Chapter 1
The Call
The question came at me from somewhere in the second row of cameras, shouted over everyone else's, in the flat, aggrieved voice of a man who had been waiting all afternoon to ask it.
"Mr. Cole, how do you sleep at night?"
It was the fourteenth of October, a Tuesday, a few minutes after four in the afternoon, and I was standing on the steps of the Calder Superior Court with a wet wind pushing my coat against my legs. Behind me the great bronze doors were closing on the last of the jurors. Below me the steps ran down to Meridian Square in a wide gray fan, and every inch of them was crowded: reporters, camera operators, a few protesters with hand-lettered signs, and, standing very straight at the foot of the stairs with her arms around each other, the family of a nineteen-year-old named Danielle Rusk.
We had won. I should say that plainly, because it is the part of the story people forget when they decide what kind of man I am. The jury had been out for two days. They had come back that morning, and the foreperson had stood and said the words, not guilty, twice, once for each count, and the man beside me at the defense table had put both hands over his face and wept.
His name was Terrence Boyle. The State of Calder had accused him of beating Danielle Rusk to death with a tire iron behind a bowling alley in the north end. The newspapers had printed his mugshot every day for seven months. He had a record. He had been seen arguing with her. He had lied to the police about where he'd been, because he had been somewhere he was not supposed to be, doing something that was merely stupid and not remotely murder. The evidence against him was a witness who had seen a man in a green jacket at two hundred feet, in the dark, and a single partial bloody footprint that matched a size eleven boot.
Terrence Boyle wore a size nine and a half. I had made the State's footwear expert say so, slowly, with her own measurements, in front of the jury, without raising my voice.
"Mr. Cole," the man in the second row called again. "She was nineteen."
I could have walked past him. Priya Raman, my associate, was already at my elbow with a hand on my sleeve, murmuring Don't. But I stopped on the third step and turned, and the cameras swung toward me like a school of fish, and I did what I always do. I told them the truth, which they never want.
"I know how old she was," I said. "I think about it every day. Danielle Rusk deserved someone who found the man who killed her. The State didn't find him. It found Mr. Boyle, and it didn't prove its case. My job isn't to decide who deserves punishment. My job is to make sure the law is followed."
A woman laughed, a short, bitter sound. Someone near the front said a word I won't repeat. Behind the flash of the cameras, the Rusk family did not move. Danielle's mother was looking at me with an expression I have seen on faces in a hundred courtrooms, and which I have never learned to meet. It was not hatred. Hatred I can work with. It was the blankness of someone who has been told that the thing that happened to her is a technicality.
I nodded to her, a small, useless gesture, and went down the steps.
I should explain how I got to be the kind of lawyer who could be spoken to like that.
I was thirty-seven years old. I had been practicing for twelve years, the first four as a public defender in the Harlow County courthouse and the last eight at the firm I had built with Gil Marsh on the nineteenth floor of the Brennan Building, with a view of the river and a reception desk that I had been quietly embarrassed by since the day it was installed. In those twelve years I had tried sixty-one felony cases to verdict. I had lost nine. The newspapers, who must have a name for everyone, had settled on one for me after the Ferris Bridge trial, three years earlier, when I had gotten a manslaughter charge dismissed against a foreman whose name no one remembers and whose coworkers are, to this day, convinced he is guilty.
They called me the Devil's Lawyer. It was a headline, originally. Then it became a nickname, and then a thing people said to my face in restaurants, some of them smiling and some of them not. I had stopped minding it. I had even, God help me, begun to find it useful. Prosecutors tended to over-prepare against it. Juries tended to treat me like a magic trick they were determined to see through, and attention is a fine thing to hold in a courtroom, whatever the reason for it.
What I believed, in October of that year, I could have recited in my sleep, and often did, in interviews, at law school panels, to my girlfriend when she asked me over dinner how I could stand it. I believed that a lawyer's job is not to find the truth. It is to test the evidence. The State has all the power: the police, the laboratories, the money, the sheer moral weight of a courtroom with its flag and its seal. All the accused has is a presumption, a fragile and very old idea, and someone willing to stand beside him and make the State prove each word. If I did not do that, no one would. If no one did, the idea would die, quietly, in the cases that nobody liked.
I believed it. I want that on the record, too. I believed it more than I believed in anything.
I also liked to win. I would like to say that was incidental. It was not. There is a moment in a trial, I could not tell you exactly when, usually during a cross-examination, when I feel the witness's certainty begin to loosen, and I know where the next question has to go. It is the purest pleasure I have ever known. I would not have traded it for money, though the money came, and I would not have traded it for fame. I did not examine it very closely. A man who does not examine his pleasures can go a long way.
The call came at 5:41 the next morning.
I was already up. I generally am. I was standing in the kitchen of my apartment on Quillen Street with a cup of coffee going cold on the counter, reading the transcript of a suppression hearing for a case that was set for the following week, and Nora was asleep in the next room with her pager on the nightstand and one arm flung over her head. It was raining again. Fall in Port Meridian is mostly rain, a gray, patient, vertical sort of rain that makes the whole city smell like wet stone and bus exhaust. I could hear it running down the glass. I could hear the old radiator ticking itself awake.
The phone buzzed against the countertop. Gil Marsh.
Gil never called before seven. Gil believed that anything urgent before seven was a mistake somebody was about to make. I picked it up and said, "Who died?" and he said, in a voice I had never heard him use, quiet, careful, with a flatness in it like a hand pressed over a mouthpiece:
"Victor Hale's wife."
I put the cup down.
"I don't follow."
"Eleanor Hale. She was found dead in the house last night. A little after eleven. Victor was brought in at one o'clock for what the police are calling a voluntary conversation." Gil exhaled. "He's been in the interview room at Ninth Precinct for four hours. He hasn't been charged. He asked for a lawyer at around three, and his general counsel got there, and he told him thanks, and sent him home."
"Then who—"
"He's asking for you."
The radiator ticked. Down on the street a bus sighed to a stop.
"By name," Gil said. "He told the desk sergeant, and I'm quoting the sergeant, who sounded like he'd swallowed his pen: I want the man the papers call the Devil's Lawyer. He said he didn't care what I cost."
I did not say anything for a moment. I was thinking of a face I had seen in magazines. Victor Hale, fifty-two, chief executive of Hale Meridian Logistics, the third largest shipping and freight company on the eastern seaboard, with a hundred and forty vessels and eleven thousand employees and a name painted on the side of half the containers in Calder Harbor. A man who had once been photographed, famously, shaking hands with a governor on the deck of a freighter. A man who had given forty million dollars to the university hospital and who was said, by everyone who had ever worked for him, never to raise his voice.
His wife was dead.
"He hasn't been charged," I said.
"Not yet."
"They never bring a man in at one in the morning to ask him about the weather."
"No."
"Does he know what he's asking?"
"I'd say," said Gil, "that's your department." A pause. "Adrian. I'm going to say this once, and then I'm going to hang up, and you can decide. The firm will back whatever you do. But if you take this, we are going to be the Hale firm for the next year, and I don't mean the money. I mean everything. We'll be on every front page in the state. They'll put your picture next to hers."
I looked at the window. The rain had thickened. Beyond it the lights of the harbor were blurring and clearing and blurring again, red and green, like something breathing under water.
"Everyone's entitled to a defense," I said.
"I know you think so."
"I know so."
"Then go and tell him." Gil's voice softened, very slightly. "And Adrian. Eat something first. You'll be in that room a long time."
He hung up.
I stood in the kitchen for perhaps a minute longer. I was aware, in the odd distant way you are aware of your own pulse, that I had made the decision somewhere in the first ten seconds of Gil's call, and that everything since had been a kind of politeness toward the idea of thinking.
I went into the bedroom to find my shoes. Nora was awake, lying on her side with her eyes open in the gray light, watching me. She had a way of waking without moving, which she had learned in six years of overnight shifts in the emergency department at St. Brigid's: she came up out of sleep all at once and perfectly still, taking inventory.
"Who's dead?" she said. It was a joke. It was also our joke, mine and hers, which was what made it unbearable.
"A woman named Eleanor Hale."
She sat up slowly. She was thirty-six, with dark hair that she cut short because it was easier under a surgical cap, and gray eyes that missed nothing and forgave less than you would think. She had been with me for two years. Of everyone I knew, she was the only one who never asked me how I slept.
"The shipping family," she said.
"Her husband's in an interview room. He wants a lawyer."
"He wants you."
"Yes."
She did not say anything. She looked at me for a long moment in the gray light, her face unreadable, one hand resting on the quilt, and I realized she was waiting, as she sometimes did, for me to say the thing I always said.
I said it. "Everybody gets a defense."
"I know," said Nora. She lay back down and turned her face to the wall. "That's what scares me. That you never ask them anything else."
I stood there holding one shoe. I wanted to answer. I had an answer, a good one, in four parts. I had delivered it to law students and to a rotary club and to a reporter from the Calder Ledger, and it was true, and it would have sounded very fine in that bedroom.
I put on the other shoe instead, and found my coat, and went down through the rain to find my car.