Once a prosecutor files charges, law enforcement gets hunkered down to prove the case, and it’s hard to make them look elsewhere. If you could call your cousin and ask him to talk to your workers after I inspect the plant so that when I begin to interview them, they’ll be more open with me, it would help.”

The phone crackles and snaps in my hand like it is about to burst into flames. If I were paranoid, I would think the line was somehow tapped already.

“Let me think about this,” Tommy says finally.

“I don’t want to do anything that would jeopardize the case.”

“They don’t have a strong one against Paul,” I say urgently, leafing through the file in my lap.

“All they can show is Bledsoe has worked for him a long time. The only thing your secretary at the plant says is that she overheard Bledsoe say that he had gotten the money, but nobody knows what that was about.

For all I know, he may have been stealing from the plant, but that doesn’t mean he was the murderer. All they have on Paul is the tape, and Paul can explain it away in five minutes on the witness stand. It’s ambiguous.

He’s going to walk away from all of this.”

“What I have trouble understanding,” Tommy says cautiously, “is why a man like that would risk so much.”

I have trouble with that aspect, too, but I say, “I don’t know how often you and Connie have been in Bear Creek recently, but I’m finding out it’s changed a lot since I grew up here.” “It’s changed, all right,” Tommy says humorlessly.

Sensing that he is willing to talk, I ask him what he does for a living, and he tells me that he has a commercial real estate firm in D.C. It sounds as if he is doing quite well, which I don’t doubt. He had the sort of mind that could make sense of the tax code but never tried to intimidate you with his intelligence. I ask what Connie does and learn that she is a physicist in Memphis who measures the amount of radiation given to cancer patients. She has been driving over on the weekends to stay with their mother, who has been ill for the last several years and whose health has not. been improved by her husband’s murder. I am sure he will be on the phone to them after this call.