"I'm Lou Mason," he told the desk sergeant. "Harry Ryman brought in Wilson Bluestone a few minutes ago. I'm Bluestone's lawyer."

The desk sergeant was reading USA Today. He wore a name tag that read sgt. Peterson and had a slack expression that read who cares? when he looked at Mason over his half glasses, sighed his resentment at Mason's intrusion, and picked up the phone. "He's here," Peterson said to whoever had picked up on the other end. Peterson traded the phone for his newspaper and resumed ignoring Mason.

A civilian police department employee materialized and escorted Mason to the second-floor detective squad room. She politely pointed him to a hard-backed chair that had been decorated with the carved initials of prior occupants. The squad room reflected the uninspired use of public money-pale walls, faded vanilla tile, and banged-up steel desks covered with the antiseptic details of destroyed lives.

Mason waited while the crosscurrents of cops and their cases flowed around him. He'd been here before, waiting to be questioned and accused. An ambivalent mix of urgency and resignation permeated the place. Cops had a special sweat, born of the need to preserve and protect and the fearful realization that they were too often outnumbered. That sweat was strongest in homicide.

Homicide cops took the darkest confessions of the cruelest impulses. They sweet-talked, cajoled, and deceived the guilty into speaking the unspeakable. The more they heard, the more they were overwhelmed by one simple truth: There were more people willing to kill than they could stop from killing or catch before the bodies were in the ground. Sterile statistics on closed cases couldn't mask the smell of blood and the taste for vengeance that clung to homicide cops like a second skin.

Justice was supposed to cleanse them, but justice was sometimes washed away by the pressure to make an arrest. Even a good cop like Harry Ryman wasn't immune from the pressure or his feelings toward Blues. Mason knew that saving Blues meant slowing down the clock.

Mason also knew that saving Blues meant taking on Harry Ryman. Mason could remember the days when Harry used to pick him up by his belt loops and swing him up over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. And Mason could remember the day he graduated from law school and Harry bear-hugged him with a father's pride. Easing his grip just enough to see Mason's face, Harry had told him how to navigate the uncertain waters that his clients would take him through.

"Just do the right thing," Harry had told him. "You won't have any trouble knowing what it is. The only hard part is doing it." Life was never more complicated than that for Harry.

Harry interrupted Mason's droughts. "You can see him now. He's in number three. No one will be watching or listening," Harry said, pointing Mason to the third interrogation room down the hall from where Mason sat. "Don't worry about it, Lou," Harry added. "Just do your job and I'll do mine."

Blues was standing at the far end of the room staring into a mirror that covered most of the wall when Mason opened the door to Interrogation Room No. 3. Blues's burnished, coppery skin, straight black hair, and fiery eyes were muted under the exposed fluorescent tubes that hung from the ceiling.

"You're not that good-looking," Mason told him.

"I get prettier every day," Blues answered. "It's a two-way mirror," he explained, reminding himself and Mason of his previous life as a cop. "Couple of detectives sit on the other side and watch the interrogation. This room is wired for sound."

"Harry said that no one is watching or listening."

"You believe that, Lou?"

"I believe that they aren't that stupid. If they want you for this murder, they aren't going to fuck it up like that. Harry won't, anyway."

Blues took a slow turn around the room as if to measure himself against his surroundings. As he did, Mason thought about his first criminal defense client, Wally Sutherland, a businessman who had been a client of his last firm, Sullivan & Christenson. Wally's one-thing-led-to-another encounter with a woman he'd met in a bar had ended with his arrest for attempted forcible rape. When Mason had first visited Wally in the city jail, he had cried for his wife, his mother, and God, in that order. Mason had never seen Blues cry, and didn't expect he ever would. Blues had contained the coiled anger that rippled through his body when Harry put the cuffs on him. Mason didn't want to be around when Blues let that spring unwind.

Mason asked, "They didn't try to question you without me, did they?"

"Nothing official. Harry tried to make it like old times. Good old Harry stroking me, telling me how much easier it would be just to get the whole thing over with. His partner, Zimmerman, telling him to hold off until you got here. Harry telling Zimmerman that I was too smart to fall for any tricks, especially since I had been such a smart cop myself. Saying that he was just reminding me of what I already knew."

Mason said, "Harry playing good cop with you is-"

"Stupid," Blues said, interrupting. "Ryman's done everything but put a bounty on my ass, and he thinks he's gonna talk me into confessing because he's such a damn nice guy. Bullshit."

"What do they have on you?" Mason asked.

Blues leaned over the oak table that separated him from Mason, planting both hands firmly on the surface. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and jeans. Mason had a fleeting image of him in jailhouse orange.

"First things first. Can you do this?" Blues asked.

"What do you mean, can I do this? You've seen the law license hanging in my office. I'm an official member of the bar. Murder cases are a walk in the park. Besides, at the rate I'm charging you, I can't afford to take long to get you off. I'll go broke."

Blues didn't laugh or smile. His face was a death mask. "I'm not asking you about the lawyer piece. You're as good as anybody I've ever seen. I want to know, can you do this?"

Mason understood the question. "Harry isn't the issue. He's not looking at the needle. You are."

"Ryman doesn't just think I killed Jack Cullan. He wants it to be me. Cops who want somebody found guilty know how to make that happen."

"Not Harry. He's hard. He probably does want it to be you, but Harry plays it straight. He doesn't know any other way."

"We get to court, Ryman's on the stand-can you take him on, carve him up, make the jury want to blame him instead of me? Can you tell the jury that Harry Ryman doesn't know his ass from third base and hates his old partner enough to send him to death row even if I'm innocent? Can you go home and tell your aunt Claire when all this is over that it was just business?"

Mason had asked himself the same questions as he drove downtown. Hearing Blues ask them reaffirmed the advice Harry had given him years ago. Knowing the right thing to do was easier than doing it. Since Harry was the lead on the investigation into Cullan's murder, his testimony would have enormous impact on the jury. Blues's life might depend on Mason's ability to turn the case into a trial of Harry and his investigation rather than a trial of Blues's innocence.

Mason realized another troubling aspect of Blues's questions. The criminal justice system was sometimes more about criminals than it was about justice. Innocent people were convicted for any number of reasons. Cops who planted evidence. Lazy defense lawyers. Jurors who believed that only guilty people got arrested, especially if they were black or brown. Being innocent wasn't always enough.

That's why nothing scared Mason more than a client that wasn't guilty. The gang-banger, the embezzler, the jealous spouse turned killer, all knew in their gut that they'd do the time. They knew that after their lawyer turned every technical trick he had, the system would beat them. The odds favored the house.