“Exactly.”

“Why’d you quit?”

“A combination of things, I guess. It always bothered me that I knew my clients were lying to me, or at least most of them. And I was constantly at war with somebody-cops, prosecutors, judges, witnesses, guards at the jails, you name it. I got tired of it. But the bottom line, I think, was that I felt like I was doing something wrong.”

“Wrong? How so?”

“Some of the people I helped walk out the door were guilty. They knew it, and so did I.”

Mooney shifted in his chair a little and looked down at the saltshaker. “You defended Billy Dockery once, didn’t you?” he said.

“He was the beginning of the end of my career as a criminal defense lawyer,” I said.

“Alexander Dunn told me you were at his trial.”

“I was curious.”

“How’d Alexander do? It was his first big felony trial.”

“The odds were against him.”

There wasn’t any point in telling him that Alexander was terrible and that he constantly referred to Cora Wilson as “the victim in this case” instead of by name. Even when he did mention her name, he referred to her twice as “Ms. Williams” instead of “Ms. Wilson.”

“So what are you really looking for, Joe?”

“It’s pretty simple. I want to do something that keeps me interested, and I want to do something that doesn’t make me feel like puking every time I look in the mirror.”

Mooney sat back and smiled. “You looking to make amends?”

“Maybe. Something like that.”

“You have to understand that Baker didn’t leave me with much,” he said, speaking of his predecessor. “He was so paranoid that he ran off every competent lawyer in the office. All that’s left are a bunch of kids learning on the fly.”

“Do you have anything open?” I said. I knew the budget in the DA’s office was tight. State legislators tend to look at the criminal justice system as a bastard stepchild, a necessary evil, when it comes to funding.