'Bart!' Farrell moved forward, raising his voice. Delivery people got nervous around big dogs. 'It's okay,' he called out, 'he's friendly. He won't bite.'

The dog started down the steps, which he'd been trained against. 'Bart!'

'It's okay. He's missed me.' Sam stopped where she stood, three steps from the top, one hand absently petting Bart. The other hand clutched a leather satchel which hung over her shoulder. 'Hi,' she said.

'Hi.' His gut went hollow.

She was wearing a green jacket with the hood still up, hair tucked into it. Jeans and hiking boots. Her face was half-hidden, unreadable, looking up at him, and then she was fumbling with the satchel.

'I wanted to bring you something.'

'We shouldn't be talking, Sam.'

'I'm not here to talk.' She pulled a red accordion file out of the satchel. 'You need to see something.'

He knew what he needed to see. He needed to see her. To have things be back the way they'd started. But that couldn't happen. They'd come to here, and he was in the middle of a trial and she was with the enemy. He couldn't forget that, or he would lose.

'I'm pretty busy right now. I don't have time to read anything else. I've got about all I can handle, unless your friend Diane's changing her story.'

Holding the file against her, she threw back the jacket's hood. Her eyes glistened with rage or regret. 'Wes, please?'

'Please what?'

'This is important. This is critical. Not just for the trial. For you.'

But she didn't move, and neither did he. Finally, she nodded, gave Bart another pat, lay the folder down on the steps, and turned. When she got to the door, she didn't pause – as he thought she might. He would have a chance then to call out, to see if… but there was no hesitation at all.

The door closed behind her.

His intention was to leave it on the stairs. But he didn't do that.

Then, once it was inside, he decided he would just throw the damn thing in the trash, but he didn't.

He'd read all of the newspaper and magazine articles about Diane Price, and he'd about had it up to his earlobes with them. Clearly, the woman was some kind of publicity hound who'd struck gold with the touching story of the brutal rape that had cut short her promising future and forced her to a life of drugs and promiscuity.

Right.

He'd read somewhere that she'd optioned her life story to some Hollywood outfit, and he thought that was just perfect. She was a charlatan and a liar and had parlayed a couple of weeks with his famous client into a cottage industry among the politically correct. He had nothing but contempt for her and what she stood for.

But now the accordion folder was on the milk crate in the other room while he sat at his kitchen table pretending to go over Emil Balian's testimony about Mark's car as he chewed on his pizza and drank his second and third beers of the evening.

He kept the radio on low – Christmas carols. He didn't want to hear any random country music. None of Emil Balian's story made any more sense than it had the fifth and sixth times he'd reviewed it. The nosy neighbor didn't know what car he'd seen on the night of the murder.

The second period of the Warriors game was like the second period of all basketball games. Farrell was coming to the opinion that they should change the rules of pro basketball – give each team a hundred points and shorten the game to two minutes. You'd wind up with the same scores and save everybody a lot of wear and tear.

In the end, he swore to himself, flicked off the tube, then the radio, opened another beer, and sat on his futon with the folder in his lap, still hesitating.

What did Sam mean, this was for him, not the trial?

There were a lot of pages. The first was from a high-school yearbook -Diane Taylor with a beaming smile, the mortar-board graduation photo, under it the list of organizations she'd belonged to and awards she'd won -Rally Committee, Debate Society, Chess Club, Varsity Cheerleader, Biology Club, Swim Team, Bank of America Science Award, Lifetime Member California Scholarship Federation, National Merit Semi-finalist.

Wes flipped to the next pages. More yearbook, the individual photos that showed her as she'd been back then – vivacious, pretty, popular.

But so what? The newspapers were filled with file photos of mass murderers who'd looked like this and done this much in high school. You just couldn't tell. Wes had no trouble recalling his own high-school yearbook photo – with his Beatle haircut, he'd been voted 'Best Hair'. Now he was forty-seven percent bald by actual count. And that alone, he thought, pretty much said it all about the relevance of high-school pictures.

But he kept going, turning the pages within the folder, sipping his beer. A change in focus now – from photographs to Xeroxes of report cards and transcripts. Senior year – all A's. First semester at Stanford. A's. Second and third semester. A's. Fourth semester. A B, 2 C 's and an incomplete.

So something happened during the spring semester of her sophomore year. Wes had seen this, too, a million times. This was – he double-checked the date on the transcript – 1968. Drugs happened, was what. Martin Luther King got killed. Bobby Kennedy. The Chicago Democratic convention and Humphrey and then Richard Nixon. America fell apart. Wes wouldn't be surprised if 1968 set a record for grades going to hell – somebody ought to do a study, get a government grant. But what did it mean?

It meant nothing. It was yet another example of a person – Sam in this case – seeing what she was already disposed to see. He finished his beer and went to get another one. He should go to sleep.

But something tugged him back to the futon, to the folder. He owed Sam something, didn't he?

No, he didn't. She was wrong here and he was right. She had caused him all the pain, not the other way around. She was still hurting him.

The next stapled group of pages, forty-two of them, contained Xeroxes of diary entries in a confident female hand – two to a page, the first eighty-three days of the year, ending March 23rd.

He read it all. Diane was a chatty and charming diarist. She was still swimming competitively. She was taking German, Chemistry, Biology and Western Civ, and she was worried that they were too easy, that she wouldn't be prepared when she got to Med School. She had two close female friends – Maxine and Sharon – and on March 14th, she'd met Mark Dooher, the first male mentioned in a romantic context within the pages.

No drugs, no sex. No innuendos of either.

On March 17th, she went to an afternoon college baseball game with Mark Dooher. Burgers. A kiss good night.

The last line on March 22nd. Mark and I m.o. a little. First boyfriend this year. Whew! Thought it was my breath.

The last line on March 23rd. Tomorrow date with Mark. Can't wait.

Wes turned the last page of this section and frowned. The next stapled section seemed to be more Xeroxes of diary pages, again two to a page, beginning March 24th, but these pages had no writing. He flipped through, page by page.

Nothing for seventeen days, where before March 23rd, Diane had never skipped more than a day. Then, on April 10th, the handwriting had changed – subtly, but recognizable even to Wes. It was more cramped somehow, less confident.

Didn 't get out of bed. Too scared. Seeing everything different now, what people are capable of now. Since Mark. From that? I'm afraid I'll see him and then what. I've got to tell somebody. But he said he 'd kill me. I want to go home, but I can't leave school without saying why, but I can't think. I can't talk to anybody. God, my mom… how can I tell them?

And then another sheaf of blank pages until June 5th, when, presumably, school got out.