that night. All the glasses were clean and put away in the cabinet. There were none on the table or on the sink. There were none anywhere except the cabinet.”

“Maybe he cleaned it,” Dr. Turner says, making the classic mistake of answering a question that wasn’t asked.

I nod. “Right. He was willing to have someone find his own dead body, but a dirty glass would have just been too embarrassing.”

“Perhaps he took the pills over the sink, cupping water in his hand.” Dr. Turner is feeling trapped, even though he has no reason to be. He’s a scientist, not a cop, and he shouldn’t feel that he has to defend the investigation. But that’s how he feels, and I’m going to take advantage of it.

“A whole bottle of pills?” I ask, not bothering to mask my incredulity.

“It’s possible.”

“There were no traces of Amenipam found in the sink. Do you find that desperate suicidal people who’ve just committed a violent murder are usually that neat?”

I move on to the pill bottle itself, which we have asked to be brought to court. I show it to Dr. Turner and ask him to read the label and tell me what pharmacy it came from.

“There is no label,” he says. “It’s been torn off… There are traces of the back of the paper.”

“According to the police reports, the detached label was not found on the boat, and seventy-one pharmacies nearest to Mr. Evans’s house were canvassed. None had provided the prescription. Can you explain that?”

He shrugs. “He didn’t want anyone to know where he got it.”

“Is it illegal for a pharmacy to dispense Amenipam?”

“Not with a prescription.”

“Is it hard to get a prescription for it?”

“Depends on the doctor, and what the patient tells him.”

I nod. “How about ‘I’m not sleeping well’? Might that do the trick?”

“Depends on the doctor,” he repeats.

“In your experience, is it likely that a suicidal murderer would care if people knew where he got his prescription?”

Coletti objects, and Judge Gordon sustains. I let him off the stand, having made enough points to satisfy myself.

In fact, all the morning witnesses have gone as well as we could have hoped, but the gallery and press in attendance have barely been paying attention. It is as if they have been watching the undercard before a heavyweight championship fight.

Our lunch hour is spent in an anteroom finalizing our plans. Karen will be bringing Reggie into the courtroom, and she will have a key role in our success or failure. She admits to being nervous but swears there is no chance she will screw things up.

I’m fairly confident, based on Reggie’s pizza box trick at my house, but I’m still nervous myself. Lawyers don’t call witnesses unless they know exactly what they will say, and I am violating that principal today. Reggie will speak through his actions, and I am far from certain what he will “say,” especially in the new surroundings of the courtroom, with so many people watching him.

“Just try to keep him as calm as you can,” Laurie says to Karen. “Keep petting him, and talk to him in a soothing voice.”

Karen nods. “I will. We’ll be fine. Right, Reg?” She pats him on the back as she talks, but he remains noncommittal about his testimony.

Karen and Richard will be the two humans with the most responsibility in this afternoon’s session. My role will be mostly to watch and hope, a situation guaranteed to leave me frustrated. But we all know on whom everything is riding.