“What happened to you?” he said, examining her. “Your eyes look like someone jabbed them with a poker stick. And did you know your phone’s off the hook?” He followed her into her office. “That looks an awful lot like Klaus’s special Napoleon brandy on the desk. Almost empty, too.”

“It is.”

“Well, I’ve got news worth celebrating,” Paul said, sitting down in the chair opposite the desk and putting his feet up on it. He smiled brilliantly. “Sit down, honey, and let me get to my report.”

“Your report,” Nina said. She sat down.

“Two breaks, Nina, big ones. Number one: we’ve caught Alex talking to Stefan on the phone right before the murder. I already subpoenaed the bastard. Maybe you’re right, maybe he did hire our poor schmuck of a client to dig up some bones and leave his footprints around. Anyway, he’s a perjurer, and you’re gonna rip him apart.”

“Rip him apart,” she repeated.

“What’s that look? You sick?”

“Yeah, I’m sick.”

“Well, this’ll make you feel better. I got a hit on Wanda Wyatt. Ready? Constantin Zhukovsky engaged in holy matrimony with Wanda Ruth Wyatt on May twelfth, 1973. After his first wife died, he married his housekeeper.”

“Huh.”

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“It’s a little anticlimactic.”

He stared at her. “Well, I can’t figure out what it all means, but man, look at the birth dates on the Wyatt boys. Wanda’s a liar, for one thing. Dominoes, Nina. The bones could be Stefan’s father! Let’s get Ginger right on it. She’ll prove the relationship.”

“No need. She already did.”

Startled, Paul paused. “You knew? Well, what do you think?”

Nina got up, came around the desk, and pushed Paul’s feet off the desk. “I think you should make an appointment when you want to come into the office and report. I think you should keep your freaking shoes off my desk. That’s what I think.”

Panic flickered in Paul’s hazel eyes. “What’s got into you?” he said.

“I have court tomorrow at nine-thirty and we are starting the defense case. I didn’t sleep much last night and I don’t plan to sleep much tonight. You have just given me two crucial pieces of information, and I’m trying to incorporate them into a mind that is already at the bursting point.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

“That’s all I can stand right this minute. Now. The phone record. Zhukovsky.”

“What’s our strategy?”

“Get the truth out,” Nina said. “Zhukovsky did hire Stefan, so we give him a chance to tell the jury why and save himself from his previous perjury. And maybe we start understanding why Christina was murdered.”

“What’s he gonna say? What do you think?”

“No idea,” Nina said briefly. “But he’s not going to implicate Stefan any worse than he’s already implicated. He’s not going to say he hired Stefan to do the killing, I promise you that. I know it’s never good to ask questions without knowing the answers, but you’ve talked to him twice, and the witness stand is where he belongs. Is Wanda subpoenaed?”

“Not yet. I-”

“Here’s another issued subpoena. Go get her. Right now. I want her back in court tomorrow. Stefan is Constantin Zhukovsky’s son. I believe he doesn’t know it.”

“His brother, Gabe, too, who may know. He’s closer to his mom.”

“Which makes Christina and Alex Zhukovsky-assuming the rest of the story is true and they had a different mother-half-siblings with Stefan and Gabe.”

“Yes. It connects Stefan to Christina directly for the first time.”

“Which is bad,” Nina said, “extremely. There may even be a money angle, someone trying to get some. The two older kids got all of it. Maybe that’s where the consult to Alan ties in. Well, the only person who can fill in the background is Wanda.”

“She’ll be there. But be careful, Nina. You sound frustrated. Don’t make any mistakes tomorrow.”

“Right. No more mistakes,” Nina said. She opened the door. “Better get going.”

“Can I drop you at home on my way to Wanda’s?”

“I have my car.”

“How much of that brandy have you had?”

“I’m not going home for a long time yet. I’ll be fine.”

Paul hung in the doorway. Nina went back to her desk. She read phone records and took notes.

“No kiss?” he said finally.

“We’re in the middle of a trial. Let’s keep things on a business footing, okay? It’s easier right now.”

“If that’s the way you want it.”

“That’s the way I want it.”

“You’re the boss.”

“Then get going.”

She heard the Mustang roar to life on the quiet street outside, dropped the records, and put her hands on her cheeks and her elbows on her desk.

She had seen it in the shifting of his eyes and felt it in the distant politeness of his body. Paul had been with another woman.

But Stefan was depending on her. She had to concentrate on the case. Talking with Paul would incapacitate her.

She put him out of her mind. She had to.

23

Monday 9/29

“RUSSIANS,” KLAUS SAID WITH SATISFACTION. HE FOLDED HIS HANDS on his paunch and snuggled back into the soft leather passenger seat of his Jag. Nina had just told him about the connections Paul had found, and updated him on Ginger’s evidence. “Everybody east of the Danube. All the same.”

“How do you mean?” Nina asked abstractedly. Nine o’clock on Monday morning, court starting up in half an hour, and now that she had safely navigated them both to the courthouse parking lot, she was polishing off lukewarm liquid in the travel mug she had brought from home. Bright marine sun glanced in at them. Klaus was resplendent in navy blue and high spirits.

“I will take Wanda,” he said. “Yes, indeed.”

“Do you know something I don’t know?”

“Put a couple of Slavs in a room,” Klaus said. “Two minutes later, you will have a conspiracy. That is what we have in this case.”

Klaus would have been in his prime in the fifties. He probably had a photo of himself and Stalin tucked away in a box. His idea of Russia was antiquated. “Who’s in this conspiracy?” she asked, setting the brake. “What’s the purpose of it?”

“We will find out. The ball of kite string is rolling free and the kite is flying off into the blue.”

“I’ve got Wanda worked out,” Nina said. She handed Klaus the papers outlining her cross-examination strategy. He folded them neatly and stowed them in his jacket pocket.

“The copy of her marriage certificate is there,” she reminded him. “Sandy had it faxed this morning.”

“We do not need it. She will tell us.” He leaned his head back and fell into a light doze, his eyes fluttering. Nina thought about getting out and leaving him to carry out his courtroom warrioring in his dreams, but he was not really asleep, he was thinking.

“So we have a big family here. The Zhukovskys. Two wives, four children, ties to ancient royalty, however tenuous. The makings of classic tragedy. The Tolstoyan unhappy family.”

Nina hung her purse off her shoulder and put the Jag keys in the flap pocket. “We’d better go. We need to talk to Stefan. This is really two families with the same father,” Nina said. “Wanda, Gabe, and Stefan. Constantin’s first wife, Davida, and their children Christina and Alex. Look. I made a diagram with birth dates.”

Klaus took it. “Thank you,” he said. “You have done well.”

She felt an absurd sense of gratitude for that acknowledgment. “The problem is that connecting Stefan to the Zhukovskys will make him look even more guilty.”

“At first.”

“What if he is guilty? What if he’s part of this conspiracy you’re talking about?”

“Miss Reilly, you have talked to him now how many times? Half a dozen? Can’t you trust your own eyes, your own heart, your own brain?”

“No,” Nina said. “I’ve been lied to and I’ve believed the liar. I’ve watched cases put on by other lawyers, first the prosecution, hugely credible, then the defense, equally sturdy. I believe both of them. I hope I’m never a juror.”