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don’t get him this time, we don’t get him at all.”
    “And if you get him?”
    “Then he gets life plus twenty-five and everybody’s happy”.
    “Rogers,” Klein called from the far end of the mezzanine. He tapped his watch with his forefinger.
    “He sure likes to tap things, doesn’t he?” Corso said.
    She smiled. “Gotta go. Nice meeting you, Mr. Corso.”
    Corso assured her that the pleasure was his. She could feel his eyes on her as she walked away and disappeared down the stairs.

4
    Tuesday, October 17
    3:41 p.m.
    “Y our Honor, I must again protest.”
    “That’s what you get paid for, Mr. Elkins. Protest away.”
    Bruce Elkins spread his arms and then dropped them, allowing his hands to slap against his sides in a show of disgusted resignation. “I don’t see how we can possibly go on with this proceeding, when Mr. Balagula is being denied his most basic . . . his most fundamental. . . constitutional rights.”
    “What rights would those be?”
    “His right to face his accusers. His right to make eye contact with the very people who will decide his fate.”
    Judge Fulton Howell waved his gavel in the air. “As you well know, Mr. Elkins, The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has recently disagreed with you. They have ruled that the extenuating circumstances surrounding this trial warrant extraordinary measures
to ensure the integrity of the judicial process. The matter is not open to discussion. Please proceed with your case.”
    “With all due respect, Your Honor—”
    The judge waved him off. “As we discussed at length this morning, Mr. Elkins, the court will not be party to any unnecessary delays. Either proceed with your case or I will appoint another attorney to represent your client.”
    Elkins had been at it for over three hours, claiming that every piece of the prosecution’s case was, in some manner or another, a breach of his client’s rights and, as such, should not be introduced as evidence. He was prospecting for reversible error, forcing the judge to rule on so many motions that some higher court somewhere would be bound to disagree with at least one of the rulings and thus create grounds for appeal.
    Elkins was good. Animated and theatrical, he accepted the stream of negative rulings from the bench with a show of profound disappointment, like a kid on Christmas morning who finds there’s nothing under the tree with his name on it and tries to be brave. What Elkins knew for sure was that, one-way glass or no, after a while the jury was going to start feeling sorry for him.
    Nicholas Balagula watched it all with an expression of bemused detachment. A man of the people in a cheap suit and a Timex watch, he sat sipping from a glass of ice water, which he periodically refilled from the government-issue plastic pitcher on the defense table.
    “Proceed, Mr. Elkins,” the judge said again.
    Elkins returned to the defense table, where he extracted a document from one of the brown file folders that littered the top of the table. He held the piece of paper at arm’s length and by a single corner, as if it were septic.
    “Surely, Your Honor will agree that last-minute additions to the witness list must be considered prejudicial to the defense.” Judge Fulton Howell’s face said he didn’t agree to any such thing. Undaunted, Elkins waved the document and began to play to the jury box. “After twice having failed to prove my client guilty of so much as a misdemeanor, after nearly three years of litigation and the squandering of untold millions in public funds”—he spun quickly, waving the document in the direction of the prosecutors—“these people would have us believe they can suddenly produce a witness whose testimony is sufficiently compelling as to permit his last-minute inclusion on their witness list. Sufficiently earth-shattering as to justify the blatant disregard for the most basic rules of evidence and discovery.”
    Klein was on his feet now. “Your