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help yourself by talking to us, now’s the time.”
    “I got nothing to do with a murder, and nobody going to say I did.”
    “You’re a lying-ass piece of shit,” Gomez said. “You think I don’t know a lying-ass piece of shit when I sit across the table from one?”
    Rafael leaned back in his chair, away from Gomez. “You got no reason to talk to me like that,” he said, his voice low.
    “I got no reason to talk to you with respect, you murdering son of a bitch.”
    There was a knock on the door. “That’s going to be forensics,” Jaworski said. “You want to help yourself, now’s the time.”
    “I never shot a gun my whole life.”
    Gomez stood up and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Rafael flinched at the sound, then shook his head, disappointed with himself for showing weakness. He knew Jaworski was studying him for just such signs.
    “This is really it,” Jaworski said quietly. “You make a statement right now, we write it up that you cooperated, that you came forward and admitted what you did. You might even be able to plead down to man one. Once we get a residue hit, you can still help yourself, but it won’t mean the same thing. You’ll be looking at murder two at best. That white security guard was hassling you, throwing your grandmother out of her home, all that fuss over you smoking a blunt. I understand, son. I do.”
    “You don’t got the right to call me son,” Rafael said, glaring back at Jaworski, the two men locked into a staring contest broken only by Gomez’s return.
    “What’re you gonna have to say for yourself now?” Gomez said. “Your hand tested positive for gunshot residue.”
    “You lying to me,” Rafael said. “I know you all are allowed to lie. I haven’t shot a gun, not tonight, not never.”
    “I guess we’ll just have to see who a jury believes, your lying ass or forensic science.”
    “I’m done talking to you. Get me my lawyer.”
    “You agreed to speak with us, Rafael,” Jaworski said quickly.
    “You hear me? What I say? Lawyer. I want my lawyer.”

    a cognizant v5 original release september 18 2010

6
    T HIS IS all fucked up,” Duncan said.
    “Don’t shoot the messenger,” Lily Vaughan, the other senior associate on the Aurora case, replied.
    It was around ten in the morning, the two of them surveying a conference room in their office. It was their team war room for both the wrongful-death suit and the DA’s subpoena, the entire room filled with boxes and binders of documents.
    “How did this get so fucked up?”
    “We left it in the hands of first-years. First-years don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”
    “And so they fucked it up,” Duncan said. “And now we’re supposed to fix it?”
    “If not us, who?” Lily said, looking over at Duncan with a slight smile. “If not now, when?”
    “Somebody else and later?”
    “That would be nice, yes. But no.”
    Duncan wondered if he and Lily were flirting, something they still occasionally fell into doing, though their relationship had ended some time back. Lily had lateraled over from Paul Weiss a little more than two years ago. She’d been personally recruited by Blake after he’d defended a deposition she’d taken. Duncan had tried not to feel threatened, though at the time he’d been Blake’s sole lieutenant, the two before him having both made partner the year before.
    He had found Lily attractive but hadn’t acted on it, wary of a workplace involvement. But then a few months after Lily had started, the two of them had spent a long week in Denver interviewing the sales force of a pharmaceutical company as part of an internal investigation into allegations of off-brand marketing of a prescription drug. Their third night they’d ended up emptying the minibar in Lily’s room, trading stories of the various lies they were being told, and one thing had led to another.
    Their relationship had officially lasted less than nine months, although they’d