“So why did Defendant do it?

“They had been business partners for nearly ten years. Why did Defendant wake up on this particular Saturday morning and decide that she was going to have to kill Mr. Vogler? We may never know the precise reason. But we do know with certainty about the life of crime they were leading together, a life where violent death, even at the hands of partners and associates, is as common as this city’s morning fog in June.”

Stier smiled politely at his homespun witticism but didn’t pause. “At the time of his death,” he continued, “Mr. Vogler was wearing a backpack into which he’d packed fifty Ziploc snack bags, each containing a few grams to up to half an ounce of high-grade marijuana that he grew himself in his attic. It seems that Mr. Vogler used Bay Beans West, the coffee shop owned by Defendant and managed by himself, as a cover for a thriving marijuana business, a business whose books and accounting ledgers will show operated with the complete cooperation and collusion of Defendant.”

Maya was beginning to fidget and Hardy reached over and put a hand on her arm, squeezing gently. Everything Stier was saying was old news to both of them by now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t disconcerting hearing it laid out in a smoothly flowing narrative. And he didn’t want a member of the jury to pick up on Maya’s discomfort, which any one of them might construe as guilt.

For his own part Hardy wore a practiced expression of barely disguised disgust at this reading of the purported “facts.” Without lapsing into anything like true theatricality he let his head, as though of its own accord, shake back and forth ever so slightly whenever he sensed a juror checking him for his reaction.

Stier went on. “But Defendant wasn’t done yet. Her drug business went back a long way, and it would take more than one murder to keep it secure. Unfortunately, the murder of Dylan Vogler aroused the suspicion of another of her confederates named Levon Preslee. Until his death Mr. Preslee worked as a fund-raising executive at the American Conservatory Theater. Like Defendant and Mr. Vogler, he had attended the University of San Francisco in the nineteen nineties. While they were students there, several witnesses will testify that the three of them-Defendant and the two victims, Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee-first got involved together in a marijuana distribution business. Eventually, the law caught up to Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee and they were both convicted of robbery in connection with a dope deal gone bad and sentenced to prison.”

Hardy had fought vigorously to keep Vogler and Preslee’s prior marijuana dealings and the robbery away from the jury. There was no evidence, he’d argued, that connected Maya to that in any way. As with almost every other motion he had tried to make, Braun had brushed him aside: “Goes to the relationship among the parties,” she’d said, as though that either made sense or had something to do with the legal ruling.

Stier picked up the narrative again. “But not Defendant. The evidence will show that she remained a silent partner, and that silence had a price. In the early afternoon on Thursday, November first, Mr. Preslee got a phone call and abruptly left work at ACT in an agitated state. At two-oh-five that afternoon he placed a call to Defendant on his cell phone. Although Defendant-again-initially denied to police that she had ever been to Mr. Preslee’s apartment, DNA and her fingerprints will in fact place Defendant at Mr. Preslee’s home right around the time of his death.”

At their table Hardy’s hand closed around Maya’s wrist, and she cast him a downward look and let out a sigh.

This last bit of evidence, of course, had caused Maya’s arrest and was in many ways the low point of the past several months. The prosecution had developed its theory about the supposed relationships and possible blackmail between Vogler, Preslee, and Maya, but without any physical evidence tying Maya to Preslee’s home, even with his telephone call to her from his cell phone, there was no practical chance that she could ever be charged with Preslee’s murder. And possibly not even with Vogler’s.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Stier went on, “we have here nearly the exact same pattern of behavior from Defendant in two related homicides. When she was in college, Defendant became involved with both victims in the sale of marijuana. You will hear evidence that Defendant both used and sold this and other drugs, and hear eyewitness testimony that her criminal partners, Vogler and Preslee, participated in robberies of other drug dealers.

“Since those days Defendant has masqueraded as an upper-class mother, a good wife, a regular churchgoer, and a law-abiding citizen. This new life was all-important to her for many reasons, but most particularly because she is a member of one of San Francisco’s most prominent political families.”

Here at last was Hardy’s first chance to stem the onslaught. “Objection, Your Honor,” he said. “Irrelevant and argumentative.”

Judge Braun frowned down at him and let him know how the wind was going to blow. “I think neither,” she said. “Overruled.”

Stier nodded at the bench, continuing smoothly. “Defendant paid dearly to keep her past secret. You will hear another eyewitness-the victim Mr. Vogler’s common-law wife-testify that her husband, with whom Defendant had been intimate, was blackmailing Defendant over an eight-year period. The blackmail mostly took the form of an exorbitant salary that he took as manager of Bay Beans West, but lately, Defendant’s financial records will reveal a pattern of money laundering through the coffee shop that corroborates the bare fact of the blackmail and provides a compelling motive for Mr. Vogler’s murder. And, in fact, for Mr. Preslee’s.

“The evidence overwhelmingly supports the People’s contention that Defendant killed both Mr. Vogler and Mr. Preslee because one had been blackmailing her and the other was about to do the same. She used her own gun to kill Mr. Vogler and-with that gun in police custody-used the nearest thing that came to hand, a kitchen cleaver, to kill Mr. Preslee. But both of these were premeditated acts that the state of California defines as first-degree murder, and that is the verdict I will ask you to deliver at the end of this trial. Thank you.”

Glitsky sat, feet up, behind his desk, which was getting pretty much littered with peanut shells. He’d opened the high blinds up sometime over the past six weeks since Hardy had last been up here, once it had become reasonable to assume that Zachary would recover, so the room was at last adequately lighted again.

Hardy and Frannie had been at the Glitskys’ home two weeks before, and while Zack still wore a football-type helmet during his every waking moment, to both Hardys he seemed absolutely normal, back to what he had been before the accident.

It was Abe, Hardy felt, who had irrevocably changed. Not a man whom anybody would mistake for Mr. Sunshine in any event, Glitsky couldn’t seem to absorb the reality that Zachary was better, and that this was good news for him and for his life. Instead, his focus tended to be on his own responsibility for the accident in the first place; his general incompetence as a human being; his unlucky star. Whatever it was, much of what had always been at best a dark and cynical spark now had ceased to throw any light at all, and Hardy found it disturbing and wearying. Not that he was giving up on his best friend, but he was constantly trying to come up with ideas that might help restore Abe to something like what he used to be.

Stopping up here unexpectedly at lunchtime today on the first day of trial with a fresh supply of peanuts, for example. The peanuts that Glitsky had always kept in his desk drawer-top left until Hardy had surreptitiously moved them one day to top right-had run out just before Christmas, never to be replaced. So even though he had his own opening argument to deliver when court resumed after lunch, he stopped by to drop off the gift and chat for a few minutes.