She got through five subjects that she was able to recall and estimated that there was a handful more that she could not. She tensed visibly as she moved to a more difficult part of the scene.

"Then Andrew started peppering the child with questions about Benedict Arnold. 'Death to traitors,' he kept saying. 'You know what happens to traitors, don't you, boy?' Dulles knew about the betrayal of West Point and the Quebec campaign, but Andrew asked him something about the Battle of Valcour Island and the boy simply froze."

"What did Andrew say to him next?"

"He pointed at the closet door. 'The gun, Dulles, don't make me take out the gun again.'"

Paige Vallis described how the boy's body shook in response to the threat. She got up from her chair and went to grab him by the hand, begging Andrew to stop and let her take the boy with her.

"Did you attempt to leave the apartment?"

"Objection."

"Overruled. I'll hear this. Go on, Ms. Vallis."

"Of course I did. I told Andrew I was going and I was taking Dulles with me. He stood in front of the door and told me the boy couldn't leave. He said that if I went to the police, he had people who would take care of me. Those were his exact words. I swore I wouldn't go to the police, that I just wanted Dulles to see a doctor. I wasn't worried about myself-this was all about the poor little boy."

"Did Andrew Tripping step away from the door?"

"No, no, he did not. He put his hand on the child's shoulder and asked him if he had forgotten about the gun. 'Death to traitors,' he repeated. 'Benedict Arnold was the scum of the earth.'"

Paige Vallis lowered her head. 'That's when he stepped away from the door."

"Did you open it?"

"No, Miss Cooper. Not then."

The logical thing to ask her was why, but the law wasn't always logical. She was not allowed to talk about the workings of her mind, just what she did and what she observed. "What happened next?"

"Dulles broke loose from me and ran back to the chair. His father followed him."

"What did you do?"

"I stayed. I couldn't bear to leave the child in those circumstances."

This was one of the biggest problems we faced with the jury. I might have proved the misdemeanor charge of Tripping's endangering the welfare of his own child, but not much more. At that moment on March 6, Paige Vallis had the clear opportunity to get herself out of harm's way. She had not witnessed any assault on Dulles Tripping and had no clear understanding of how he had been bruised. She heard Andrew refer to a gun, but had not seen any weapon nor been threatened with the use of one.

"Objection," Peter Robelon said. "Move to strike."

"Motion granted," Moffett said, tapping on the railing in front of him, telling the reporter to strike the comment about Paige not being able to bear leaving Dulles behind.

But the jury had heard the words, and it was impossible to erase them from their minds.

"What did the defendant do next?"

"He took something out of his pocket. Something small. At first I couldn't see what it was. Dulles started to whimper. 'Please don't,' he said, over and over."

"Did there come a time when you could tell what the object was?"

"Tweezers. It was a small pair of metal tweezers. He leaned the child's head back, and inserted the tweezers in his nose."

Juror number four slinked down in her seat and closed her eyes. Squeamish, I guessed. An appropriate reaction. Number eight leaned forward and seemed to enjoy the detail. Too much television, no doubt.

"What did you do?"

"I ran to stop him. But I couldn't. He had already placed them in the child's nostril, and I was afraid I'd cause more damage if I shook his arm. In seconds, he pulled a bloody piece of cotton out of the boy's nose."

"Was there any discussion about that?"

"Yes, Andrew told me he had packed Dulles's nose to stop some earlier bleeding, before he came out to meet me for dinner. It looked to me as if the stuffing must have caused as much pain as the initial blow."

"Objection, Judge."

"Sustained."

Jurors were listening intently, some of them occasionally glancing over at the defense table to see whether Andrew Tripping was reacting to Paige Vallis's testimony. I desperately needed the testimony of Dulles himself. Without him, there was only this hint of what his father's nightly torture routine had been.

The luncheon recess interrupted the narrative's drama once again. Neither Paige nor I felt like eating. She noshed on a sandwich and I played with a salad, knowing how likely I was to develop a crushing headache by midafternoon with the combination of the stress level escalating during the proceedings and my failure to eat.

Back on the stand, Paige took us through the rest of the bizarre evening. Eventually, at some point after midnight, Andrew allowed Dulles to change into pajamas and go to sleep on the narrow cot that had been placed in the alcove off the kitchen.

Then, Vallis said, Andrew spent more than two hours telling her about the terrible pressures of raising the boy alone.

"It must have been two o'clock in the morning," she went on. "Andrew stood up in front of me. 'You're going to come inside,' he said. 'I want you to come in and take off your clothes.'"

"What did you do?"

"'No,' I said to him." Vallis tried to stay composed as she looked at me, instead of at the jurors. "'Don't do this, Andrew.' That's what I said."

"Did Andrew respond?"

"Yes. He said, 'Don't make me hurt you. Don't make me hurt my son.'"

"What did you do, Paige?" I asked.

"I had no choice. I, I-"

"Objection, Your Honor. The jury will decide that," Robelon said, smirking at the panel.

"Sustained."

"I went into the bedroom and did exactly what Andrew Tripping told me to do," Paige said, finally getting angry with Robelon. "I was afraid he'd kill his son, and I was afraid he would do something to hurt me."

"From the time that Dulles went to sleep, did Andrew ever mention his gun again?"

Vallis answered softly. "No."

"Did you ever see a gun in the apartment?"

"No."

"Did you see any other weapons?"

"Lots of them. Odd things, hanging on his walls and on table-tops. Machetes and swords and arcane-looking things with blades. I wouldn't even know what to call some of them."

"Did he threaten you with any of them?"

"No. Not explicitly."

Robelon and I would both try to use this fact to our advantage. He would argue that Tripping had the means to scare his companion into submission, if he had needed to threaten her into sex. I would say that a sign of her credibility was that despite the presence of so many sharp objects, she had never exaggerated the kinds of threats that the defendant made.

Paige Vallis went on to describe the sexual assault, which occurred for the next hour in Tripping's stark bedroom. Not a word was exchanged between them after he demanded that she undress and get onto the bed. He moved and positioned her as he desired, subjecting her to a variety of sexual acts that I made her detail for the jurors. She cried, she told them, from the moment she crossed the threshold into the room until her tormentor fell asleep beside her.

"What time was that?"

"Four o'clock in the morning, roughly."

"Did you leave then?"

"No. I just lay still in the bed until I could see daylight through the crack in the blinds. I got up and dressed myself. Quietly, very quietly. I awakened Dulles and helped him to put his clothes on. That's when I saw even more bruises, on his forearms and thighs. Andrew must have heard-"

"Objection."

"There was a noise in Andrew's bedroom, so I hurried the boy along. When the two of us got to the front door, Andrew was in the hallway near the living room. I told him I was walking Dulles to school, and that I had written my home phone number on the telephone pad in case I could help in the future."