'I'm sure there's a little of that, yes. But mostly something else.'

'Oh, what's that?'

Next to Pratt, Freeman clucked. She'd just asked another question to which she didn't know the answer, and it was always – always – a bad idea.

Hardy looked at Pratt, at Torrey, finally at the judge. 'Your honor, Lieutenant Glitsky is – was – Elaine Wager's father.'

After several seconds of absolutely dead air, Torrey found his voice. 'My God,' he said, incredulous, 'is there no end to it? It appears that Messrs Hardy and Freeman will go to any lengths of fabrication to muddy the waters here. This has got to be the most ridiculous…' Words failing him, he made some dismissive noise, then turned to the judge for commiseration. 'Your honor, please?'

By now, though, Hill was fully engaged. Whatever else was going on here, this was as unusual a set of facts as he'd ever dealt with. If they were facts. He turned to Hardy, ready to strike at the first sign of nonsense. 'I'm very much hoping you have proof of this, counsel.'

'Of course, your honor.' He approached the desk with his papers. 'As I began to say so long ago now, last night Lieutenant Glitsky was looking over some of Elaine's property that had been brought down to my office. Among the items was a key that he recognized as belonging to a public locker.' He kept talking, loath to give anyone a chance to interrupt him again. 'As it turned out, this locker was located in the bus station, and Lieutenant Glitsky opened it.' He held up a hand, stopping Torrey before he could start. 'He is her next of kin, your honor, and not acting as a police officer. There was no question of his needing a warrant. He was perfectly within his rights. In any event, the locker contained many of Elaine's personal items, but also a handwritten letter addressed to Lieutenant Glitsky-'

Torrey could restrain himself no longer. 'Oh, please…'

But Hardy could see that Hill was still with him, and continued, '-a copy of which I have with me. The original is in a safe place and can be made available to the court at short notice. Several references in this letter bear strongly upon this case, your honor, and I wanted to bring them to the court's attention at the earliest possible moment.'

'To what end, Mr Hardy? If this is evidence, present it at the hearing in your case in chief. If it's not, I don't want to hear about it, here or anywhere else.'

'Your honor.' Freeman came slowly up from his chair. 'With respect, I've seen the document and believe it raises issues that address whether or not the District Attorney's office should recuse itself, or you should recuse it, entirely from this case.'

Pratt, under her breath: 'You've got to be joking.'

'Not at all, Sharron.' Freeman turned to her. 'We believe the AG is much more objectively situated to prosecute this case, your honor. There is evidence of personal animus here that-'

'I've heard enough talking,' Hill interrupted. 'We've got a hearing in the real world out there and I'd like to get back to it someday. Mr Hardy, let's see what you've got. You make a motion if you've got one, and I'll make a ruling.'

'Of course I knew the judge wouldn't force them to recuse. The fact that Torrey used to have a personal relationship with her sometime in the past isn't enough, even if we could prove it without hearsay. As his honor astutely noted.' Freeman was in high spirits, trying to bring Cole up to date at the defense table while they waited for Judge Hill to enter the courtroom again after the long adjournment to chambers. 'Besides, we need a written motion, notice to the AG, and a whole lot more than we've got.' David displayed a slight edge of disappointment that Cole had felt he had to ask why they'd requested the DA's dismissal from the case. But it wasn't enough to dull his pleasure in the result. 'And there was no way Pratt was taking herself out of this.'

'OK. And yet you asked them both to do it anyway because…?'

Saddened by the thickness of his slow student, Freeman went into teacher mode. 'Because we needed the judge to see that letter, Cole. We needed him to know as a fact that Glitsky was Elaine's father – that's why him helping your defense, bucking his own police force, is so significant. We also needed him to know that our friend Mr Torrey slept with her. But mostly it goes to his character, which we've been trying to get out for reasons that Mr Hardy might be better able to explain. Because say what you will, Torrey outranked Elaine and in our culture, that smells enough like sexual harassment to make Hill wonder. Also, just between you and me, it didn't hurt for Pratt to hear about his little indiscretion, either.

'Basically,' Freeman's smile was terrible to behold, 'we're just screwing with them, Cole. Screwing with them because they screwed with us. We're showing them this case isn't going to be a political victory lap ending with you on death row.'

And indeed, across the courtroom, the two prosecutors were studiously not talking, sitting as far apart as they could possibly get as they arranged their water glasses and other important items on their table.

'But the most important reason, by far, really wasn't any of that. Since we really don't have a shred of evidence that somebody else in fact killed Elaine, the next best thing is to prove that Elaine's life was at least troubled and complicated. She had man trouble, work trouble, law trouble. Personal issues. She might have been killed by an unlucky random event like a mugger, that's true, but now it's definitely in his mind, and very strongly, that she wasn't your average Jane Doe walking back to her office on a Sunday night. With so much going wrong in her life, so much obvious angst that she was actually leaving the country on the next day, what would you think?'

'I'd think it's a pretty big coincidence that she got killed that night.'

'Right. It makes the odds a lot better that one of these people had a reason to kill her.' He shrugged. 'To tell the truth though, Cole, I don't want to bring you down, but none of it proves anything really. Certainly, it doesn't prove that you didn't do it and that's the whole point here. But it's got to give the judge some pause at least, and that in turn will maybe give us a little more stage to dance on and that, my friend, that's the name of the game.'

Glitsky the cop had his own jobs this morning.

His vision had shifted since he'd read his daughter's letter, and suddenly Hardy's theory of the previous night played to all the unrelated variables. Elaine had discovered something. Someone she trusted had recently made her lose all faith in the law. She had once slept with Gabe Torrey. She was in the middle of an investigation involving Dash Logan, who hung with Visser, who'd been with Cullen Alsop.

This was no longer a universe of possibilities. They were no longer searching the city for an anonymous trigger man. Glitsky could concentrate his efforts on limited targets. Hardy's theory might yet prove unfounded, but before he would abandon it now, Abe was going to test its limits.

Neither comfortable nor welcome at the Hall of Justice, he set himself up in the Solarium. Everyone on the team, with the addition of Jan Falk, had checked in by seven thirty. He'd passed around the letter, told the story. By eight, Amy Wu was off with Gina Roake to interview the various witnesses who'd come forward in the Abby Oberlin will contest. If Gene Visser had threatened any of these people…

Curtis Rhodin had a good friend in the Attorney General's office. Hardy and Freeman thought that Curtis could talk to his pal and bring him up to speed with the confluence of all these events. Elaine had been looking at Logan's files when she'd been killed. The AG's office didn't have even a remotely good relationship with the DA anyway. Based on Torrey's relationship to the murder victim, it might be disposed to believe that Logan's files held evidence of a DA cover-up of some kind that had somehow resulted in a murder. It was all nebulous and unfounded, but it was also provocative and a capital murder, and these traits tended to get a judge's attention. They were hoping for a search warrant on Logan's office – and this time not a warrant directed at a few folks who happened to be Logan's clients, but at Logan's whole practice. At Logan himself. This was a long shot since they had no active case – but at the very least, it might shake up the principals and force one of them to do something rash.