“Oh, no, you gotta save me from him,” Mike responded. “Son of a senator. That’s about as useful as having my mother at the station house. Fremont ’s a whackjob of the first order-I don’t think he’d know probable cause if it bit him in the ass.”

Chapman often did a stand-up comic routine at the bar at Forlini’s, the courthouse watering hole, with the monthly calendar and chart in his hand, calling out the name of the assigned assistants and reliving some embarrassing episode from the career of each of us as he rolled off the dates. Fremont was an easy target, one of those brilliant students with impeccable academic credentials that simply failed to translate to the courtroom. Everyone assumed he had been hired as a “contract,” because his father, the former senior senator from Indiana, had been Paul Battaglia’s roommate at Columbia Law School.

“Or if you wait until a few minutes after eight, you can have Laurie Deitcher,” I countered, aware that she would be responsible for decisions on anything coming in during the next twenty-four hours.

“The Princess? Never again, Blondie. The only time I had a high-profile case with her, it was a disaster. During the lunch hour, instead of prepping witnesses and outlining her cross-examinations, she’d make us wait in the hallway while she plugged in her hot rollers and troweled on some more makeup. Then she’d belly up to the jury box like she was Norma Desmond ready for her close-up. She looked great for the cameras, but the friggin‘ perp walked. Nope. You just call Battaglia and tell him Wallace and I woke you up in the middle of the night because you were the only person who could answer our questions. Hang tough with him, Cooper. This is your case.”

“Like what kind of questions, Mike?”

“Like can you tell if she was raped before she was killed or after? Like does establishing the time of death have anything to do with the speed at which the sperm deteriorates, because of interference from her body fluids?”