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Anthony Szarek, retired.’ I detailed my conversation with Linus Potter, laying heavy emphasis on the timing of Szarek’s suicide, just two weeks before Lodge’s scheduled release, and Szarek’s devotion to alcohol.
    â€˜So what does this mean to us, Corbin?’ Adele asked when I finished.
    â€˜According to Potter, Tony Szarek holds the case against Lodge together by putting Lodge alone with the victim. But who speaks for Tony Szarek?’
    â€˜Nobody,’ Adele replied without hesitation, ‘and now he can’t speak for himself. But I’m still asking the same question. What does this mean to us?’
    â€˜Szarek was a drunk. He was the weak link.’
    â€˜I’m not disagreeing with you, Corbin, but it’s getting late.’
    â€˜And you want me to come to the point?’
    â€˜Please.’
    â€˜The point is that the shit’s hit the fan, and I intend to maintain a low profile until I see if it’s aimed in my direction.’
    â€˜This isn’t like you, Corbin.’
    â€˜I don’t care. Everything goes across the lieutenant’s desk, every move we make. That way, the bosses can’t protect themselves without protecting us. Remember, it’s not just us. Sarney’s also at risk here.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Adele finally admitted, ‘I could hear it in his voice.’

EIGHT
    I know what I expected as I approached the Attica Correctional Facility in my rented Plymouth: soot-stained granite walls, ancient and forbidding, topped by coil upon coil of gleaming razor wire. But Attica’s walls weren’t soot-stained, or topped by wire, or made of granite. They were poured concrete and they appeared, from a distance on that day, as white as the fields of snow surrounding them. The effect was more Camelot than Tower of London, an illusion compounded by octagonal guard towers set into the walls like rooks at the corners of a chess board. Imposing in themselves, the towers were large enough to accommodate fully enclosed rooms behind their battlements, rooms to which the guards undoubtedly retreated on frigid winter days. These rooms were topped by funnel-shaped roofs covered with festive orange tiles.
    From inside the Plymouth, with the heater running on high, it was a beautiful day. The sun at my back fired the edges of the undulating dunes with a wavering line of pure silver. The sky ahead was intensely blue and seemed to grow directly from the prison walls. Even the few sunlit clouds, though clearly in motion, could have been details in a painted backdrop.
    But I wasn’t going to be able to stay inside the car, enjoying the picture-postcard scenery, a fact of life that became painfully obvious when I finally turned into a parking lot surrounded by snow banks higher than my head. The temperature outside was minus six degrees, the sun no warmer than an uncooked egg yolk, the winds strong enough to stir up mini-tornados of snow. I was wearing a really nice wool coat, a coat suitable for a Broadway show or an uptown dinner. But when I stepped from the car – bravely, I thought – my coat afforded me all the protection of a terrycloth robe.
    By then, thanks to a long delay while airport security cleared my weapon, I knew a lot more about David Lodge. The wait had left me plenty of time to read New York’s three daily papers, each of which had uncovered a different piece of the investigation Adele and I were conducting.
    A Times reporter named Gruber had somehow wangled an interview with Ellen Lodge. Her husband, she’d told Gruber, had claimed, on more than one occasion, to fear a revenge-motivated attack. According to Ellen, ‘He was wired when he left the house. I could see that.’
    Eva Hinckle made an appearance in the Daily News where she described Lodge’s murderers as ‘black males’. According to the reporter covering the story, Carl Gonzalez, Eva was certain because (as she only now remembered)