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from our hubbies’, it’d still irritated Candice enough to take jerkwad landlord to court. As I’d predicted would happen, at the eleventh hour when it was absolutely clear he’d go to court and lose, he’d offered us a tidy settlement, which had paid for five months’ rent at the new place.
    Our new building was just off Sixth and Lamar in a hip and trendy section of town about a stone’s throw from the original Whole Foods.
    We’d signed a three-year lease on the seventh floor of a bright redbrick building with funky lime green trim. Our suite was a corner unit and I’d offered Candice the largest room, which was the actual corner on the east side. The door to her office was all glass, and I had to admit that she presented a fairly striking first impression for our clients, who walked into the entry and looked to their right to see Candice in there, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows and sparse but elegant furnishings, seated at a glass desk in a thousand-dollar suit and heels to die for.
    Meanwhile I camped out on the west side of the suite in a nearly equally roomy office with great light, a spectacular view, especially at night, and lots of privacy. The best part of thebuilding was the rooftop patio, which had been covered with greenery to help reduce the heat coming off the building, which contributed to nightly temperatures in downtown Austin that, at times, hovered between “Are you freaking kidding me with this heat?” and “
Hell
no.”
    Candice peeled off to the right and I went to the left as we walked in the door, and I got busy checking my list of clients for the next day and returning e-mails. Candice waved at me about an hour later, indicating she had a meeting with a client. I got bored shortly after she left and on an impulse I got up from my desk and moved to my supply drawer in a credenza behind my desk. Getting out a fresh manila folder, I wrote Skylar’s name across it and sat back down in front of the computer. I started with Google, and quickly discovered that Noah Miller’s murder trial had been major news covered by every reporter in town. I read every single article, and it took me a while to get through it all, but I had a very good picture of Skylar’s background and the arguments presented at trial by the time I was finished.
    According to the reports, nine-year-old Noah and his mother had been living in a two-bedroom home in East Austin when one night in early July the police were called to the scene of a homicide at the home.
    When police arrived, they found Skylar at her neighbor’s house, covered in blood and hysterical. She claimed that she’d been awakened by a sound inside her home, and when she’d gone to investigate, she’d found Noah in his bedroom, on the floor, stabbed multiple times. As she’d collected him in her arms, she’d been attacked by an assailant who’d been hiding in the closet, and she managed to get away from him and run next door for help.
    Investigators noted at her trial that Skylar had acted suspiciously at the scene, that her hysteria had seemed “fabricated,” andshe wasn’t consistent about the facts of that evening, leaving out some key details whenever she retold the story during her initial interview with police.
    Now, it’s been my experience that when you interview someone right after a traumatic event, they go into a mild form of shock, and their memory can get cluttered and jumbled and become a mess. That’s one of the reasons that eyewitness testimony has been shown over and over again to be pretty unreliable, but ten years ago the opinion that it couldn’t be counted on wasn’t nearly as well documented as it is now. Still, it irked me that the investigators had been so keen to point out the flaws in Skylar’s initial interviews. Of course she’d be all over the place. She’d just held her murdered son in her arms and been