“Call your witness,” sixty-year-old Judge Leonard Green said.

Beaumont nodded and stood. “The defense calls Billy Dockery.”

Dockery got up, ambled to the witness stand, and took the oath, the smirk still on his face. I’d seen the proof in the case and knew Dockery should exercise his Fifth Amendment right to keep his mouth shut. He’d be a terrible witness. But I also knew that Dockery enjoyed the spotlight almost as much as he enjoyed thumbing his nose at the prosecution and torturing defenseless, elderly women.

After a few preliminary questions, Beaumont got to the point.

“Mr. Dockery, I’ll ask you this question on the front end. Did you kill Cora Wilson in the early-morning hours of November seventeenth?”

Dockery leaned closer to the microphone.

“No, sir, I did not. I did not have anything to do with her death. I was not nowhere near her place that night. I ain’t never hurt nobody and I ain’t never going to.”

The sound of his voice made me cringe. Five years earlier, Dockery had been charged with murdering another elderly woman during a break-in at her home. His mother hired me to represent him, and after a trial, the jury found him not guilty and set him free. The next day, Dockery walked into my office and drunkenly confessed to me that he’d murdered the woman. He offered me a five-thousand-dollar cash bonus, money he said he’d stolen during the break-in. I threw him out of the office, along with the money, but since double jeopardy prevented them from trying him again, and since the rules of professional responsibility forbade me from telling anyone, I couldn’t do a thing about it. When I read in the newspaper that he was about to go on trial for killing another woman, I wanted to be there to see his face when they sent him to the penitentiary for the rest of his life.

“Did you know the victim?” Jim Beaumont said from the podium in front of the witness stand.