Fine was biting his lip. “Judge, would you mind if we-?”

The court reporter had worked with Moffett often enough to know to keep her fingers away from the keyboard until the judge signaled that he wanted to go on the record.

“Take off your sunglasses, Mr. Fine. That’s what I mind. We’re not in Malibu. You admitted in New York?”

“Yes, sir. I graduated from New York Law School. Took the bar both here and California.”

“Long as we’re legal, son.”

The door to the holding pen opened and an officer led Jamal Griggs into the room. He smiled when he saw his lawyer, and waited for his hands to be uncuffed before taking the seat beside him.

Fine was whispering something to Griggs when Moffett interrupted him. “What brings you to town today?”

“Ms. Cooper and her team have been conducting an investigation, and-”

“We’ve got a habit here, son. We stand up when we address the court,” Moffett said, turning the motion papers over to read the name of Fine’s law firm. “Stein, Schlurman, and Fine. Ever try a murder case, son?”

Eli Fine slowly rose to his feet. “Entertainment law, sir. It’s our specialty.”

“Entertainment lawyers? That’s an oxymoron,” Moffett said, resting his elbows on the bench and tapping his fingertips together. “Ms. Cooper’s had-what is it, dear? Six, seven trials to verdict in front of me. You’re not careful, she could take you to the cleaners. What’s your motion?”

The young lawyer looked at the reporter. “Are we on the record?”

Moffett rapped the gavel to regain Fine’s attention. “When I tell you we are. Give me a sense of what you want.”

“As you know, Judge, my client is incarcerated for an armed robbery. Despite Ms. Cooper’s best efforts to connect Jamal to the unsolved homicide of Kayesha Avon, his genetic profile did not match the evidence in the case,” Fine said, reading from notes that I expected had been prepared for him by a defense attorney familiar with the language of a criminal law practitioner. “Now she’s come before this court on an absurd fishing expedition, having applied for an out-of-state search warrant to get into the California database. I’m here to oppose that application.”

“Come all this way to try to stop Ms. Cooper? I’m impressed, son.” Moffett rubbed the hem of his sleeve over the garnet stone in his ring, admiring the polishing job when he finished. “Now, what’s in that databank that’s so damn important to the People of the State of New York?”

“Nothing worth invading the privacy of any citizens of California, sir. The attorney general has taken a strict position on protecting the integrity of the state’s database.”

“What are you after, Alexandra?”

I was on my feet, ready with my arguments. “We’d like to do a familial search, Your Honor.”

Moffett cupped his hand to his ear. “A what?”

“A familial search, Judge. It’s a new forensic technique, and we’d like to use it in this matter. The warrant requests the DNA profile of Jamal’s brother, Wesley Griggs, which we believe is in the crime scene evidence database of California.”

“Wesley’s a convicted felon out there?”

“No,” I said. That would make our task simpler. His profile would probably be in the FBI’s CODIS files if that were the case. “We understand he was present at a drug-related shooting, and that genetic material of his was recovered and processed. He’s not in the convicted offender files, but we have reason to believe he’s in the evidence databank.”

“Why go through all this red tape?” Moffett said. “You asked the AG nicely for it?”

“Yes, Your Honor. But Mr. Fine is right. California is among the toughest jurisdictions on kinship searches. They simply don’t allow them at this point, although there is precedent in several other states. There haven’t been many cases on point. I’ve submitted documents to you and have a copy for counsel,” I said, passing a memo and stack of scientific treatises to the court officer to give to Eli Fine.

“So you want to make some law here, hon, is that it?” Moffett said, shuffling papers around on his blotter. “Eli, did you brief this for me?”

“No, sir. I figured you’d take oral argument.”

“From the land of the hip-shooters, young man,” Moffett said, swiveling in his chair and pointing to the elaborate portrait of Lady Justice, standing beneath the flag, with the words E Pluribus Unum at her feet. “You know how that translates, Mr. Griggs?”

Jamal leaned forward and squinted at the Latin inscription, then shook his head.

Harlan Moffett stood and adjusted the belt on his trousers before wagging a finger at the defendant. “ E Pluribus Unum. Always hire local counsel, Mr. Griggs.”

“Judge, I really object to that kind of comment in front of my client,” Fine said.

“Move for a change of venue if it suits you. You got some nice racetracks in California. I’d like to hold these proceedings somewhere near Santa Anita myself,” Moffett said, taking his seat. He liked the ponies more than he enjoyed writing decisions, since he had an unusually high percentage of reversals by the Court of Appeals. “Maybe I’d better take some testimony.”

He pointed at the reporter and made a few comments about the nature of the hearing, then asked me to call my witness. I signaled for Mattie to go out to the witness room to wait for her turn to testify, and I called Mike’s name into the record.

Mike Chapman walked to the stand and placed his hand on the Bible that the court officer held out to him. I walked him through his education at Fordham College, where he majored in military history, through his years on the job and early successes that vaulted him to the prestigious homicide squad, and brought him to the current re-investigation of Kayesha Avon’s death.

“Did you respond to the scene of the crime, Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did.”

“At what location?”

Mike stated the address. “On the rooftop of her apartment building, in the projects at Taft Houses in East Harlem.”

I let him describe the heartbreaking sight of the college student’s body, after she was abducted from the elevator in her own building on her way home from class.

“Were you present the following day, eight years ago, at Ms. Avon’s autopsy?”

“Yes, I was.”

“What findings were made by the pathologist?”

“There were six stab wounds in Kayesha’s neck and chest, one of which pierced her heart.”

“Was there any blood evidence found at the scene?”

“No. No, there was not.”

“Any fingerprints?”

“None.”

“Any seminal fluid?” I continued.

“Yes. There was semen in her vaginal vault, and also on her right thigh. She appeared to have been sexually assaulted before she was killed.”

“Was a genetic profile developed by a forensic biologist at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Can you tell us what efforts were made at that time to find a match to that DNA sample?”

“As Your Honor knows,” Mike said, “back then, we were in the infancy of databanking. We ran the crime scene samples against the entries-many thousand fewer than there are today-and had the lab make comparisons to specific suspects we developed through the tip hotline.”

“Was a match ever declared?” I asked.

“Nope. Not even close.”

“What else did you do?”

“Every six months, I asked Dr. Prinzer at OCME to run the evidence against the convicted offender databank, which has been growing steadily, Judge. Kept going back, hoping to get lucky.”

Mike had been haunted by the brutality of Kayesha Avon’s death. He had refused to give up the investigation to the more recently formed cold-case squad, determined to find the young girl’s killer himself, with the help of this revolutionary scientific technique.

“Was Jamal Griggs’s DNA profile among the samples submitted during the last seven and a half years, Detective?” I asked.