"But you didn't either save or analyze any of those materials, did you?"

Faro's eyes darted over to Abrams, out to the gallery. This was the crux of the matter-he hadn't collected the most important evidence. "Sergeant, your answer."

It took him nearly a full minute, which is a long and eerily silent time in a packed courtroom, until finally he shook his head and said, "Uh, no."

"And if you had retained that 'garbage,' as you called it, and we had the paper towels used to wipe the bottle, we might be able to know whether my client was the person who'd wiped it down, wouldn't we?"

"Objection. Speculation."

It was, but Gina didn't care what the ruling was. She'd made her point.

From the bench, before Gina had even turned around to go back to her table, Toynbee tapped his gavel and called for the lunch recess. Standing at her place in front of the witness box, Gina let Faro walk by her and turned to watch him stop to say a few possibly uncharitable words to Gerry Abrams.

She waited until Faro had let himself out through the bar rail, then on an impulse she walked the few steps to the prosecution table. Abrams was standing, head down, arranging his folders, but after a moment looked up. "Well," he said, "looks like you drew first blood."

"It's a bad case, Gerry."

He shrugged. "It's what it is. And I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. It's still going to go to a jury."

"Without a murder? You're kidding yourself."

Another shrug. "We'll see. It's still a murder-you got nothing to rule it out, anyway."

"True, but traditionally, you're supposed to be able to prove it."

"I intend to. And a jury will buy it. Your man's guilty. Get used to it." Dismissing her out of hand, he turned and walked through the gate in the bar rail out to the gallery, where he cracked some joke that got the uniformed policemen chuckling.

Gina stood rooted, paralyzed with a sudden spike of anger. These guys, she thought. What were they basing their prosecution on if it wasn't the facts of the case? Because surely the facts as she'd seen them couldn't support anything approaching the bedrock certainty with which Abrams, Juhle, even Jackman obviously felt that they were right. Could it be that it was just a question of arrogance? She had the feeling that the pursuit of Stuart did not spring from any sense of justice, but from a belief that he was vulnerable, convictable, and that was all that mattered-he'd be another notch in the belt, that was all. A career step for Gerry Abrams, a timely closed case for Devin Juhle, proof that Clarence Jackman's administration was equal-opportunity in prosecuting those who broke the law.

Here they were, in the midst of a well-attended, high-profile hearing. The State's apparatus for punishing the guilty was in full array, the district attorney's position set in stone. And yet she had just shredded their contention that a murder had even been committed at all, and gotten a straightforward admission that they hadn't collected the strongest possible evidence that might have tied Stuart to what had happened, whatever it had been.

And still, obviously, on a fundamental level none of this mattered to the prosecuting team. It wasn't personal, either to them or about Stuart. Nor should it be, she knew. She was fine with that in the normal grinding mill of the legal system, where most of the time there was no real question of the defendant's culpability. But the problem with that was that it seemed to create this mind-set that was literally blind to the concept that someone could get into the system and be innocent.

Perhaps this was really what Wes had been warning her about all along. You don't get involved with people you believe to be innocent, because the fundamental function of the law wasn't to dispense justice. She'd said it herself not long ago: It was about conflict resolution.

You say he's guilty, I say he's not. Let's decide this case and get on to the next one before lunch, because we've got five more of them this afternoon. Justice was nice. Something everyone hoped for and even usually attained. But it was fundamentally a by-product of a system designed effectively to settle disputes short of clan warfare. If a conflict could be resolved by a conviction, and that was apparently the case here, then a warm body who could be convicted was all the system demanded. And once those wheels were set in motion, they inexorably rolled on.

Perhaps Farrell was right after all-it shouldn't matter this much. It was business. The job was to provide the best defense the law allowed, period. But she suddenly saw with great clarity that even the best defense might very well fail, and if that happened, this case might wind up consuming years of Gina's life. To say nothing of Stuart's.

She couldn't let this case be about conflict resolution, a simple verdict. It was going to have to be about the truth.

The medical offices for most of the doctors who worked in Parnassus Hospital, and this had included Caryn Dryden, were on the upper three floors of the six-story building. It took Wyatt Hunt the better part of a half hour, starting with the information booth on the first floor, to wade through the bureaucracy, the hospital administration, and then the various nurses' and scheduling stations upstairs before he finally found himself in the staff canteen and lounge on the sixth floor, stirring a paper cup of coffee, pulling a plastic-and-metal chair up to a table across from a young woman named Cindy Delgado.

Cindy was probably in her early thirties. Short and slightly overweight, she wore a neat blue knee-length skirt and starched white blouse. Medium-length curly black hair framed a lovely face made prettier by the easy and bright smile with which she'd greeted Wyatt when he'd introduced himself to her at her station down the hall a few minutes ago.

She wasn't smiling, though, as she stirred her own coffee and said,

"It's such an incredible waste. She really was one of the best doctors, and I'm not just saying that because she's not here anymore. You know, trying to say nice things? With Caryn, everybody acknowledged it right from the beginning. It's so hard to believe that something like this can just happen to somebody like her. Out of nowhere, in the middle of everything, and then boom, your life is over."

"Well, it didn't just happen to Caryn, though. Somebody made it happen."

"I guess that's true." She sipped her coffee. "So. You said you're working for Stuart's lawyer. Does that mean you don't think he's guilty?"

"I don't think much of anything yet, Cindy. We're trying to understand a little more about Caryn's life. Do you think Stuart could have killed her?"

The directness of the question brought her up short. "I don't know. I've just been hearing about it everywhere, you know. From what they're saying, it seems like he might have."

"Do you know him? Stuart?"

She shrugged. "Not really. I've never actually said hello to him or anything that I remember. He didn't come up here too much. If ever, really. So no, I can't say I know him."

"How about when you first heard that Caryn had been killed? Do you remember your thoughts then? Your very first ones?"

She shook her head. "Just that I couldn't believe she was dead, that it had to be some mistake. But of course it wasn't."

"How about when you heard that it was a suspected murder?"

"I don't know. I'm sorry. I guess I didn't really think anything except maybe it was a break-in at her house or something like that. And then they started talking about her husband."

"So you had no reason to doubt it was Stuart?"

"Like what?"

"Like maybe something that was happening here at the hospital. Something you might have heard or seen, or simply known. Were you and Caryn friends?"