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not? Let’s just say the whole thing was just a practice run so we could get it right the second time.”
     
“Glad you think it’s funny.”
     
“So, what do you want to do?”
     
“I think we have to take the position that the indictment still stands and this is still an active investigation,” Paul said, adopting the sagacious furrow and dignified chin of a man running for public office. “Nothing in the four-forty motion contradicts the underlying facts of the case itself. If Debbie A. wants to come after us, she’ll have to prove there was a deliberate intent to ignore specific evidence.”
     
“Right,” said Francis, the subband of commentary beginning to crawl through his head again.
     
“And she’s going to have a hard time proving that. It’s been twenty years. I don’t know where she’s going to find any witnesses. . . .”
     
Arroyo. Hernandez. Francis was already dipping into the slipstream, trying to remember the names that came up in the original investigation. He wondered if he even had any of his old notebooks around at home.
     
“Francis . . . ,” Paul interrupted him.
     
“Wha?”
     
Paul leaned across the table, peering out from under the mask of jurisprudence one last time. “We’re sure we got the right guy, aren’t we?”
     
“Julian Vega killed her,” Francis said firmly. “The front door of that building was locked after midnight. Nobody else could’ve gotten into her apartment unless they had a key, like he did. His fingerprints were all over the murder weapon. No one else was seen leaving. Her blood was on his tool. . . .”
     
But he noticed the litany had a certain hollowness after all this time, like an agnostic’s prayer.
     
“So has anybody talked to the family yet, let them know what’s going on?” he asked.
     
“I made some calls to try to track them down through Victims’ Services,” Paul said vaguely. “But the last number I had is disconnected. They’ve moved around a lot since ’83.”
     
“So Hoolian’s out and they don’t know it yet?”
     
Paul looked abashed, reminding Francis that even the most calculating people in the world sometimes got the basic math wrong.
     
“What’s going to happen if they read it in the paper first?”
     
“I was hoping you’d try and smooth it over with them a little, Francis.” The eyebrows rose and the bristles bent back. “We want them on our side. The last thing we need is them bad-mouthing us in the press while we’re going through this again. We don’t want to look callous.”
     
“Then why didn’t you reach out before the hearing?”
     
“I didn’t think there was any way we were going to lose.”
     
Francis watched the look of genuine astonishment spread across Paul’s face, the absolute amazement that anyone could consider the same set of facts he had at his disposal and come to a different conclusion. And in that instant, he saw the totality of the man’s strength and weakness. That utter certainty of his own righteousness that had made Paul a successful prosecutor and a near-total failure at every other kind of human transaction.
     
“All right, I’ll reach out to them,” said Francis. “But you’re going to owe me big-time, Judge.”
     
“Francis, let me count the ways.”
     
“Just help me find our waitress,” he said, having finally ascertained that there was, in fact, no milk on the table. “This coffee’s too strong.”
     
     
    6
     
     
     
HOOLIAN WIPED HIS tired eyes and studied the subway map, eventually finding the route from Coney Island to his lawyer’s office. His own flesh and blood turning him out like some scabby, flea-ridden dog. He fingered his father’s Saint Christopher’s medal. Wishing he’d at least had a chance to catch a shower before he got chased out. He thought he could still smell prison on his skin.
     
The train sliced through a graveyard, rows of low-lying tombstones darkened like a smoker’s teeth by air pollution. Land of the dead. You are now departing from the land of the dead. Please have your passport