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testing.”
    Theresa headed for the coffeemaker, and not even Leo dared to get in her way when on that path. Of course, since Leo insisted on keeping the machine in his office, this move didn’t get rid of him either, and he followed. Springer, a defense-hired expert, had visited the lab weeks before to perform his own examination of fiber evidence.
    “He said you were uncooperative.” Leo rattled the sheets for emphasis.
    “Because I let him make his own slides? How else would he know they were from the real evidence unless he prepared them himself? It’s not my problem if he doesn’t like to get his fingers in the mounting media.”
    “He says you created a, let me quote this here, ‘unfairly prejudicial work environment.’ What the hell does he mean by that?”
    “Probably that I told him his client is guilty as hell.” She stirred in creamer with a wooden stick; they used to use the sticks for blood enzyme work, now supplanted by DNA. She continued to order the sticks. They made great coffee stirrers.
    The secretary strolled in, caught a glimpse of Leo’s face, dropped some typed reports on his desk, and sidled right out again, not even risking an empathetic glance in Theresa’s direction.
    “Terrific. Nothing like demonstrating an inability to be objective.” Leo crossed his arms and stared her down. “Is that what he’s referring to when he says you were blatantly hostile?”
    “Well—” She sipped her coffee as if trying to remember, when of course she remembered perfectly. The human mind seemed perverse in that way; it recalled moments of misery with photographic precision, but pictures of happy times got fuzzy around the edges. Or maybe it was just her.
    “Well, what?” Leo demanded.
    “I may have wondered aloud how he shaved in the morning, what with the difficulty he must have looking at himself in the mirror.”
    Leo’s mouth twitched, almost in a grin, but he stifled it. “And you thought he’d just let that slide? You think the judge will wink at a charge of interfering in a criminal defense?”
    “He got to do the analysis he wanted to do. No court in the world says I have to be friendly.”
    “Not friendly is a world away from outwardly hostile.”
    She twirled the loose knob on Leo’s barrister’s bookcase. The books and papers inside pressed against the glass as if pleading for escape. “This was after he started asking where I went to school, how long I’d been in forensics, why I hadn’t poured a cast of the shoe print found under the window, crap like that.”
    “Well?”
    “Well what?”
    “Why didn’t you pour a cast of the shoe print?”
    “Because it was two o’clock in the morning, because the budget wouldn’t allow us to order more dental stone, because it wasn’t a homicide so we had a live witness.”
    “And maybe you just didn’t care.”
    She stirred her coffee.
    “Not caring is a dangerous condition in this line of work.”
    “I care.” Now. In the middle of the night, when you hadn’t slept well for months, when dying sounded like the only reward for living, caring had proved much more difficult. But she couldn’t confess that to herself, much less to Leo. “He was fishing for weaknesses so he could report back to his client and collect his fee.”
    “That’s his job.”
    “No, his job is to report facts and form an expert opinion. It’s the lawyer’s job to impeach me, and it’s not even
his
job, it’s his job to present his client’s case in the best possible light, not to use the most underhanded tactics he can think of to shred an impartial fact finder just so he can get a rapist out on the street again. Do any of these guys ever wonder how they’d feel if one of their former clients moved in next door? Would they still let their kids play in the backyard?”
    “Theresa—”
    “So he was hostile first,” she finished.
    “Is that what you’re going to tell the judge? He started it? Sure, the school-yard defense never fails to