North waved impatiently. "I don't need it. If you're convinced, it'll be good enough for a jury." He slammed a palm against the side of his seat. "I knew he took it, goddamn it. I knew he was lying to me." Smoldering, North sat forward with his shoulders hunched, his elbows resting on his knees, head down. Finally, he looked up at Wu. "What about the lineup?"

"The man upstairs saw him leave just after the shots. Positive ID."

North slumped again, shook his head from side to side wearily, came back up to face her. "So he did it." Not a question.

"Well, maybe he wasn't taking that walk to rehearse his lines, let's say that."

"Jesus. This is going to kill Linda."

"She really believes him?"

"We're talking faith here, not reason. I thought that alibi story was like the ultimate in lame myself, but once Andrew came up with it, he had to stick to it. I just wish he would have invented something else, almost anything else." North shook himself all over, then straightened his back and threw Wu a determined, pugnacious look. "Okay, Counselor, what do we do now?"

Wu was ready for the question, and suddenly glad that Linda wasn't here. Hal would play much more into her plan that she'd reluctantly come to believe was the boy's best hope- albeit a defeatist and cynical one because it was based on the absolute fact of Andrew's guilt.

As a good lawyer with a difficult case before her- hell, as a good person- she knew she should have been consumed with getting Andrew off. That was in many ways the definition of what her job was all about. Give her client the best defense the law allowed. And myriad defenses- insanity, psychiatric, diminished capacity, some form of self-defense or manslaughter- were always available, a veritable smorgasbord of reasons that homicide could be if not forgiven entirely, then mitigated. But all of those defenses and strategies involved huge expense for her client's family, a year or more of her life's commitment, and tremendous risk to her client should she fail, or even not completely succeed.