"Objection!"

Judge Howard sighed. "Mr. Hickory?"

Flair smiled, waved his apology. This was the kind of thing only Flair could get away with. "Now, Ms. Tynes, when you were in this chat room, you were pretending to be an underage girl, isn't that correct?"

"Yes."

"You then engaged in conversations designed to entice men into wanting sex with you, isn't that also correct?"

"No."

"How's that?"

"I always let them make the first move."

Flair shook his head and made a tsk-tsk noise. "If I had a dollar for every time I said that…"

A smattering of laughter rippled through the courtroom.

The judge said, "We have the transcripts, Mr. Hickory. We can read them and decide for ourselves."

"Excellent point, Your Honor, thank you."

Wendy wondered why Dan Mercer wasn't here, but that was probably obvious. This was an evidentiary hearing, ergo, there was no requirement to attend. Flair Hickory was hoping to persuade the judge to throw out the horrible, sickening, stomach-turning material the police had found on Mercer's computer and hidden throughout his house. If he could pull this off-everyone agreed it was a long shot-the case against Dan Mercer would probably vanish and a sick predator would be out on the streets.

"By the way"-Flair spun back toward Wendy-"how did you know it was my client on the other end of these online conversations?"

"I didn't at first."

"Oh? With whom did you think you were conversing?"

"I didn't have a name. That's part of it. I just knew at that stage that it was some guy who was trolling for sex with underage girls."

"How did you know that?"

"Excuse me?"

Flair made quote marks with his fingers. " ' Trolling for sex with underage girls,' as you put it. How did you know that was what the person on the other end of the conversation was doing?"