Finally, Hunt hired another young stringer, Craig Chiurco, to help out with surveillance, and soon enough Chiurco and Tamara became an item. So now, since Shane Manning had been killed, there were eight of them-four, including Hunt, on the payroll-and another four irregulars who took the occasional break from their day jobs as lawyers and cops and even mothers to have a little fun on the edge of things, break up the routine.

This morning at the office, Hunt had given his employees each a five-hundred-dollar bonus. For the irregulars, the anniversary was a reasonably good excuse to have a dinner and a few laughs at Sam's.

Wes Farrell had grown out his hair again, though not as extreme as a few years before when it had gotten below his shoulders. Still, in a ponytail, the hair was a statement, like tonight's T-shirt he'd just shown everyone under his dress shirt that read, I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE NO MATH. He was explaining that he generally preferred nonverbal statements, such as his hair.

"So what's with the hair, anyway?" Wyatt Hunt asked him.

"You don't like it?" Farrell, hurt, put a hand to his heart. "I've been working on it for weeks."

"I know. I love the hair. I do. It's just not exactly the standard lawyer look."

"Tony Serra has it," Amy Wu said, referring to the defense legend they'd once made a movie about. "Long hair, I mean."

"Tony Serra's not your run-of-the-mill standard lawyer," Hunt said.

Farrell took umbrage. "Nor, might I point out, am I."

"No," his girlfriend said, "that you're not." Samantha Duncan-no relation to the restaurant Sam's-put a hand over his and leaned over to answer Hunt. "And as for the statement, he's not cutting his hair until something makes sense. I tell him that's not going to happen until we've got a new administration in Washington." Sam was rather flamboyantly a Green Party person, which in San Francisco put her close to the mainstream, though not necessarily among this crowd of law enforcement types.

"Don't start, my love." Farrell covered her hand with his. "It doesn't have to be on the national front. A sign of anything making sense anywhere could propel me to a barber. But I see little evidence of it." Farrell looked around the table.

The dinner was going very well but hadn't exactly turned out to be the Hunt Club anniversary extravaganza that Hunt had originally billed it. Devin Juhle had pulled a huge case just this morning-a federal judge had been murdered-and he and Connie had had to blow it off. Hunt had reserved a table for nine, the empty chair for Shane Manning's memory and rather emphatically not for Juhle's new partner. When Amy had seen the crew from Trial TV-in for the current tabloid-fodder murder trial of Randy Donolan that was now in its sixth week at the Hall of Justice-which included her friend Andrea Parisi, she'd invited them to fill in the three open spots at the table. Now the party included Spencer Fairchild, the location producer; Parisi; and Richard Tombo, a black attorney, who along with Parisi worked as a talking-head expert on the trial.

"For example," Farrell said, pointing at Tombo, "if you, Rich, or Andrea, or both of you, actually do go large with Trial TV, that would make some sense."

"I'd make an appointment with your barber now, then," Tombo said. "Andrea's a lock for national anchor." He looked to his location man. "Isn't she, Spence?"

Fairchild tried not to wince. "As I believe I've mentioned, my friends, I just do local. This current Donolan circus ends in a couple of weeks, and I'm off to Colorado or Arkansas for the next hot trial. The big decisions are made in New York, not in the field."

But Brandt, always up to talk legal cases, got Fairchild off the hook. "You think Donolan's going two more weeks? I'm thinking after what he did on the stand today…"

Andrea Parisi finished applying her lipstick and looked at herself in the mirror in the women's room. She'd been trying not to think about yesterday and felt that she'd needed a couple of glasses of wine at lunch to keep her spirits up for the daily wrap-up broadcast. She and her producer and her male counterpart had had a little champagne in the limo on the way over here. In the past ninety minutes since they'd arrived, she'd had a vodka martini ("Belvedere, a little dirty, up") at the bar before they'd all sat down, then a glass of pinot grigio with her half-shell littlenecks, some Jordan cab (two glasses? three?) with the sweetbreads. She weighed 122 pounds and knew that she was probably legally drunk, although she felt fine.

She checked to make sure that the bathroom door was locked. Then, closing her eyes, she lifted her right foot slightly off the ground, touched the tip of her nose, and counted to five. Opening her eyes, she put her foot back down, and forced a bright smile at her reflection. "She sells seashells by the seashore," she whispered. She repeated it three times perfectly.

She would have bet that she'd be rock steady, and she was, but it never hurt to do a little inventory. Now she had verified for herself that she would easily be able to handle having some Amaretto or maybe, depending on her dinner partners, some Grand Marnier or a snifter of cognac with dessert. Then at least some of them would go around the corner to the cigar bar and have another round or two with their smokes, and she intended to be among them if that was the way the night went.

She took a last look, and something in her gaze held her for another moment. Oh, she supposed she was glamorous enough, to be sure. Her dark hair, a little below her shoulders, gleamed with red highlights-natural, thank you, since she was only thirty-one years old. A bridge of pale freckles rose off each smooth cheek and crossed a nose Modigliani might have painted. Perhaps in a technical sense her chin was too small, her lips too full, but for television, they were if anything a plus. Still, the mirror caught the trace of doubt, of what might be a flash of insecurity. At the corners of the startling green eyes, she saw a tiny web of worry lines form and then dissipate like an apparition. Leaning forward, she tried to see what was in those eyes that stared back at her. But there was no ready answer, and she couldn't stay in here any longer, not if she didn't want to call attention to herself as less than one of the guys, and she wouldn't do that. She would never let herself do that.

She pulled back, ran her tongue over her lips, over the bright red lipstick, and smiled at herself. A small sigh escaped, but she was unaware of it. "It's all good," she said aloud to her image. "Be cool. Don't push it." Now drawing a deeper breath, she steeled her shoulders, reached for the doorknob, and walked back out into the main dining room.

Hunt reached for his cabernet, brought the glass to his mouth, and a vision stopped him before he sipped. With the ongoing discussion into the fate of Randy Donolan playing in the background, he watched the sublime Andrea Parisi weave her graceful way back through the packed restaurant to their table. Because of his lucky seat against the front wall, she was going to be in his line of vision all the way.

The sound around him faded.

Dessert, and back with Trial TV. "Spence isn't leaving, anyway," Hunt said. "Not after the Palmer thing this morning hits. A federal judge gets shot, it goes national."

"But not right away," Farrell said. "Even if they find somebody and charge him, it won't get to trial for years."