“Well, you’re here, ain’t you?”

“For the time being. You pull anything like that again, I walk. And you better hope she doesn’t walk with me.”

Cade didn’t look at him. The prisoner next to them was starting to talk excitedly, his accent so heavy Louis couldn’t understand what he was saying. Cade was staring at him.

“Did you hear me, Cade?”

“Why would I care if the bitch walks?”

Louis leaned close to the plexiglass. “Because she’s probably the only person in Lee County who thinks you didn’t kill Duvall. How’s that grab you?”

Cade’s eyes slid back to Louis. “You don’t?”

Louis didn’t answer.

“How the hell can you help me if you think I’m guilty?”

“Convince me otherwise.”

Cade looked away again. He was picking at his cuticles, scratching at them with the hard, dark nails of his other hand.

The prisoner in the next cubicle raised his voice, his speech slipping now into a foreign language that sounded like slurred French.

“Talk to me, Cade,” Louis said.

Cade was staring at the black man and his girlfriend.

“Cade,” Louis said sharply.

Cade shook his head slowly. “Fucking foreigners. Can’t even get away from them in jail.”

He finally let his eyes drift back to Louis. “Haitians. Washing up on the beach like goddamn fish. They ought to toss them off a boat in the Bermuda Triangle and see if they can swim home past the sharks.”

Cade was waiting for Louis’s reaction. But Louis wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing his disgust.

“Tell me about the night Duvall was killed,” Louis said. “Why did you go back to his office that night?”

“I didn’t.”

“They’ve got a witness who ID’ed you.”

“A homeless drunk.” Cade smiled.

“Why were you going to sue Duvall?”

“I told you.”

“You said he was incompetent. How?”

“I never said he was incompetent. Incompetent means somebody doesn’t know what they’re doing. Duvall knew exactly what he was doing.”

The Haitian prisoner was getting more agitated. His girlfriend was crying. Cade’s eyes lasered onto the couple.

“What do you mean?” Louis asked.

“Duvall sold me out.”

“How?”

Cade shook his head.

“Cade, look at me.”

Cade shifted, his breathing turning hard. “It’s fucking over. I got no way to get anything back now. My life is down the drain because of Duvall and I got no way to get anything back because the sonofabitch is dead!”

The guard was eyeing Cade.

“You’ve got to calm down here, Cade,” Louis said.

“Shit. .”

“You’ve got-”

Cade leaned into the plexiglass. “Don’t tell me what I gotta do,” he said. He took a deep breath and leaned back, running a hand over his hair.

“My kid was here yesterday,” Cade said. “He’s lost most the yards on his routes,” Cade said. “Folks are telling him they don’t want their lawns paying for his scumbag father’s defense.”

Louis let out a long breath. “Look, Cade. .”

“That sonofabitch lawyer took away my life and now he’s taking away my kid’s. He owes me.” Cade leaned forward, his eyes glistening. “You hear me? He owes me!”

Louis was quiet for a moment. He decided to play his card.

“You couldn’t have sued Duvall anyway,” he said.

Cade looked up at him.

“Statute of limitations on legal malpractice is two years in this state,” Louis said.

Something passed over Cade’s eyes momentarily and was gone, like a final dissipating swirl of smoke from a dying fire.

“You didn’t know that, did you?” Louis said.

Cade was silent for a long time, head bowed as he picked at his hands. The Haitian’s creole mixed in with the hum of the florescent lights.

Suddenly, a hard twisted smile came to Cade’s face. “I should have known, man, I should have known.”

“Known what?” Louis asked.

“That it wouldn’t work,” Cade said. “The cards aren’t stacked that way for guys like me.”

The black woman in the next cubicle started to cry softly again. The Haitian man just sat there.

“When I was in the joint,” Cade said, “this guy who knew something about the law told me I could sue Duvall for a million bucks when I got out. I didn’t believe it. I mean, a fucking jury giving a guy like me a million bucks.”

He looked up at Louis. “Then I got out and saw how bad things were for Ronnie and I figured what the fuck, what do I got to lose?”

He gave a sharp laugh. “Now you tell me I couldn’t have gotten anything anyway. Ain’t the legal system fucking great?”

Louis was silent. The Haitian man had started up again. But his angry chattering was muffled, pushed to the back of Louis’s mind.

If Cade thought he stood to get a big settlement from Duvall, he was the last person who wanted Duvall dead. But there was something else here, too. Cade represented a part of the past that a lot of people wanted to forget. Suing Spencer Duvall would have brought back bad memories for a lot of people, no matter how hard the courts tried to keep the focus on Duvall’s alleged malpractice and away from the evidence that convicted Cade in the first place. The media alone would retry the case. He wondered if Jack Cade looked at it from that angle.

“What do you think would have happened if you could have sued Duvall?” Louis asked.

Cade just looked at him.

“The evidence would have been reexamined, Cade,” Louis said. “Other people, the newspapers, would retry it all over again, outside of the courtroom. Things would come out that have nothing to do with Duvall’s ability or intent. Hell, other lawyers would step forward with new technology, raise questions. It would have been a circus.”

“Told you, it doesn’t matter now.”

“Not to you, but maybe it did to someone else.”

Cade looked up at him. “Who?”

“The person who really killed Kitty Jagger?”

Cade gave a snort, shaking his head. “Now you’re saying you believe me, that I didn’t do it?”

Louis hesitated. “Let’s just say I believe that if someone thought Duvall could be sued, they’d be worried about what might come out.”

The Haitian man raised his voice and Cade looked over at him.

“Who did you tell that you planned to sue Duvall?” Louis asked.

“Everyone from here to Raiford for the last year.”

“Did you see a lawyer?”

Cade shook his head, his eyes still on the Haitian. “No money.”

“Then we’ll have to go another direction,” Louis said. “We have to talk about Kitty Jagger.”

Cade looked back quickly. “Fuck that, man.”

“It’s a believable defense for the mess you’re in now,” Louis said.

Cade was silent. The Haitian man was ranting, his girlfriend’s crying growing louder.

“You’ll have to tell me everything that happened twenty years ago,” Louis said.

Cade sucked in a slow, long breath that expanded his chest under the orange jumpsuit.

“The only thing I’m going to say is that I was set up.”

Louis didn’t reply.

Cade raked at his hair with both hands, glancing again at the Haitian. Suddenly, he spun toward the man. “Hey, shut the fuck up!” he yelled.

The Haitian man and his girlfriend froze, staring at Cade.

Louis tapped on the plexiglass.

“Cade, forget them. Look at me.”

Cade’s eyes shot back to him.

“Now tell me about Kitty Jagger,” Louis said.

Cade shook his head slowly. “It’s over, man.”

“How did you lose the garden tool?”

“Look, I told you I don’t know nothing about it.”

“Who else had access to your tools?”

“I said I didn’t do it, man.”

“But someone-”

“I told you!” Cade spat out. “I told you I don’t know who killed that girl!”

Louis’s eyes flicked up to the deputy watching Cade’s back, then he looked back at Cade.

“She had a name, Cade. Her name was Kitty.”

Louis was amazed to see a small smile tip Cade’s lips.

“Kitty,” he said slowly. He cut Kitty’s name into two sharp syllables, holding each between his teeth before spitting them out.