His eyes raked the gallery, rested for a second on Frannie, who’d surprised and delighted him by saying she wanted to come down to root for him, at least for his opening statement. The kids were back in school. She might bring him some luck. He gave her an imperceptible nod, touching hand to heart as though he were straightening his tie. She saw it and nodded back.

In front of Frannie, Graham’s mother, Helen, who’d come to court for every day of jury selection, imitated a trompe 1’oeil statue. Hardy stared at her for several seconds, during which time she did not so much as blink. Her ash-colored hair was off her face, hands clasped on her lap. A general murmur hovered over the courtroom – people talking, speculating, arguing – but Graham’s mother was by herself, alone, self-sufficient. Neither her husband nor her other son was there, nor had they appeared last week.

Hardy recognized other faces on Graham’s ‘side’ of the gallery, several staff from his office. These were Freeman’s acolytes, here to see the show, especially the opening statements. Freeman had shamelessly pimped Hardy to these Young Turks as a master, and they’d come to see him work his magic.

He’d never lost! Freeman had told them all, and Hardy had rushed in with the clarification that he’d only fought twice. Never losing would have a lot more punch six or eight trials down the line. But they’d come anyway.

Conspicuously absent was Michelle, who had assumed much of the day-to-day responsibility of Tryptech. She was clearly resentful of the trial, of the way Graham Russo had come to consume her boss’s life over the past months, but Hardy thought it was actually working out very well for all concerned. Never a trial lawyer, Michelle was superb in her new role as corporate litigator. Hardy’s billings on Tryptech had dropped to about five hours a week, Brunei’s limit on cash outlay, and Michelle was taking her pay in discounted stock. Hardy hoped that she wouldn’t wind up impoverished by that decision, but she had made it on her own.

On his side also, and it surprised him, was Sharron Pratt herself. The newspapers had it that she planned to attend as much of the trial as her schedule allowed. Barbara Brandt, too, the perhaps-lying lobbyist – a redundancy? – whose face had become familiar, talked nonstop to her contingent by the back doors.

On the other side, behind the prosecution table, in the first row and far to the side, sat Dean Powell, the attorney general of the state of California. Like Pratt he was here to observe, to be a presence.

Hardy glanced over at Freeman and his client, still head to head, chatting amiably. Hardy was too tightly wound up even to feign listening. He blew out heavily, then stopped midway in the breath, lest any sign of his nerves get misinterpreted by the jury. He must forever appear confident, though not too. Grave, friendly.

Juror #4, Thomas Kenner, was looking at him, and Hardy met his gaze, nodding as if they had been acquainted for ages. Leisurely he took in the rest of the panel.

Jury selection had not gone well. In one important sense the final panel failed to be a representative cross-section of the citizenry of San Francisco – and that had been Hardy’s primary goal. In spite of the jury experts he and Freeman had hired, they had nearly been unable to counter the prosecution’s strategy. By the (bad) luck of the draw the jury pool had contained a huge preponderance of men, and though Hardy and Freeman had used their peremptory and other challenges to eliminate as many as they could, still the final panel had eight men, six of whom were white.

It was a generalization, but Hardy had no illusions: these working class men would not be as sympathetic as women would be. Soma and Drysdale had been shamelessly gender biased about wanting men on the jury – all men! Gender bias was okay if you won. Anything was okay if you won.

Of the four women, Hardy had a young Asian mother, an African-American thirtiesish schoolteacher, a divorced white secretary in her fifties, and a young gum-chewer with short hair dyed a bright carmine who read meters for the gas company.

Friday night after the adjournment, after the jury had been empaneled, Hardy and Freeman were having a consolation drink in one of the back booths at Lou the Greek’s. Soma and Drysdale had come in and sat at the bar up front. They were in high spirits, raised their glasses and toasted one another. Hardy heard them clearly enough. ‘Here’s to the best jury in America!’

Freeman, his liver-spotted lugubrious face buried in his bourbon, raised it enough to nod knowingly. ‘Good thing you’re motivated by a challenge,’ he’d said. ‘I’d say you got one.’

Understatement. Freeman’s forte.

Gil Soma’s stridency at the bail hearing, his sharp-edged ironic tone when he’d been with Drysdale and first met Hardy, his obvious, vitriolic hatred for Graham Russo – these examples had all worked to convince Hardy that Soma’s courtroom behavior would not help his case. Jurors would not warm to him.

But this appeared now to have been wishful thinking. Soma was neither arrogant nor stupid, and his easy manner in front of the jury showed that he was aware of his personal shortcomings and had learned to harness them.

Now, attired in his charcoal suit, his muted blue tie, his artfully scuffed shoes (for the common touch – an old Freeman trick), he stood quite close to his mostly male jury and spoke to them quietly, without histrionics, sincerely convinced of the justice of his position.

‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury. The defendant, Graham Russo, murdered his father for money.’

There was a minor stir in the courtroom at the drama of the words, but it subsided before Judge Jordan Salter had to intervene. Soma’s eyes never left the jury box, calmly surveying them. ‘In this trial, in the coming days and perhaps weeks, we’ll be presenting a great deal of evidence, an overwhelming array of both direct and circumstantial evidence, that will prove to you, and prove beyond any reasonable doubt, that early on the afternoon of Friday, May ninth, the defendant, sitting right there at the table to my left’ – and here he pointed as naturally as if it had been at a lovely sunset, meeting Graham’s hard glance with a calm one of his own – ‘came to his father’s apartment, and while there, he killed his father with an injection of morphine, took money and property, and fled.

‘There may be evidence that Salvatore Russo – Sal, the defendant’s father – was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and from brain cancer. No one disputes these facts. There may be evidence that on some days the defendant came to his father’s apartment to administer morphine to help Sal deal with his pain. No one disputes this either.

‘But on May ninth the defendant came not as a helper, but as a thief. Not as a healer, but as an assassin.

‘The defense may suggest that Sal Russo was in pain, that he was dying anyway, that somehow the defendant Graham Russo was entitled to decide whether he should live or die. But whether through simple greed or some twisted sense of loyalty, Graham Russo took his father’s property and his father’s life. This the law calls robbery and murder, regardless of motive.

‘We will introduce witnesses who will testify that the defendant was a trained paramedic, skilled in giving injections, that he had nearly constant access to and in fact provided the syringe that was used in this fatal injection, that he obtained, under his own name, a prescription for the morphine he needed to kill his father.

‘We will bring before you a witness, Ms Li, a teller at the defendant’s Wells Fargo Bank branch, who will testify that on the very afternoon of Sal’s death, defendant placed into his own safety deposit box’ – and here Soma paused and lowered his voice – ‘fifty thousand dollars in cash and a collection of baseball cards from the early 1950s worth another many thousands more.’