“And what was the purpose of this shadowing?”

“Curiosity. I wanted to see what he was like. I wanted to see if he had money. Then I did the same with Christina.”

“You checked her out?”

“She got up late, sat on her balcony making phone calls, ate lunch at nice restaurants in town. She dated now and then and had friends over to lavish spreads. She was working on some kind of Russian conference at the college, but there was something more going on. She drove a Caddy, too, an Escalade SUV. Any idea what those cost?”

“Why don’t you tell us, Mr. Wyatt.”

“Fifty grand stripped down.”

Nina said, “Were you jealous of how well your new siblings lived?”

“Hey, no. I prefer my mom’s hand-me-down Taurus to her Escalade. I like going forty-five because it won’t go any faster on hills. Of course I was damned jealous.”

“What happened then?”

“This conference happened. The Russian one that Christina organized.”

Nina continued to ask open-ended questions. Gabe went on with his story.

Gabe Wyatt went to the conference on post-Soviet Russia at Cal State. In spite of what he had recently learned about his father, he didn’t care about Russia. He had a different agenda, to follow Christina. Unlike their father, she was alive. He understood Alex. Now he wanted to understand her.

He had ruminated upon the fact that she had grown up with their shared father, and that she and her brother were somehow the favored ones, being legitimate in the eyes of the world, while he and Stefan were the ugly secrets. It was almost worse than before, when at least he could fantasize that his father loved him.

The lack of money mixed in with the lack of love. Too late on the love front. Maybe he could still get some of the money, do something big with it, something important. He had waited all his life for a break. Maybe this was it.

At the opening ceremony, Christina introduced the keynote speaker. From the second row, Gabe studied her, listening for a familiar note in her voice but discovering none. He looked at her blue eyes, and thought maybe they looked like Stefan’s. Certainly, nothing about this woman reminded him of himself. She was a complete stranger who had gotten between Gabe and his father.

Getting antsy to see if she recognized something in him, he tested her a few times, trying to catch her eye, walking close by that first day. During lunch, he sat down beside her on a bench briefly while she ate. But she didn’t notice anything unusual. She didn’t seem any more connected than he did. She faded into the woodwork after the duty of introductions, a forceful but quiet intellectual woman.

“So you followed her around without her knowledge at this conference?”

“Right. I got kind of obsessed. I couldn’t figure her out.”

“Did she have any repeated contacts with any of the attendees?”

“Sure. A Russian Orthodox priest, Father Giorgi. Plus her brother Alex was there. She spent a lot of time in little sessions outside with both of them. And a man I figured for an ex-boyfriend, judging by the way she reacted to seeing him lurking around. Very blond. He figured out I was watching her, but he didn’t do anything.”

“And did you learn the name of this man?”

“Sergey Krilov, supposedly an economist from St. Petersburg, at least that’s how he was listed among the participants. He didn’t know a euro from a hole in the head. I knew something was up, and it didn’t have anything to do with the Moscow stock exchange.”

“Did you come to realize what this something was?” Nina said.

“Well, Christina was such a busy bee, hitting people up for money, secretly meeting with this priest from San Francisco. She talked to Krilov, but didn’t look happy about it. Then she’d sneak off somewhere to talk to her brother.”

“So you were suspicious that the conference was-what?”

“Rigged. A front.”

“For what?”

“She organized it to raise money for a pet cause of some kind. I never got details, because they were very discreet, but I think it had to do with some scheme she had… and then Christina was attacked. It was late in the first day of the conference. She had just left a presentation and walked by herself toward her car with a heavy briefcase. I followed her. It was getting dark. To tell the truth, I had made up my mind to talk to her. I was starting to feel foolish, and I had a lot of questions. I-”

“Hold on. You say she was attacked?” Nina asked.

“A heavyset bald man, big as a grizzly, came around the corner and took hold of her from behind. I didn’t have time to think, much less do anything about it. If he had really meant to kill her, I couldn’t have gotten to her. He held her tight and whispered something into her ear, something that scared the hell out of her. Then Krilov popped up, jumping him from behind. I don’t even know where he came from. He did something to this man’s neck that made him scream. He dropped his hold on Christina and took off. Krilov dusted off his hands like he’d been handling something dirty and tried to talk to Christina, but she wanted nothing to do with him. She brushed him off.”

Nina took a second to go to the table. Stefan wanted information, but she shook him off with a finger to the lips. She drank water and tried to think. A big bear of a Russian man? She didn’t know if Gabe was telling the truth or inventing folk tales to distract attention.

But the jury members were listening. Just as she did, they wanted to know who in hell had killed Christina Zhukovsky. Maybe not Sergey Krilov, if he had been so keen to defend her from attack. She decided to let Gabe run with his story until somebody, the judge or Jaime, shut her down.

“That’s quite a tale, Mr. Wyatt,” she said, putting the glass down, looking at the jury. Santa Ana definitely didn’t believe a word of his testimony so far.

“You know what? I’ve been wanting to tell what happened,” Gabe said. “But I was afraid. You’ll get why in a minute.”

“Do you know who this attacker was, as you sit here today?”

“No. Although later I overheard more about him.”

“What did Christina do then?”

She was tough, Gabe gave Christina that. She talked sharply to Krilov, sent him away, then she walked uncertainly a few more steps to an old wooden building and made it inside, but reappeared soon after with her brother Alex. Gabe stood back behind the building, watching them, listening.

“I tried, but couldn’t hear anything in there, but they came out after a few minutes and stood by his Cadillac, and she told him everything, why she was attacked, why she went to Russia, the whole thing.”

The judge leaned over, saying, “Mr. Wyatt, do you know where Alex Zhukovsky is?”

Up to now, Nina had taken in Wyatt’s story like a computer spreadsheet took in data, making lists in her mind: this goes here; that goes there; now how does it add up? Salas had other concerns.

“I remind you of your rights,” Salas persisted, not specifying them again because of the jury’s presence.

“No idea,” Gabe Wyatt said. “None.”

“All right. Continue, Counsel.”

“What exactly did you overhear at that place and time?” Nina said. Jaime and his assistant scribbled furiously.

“Okay. Alex was really worried about her injuries. Christina said, ‘I knew this was a dangerous game to play, stalling them, putting them off. They can’t stand it that I’m my own woman now, and I won’t be a puppet. It’s time, Alex, time for the world to hear about me. Tell the papers. That’s the only guarantee I’ll be safe.’”

“Did she explain exactly what the world should hear?”

“She said…”-he smiled as if embarrassed-“she was heir to the throne of Russia.”

One of the jurors giggled.

“I laughed at first,” Gabe said.

“Go on,” Nina said.

“She said, ‘Our father, Constantin Zhukovsky, was the tsarevitch, the only son of Nicholas the Second, the last tsar of Russia.’”