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‘Brendan sent you, didn’t he? Brendan sent you to kill me.’ They’re the last words I ever heard Amanda say.”
    “Did the other person ever speak while your phone line was open?”
    “He didn’t speak, Ms. Cooper. He just laughed. Amanda screamed one more time and the man just laughed.”
    I paused, letting the jury absorb the impact of the image Kate Meade had just re-created. “Was there anything distinctive about the laugh? Anything that you recognized or can describe to us, Mrs. Meade?”
    “I remember he had a deep, gruff voice. He sounded like a madman, like he was enjoying the fact that he was torturing poor Amanda,” she said, again pressing the handkerchief to her eyes. “I could still hear her screaming — more muffled at the end. And then the phone line went dead.”
     
3
     
    “I’m Lemuel Howell, Mrs. Meade. I’m sorry we haven’t had the opportunity to meet before today, but I have some questions to ask you as well,” he said to the witness, following a twenty-minute break given the jurors to refresh themselves. Howell wanted to make it clear to them that I had an advantage he had been denied.
    He was polite and charming to Kate Meade, but whatever brief period of comfort she had achieved in recalling her friendship with Amanda during the first part of the direct examination had been wiped out by the last. Her body tensed up, and she wrung the handkerchief in her hands as her eyes darted back and forth between Brendan Quillian and his lawyer.
    “So you’ve known Brendan for more than half your life, haven’t you?” Howell had been standing behind his client, hands resting on his broad shoulders, and patted him on the back before walking closer to the jury box. He was telling the panel that he not only represented Quillian, but liked him, too.
    Kate smiled wanly and nodded.
    “You’ll have to speak up, for the record,” Judge Gertz said.
    “Yes. Yes, sir. I’m thirty-four now. I met him when I was sixteen.”
    “Spent time with him during your high school days, did you?”
    “Yes.”
    “Saw him often throughout your college years?”
    “Occasionally.”
    Howell ticked off a litany of social events at which Kate Meade and the Quillians had spent time together. There were intimate family gatherings and celebrations of every variety, countless business functions in which the Meades had participated, and enough philanthropic work that both couples had engaged in that might have allowed the defendant to call on Mother Teresa as a character witness.
    I had figured that Kate Meade would present the opportunity for Howell to put as much of Brendan’s pedigree before the jury as Amanda’s, and that she would establish for the defense some of his best qualities. It might even weigh in the decision that Howell would later have to make about whether to let his client testify. If he could establish enough of the defendant’s good nature through the prosecution witnesses, he might not expose him to the cross-examination I so dearly wanted the chance to do.
    But I had no other choice than to use Kate in my direct case. She gave me facts — the repeated separations that occurred in the middle of the night, the revelation that Amanda had chosen to end the marriage, and the last phone call before Amanda’s death — that were among my strongest evidentiary links to Brendan’s motive and role in the murder of his wife.
    “I believe that you served on several nonprofit boards over the last decade, some organizations that do great work for the people of this city, am I right, Mrs. Meade?”
    “Yes, I have.”
    One art museum, one major medical center, two diseases in need of a cure, and the junior committee of the best public library in America. Howell called out the name of each, his mellifluous voice investing them with even greater dignity.
    “And was Brendan on any of those boards with you?”
    “Yes,” she answered quietly.
    “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Meade,” Howell said, cocking his