'I don't know what you did just then, David,' Hardy said, 'but it sure was fun to watch.' The court was in a recess after Westbrook stepped down. They hadn't left their table, although Cole had gone back with the bailiff to use the bathroom, so they were alone. Freeman didn't show any sign of glee over his performance. He lowered his voice. 'We need a fact here pretty soon or we're dead. If I were Hill, capital case or not, I would have called it already and our boy's going to trial.'

Hardy turned around and surveyed the courtroom behind him. No Glitsky or Treya. No Logan, either. He thought he'd recognize Visser if he saw him, and didn't. The musketeers were out on their errands. He drew little circles on the legal pad in front of him. He thought he knew so much about this case, but for the life of him he couldn't figure a way to get his vital information in front of Hill. 'We've got to start talking about these tenuous connections and hope the judge stays interested.'

Freeman shook his head, disagreeing. 'Nope. We need facts,' he repeated. 'Now.'

Hardy stopped scribbling. 'Is Ridley Banks part of this yet, his connection to Cullen? Both of them either dead or missing. Those are facts.'

Unconvinced, the old man clucked. 'Slim pickin's,' he said.

But until Glitsky or someone else hit some pay dirt, it was all they had.

Jan Falk was obviously a surprise both to the prosecution and to the judge. After he'd been sworn in and had described his position as an undercover narcotics officer, Hill stopped Hardy and beckoned him up before the bench. 'Mr Hardy, as far as I can tell, your last witness brought nothing of any substance to this party. Now I have been granting you extraordinary latitude up until now, and will continue to do so because of the gravity of this case, but I'm not going to tolerate any more fishing expeditions. If you've got something to get out of this witness, it had better become damn clear what it is in a short period of time, or I'll dismiss him. Am I making myself clear?'

Hardy swallowed, although his mouth was sand. 'Yes, your honor.'

Treya opened the top left-hand drawer in her old cubicle at Rand and Jackman. It seemed so long since she'd worked there. Her face fell. 'I know, I know, I know I didn't lose it. I'm just so tired, my brain's not working.'

Glitsky put a hand on her shoulder. 'Didn't you get much sleep?'

She turned in the chair and laid a gentle palm against his face. 'Stop.'

He kissed her, then straightened up and sat against the edge of her desk. 'All right,' he said. 'Let's go back to where you were when she gave it to you.'

'I was in her office.'

'Where we've been looking at files all this time?'

'Yes.' Elaine got up abruptly. Glitsky followed her across the hall into the now familiar room, where she went and stood by a low file cabinet. 'This was where I was. She was carrying her leather shoulder briefcase and came in and…' She closed her eyes, trying to bring it back.

Glitsky, content to watch the subtle changes in her face, let her be.

'I was holding – that's it – I had a stack of files I was holding and she threw the briefcase on the desk and took out a manila folder and handed it to me while we were talking. Her meeting. She had to run.'

'So it was with your other files?'

She nodded. 'But I was going home too. It was almost dinner time.' She took a breath, closed her eyes. 'And first thing next morning I heard about her, and then everything else…'

'You never filed it.'

They crossed back to her cubicle, and she sat again, thinking. Suddenly she spun the seat and slid the chair across the small space to a horizontal bank of metal file cabinets. Opening the bottom tray, she sighed with relief. 'Here we go.' Reaching down, she pulled out a loose bundle of folders, perhaps twenty of them. She opened the top folder, sighed again, and handed it to Abe. 'This is the one after she got back from Logan's. It looks like a business ledger, a check register,' she said.

Glitsky was flipping through the xeroxed pages, twenty or thirty of them. At one of the pages, he stopped, a puzzled look on his face. 'It's missing some entries here,' he said, flipping to the following page. 'A couple more here. What do you think that's all about?'

She took the pages and studied them. 'I'm not sure. Voided checks, maybe,' she said. 'What do you think?'

'I think it's funny,' Abe said. 'A little bit funny.'

36

Jan Falk's testimony had only the most tenuous relationship to Cole Burgess, but by the time Hardy was done with him, after three o'clock in the afternoon, he felt certain that he'd forged another link in the chain that bound all these disparate elements to the murder of Elaine Wager.

Over a near-constant clamor of relevance objections from both Pratt and Torrey, Judge Hill let Hardy make his case. The Cadaver spouted a constant flow of overruling rationalizations, and all of them taken together assumed the force of a mantra.

'Mr Torrey, this is a capital case. I'm going to let it all in and sort it out at the end.'

'Mr Torrey, this will go a lot faster if you just let Mr Hardy do what he has to do.'

'Yes, I realize that defense counsel is arguing his evidence, but you're the one asking for the death penalty, and if you get it, Mr Torrey, every single layer of appellate court in this country is going to review it. They're going to want a complete record of all the issues and I intend to give it to them.'

'Ms Pratt, if as you say this line of questioning is irrelevant, how could it possibly hurt your case to hear it?'

'I know my job, Mr Torrey. I will throw out what doesn't belong here. You'll have to trust me on that. But I've told you I'm allowing extreme latitude here, especially after this morning's revelations in Ms Wager's letter to Lieutenant Glitsky.'

Hardy knew that no judge had ever been reversed for giving the defense what it wanted. He couldn't say whether it was Jeff Elliot's Examiner article, or the judge's time-tested views of the integrity of the DA's office, or Elaine's letter, but whatever had caused it, suddenly the Cadaver appeared compelled by the argument that events surrounding Cullen Alsop's overdose were somehow key to Cole's guilt or innocence.

Hardy had introduced no physical evidence – the judge had simply allowed hearsay and argument. Falk had put Gene Visser with Cullen Alsop at the Jupiter on the day of his release from jail and subsequent overdose. He'd disclosed information familiar to narcotics inspectors that substantial quantities of cocaine and heroin seized in arrests of dealers were finding their way back onto the street again. He opined that perhaps the evidence lock-up room under the Hall of Justice was not as secure as was generally imagined. A recent internal narcotics department audit had revealed, for example, that in the past twelve months, there was a discrepancy of nearly eighteen ounces between the amount of opiates and cocaine logged into evidence and stored downstairs, and the amount actually on-hand in the case lockers.

More specifically, though, Falk had testified that Banks was going to interview Visser on the day of his own disappearance. With the inspector still on the stand, Hardy argued that since two critical witnesses in this case had died or disappeared within the past week, more investigation was called for. The burden of proof, always on the prosecution, demanded some explanation for these unusual events.

In spite of all the objections, the prosecution didn't even bother to cross-examine Falk. What were they going to ask? If he'd made up any of this stuff? They knew he hadn't. He was Hardy's witness and they were evidently happy to see the end of him.