Though I have been burned more than once taking checks from clients, I say that I will, and watch her count out ten one hundred bills and then

also write on a green piece of paper that obligates the Farmer’s State Bank of Bear Creek to give me her life savings. I make her a receipt, and we exchange paper. I will have her husband sign a retainer agreement. It occurs to me that it is not out of the realm of possibility that she is lying, and I, like my client, am now on Paul Taylor payroll. For that to happen, though, Paul would have to be suffering from a major case of amnesia, but the thought makes me nervous as does the knowledge of how much time this case will take. I have recently abandoned my neighborhood of over twenty-five years and am moving into a new house. Add the new mortgage to Sarah’s tuition and my other expenses and you have the equation for tight money.

In the next thirty minutes I cover as much ground as I can but don’t find out anything that makes it seem less likely that Class Bledsoe is guilty of slitting his employer’s throat. According to his wife, the plant was in operation from six to two, and it was her husband’s habit to come home after work, fix himself some lunch, drink a beer, and take a nap. The time of death she thinks is claimed to be between two and four in the afternoon, the time when Willie’s wife discovered his body.

Bledsoe has no alibi, just his word.

In her haste to get over here this morning, she has forgotten to bring a copy of his charges and her information is sketchy at best. She has heard through a clerk in the courthouse that the prosecutor had been waiting for the DNA results from the FBI lab in Washington, D.C.” before arresting Class and Paul yesterday. Having exhausted her knowledge of the charges, I learn that Lattice now works the night shift in a 7-Eleven, but at the time of the murder back in September, she was working days. She and Class, in their early thirties, and lifelong