The preliminary hearing in State of Oregon v. Joshua Maxfield was scheduled for one in the afternoon, but Delilah Wallace had been working on her preparation since seven in the morning. She’d let herself into the district attorney’s office with her key, first in as usual, turning on the lights as she walked past the empty offices.

Delilah was always first at everything she did; she’d been first in her high school class, first in her college class, and first in her law school class. Delilah was smart but she also worked as hard as she was able on everything she did; she didn’t know any other way. She could hardly remember a time when she wasn’t working. Her father had walked out on the family when she was born, and her mother had supported her and her brother with minimum-wage jobs because she had no education and no skills except the ability to push herself to exhaustion and beyond. That meant that Delilah worked, too, from the time she could work, to help pay the rent and put food on the table. She had been an adult long before she was one legally.

Religion and music had been Delilah’s salvation. The church choir had given her purpose and pride in an ability to sing that was unique. Her voice had kept her in high school while her friends dropped out. Her solos put her in a spotlight that she came to cherish, and had pointed her toward trial work where she could continue to be the center of attention. There was no bigger spotlight than the one the press and public shone on a trial lawyer who was seeking the death penalty.

At eight A.M., someone knocked on Delilah’s doorjamb. She looked up from a stack of police reports to find Tony Marx standing in her doorway with a smile plastered on his face and a small notebook in his hand.

“What is the reason for your shit-eating grin, detective?”

“My excellent detection skills. You have some time to hear what I’ve discovered about Joshua Maxfield?”

Delilah glanced at her watch. “I’m not prepping Ashley Spencer until eleven, so I can spare a few minutes. What have you got?”

Marx took a chair in front of Wallace’s desk, which was completely covered with law books, police reports, crumpled scraps of paper, and legal pads.

“How the hell do you ever find anything?” Marx asked as he opened his notebook.

Delilah tapped her temple. “It’s all up here. Come on now, what have you got?”

“Our boy is definitely not what he seems. First, Maxfield isn’t the name he was born with. That’s Joshua Peltz. Mr. and Mrs. Peltz belonged to some fringe Christian sect in Massachusetts that subscribed to a spare-the-rod-and-spoil-the-child philosophy. When Joshua was eleven, he was truant from school for a week. A caseworker found him chained in a closet. He was emaciated, dehydrated, and covered with cigarette burns. My guess is that he was subjected to some really sick shit. The state must have thought so, too, because it terminated the Peltzs’ parental rights and put our client in foster care.”

“I just read Maxfield’s first book, A Tourist in Babylon,” Delilah said. “Now I know how he can write so realistically about a classic abused childhood.”

“He’s also pretty knowledgeable about crime,” Marx said. “Our boy developed quite a juvenile record. He set fire to his first foster home and spent time in juvenile detention for arson; there are several assaults in elementary and middle school, quite a few expulsions, too. The only consistent thing in his life was judo. One of his foster parents thought the discipline would do him good, but he only used his skills to bully kids. He was expelled from high school when he was a senior for breaking a boy’s arm. After that, he bummed around for a year, then went back to school.”

“When did Peltz become Maxfield?” Weller asked.

“His last foster family was named Maxfield. He had his name changed legally when he went to college at the University of Massachusetts. I guess Maxfield does sound classier than Peltz. He used to tell people that he was from a wealthy family in California.”

“He wrote his big bestseller in college, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he started it in community college and finished it his senior year at U. Mass.” Marx looked up from his notes. “I got a lot of his writing history from book reviews and interviews he gave when Tourist hit the big time. The story is that he wrote an essay about his childhood in an English class, and the professor suggested he expand it. There was a big-bucks advance, literary prizes, bestseller lists, the whole nine yards. Maxfield was on top of the world, a genuine boy wonder. The problem was that he used up all the material he’d accumulated from his miserable life in his first novel and couldn’t write a decent follow-up. His second book tanked, and he hasn’t written another one since.”

“Unless you count his serial-killer opus.”

“A point well taken.” Marx paused. “You don’t think he killed to get material for the book, do you?”

“Now that’s an idea.” Delilah stared into space for a moment. “I’m gonna think on that.” She refocused on the detective. “You have anything more for me, Tony?”

Marx told Wallace what he’d found out about Maxfield’s reasons for leaving Eton College.

“Can we get the name of the woman he hit on?” Delilah asked.

“I’m working on it.”

“Any luck tying Maxfield to any of the out-of-state murders?”

“The FBI is working that angle and I haven’t heard from them yet.”

“Okay, good job. Now let me get back to work so I don’t mess up this afternoon.”

Ashley’s nightmares were less intense after Joshua Maxfield’s arrest. Boredom replaced fear as her preeminent emotion. She started exercising again, because it gave her something to do. One afternoon, Ashley kicked a ball around the soccer field and tried a few shots on goal. The next day, she practiced again. It felt good to be back on the pitch where her only problem was getting the ball in the net. On Saturday, Sally Castle drove Ashley to the mall where they saw a movie and ate pizza. Leaving the Academy campus made Ashley feel like a prisoner freed from solitary confinement.

Ashley looked forward to her meals with Henry Van Meter. She enjoyed Henry’s stories about his travels, Oregon history, and interesting things he’d accomplished. By contrast, her life seemed dull. The only time she’d traveled was when her parents took her on vacations to Mexico and Aruba, but they had stayed at resorts with other Americans, and the places hadn’t seemed as foreign as she expected.

Sometimes Miles joined Ashley and his father for a meal. He was as kind to her as his father, and she felt comfortable in their company. The Van Meters encouraged Ashley to think about her future. She resisted at first, but they assured her that she could attend the Academy for free in the fall and they mentioned the soccer team from time to time. There was a plan to send the girls on several trips out of state where they would test themselves against other nationally ranked powers.

Ashley’s recovery took a step backward on the morning of the preliminary hearing. She woke up frightened and nauseated, passing on a morning run because nerves and fear sapped her energy. She had gone to the mansion for breakfast but she could only eat toast and tea. As usual, Henry Van Meter tried to distract her from her troubles with tales of far-off places, but she only half-heard him. None of his stories could stop her from imagining what it would be like to face Joshua Maxfield later in the day.

Detective Birch picked up Ashley from the Academy dormitory at nine and drove her to the courthouse. He asked her how she was feeling and she told him that she was nervous, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him how truly frightened she was at the thought of being in the same room with the man who had killed her parents and come within moments of murdering her. Birch said that it was natural to be nervous, and he assured her that Delilah Wallace was a nice woman who would make sure that her ordeal was as painless as possible. Ashley pulled into herself after that, and there was very little conversation during the rest of the ride.