"Can you reconstruct that conversation for us? The details of it, I mean."

There would be skeptics on any jury that was eventually impaneled, people who would assume that there must have been verbal foreplay between the time of the first meeting of this attractive young woman and the stranger at whose home she later arranged a sleep-over. I needed to know that before Mercer and I took the next steps.

"Selim asked me if we had made plans for the days that we'd be in the city and what we wanted to see. Things like that."

"Did he say anything at all, Jean-anything-that made you think he was interested in you, maybe socially or even sexually?"

She answered quickly and firmly. "No." Her green eyes opened wide as she looked at me to measure my response.

"Nothing inappropriate?"

She thought for several seconds. "He asked me why my boyfriend wasn't coming with me. I told him I didn't have one," Jean said. "Oh, yeah. He wanted to know if I liked to smoke marijuana, 'cause he could get some while I was here."

Mercer moved his head back and forth. This was a fact he was hearing for the first time. It didn't necessarily change the case at all, but it reminded us that we had to constantly press for things that often seemed irrelevant to witnesses-and for the truth.

"What did you tell him?"

"That I don't like weed, that it makes me sick."

"Did you expect to spend any time with him, Jean?"

"No way. Dr. Sengor-Selim-told us he'd be at work all day and with his girlfriend most evenings. I just thought he was being a nice guy, letting us crash at his place."

Most of my prosecutorial career had involved women meeting nice guys who had other things in mind. Cops and prosecutors-and often Manhattan jurors-found young people from west of the Hudson River and north of the Bronx a bit too trusting much of the time.