"And when will that be?"
"We've got a call in for someone right now, but he may not get his messages until morning. In any case, it won't be for a few hours at best. And the echocardio-gram couldn't be scheduled until tomorrow. We felt we had to talk to you and your wife before then."
Glitsky met the doctor's eyes again. "What if it's the VSD, the hole in the heart? The better option."
"Well, if it's a big hole, we operate, but I don't think it's a big one."
"Why not?"
"The murmur is too loud. It's either a tiny, tiny hole or… or aortic stenosis." "A death sentence." "Not necessarily, not always." "But most of the time?" "Not infrequently."
"So what about this tiny hole? What do you do with that?"
"We just let it alone as long as we can. Sometimes they close up by themselves. Sometimes they never do, but they don't affect the person's life. But if the hole does cause… problems, we can operate."
"On the heart?"
"Yes."
"Open-heart surgery?"
"Yes. That's what it is. And it's successful a vast majority of the time."
Glitsky was trying to analyze it all, fit it in somewhere. "So best case, we're looking at heart surgery. Is that what you're saying?"
"No. Best case is a tiny hole that closes by itself."
"And how often does that happen?"
Trueblood paused. "About one out of eight. We'll have a better idea by the morning."
Glitsky spoke half to himself. "What are we supposed to do until then?"
The doctor knew the bitter truth of his suggestion, but it was the only thing he could bring himself to say. "You might pray that it's only a hole in his heart."
"Only a hole in his heart? That's the best we can hope for?"
"Considering the alternative, that would be good news, yes."
It was eight thirty and Hardy told himself that he should close the shop and go home. He reached up and turned the switch on the green banker's lamp that he'd been reading under. His office and the lobby through his open door were now dark. A wash of indirect light from down the associates' hallway kept the place from utter blackness, but he felt effectively isolated and alone. It wasn't a bad way to feel. He knew he could call Yet Wah and have his shrimp lo mein order waiting for him by the time he got there, but something rendered him immobile, and he'd learned over the years to trust these intuitive inclinations, especially when he was in trial.
The primary reality in a trial like this is that there was just too much to remember. You could have pretty damned close to a photographic memory, as Hardy did, and still find yourself struggling to remember a fact, a detail, a snatch of conflicting testimony. The big picture, the individual witness strategies, the evidence trail, the alternative theories-to keep all these straight and reasonably accessible, some unconscious process prompted him to shut down from time to time-to let his mind go empty and see what claimed his attention. It was almost always something he'd once known and then forgotten, or dismissed as unimportant before he'd had all the facts, and which a new fact or previously unseen connection had suddenly rendered critical.
Once in a while, he'd use the irrational downtime to leaf through his wall of binders, pulling a few down at random and turning pages for snatches of a police report, witness testimony, photographs. Other times, he'd throw darts-no particular game, just the back and forth from his throw line to the board and back again. Tonight, he backed his chair away from his desk and simply sat in the dark, waiting for inspiration or enlightenment.
He hadn't noticed her approach, but a female figure was suddenly standing in the doorway. She reached for the doorknob and started to pull the door closed.
"Hello?" Hardy said.
"Oh, sorry." The voice of Gina Roake, his other partner. "Diz, is that you? I saw your door open. I thought you'd left and forgotten to close it."
"Nope. Still here."
A pause. "Are you all right?"
"First day of trial."
"I hear you. How'd it go?"
"You can flip on the light if you want. I'm not coming up with anything. It went okay, I think. I hope. I even got a little bonus from Strout's testimony, so maybe I should declare victory and go home."
But Roake didn't turn on the room lights. Her silhouette leaned against the doorpost, arms crossed over her chest. "Except?"
"Except… I don't know. I was waiting for a lightning bolt or something."
"To illuminate the darkness?" "Right, but not happening."
"It's the first day," Roake said. "It's too soon. It never happens on the first day."
"You're probably right," Hardy admitted. "I just thought it might this time."
"And why would that be?"
"Because Catherine didn't…" He stopped.
"Didn't what?" "That's it."
"Okay, I give up. What?"
"I told her she wouldn't spend the rest of her life in jail. Spontaneously. That I wouldn't let that happen."
Silent, Roake shifted at the doorpost.
"I don't think she did it, Gina. That's why I said that. She didn't do it."
But Gina had been in more than a few trials herself. "Well, you'd better defend her as though you think she did."
"Sure. Of course. That's about all I've been thinking about all these months. How to get her off." "There you go."
"But it's all been strategy. Get the jury to go for murder/suicide. Play up the harassment angle with Cuneo. Hammer the weak evidence."
"Right. All of the above."
"But the bottom line is, somebody else did it."
She snorted. "The famous other dude."
"No, not him. A specific human being that I've stopped trying to find."
Roake was silent for a long moment. "A little free advice?"
"Sure. Always."
"Defend her as if you believed with all your heart that she's guilty as hell. You'll feel better later. I promise."
But driving home, he couldn't get the idea out of his mind. So basic, so simple and yet he'd been ignoring it for months, lost to strategy and the other minutiae of trial preparation. If Catherine didn't kill them, someone else did. He had to get that message into the courtroom, in front of the jurors. In his career, he'd found nothing else that approached an alternative suspect as a vehicle for doubt. It struck him that Glitsky's failure to get an alternative lead to pursue-another plausible suspect- had derailed him from any kind of reliance on the "sod-dit," or "some other dude did it," defense. He never had come back to it, and he should have, because in this case some other dude had done it.
It wasn't his client. It wasn't Catherine. Somehow, from the earliest weeks, and without any overt admission or even discussion of the question of her objective guilt, Hardy had become certain of that. This was a woman he'd known as a girl, whom he'd loved. They'd met nearly every day for months and months now, and even with all the life changes for both of them, every instinct he had told him that Catherine was the same person she'd been before. He'd been with her when she sobbed her way through The Sound of Music. One time the two of them had rescued a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She'd been a candy striper at Sequoia Hospital because she wanted to help people who were in pain. This woman did not plan and execute a cold-blooded killing of her father-in-law and his girlfriend and then set the house on fire. It just did not happen. He couldn't accept the thought of it as any kind of reality.
Every night as he sought parking near his home he would drive up Geary and turn north on 34th Avenue, the block where he lived. He never knew-once or twice a year he'd find a spot. His house was a two-story, stand-alone Victorian wedged between two four-story apartment buildings. With a postage-stamp lawn and a white picket fence in front, and dwarfed by its neighbors, it projected a quaintness and vulnerability that, to Hardy, gave it great curb appeal. Not that he'd ever consider selling it. He'd owned the place for more than thirty years, since just after his divorce from Jane, and now he'd raised his family here. He felt that its boards were as much a part of who he was as were his own bones.