"I am. And it's not stupid, it's right. This is what I need to be doing. This is who I am, who we are. I'm just sorry it took me so long to figure it out."

"You don't have to be sorry for anything," he said.

But she shook her head. "No, you're wrong. I'm sorry for everything that's got us to here. I'm just so, so sorry, Evan. I really am."

His eyes met hers. "I am, too, Tara," he said at last. "I am, too."

19

ON TUESDAY MORNING, the second week of September 2005, an assistant district attorney with the impossible name of Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille looked at her wristwatch in Department 21 of the San Mateo County Courthouse in Redwood City. It was nine forty-two A.M. This meant that court was starting a few minutes late, but the tardiness didn't bother her.

Mary Patricia's law-school friends had given her the nickname of Mills almost before she'd gotten her full name out for the first time, and now Mills, with excitement and some trepidation, took in the scene around her. She was exactly where she wanted to be at this moment-in a courtroom as a prosecutor about to begin the trial of her life, and one that had a chance to become a defining moment in her career.

Oh, there would undoubtedly be pitfalls ahead, as in fact there had already been. Her boss Doug Falbrock's decision to abandon the charges against Evan Scholler in the murders of Ibrahim and Shatha Khalil for lack of evidence, for example, had been a bitter pill for her to swallow in the early innings. Pulling Tollson, a multidecorated Vietnam combat veteran who'd lost a foot to an antipersonnel bomb in that war, as the trial judge perhaps wasn't the greatest bit of good fortune imaginable either. Probably fewer than two or three years from retirement, Tollson, as the prototypical éminence grise, had earned the sobriquet "His Griseness" from Mills's paralegal, Felice Brinkley, and it fit perfectly.

Outside of the courtroom, in the building's halls, Tollson limped along exuding a nearly boyish enthusiasm. He came across as preppy, favoring casual menswear instead of coat and tie. He wore blue contact lenses, his perfectly combed, silver-tipped, Grecian Formula hair nearly luxuriant in a man his age. But on the bench he wore the black robe and thick black eyeglasses that magnified a pair of rheumy, depthless black pupils. His hair remained permanently in disarray, as though he spent his time in chambers running his hands through it in constant despair at the human condition. Add the permanent scowl, which emphasized heavy brows, a prominent and aggressive nose, and the thin-lipped set of his mouth, and His Griseness was a formidable and vaguely menacing force that attorneys in court crossed at their own peril.

Nor was Mills entirely sanguine about the defense attorney who was now standing behind his desk fifteen feet to her left. Everett Washburn, somewhere north of seventy, white-haired, and in rimless glasses, wore a light tan suit that was at least one size too large. His shirt had had all of its wash-'n'-wear washed out of it. The tie was an orange-and-tan paisley design, three inches wide. His florid face was a creased dried apple, and his voice combined equal parts honey and whiskey. He had the teeth of a horse, yellowed with age, cigars, strong coffee, and wine.

Washburn, reportedly, had lost a murder trial once, but nobody remembered when. Mills herself had come down to court just to watch him perform several times and considered him tenacious, brilliant, ruthless, and unpredictable. A dangerous combination.

Plus, and this made it worse, he was a famous nice guy, a favorite of all the judges, bailiffs, clerks, and even prosecuting attorneys such as herself. He knew every birthday and anniversary in the building and reportedly spent in excess of fifty thousand dollars a year on political fund-raisers, charity events, and lunches.

And that didn't include his bar tabs.

But all of that being said, Mills liked her chances. Greater forces were at work here, the first of which was the fact that some benign karma had delivered her to San Mateo County. Her first seven years as a prosecutor had been in San Francisco and in spite of always being prepared beyond reason and never seeing a suspect who hadn't committed the crime of which he or she had been accused, she had only managed four jury trials-the rest had been pled out by her superiors for far less than any sentence they would have received in a fair world-and her record in those trials had been three hung juries and an acquittal. San Francisco juries, she believed because it was true, just didn't convict.

But San Mateo County!