Hardy thought this would be a good time to shake things up. He forced an amused little chuckle, walked up to the table, looked down at Wu. "The boy's good, Amy," he said. "This is some brilliant delivery. I can see where he got the lead in the play."

"What are you talking about?" Andrew asked.

Hardy kept his tone easy. "I'm talking about acting, Andrew. What else?"

"I'm not acting. This is what happened." A pause. "Really."

Hardy nodded, chuckled again, talked to Amy. "Damn," Hardy said. "Impressive. I mean it. I'd be pretty well swayed if I were on a jury."

"Me, too," Wu said. "We put him on the stand, he flies."

Hardy looked down at him. "It's always a big decision whether or not to put a defendant on the stand himself. But we get a world-class performer like yourself, it's a real bonus."

"Why are you saying this? I'm not performing. I'm telling you the truth."

Again, Hardy spoke directly to Wu. "And the award goes to…"

"I'm telling the truth, goddamn it! What are you saying?"

Hardy didn't rise to the challenge. Retreating to his neutral corner, he leaned against the wall again, crossed his arms. "You tell him, Amy."

She took the cue. "Andrew," she said. "Andrew, look at me."

He dragged his pained expression back down to the table.

"Why Mr. Hardy is skeptical is that in 'Perfect Killer,' you tell that same story as the-"

Andrew jumped as if he'd been stung. "How do you know about that? I never…" He shot a look to the corner, where Hardy was the picture of nonchalance. Nothing there. He came back to Wu. "I never even printed that out."

"No," Wu said. "I don't suppose you would have. But it was still on the disk."

Hardy spoke up. "It's pretty standard procedure now, Andrew. The police get a search warrant and dump your computer files, read your e-mail. That's the one thing I'd criticize about your story. The writing was good. It reminded me a little of Holden Caulfield, but you hadn't done your research on the latest tech stuff. Didn't you know they'd served a warrant at your house? Didn't it occur to you that they'd look for everything they could find?"

Andrew slumped at his desk. His arms hung straight down, his head bowed. They let him live with his new reality for a minute or more, a very long time under those circumstances. Finally, he sighed and raised his head. "Look," he said, "I'm not acting. I'm telling you guys the truth. What I made up was that story. I had my guy, my character-"

"Trevor," Wu said.

"Right, Trevor. I had Trevor-"

Hardy cut in. "Andrew," he said. "That's the most incriminating document I've ever read and I've been in this game a long time. No judge in the world is going to let you off if he gets a look at that, which he will. How many other stories like that are in your computer?"

"None just like that."

"Thank God," Wu said. "What in the world were you thinking, Andrew?"

Unbowed, he snapped back. "I was thinking about writing a story. You know, fiction?"

"We know all about fiction," Hardy said. He hadn't moved from his spot in the corner by the door. "But this just… Well, it isn't fiction. I flat don't believe it."

"You can believe what you want. Haven't you ever read Crime and Punishment? Or John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure?"

"I've read them both," Wu said. "What about them?"

"Well, I had just read Debt to Pleasure earlier in the year, when I was starting to have some problems with Laura." His eyes went back and forth between his attorneys. "When we first started rehearsing with Mike, she… well, like Julie in the story, she was just all impressed with him, that she'd gotten the part, all that. It got to me. We actually broke up about it."

"That wasn't in the story," Hardy said. "The breakup."

"No," Andrew said. "That's because I made up the story. Have I already mentioned that? I thought I had."

Hardy's mouth grinned, but his eyes didn't. "I don't know who convinced you that sarcasm was a powerful debating tool, Andrew. But whoever it was didn't do you a service. I understand that you made up your story. It's not that tough a concept to grasp. But you have to admit that there's a lot of it that seems pretty closely based on your own experience. Now, do you want to tell us about that, or not?"

Andrew tried stewing for a moment. He turned to Wu, who might show some sympathy, for support, but she stonewalled him. At last, he spoke. "When I wrote it, I was jealous of Mike with Laura. I was going for a weird-guy feel like Lanchester did."

"You got that," Wu said. She turned to Hardy. "The Debt to Pleasure again."

Hardy deadpanned. "I've got to read it."

"In the end," Andrew said, "that's why I didn't send out the story anyplace. It was too derivative. I mean, a really really bright guy who's basically insane. It's been done a million times now. Plus, I don't think the ending worked really well. I wanted Trevor to find a really unique way to commit these murders, but in the end, I fell back on the gun."

Hardy had to fight a disorienting sense of surrealism. Here's a client up for murder and what he wants to discuss are plot points in a story that might hang him. "Have you published before?" he asked.

"No. But I've sent out a bunch. I did get a nice note back from McSweeney's on one of them, not a straight rejection."

"I'm happy for you." Hardy finally moved up to the table, pulled around a chair and sat in it. "Listen, Andrew, whether or not you made this up, we've got to work on some kind of spin for this story. You've got to see that it casts you in the worst possible light."

"It wasn't that bad," Andrew said.

"No, it's peachy," Hardy said. "But I'm not talking about its literary quality. I'm talking about the events and motive around these two murders that have actually taken place and that you're charged with committing and that you pretty much exactly mirrored in the story you wrote two months earlier. Two murders- your teacher and your girlfriend. Your dad's gun. Even down to your alibi."

"Don't forget my favorite moment," Amy said. She'd printed the thing out at the office, and now had found the page, and read aloud. "Talking about the gun now. Here's your narrator. But what if I get rid of it after? Then, even if they can recover the slugs, they won't be able to compare the ballistics marks. I double-check and make sure the gun isn't made in Israel, where they shoot their guns before they sell them. Then the ballistic readouts are computerized and matched with the weapon's buyer, so even if the gun itself is unavailable, they can identify its owner."

"That's true," Andrew objected. "That's what they do. I found it in my research."

"Good for you," Hardy said. "But not the point. Here, Amy, let me."

She handed the pages across to him. He flipped to the end. "How about this part, Andrew? How do you think a jury would feel about you if the prosecutor got this admitted, which he will, and reads it out loud? I come back and find the bodies. I call nine one one. They're going to think there's no way I'd come back and do that if I'd done the shooting.

"Will the cops suspect me? Yeah. But I've gotten rid of the gun and the gloves. The night I do it, I pack a change of clothes just like the ones I was wearing in a plastic bag in my trunk. Shoes, too. I adios the whole package before I come back and discover the carnage.

"The cops look, but I'm clean. And Mike and Laura are gone."

"No! That's wrong." Andrew came halfway out of his chair. "I didn't write Mike and Laura. I wrote Julie and Miles. The characters."

"Oh, that's right, you did. I guess it seemed like you meant Mike and Laura, so that's what I read. Honest mistake." Hardy turned the pages facedown, looked across the room at his client. "Listen, Andrew. Not only is this pretty much exactly what happened, it shows premeditation and planning. It's also sophisticated stuff. You may remember that as another one of the criteria we're supposed to avoid- criminal sophistication."