Reaching down for his props, though he didn't need them, Dooher pulled his briefcase from the floor, opened it, and extracted a yellow manila folder labeled Felicia Diep.

Mrs Diep had come to the United States in 1976 from Saigon, a young single mother with a substantial nest egg from her deceased husband in Vietnam. She'd settled in the lower Mission District of San Francisco, where she became a regular parishioner at St Michael's Parish and, not incidentally, a long-time paramour of its pastor, Father Peter Slocum.

Over the course of the next twenty years, Mrs Diep gave Father Slocum something in the order of $50,000 for one thing and another, and all might have been well had not the good priest decided to take his promotion to Monsignor and move away from her, down the peninsula to Menlo Park.

He had abandoned her and she wanted her money back, so she decided to go to a young lawyer in her community named Victor Trang.

Trang wasn't in the medical field, but if he was, he would have qualified as an 'ambulance chaser'. Barely making a living in his first three years after graduating from one of the night schools that taught law, he took the case, hoping for no more than his fee of one third of the fifty grand Mrs Diep wanted.

He sued the Archdiocese for fraud – Father Slocum wasn't celibate as promised, and he'd taken Mrs Diep's money under false pretenses, promising her over the years that he would eventually leave the priesthood and marry her.

This was where Dooher got involved, and it hadn't been a big item on his plate. One of his associates took care of the preliminary motions in response to the lawsuit, then passed them up to him. He and Flaherty had determined that they would offer ten grand as a settlement and if Mrs Diep didn't accept it, they would go to court and take their chances.

So in the middle of the previous week, Dooher had called Victor Trang, conveying the settlement offer. It was then he discovered that things had changed, and he'd arranged this meeting with Flaherty.