"Questioned after his appearance in the courtroom yesterday, Sergeant Cuneo expanded on the conspiracy theme, saying that Glitsky and, by extension, Mayor West herself had repeatedly undermined his efforts to apprehend his chief suspect, Catherine Hanover, in the slayings last May. 'They cooked up sexual harassment charges against me, they told me to keep away from her, told me not to do any more interviews, tried to direct me to other potential suspects. It was a full-court press.'

"Several groups in the city have already expressed outrage over the allegation, although the mayor herself has thus far declined to comment. Marvin Allred, spokesperson for the Urban Justice Project, a police watchdog group, has called for a full-scale investigation into the mayor's relations with senior police officials. 'The mayor's arrogance and sense of entitlement undermine the very basis of our system of justice. This peddling and trading of influence in our political leaders is a cancer on the body politic of this city and has to stop,' he said."

Another half dozen quotes spun the story the same way. It wasn't just an accusation anymore. Strongly implied was proof of a conspiracy.

"Cuneo's allegations also implicate Catherine Hanover's defense attorney Dismas Hardy, whose cozy relationship with top cop Glitsky and the mayor has long been a subject of conjecture and discussion among Hall of Justice regulars. Cuneo went on to say that 'Everybody knows that he dated Catherine Hanover when they were both in high school. They've been friends since they were kids. When it was obvious that she would be my chief suspect, he went to his friend the mayor and asked her and their friend Glitsky to use all of her influence to keep me away from her. Luckily, it didn't work.'

"Deputy Chief Glitsky has not been at work for two days and did not return calls to his office, and Hardy, likewise, could not be reached for comment."

"Dad? Are you all right?"

Still leaning on his hands, the paper spread open under him, Hardy stood immobile. "If any of the jury saw this or heard about it, we're going to ask for a mistrial. I've got to or I'm incompetent." Now he straightened up, pressed a hand to his eyes. "I'm going to have to do this all over again. And Catherine in jail all that time. Lord."

His daughter moved up next to him, put an arm around his waist. He turned back to the front page so she could read the article from the top. When she finished, she rested her head against him. "But none of it is remotely true."

"No. What makes it so effective is that most of it is true. The mayor and Abe and I are friends. She asked Abe to look into the investigation. I used to date Catherine. The facts are fine. It's just all twisted. I especially love where it says that Abe hasn't been in the office for two days, implying that he's ducking questions, when in fact he had a baby born with a hole in his heart. You think that might account for it?"

"How about your relationship with Uncle Abe being a source of discussion . . ."

"My cozy relationship. And it's discussion and conjecture. Don't forget conjecture."

"I never would. But what's that supposed to mean?"

"It means we're somehow up to no good."

They both stood over the paper, staring down at it. "So what are you going to do?" Rebecca finally asked.

"Well, first, let's see if I can get the judge to ask if any of the jurors saw this or heard about it."

"Do you really want that?"

"I don't have a choice. It's too big to ignore. I think I can convince Braun."

"To declare a mistrial?"

He nodded. "If any of the jurors read this, and I'm almost certain at least three of them can read, then it's extremely prejudicial. They get kicked off just for ignoring Braun's instructions. If they discussed it with the other jurors, the whole panel goes." Suddenly, he let out a little yelp of alarm and reached over to uncover his black pan and flick the heat off under it.

"I like a nice crust on hash." Rebecca squeezed his waist. "Don't worry about that."

But Hardy's lapse in timing bothered him. "I've never ruined anything I cooked in this pan before," he said miserably.

"And still haven't," his daughter responded. "Besides, it's not ruined. It's well done."

"Same thing. It's got to be an omen."

"No, it's a sign. Besides, I hate runny eggs."

Hardy stuck the corner of his spatula into one of the hard yolks. "Well, they're not that. And what would it be a sign of?"

She gave it a second. "Perseverance. Staying in the frying pan even when it's too hot."

The lighthearted, feel-good words resonated on some level, although Hardy couldn't put his finger on it. "You think?" he asked.

"Positive," she said.

In the "Passion Pit" two hours later, the attorney and his client sat on either end of the library table that served as the room's only furnishing. "This is unbelievable," Catherine said as she put down the paper. "What's it going to mean?"

"It means we might be able to start over if you want."

She threw a terrified glance across at him. "You don't mean from the beginning?"

"Pretty close."

"I can't do that, Dismas. I couldn't live here that long."

Hardy wasn't so sure that she was exaggerating. He'd known a lot of people who'd gone to jail-including some who more or less called it home-and most of them went through the original denial of their situation, hating every second of the experience, but then came to accept the surroundings as the reality of their life. Over these eight months, if anything, Catherine had come to hate her incarceration more and more each day. She'd lost the weight because she'd all but stopped eating. Another eight months, or more, preparing and waiting for another trial, might in fact kill her. If she didn't kill herself first. The year before Hardy had had another client try to do that very thing.

"Well, Catherine, after we find out if any of the jury has seen this, and they have, then if I don't move for a mistrial-regardless what Braun rules-it's damn close to malpractice."

"I'd never sue you for that."

"No. But an appellate court might find me incompetent."

She couldn't argue with that. "I don't want to stop, though. I think we're doing okay."

"That's heartening."

"You don't?"

"Honestly, Catherine, I don't know. Cuneo has . . ." He stopped.

"What?"

An idea had occurred to him, but he didn't inadvertently want to give Catherine any false hope. "Nothing. I'm just thinking we've still got some rocky ground ahead of us. You testifying, for example." He explained his problem with her old and brand-new alibi, how the discrepancy would sound to the jurors.

"But I have to testify if I'm going to talk about Cuneo. Isn't that our whole theory about why he kept coming after me?"

"Yes. Initially, anyway."

"Would a second trial be any different?"

"Maybe. Slightly. I don't know. A venue change might make a difference." "Are you still mad at me?" The question took him by surprise-talk about irrelevant-but he nodded. "Yep."

"I didn't kill anybody, Dismas. I know you don't like to talk about that. You've told me not to go on about it, but it's the truth. It really is. And I can't stay in here too much longer. I've got to see the end in sight."

"Don't do anything stupid, Catherine."

"I won't. But I can't start all this over again."

Hardy boosted himself from the table and walked across to the glass-block walls of the jail's attorney-client visiting room. He couldn't remember the last time he'd let a trial get so far away from him, and now he wasn't sure how to proceed. Most defense attorneys spend a great deal of their time trying to get delays for their clients-to put off the eventual day of reckoning and the finality of the sentence. But Catherine didn't want delay, couldn't accept it. She wanted resolution. But if he'd tried to deliver on that at the expense of a winnable strategy, a shortchange on the evidence issues, or a blunder in his refusal to press for an obvious mistrial, he stood the very real risk of condemning her to life in prison.

But maybe, he was beginning to think, there was another approach-legal but rarely invoked-that could change everything. If he could get Braun to rule that Cuneo's statements to the press were a result of deliberate misconduct on the part of the prosecution-i.e., Rosen- she might give him a mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct. In this case, Catherine-having once been placed in jeopardy by the state-would under the theory of double jeopardy walk out of the courtroom a free woman. They couldn't try her again for the same crimes, even if they were capital murder. But of course, this made it a potentially huge decision for the judge, since it would undo the efforts of the grand jury that had issued the indictments, as well as those of the district attorney and the police department. And there would be an immediate uproar from the conspiracy buffs that somehow the fix was in.

But Catherine cut him off midthought. "Can I ask you something?" she said from behind him.

He turned.

"Is this true, what Cuneo says? That the mayor asked Glitsky to intervene?"

"Yes."

"Why did she do that?"

"Because she was afraid of your father-in-law's enemies. She thought it might have been about business somehow. The city's towing contract."

"And Glitsky followed that up?"

" 'Til it ended with nothing."

"And all the other leads?"

"Every one he could find, yes."

"How about the political one?"

"You mean with the mayor?"

"No, with the president. You know, the cabinet thing."

In the endless reams of newsprint leading up to the trial, the nascent potential cabinet appointment naturally got its fifteen minutes of spin and conjecture. But no one-reporters, private investigators or administration officials-had uncovered or revealed anything remotely approaching a connection to Hanover's murder. Many people, including Hardy's investigator, had looked, and all had concluded that Hanover hadn't been involved in anything controversial on the national scene. Beyond that, the nomination process itself had not even formally begun-Hanover's vetting by the FBI was still at least weeks away when he'd been shot.

Hardy shook his head. "I don't know if Glitsky has looked at that specifically. Why? Has something occurred to you?"

Hardy was more than willing to take anything she could give him. A little ripple of concern ran through him. Here he was, nearly a year into his defense of this woman, on the third day of her actual trial, and in the past two days she'd given him not one, but two, potentially important facts-the ring and the nomination- which he'd previously given short shrift. It brought him up short.

Were his own personal demons-his concern over Cuneo's conspiracy theory, allowing the personal element inevitably to creep into his representation of his old girlfriend, the media madness, Abe's personal and professional issues-were these concerns threatening his ability to conduct a competent defense, blinding him to other critical facts? The basic rule of trial strategy is that you didn't want to be surprised by anything once you got to the courtroom, and now in two successive days he realized he'd been vulnerable to broadsides twice! Luckily, it had not yet happened in the courtroom, but he'd obviously been so sloppy in his preparation that it would only be a matter of time.

It was unconscionable-he ought to go in to Braun and get a mistrial declared today and then bow out entirely. In waves of self-loathing, he realized that he'd failed Catherine and even failed himself. He was unprepared. She would go down.

But Catherine was still on the nomination. "That's what they were fighting about, you know. The nomination."

"I'm sorry," Hardy said. "Who was fighting?"

"Missy and Paul."

"When?" Hardy, all but babbling.

"Dismas. That day. Don't you remember I said they'd been arguing?" Though it didn't eradicate the disgust Hardy was feeling with himself, he did realize that he'd reread this bit of information, the arguing, while reviewing his binders last night. Though he hadn't recognized its relevance, if any. And didn't even now.

But Catherine was going on. "That's why Missy wasn't there when I was. She'd left all upset that morning."

"Why was she upset?"

"Because she didn't want Paul to go for the nomination." "Why not?" "I think mostly it was the house. She'd just spent over a year redecorating the place. The thought of moving to Washington, D.C.? I don't really blame her."

"Is that what Paul told you?"

"What? That she didn't want to move? No. He said she was paranoid about the government and their background check, which he thought was ridiculous. She didn't even want them to start. She thought they'd be prejudiced somehow because she was foreign. She just didn't want to be involved. It scared her, he said."

"But Paul wanted it? The nomination."

"Did he want it? Did Paul Hanover want national recognition for a lifetime of public and private service? Does the pope shit in the woods? Of course he wanted it. Missy would come around, he said. They weren't going to break up over it. They loved each other. She'd see there wouldn't be anything to worry about. He told her that morning that he was going ahead anyway, and that's when they'd fought and she'd walked out."

"And then come back," Hardy said, "in time to get shot."

This sobered Catherine right up. "I know. Great timing, huh?"

In the end, though, Hardy thought with some relief, this at least was an example of a fact to be filed under interesting, even fascinating, but irrelevant. Paul and Missy's argument on the day of their deaths didn't lead either one of them to kill the other. Someone else had killed them both. Which left Hardy only with the ring, and the question of Theresa Hanover's alibi for the night of the fire.

But the bailiff now knocked at the door and announced that it was time to go over to the Hall. Hardy, in a dangerous emotional state in any event, had to bite his tongue to keep from telling the bailiff not to cuff his client, that she didn't need that indignity.

But he knew that this would have been wasted breath.

The cuffs clicked into place.

24.

Marian Braun was a Superior Court judge when Barry Bonds was still playing baseball for Serra High School down in San Mateo. Her chambers reflected that longevity with an unusual sense of homeyness. She'd had built-in wooden bookshelves installed all across the back wall, put down a couple of nice large rugs to cover the institutional linoleum floor, hung several pleasant California landscapes here and there. Drapes under sconces softened the two window areas, and the upholstered furniture for her visitors marked a significant departure from the typical judge's chamber setting of a few metal chairs in front of an often imposing and distancing desk.

But the comfortable physical setting wasn't making anybody in the room more relaxed at the moment. To no one's surprise, Braun had summoned Cuneo and counsel for both sides here as soon as her bailiff told her they were all in the courtroom. At the same time, she'd had the bailiffs bring in a copy of the morning's Chronicle and told them to instruct the jurors not to speak with each other, even casually, until she came out into open court.

Now Hardy leaned against the bookshelf, hands in his pockets, and Chris Rosen held up the wall next to him. Jan Saunders had pulled in her portable chair from the courtroom and was setting up her machine on the coffee table in front of the couch. Braun, silent as a stone Buddha, sat at her desk sipping coffee and pointedly ignoring everyone's entrance as she turned the pages of the morning's paper. She was waiting for Saunders to be ready to record the discussion, and didn't seem inclined to make small talk to cut the tension until that moment arrived. In fact, to Hardy, the gathering tension seemed to be her point.

Saunders hit a few keys, then cleared her throat-a prearranged signal-and Braun glanced at her, took a sip of coffee, put down her newspaper. She looked first at Rosen, then over to Hardy, then over to Cuneo and finally back to the prosecutor. "Mr. Rosen, do you remember a couple of weeks ago when we were starting with jury selection and I said I didn't want anybody talking to the press about this case?"

Rosen pried himself off the wall into a respectful stance. "Yes, Your Honor. Of course."

"Here in the legal world, we call that a gag order. Does that phrase ring a bell?"

"Yes, Your Honor."

"And since Inspector Cuneo has been in the courtroom, sitting next to you at the prosecution table since the formal start of these proceedings, do you think it's unreasonable of me to assume that he is part of the prosecutorial team? And that therefore the gag order would apply to him as well?"