He just wanted Shiu to have a little perspective. On the other hand, he and Shiu lived most of each day together, and there wasn't any point in alienating him or helping to make him look bad. "There is one way it might have worked, though," he said.

"What's that?" Lanier asked.

"You been following this thing in the papers between Palmer and the prison guards?"

In one of his well-tailored Nordstrom suits, Hunt was in a room full of very serious adults, talking about financial details of a million-dollar partnership that had gone awry because one of the principals had played loose with the books. It was important stuff to everybody else there-Hunt knew that the associates at McClelland, all younger than he was, made a minimum of one hundred fifty dollars per hour and that they lived and breathed these details.

Now he was there, at a mere eighty dollars per hour, to ensure that his witness, a sixty-year-old gentleman named Neil Haines, was going to say substantially the same things in his deposition testimony as he'd told Hunt in their discussions about four months before, discussions that Hunt only vaguely remembered, but which fortunately he'd recorded. He'd also taken copious notes.

Looking out over the sun-drenched city from the thirty-fifth-floor conference room windows inside McClelland, Tisch & Douglas, Hunt passed the rest of the morning in a haze of detail and tedium. When the depo team broke for lunch, he checked with Tamara. Andrea was still AWOL. Apparently she'd called in at work yesterday on her way to see a client at her home.

"Who was the client?"

"Carol Manion. And, yes, if you were wondering, that's the Manions."

Hunt whistled. Unless she'd known the Manions personally beforehand, Andrea Parisi had obviously bartered some of her notoriety into hard billings if she was scoring this level of client. Ward and Carol were a well-known couple who had made their initial money in the grocery business but since had branched out into wineries and restaurants and sports teams. They owned a good portion of the 49ers. They had also been regulars on the society page, but Hunt seemed to recall that recently their son had died in a boating accident or something, and since then their public appearances had tailed off. "So did you talk to her, Mrs. Manion?"

"No, are you kidding? How do I get to her?"

"Andrea's secretary?"

"Wyatt, come on. No way is Carla Shapiro giving out Manion's private number."

"Did you ask?"

"Did I ask? Am I slightly insulted by that question?" Hunt could almost see Tamara pout over the line. "She pretended she didn't have it. I'm sure."

"So we don't know if Andrea ever got there?"

"Right. I did call their corporate offices-the Manions's-and asked, too, but evidently it was something more personal. At the main office, they didn't know about any connection between Carol and Andrea."

"Okay. What about Dev? Any word from him?"

She told him that Juhle had called to report that no local hospitals had unidentified accident victims, the morgue had no recent Jane Doe, the jail hadn't acquired an attractive, young female-attorney inmate overnight. All this, as far as it went, was good news-Parisi wasn't verified as hurt or dead-although it was nowhere nearly as good as a sighting would have been.

"Have you heard any more from Amy?"

"No word."

"I'll call her." But as soon as they hung up, the young McClelland turk who was directing their efforts in the depositions knocked on the glass conference room window and motioned to Hunt, indicating that they were going to start. Time was money, and the lunch break here at McClelland was thirty minutes. But whatever it was, they needed him in there, and the call to Wu would have to wait.

Spencer Fairchild had been the line producer on more than twenty-five trials nationwide for Trial TV, and in his opinion, the trial of Randy Donolan for the double murder of his wife, Chrissa, and her lover, Josh Eberly, was the absolutely best one he'd ever been involved with.

It had it all.

Randy Donolan was thirty-one to Chrissa's twenty-six to Josh's seventeen. Both of the adults were attractive, though neither matched Eberly for sheer heartbreaking sex appeal. Chrissa had been substitute-teaching PE and history at Lincoln High School when she met Josh, and they'd begun their affair within a couple of weeks. Right up until the day of his arrest over a year and a half ago, Randy had run a small but enthusiastic fundamentalist Christian ministry (and Web site startup business) out of his house in the Sunset District.

Although Josh's and Chrissa's bodies had not been found to date, samples of blood types matching both of theirs, as well as DNA-matched hairs from each of them, had turned up in the truck bed of the vehicle that Randy used for his pastoral and Web-master duties. That truck turned out to be owned by a parishioner named Gerry Coombs. When the police discovered the blood and hair in Gerry's truck, Mr. Coombs found an altogether different religion and became the chief state witness against Randy, with whom he'd been having a homosexual affair.

Among the dozens of allegations of one type or another that came out before and during the trial were the proposals that Gerry, Randy, and Chrissa had been involved for some time as a threesome; that Josh had decided to cut Randy out and leave Gerry and Chrissa; that Chrissa loved Josh and wanted to marry him; that Gerry had actually done the killings at Randy's request; and just about all other possible variations on the theme. Which in the San Francisco environment were nearly endless.

From the get-go, the case had been a gold mine for Trial TV.

And now, as if the case didn't already have enough complications, the extremely coolheaded, logical, and knowledgeable babe Andrea Parisi, who'd been explaining the meaning and nuance of every defense strategy and move since Day One, had apparently disappeared.

Wu's early-morning call to Spencer Fairchild had alerted him to this fact before he'd left his apartment. Andrea had been upset the other night, of course-he really didn't blame her-but it never occurred to him, even if she weren't going back to New York, that she would do anything to jeopardize the position she'd created for herself here in San Fran. After all, she was definitely on the inside track for any future trials here. She had kicked ass on camera. And the money they were paying her, even given that in her everyday life she was a highly paid lawyer, was not chump change. To say nothing of the notoriety and branding, both for her and her firm.

Even if her one first shot at the Apple hadn't worked out, Fairchild didn't doubt that she would realize that she was still young. A little more seasoning, a different break here or there, and she would be ready. And even if she wasn't, what she had here was not just good-television is a career-making medium, and she was already a star. She'd get over the affront to her amour propre. It was part of the business.

So his initial feeling after he talked to Wu was that Andrea was probably off pouting and would be back in plenty of time, at least for the afternoon court session and definitely for when she was really needed at the wrap-up. This was the segment after the court adjourned for the day, usually no earlier than four o'clock, when she and Tombo would not only review the day's major events but put them in context from the defense and prosecution sides, respectively. Great television, especially when they'd get into it with one another, as they sometimes did.

But he didn't like to lose tabs on the "talent," and just to be safe, he'd done a little calling around-to Andrea's completely private, off-limits-to-anyone-else, emergency-only Trial TV-issued cell number, then to Richard Tombo's home. Knowing that Wyatt Hunt had run out after her the other night, he had called The Hunt Club and talked briefly with Tamara, who was trying to locate Andrea herself. At Piersall, he talked to Carla, whom he knew and who, he felt sure, admired the hell out of him, and she really, truly hadn't heard from her boss. She was worried.