She looked around at the room full of men, brushed her husband’s arm, and moved around him. “We’ll be right back,” she said.

“He’s sure?” she said.

“He said he’s one hundred percent sure. You’ve got a memorable face, Maya. You passed right by him as he was going in.”

“I don’t remember him.”

“No,” Hardy said, “maybe you don’t.” Thinking that it was probably because she had just killed someone. “But you were in fact there, weren’t you?”

She didn’t say anything.

“Maya?”

She looked up at him. “I didn’t think anybody would believe me if said I went there but he wasn’t home. But that was what happened.”

“Why did you go there?”

“He asked me to. He told me he needed to see me. That he’d tell about me and Dylan and him if I didn’t.”

“Just like Dylan?”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what Dylan threatened you with if you didn’t come down too.”

“No. That was different. That was the shop. I already told you that.”

Hardy took a beat. “You also told me you didn’t go to Levon’s.”

Again, silence. Finally, “So what are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, are you going to tell the police?”

“No. Of course not. I’m on your side here, Maya. We can’t let the police find out about this at all. We’re just lucky it was my investigator who saw you. He’ll never tell a soul. I’ll never tell a soul. And there is no way we can ever be made to testify against you. But I think it’s time we stop answering any more questions at all. Someone wants to talk to you, you refer them to me.”

But no sooner had they walked back into the kitchen than Maya walked and then ran the last few steps up to her husband, hugged him, and started crying.

“Hey. Hey,” he said, holding her. Then, at Hardy, “What did you say to her?”

Hardy stood his ground. “There were things she had to understand. She’ll be all right.”

“She’ll be all right! She’ll be all right! Look at her. She’s crying now, for God’s sake. She’s not all right at all.”

“I’m sorry,” Hardy said. “I didn’t mean to make her cry.”

“Well, whether or not you meant it…” He brushed his hand down over her hair. “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay.”

She pulled away and looked up at her husband, her voice breaking, hysteria coming on. “It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay. Maybe not ever again.”

“Sure, it will. We’ll get through this and-”

“No, Joel. You don’t understand. I was there. I was there.” She turned and pointed to Chiurco. “He saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m so, so sorry.”

Three days later, after the lab confirmed that both Maya’s fingerprints and DNA were on the doorknob of Levon’s apartment, Schiff and Bracco took Maya into custody.

Part Two

19

There were Superior Court judges Hardy liked a lot, and a very few that he’d prefer to avoid if at all possible, but only one he actively despised, and that was Marian Braun.

The history between the two of them was so extreme that it included a contempt violation and actual jail time for Hardy’s wife. He honestly believed that he might prevail on appeal, should it come to that, if he argued that Braun should have recused herself when she discovered that Hardy was going to be defending a murder suspect in her courtroom. Of course, the flip side of that was that if Hardy was worried about the impossibility of getting a fair trial from Braun, he could have exercised his 170.6.

That section of the California Code said that any lawyer assigned to trial could excuse one, but only one, judge, without giving any specific reason. The lawyer was sworn and simply declared under oath that he believed the judge to whom he’d been assigned was prejudiced against himself or the interests of his client to the point he thought he couldn’t get a fair trial.

That was it-no hearing, no evidence. The declaration itself caused the judge to be removed forever from the case. And challenges were reported to the judicial council. Obviously, a judge with too many challenges acquired the unfavorable attention of that supervisory body.

But the move had its price.

First, the courts hated challenges. They not only dinged one of their colleagues, however deservedly, but screwed up the scheduling for everyone else, because another judge had to take the case, and someone had to take their cases, and so on. And even if the judges personally despised the object of the challenge, they despised more the hubris of a mere lawyer who dared to suggest that one of their own tribe might not be fair.

So if Hardy exercised a challenge, he would likely immediately find himself in the courtroom of the most antidefense judge that the presiding judge could find available, and that judge would have an additional motive to make Hardy’s life as miserable as he or she possibly could. Hardy knew he challenged at his peril.

So Hardy elected to roll the dice with Braun. Call him superstitious or crazy-he’d also pulled Braun for his last murder trial, nearly four years before. She hadn’t liked him any better then, nor he her. And that trial had never been given over to the jury because a key prosecution witness had changed his testimony at the eleventh hour. Nevertheless, Hardy’s client had walked out a free woman, Braun or no Braun. He’d already proven that he could win in her courtroom, and if he could do it once, he could pull it off again.

Now, as he sat in Department 25 on the third floor of the Hall of Justice, waiting for his client’s appearance in the courtroom, Hardy found himself marveling anew at the thought that they were about to begin a full-blown murder trial. He felt vaguely responsible and not-so-vaguely incompetent that things had come to this point. Surely a better lawyer could have closed the case after the PX-the preliminary hearing-which they’d had a little over four months ago, within two weeks of Maya’s arrest.

At the end of that fiasco, Maya had been held to answer. In Superior Court he’d filed the pro forma 995, which called for the dismissal of the two first-degree murder charges against Maya on the grounds that the prosecution had failed to present even probable cause to suggest she’d committed these crimes.

Hardy had even permitted himself a flicker of optimism. There might have been technically enough evidence to justify a trial, but surely the court had to see the same weaknesses in the evidence that he himself saw. That was why Hardy had demanded, as Maya had a right to do, that the prelim take place within ten court days of her arrest. He had felt that on the evidence, he might win, and in any event, the case wasn’t going to get any better for the defense. But now, here he was in Braun’s court.

He’d been wrong.

The other, political, reason that he’d pressed for the speedy PX was that Maya’s arrest had set off a news frenzy in the city that Hardy thought could only get worse over time, and in this he was right. The secret grand jury investigation that Jerry Glass was conducting on the U.S.-attorney front, along with the public threats of forfeiture of the properties of one of the town’s major development and political families, had by now neatly dovetailed into a narrative that had captured the public’s imagination, as Hardy had suspected it would.

Knowing that the body politic of San Francisco in general, and probable members of jury pools specifically, tended to have little sympathy and lots of hostility and envy for the two aligned, and-in the public eye, generally malignant-classes of developers and politicians, Hardy had wanted to hurry up with a jury trial before every single person in San Francisco had been so exposed to innuendo, insinuation, and the venom of the press that they had all long since made up their minds. Juries didn’t always return verdicts based on the facts; sometimes they voted their prejudices. So, given the dearth of evidence for the actual murders, he’d believed back in October that a quick defense was his best chance to free his client and cut short the debate about the kinds of people the Townshends and other developers and power brokers must be.