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"I'll go with ground rules," Hardy said. "Same as Charlie's."

"Do you even know what they were?"

"It doesn't matter. I'll agree unseen."

"There's a desperate offer." She folded her arms over her chest. "Look, Mr. Hardy…"

"Dismas."

"Mr. Hardy, please. I don't want to be a hardass, but I'm not going to talk to you about Evan Scholler. He was guilty and I got him convicted and I hope he rots away in prison. That's all I've got to say, all right? Please."

Hardy counted five of his heartbeats. Of course, there always had been the make-an-appointment-and-set-ground-rules option, but he'd never before had a conference like that produce anything of real substance. If you wanted your soda to fizz and bubble, you had to shake it up.

But now he was looking at turning around and driving back home, facing a weekend with absolutely nothing to chew on and work with. The words and the idea came out of his mouth before he was aware that he'd thought of them. Anything to keep her talking with him. "How about if I don't talk about that case at all?"

She cocked her head, still wary. "Then what exactly would we be talking about?"

"Charlie Bowen."

"What about him?"

"Anything he might have said to you before he disappeared."

That stopped her. She combed her hand through her hair, made a face at him that could have meant anything, looked down at her desk, back at Hardy. "Why do you want to do that?"

"He disappeared while he was working on this appeal. Before I get too far with it, I don't want to have the same thing happen to me."

She shook her head, chortling. "Don't be ridiculous. He'd barely started even the preliminary work. I don't think he'd even finished the transcripts when I talked to him."

"So what did you talk about?"

"He wanted to review the evidence that hadn't been used at the trial. To see if I had any working papers not included in the defense discovery. Stuff like that. Just to make sure the record was complete while he was going ahead. Housecleaning."

"He didn't mention any personal conflicts?"

"No. If I recall, the meeting lasted under the hour. We didn't get too close."

"But he was going ahead with the appeal?"

"Of course. That's why we were talking at all."

"He didn't seem nervous or overly concerned with his safety?"

"Why would he be? The bad guy was already in jail." Shaking her head as if to clear away that thought, she went on. "I hate the appeals process, you know that. They ought to give our side an appeals process if we lose a case-try the scumbags again until we get 'em and put 'em away."

***

"YEAH, THAT'S MILLS," Washburn said. "She's a bit of a zealot, but she's also only the second person in thirty years to whip me in court, so she's got my respect." Hardy had thought it was late enough in the day that there would be a good chance he'd find Washburn at the Broadway Tobacconists, and he was right.

Now they sat in a cloud of cigar smoke in the back of the unpretentious little store. Except for Greta, the female proprietor, they had the place to themselves, a situation-Washburn assured him-that would change in the next hour, when his acolytes and his girlfriend would appear from their various offices to drink "from the vast fount of my knowledge."

Not entirely sure Washburn was poking fun at himself, Hardy said, "Well, whatever time you and I get together here, it's on the clock."

"Goes without saying." Washburn savored his smoke, drawing on it, exhaling another plume. He twirled the cigar around between his lips, then dipped the unlit end into a small glass of amber liquid which, from the bottle next to it, was Armagnac. "Sure you won't join me?"

"Thanks, but then I'd just want a little nip of your nectar, and I'm going to be driving."

"Probably wise. So how can I help you today?"

"Well, this is odd, but it came to me when I was trying to get to Mills. I didn't even see a draft of Charlie Bowen's appeal brief in the file, so I'm assuming he hadn't gotten to it. I'd also been assuming that he was going to go with the PTSD. But now I'm wondering if he'd mentioned anything about that to you."

"What?"

"What he was basing his appeal on. Especially if it wasn't PTSD."

Washburn sat back, drew on his cigar, held the smoke. "Actually," he said, "you raise a good point." Another pause while he dipped the cigar again in the Armagnac. "You know, he seemed to think that it might be more fruitful to attack the competency of the local constabulary as well as the FBI."

"How's that?"

"Well, the Khalil murders." Turning the cigar between his lips, Washburn sat back, pensive. "I mean, here you had two murders intimately connected with the Scholler case-there was no question of that-and a blatant assumption that Evan had committed them with the frag grenades and so on. But the DA never charged him with those murders. You see the issue?"

Hardy saw it plainly, and it struck him as unusually powerful. "So the police and the FBI never questioned anyone else?"