“He did.”

“Well?”

“Well, I agree. He should have been overcome with gratitude at how we burnished his flagging career. But somehow he didn’t see it that way. He kind of thinks I set him up and Gina screwed him. And she did make him look bad at the trial. No, worse than bad. Incompetent and stupid. And I helped her.” He shook his head. “So, no is the answer. No to pretty much anything I’ve asked him since.”

“But this is something new. And it will save him time and effort, maybe lots of both. He’s got to see that. And if he doesn’t, Russo will.”

“Maybe.” Hunt, now back at the stoop, lowered himself down again, finished his lemonade in a long swig, and placed the beaded glass on the cement between his legs. “I’ll think about it. And I do appreciate you trying to keep us alive here, Mick, but I’m not sure this is the way. We need more than one case.”

“Well, maybe not. We do good on one case, people might start remembering we do good work in general. What I’m just trying to do is get us back on the street. Get you back on the street, instead of sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring.”

Hunt let out a frustrated sigh. “Not to be defensive, Mick, but I’ve been doing a little more than that. A lot more. The way it usually works is your clients come to you. And nobody seems hot to let us play.”

“So we make our own game. We can bring these people in, I know we can.”

“How do you know that?”

Mickey took a breath, hesitating. Alicia Thorpe was the other foci in the elliptical orbit they needed to enter, and so far he’d left her out of it entirely. “There’s a woman who may already be a suspect who knew Como and most of what he was working on. She can put us in touch with the people we need to talk to.”

Hunt looked across at him. “She’s a suspect?”

“She might be a suspect. Juhle and Russo talked to her.”