"Bend her oven Jim… Whoa, Cal, the bitch is loving it… Do her, Jim, yeah, harder.

Like that. Cal and Jim. On and on. Their voices were cruel, awful, hell spawned. I looked toward the back of the room and found Chamique Johnson. Her spine was straight. Her head was high.

"Woo hoo, Jim… Yeah, my turn…" Chamique met my eye and nodded. I nodded back. There were tears on her cheeks. I couldn't be sure, but I think there were tears on mine too.

Chapter 20

Flair Hickory and Mort Pubin got a half-hour recess. When the judge rose to leave, the courtroom exploded. I no-commented my way back to my office. Muse followed me. She was this tiny thing but she played like she was my Secret Service agent.

When we closed the office door, she put up her palm. "High five!"

I just looked at her. She put down her hand.

"Its over, Cope."

"Not quite yet," I said.

"But in a half-hour?"

I nodded. "It will be over. But in the meantime, there's still work to do."

I moved back around to the conference table. The message from Lucy was sitting there. I had managed to do my brain-partition thing during my Flynn questioning. I had kept Lucy out. But now, as much as I wanted to spend a few minutes basking in the glory of the moment, the message was calling out to me again.

Muse saw me looking down at the note.

"A friend from twenty years ago," Muse said. "That's when the Camp PLUS incident occurred."

I looked at her.

"It's connected, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I said. "But probably."

"What's her last name?"

"Silverstein. Lucy Silverstein."

"Right," Muse said, sitting back and crossing her arms. "That's what I figured." "How did you figure that?" "Come on, Cope. You know me." "That you're too nosy for your own good?" "Part of what makes me so attractive." "Nosiness and maybe your footwear. So when did you read up on me?"

"Soon as I heard you were taking over as county prosecutor."

I wasn't surprised.

"Oh, and I brushed up on the case before I told you I wanted in."

I looked at the message again.

"She was your girlfriend," Muse said.

"Summer romance," I said. "We were kids."

"When was the last time you heard from her?"

"Its been a long time."

We just sat there for a moment. I could hear the commotion outside the door. I ignored it. So did Muse. Neither one of us spoke. We just sat there with that message on the table.

Finally Muse stood. "I got some work to do."

"Go," I said.

"You'll be able to make it back to court without me?"

"I'll muddle through," I said.

When Muse reached the door, she turned back to me. "Are you going to call her?"

"Later."

"You want me to run her name? See what I come up with?"

I thought about it. "Not yet."

"Why not?"

"Because she used to mean something to me, Muse. I don't feel like having you poke around in her life."

Muse put her hands up. "Okay, okay, sheet, don't bite my head off. I wasn't talking about dragging her in here with cuffs. I was talking about running a routine background check."

"Don't, okay? At least, not yet."

"I'll get to work on your prison visit to Wayne Steubens then."

"Thank you."

"This Cal and Jim thing. You're not going to let it slip away, are you?"

"Not a chance."

My one worry was that the defense would claim that Chamique John son had watched the movie too and made up her story based on it or had deluded herself into thinking the movie was real. I was helped by several factors, however. One, it was easy to establish that the movie had not been playing on the fraternity's big-screen TV in the public room. Enough witnesses would back that up. Second, I had established via Jerry Flynn and photographs taken by the police that Marantz and Jenrette did not have a television set in their room, so she couldn't have seen it there.

Still, it was the only direction I could see them going in. A DVD could be played on a computer. Flimsy, true, but I really didn't want to leave much of an out. Jerry Flynn was what I refer to as a "bullfight" witness. In a bullfight, the bull comes out and a bunch of guys-not the matador-wave capes around. The bull charges until exhausted. Then picadors on horseback come out with long lances and jam them into a gland behind the bull's neck muscle, drawing blood and swelling the neck so that the bull cant turn his head much. Then some other guys run up and throw banderillas-gaily decorated daggers-into the bulls flanks, near his shoulders. More blood. The bull is half-dead already.

After all that, the matador-from the Spanish matar or "to kill"- comes in and finishes the job with a sword.

That was my job now. I had made my witness run into exhaustion and jammed a lance into his neck and stuck some colorful darts into him. So now it was time to bring out the sword.

Flair Hickory did everything in his considerable power to prevent this. He called for a recess, claiming that we had never produced this film before and that it was unfair and that it should have been given to them during discovery, blah, blah, blah. I fought back. The film had been in the possession of his clients, after all. We only found a copy our selves last night. The witness had confirmed that it had been watched in the fraternity house. If Mr. Hickory wants to claim his clients never saw it, he could put them on the stand.

Flair took his time arguing. He stalled, asked and got some sidebars with the judge, tried with some success to give Jerry Flynn a chance to catch his breath.

But it didn't work.

I could see that the moment Flynn sat in that chair. He had been too seriously wounded by those darts and that lance. The movie had been the final blow. He had shut his eyes while it played, shut them so tightly that I think he was trying to close his ears.

I could tell you that Flynn probably wasn’t a bad kid. The truth was, as he now testified, he had liked Chamique. He had asked her out legitimately on a date. But when the upperclassmen got wind of it, they teased and bullied him into going along with their sick "movie reenactment" plan. And Flynn the Freshman folded.

"I hated myself for doing it," he said. "But you have to under stand."

No, I don’t, I wanted to say. But I didn't. Instead I just looked at him until he lowered his eyes. Then I looked at the jury with a slight challenge in my eyes. Seconds passed.

Finally I turned to Flair Hickory and said, "Your witness."

It took me a while to get alone.

After my ridiculous act of indignation at Muse, I decided to do some amateur sleuthing. I Googled Lucy's phone numbers. Two gave me nothing, but the third, her work number, showed me that it was the direct line to a professor at Reston University named Lucy Gold.

Gold. Silver-stem. Cute.

I had already known it was "my" Lucy, but this pretty much con firmed it. The question was, what do I do about it? The answer was fairly simple. Call her back. See what she wants.

I was not big on coincidence. I hadn't heard a word from this woman in twenty years. Now suddenly she calls and won't leave a last name. It had to be connected to Gil Perez's death. It had to be connected to the Camp PLUS incident.

That was obvious.

Partitioning your life. It should have been easy to leave her behind. A summer fling, even an intense one, is just that-a fling. I might have loved her, probably did, but I was just a kid. Kid love doesn't survive blood and dead bodies. There are doors. I closed that one. Lucy was gone. It took me a long time to accept that. But I did and I kept that damn door shut.

Now I would have to open it.

Muse had wanted to run a background check. I should have said yes. I let emotion dictate my decision. I should have waited. Seeing her name was a blow. I should have taken my time, dealt with the blow, seen things more clearly. But I didn't.