Luckily or too conveniently, Wu thought. But she moved along. "And Andrew got arrested when?"
"They came by about twelve-thirty, one o'clock. School is out for spring break. And they just took him."
"I was at work," Hal said, "or I would have tried to slow them down, at least."
"Then it's probably better you weren't here." Wu was sitting beyond Linda at the table and could see them both at once. "When did the crimes happen?"
"February." Linda said. "Mid-February."
Wu's face showed her confusion.
"What's the problem?" Hal asked her.
"I guess I don't understand how two months have gone by and all that time, with the police coming by, neither of you thought Andrew was a suspect?"
"He said he didn't do it," Linda said, as though that answered the question. "I know he didn't. He couldn't have."
Ellie came through the door and the conversation stopped while she set out the coffee service. As soon as the door to the kitchen closed back behind her, Wu began again. "Mrs. North, you just said that Andrew couldn't have done these killings. Why not? Do you mean he physically couldn't have done them because, for example, he wasn't there? Does he have an alibi? I mean, beyond the walk he took."
"But he did go for that walk," Linda said. "There's no doubt about that. Besides," she added, "Andrew's just not that kind of person."
Wu's experience was that anyone- if sufficiently motivated- could be driven to kill. And Hal, she'd noticed, had stopped talking, was looking down into his coffee cup. "Mr. North," she said, "why'd they decide just now, after two months, and after they'd talked to Andrew several times? Did something new come up? Do you have any ideas?"
He raised his eyes to her, made a face. "Well, the gun," he whispered.
"That's nothing!" Linda's eyes flared and her voice snapped. "That's not even been definitely connected to Andrew."
Hal, muzzled, shut up and shrugged at Wu, who then spoke gently to Linda. "I don't believe I've heard anything yet about a gun."
She was prepared to answer. "This was early on, in the first week or so. The police asked Hal if we owned any guns, and Hal told them he had an old registered weapon…"
"Nine-millimeter Glock semi-auto," Hal said.
Again, Linda snapped. "Whatever. And when Hal went to find it, he couldn't." She turned to her husband. "But you know you're always misplacing things. It didn't mean Andrew took it."
Wu touched Linda's arm. "But the police think he did?"
Linda looked at Hal, who answered for her. "They found a casing in his car."
"So what?" Wu asked "Without the gun, you can't have a ballistics test."
"It was just a random piece of junk under the seat," Linda said. "It might have been there forever. It was nothing."
Wu tried to look sympathetic. "So the police didn't specifically refer to that when they came today?"
"No. They just said he was under arrest. They had enough evidence, they said. Something about a lineup," she added.
"He stood in a lineup? You let him do that? Who was trying to identify him?"
Hal North bristled. "I don't know. Some witness. Someone identifying Andrew, obviously."
"And wrongly," Linda said.
"Although," Wu phrased it gently, "as you say, he was there at Mooney's place. So someone might have seen him. Yes?"
"Yes, but…" Linda slapped at the table.
Hal reached out and put a hand over hers. "Look," he said to Wu, "we're not sure why any of this is happening. We don't think Andrew did this."
Linda slapped the table again. "We know he didn't do this."
"Okay, okay, that's what I meant," Hal said. He turned to Wu. "But they must have built a pretty impressive case against him if they got all the way to arresting him, wouldn't you think?"
Wu more than thought it. They had a case, and- since Andrew was the son of a wealthy and prominent man- it was probably a strong one. A gun in the house, a casing in Andrew's car, a positive lineup identification. What she had here, she was beginning to believe, was a young man who'd made an awful mistake.
"What are you thinking?" Hal asked her abruptly.
"Nothing," Wu said. "It's too soon. I don't know anything yet."
"You know he's innocent," Linda said. "We know that."
"Of course," Wu said. "Other than that, though."
By Sunday afternoon, when she met with Hal North again, Wu knew that they had a substantial problem. She also thought she had a solution.
This time it was just she and Hal in the large, bright, and high-ceilinged living room. Hal sat in the middle of a loveseat while Wu perched on a couch.
Linda had gone to visit Andrew and would be gone for at least two hours.
Wu had been lucky to get a couple of folders of discovery on Andrew's case from the DA's office before close of business on Friday. She had spent all day Saturday going over what the police had assembled. It looked very, very bad.
"What's so bad?" North asked.
Wu sat all the way forward on the couch, hunched over in tension. Her folders rested unopened on the coffee table in front of her. "Where do you want to start? It could be almost anywhere. They've got a good case."
"It looks like he did it?"
"Do you know anything beyond what we talked about on Friday?"
North shrugged. "I figured the gun was a problem, but I didn't know how they'd tied that to him. They didn't find it, did they?"
"No. Still no weapon, but there's plenty in here"- she tapped the folders-"to prove to me that he had the gun with him that night. You want me to go over it piece by piece?"
North waved impatiently. "I don't need it. If you're convinced, it'll be good enough for a jury." He slammed a palm against the side of his seat. "I knew he took it, goddamn it. I knew he was lying to me." Smoldering, North sat forward with his shoulders hunched, his elbows resting on his knees, head down. Finally, he looked up at Wu. "What about the lineup?"
"The man upstairs saw him leave just after the shots. Positive ID."
North slumped again, shook his head from side to side wearily, came back up to face her. "So he did it." Not a question.
"Well, maybe he wasn't taking that walk to rehearse his lines, let's say that."
"Jesus. This is going to kill Linda."
"She really believes him?"
"We're talking faith here, not reason. I thought that alibi story was like the ultimate in lame myself, but once Andrew came up with it, he had to stick to it. I just wish he would have invented something else, almost anything else." North shook himself all over, then straightened his back and threw Wu a determined, pugnacious look. "Okay, Counselor, what do we do now?"
Wu was ready for the question, and suddenly glad that Linda wasn't here. Hal would play much more into her plan that she'd reluctantly come to believe was the boy's best hope- albeit a defeatist and cynical one because it was based on the absolute fact of Andrew's guilt.
As a good lawyer with a difficult case before her- hell, as a good person- she knew she should have been consumed with getting Andrew off. That was in many ways the definition of what her job was all about. Give her client the best defense the law allowed. And myriad defenses- insanity, psychiatric, diminished capacity, some form of self-defense or manslaughter- were always available, a veritable smorgasbord of reasons that homicide could be if not forgiven entirely, then mitigated. But all of those defenses and strategies involved huge expense for her client's family, a year or more of her life's commitment, and tremendous risk to her client should she fail, or even not completely succeed.
On the other hand, assuming that Andrew was guilty in actual fact (and every other client she'd ever defended had been), Wu knew that she could get him a deal that would give him a life after he turned twenty-five years old, eight years from now. And this when the best result she could reasonably expect under the other various defense scenarios was ten years- and probably many, many more.