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thought, as she searched through the press releases. She was certainly going to try. All he could say was no, which he was pretty good at, but for now she was stuck with the wire services.
    And then she saw it. The reason for Blondell’s immediate release: the recanting of key prosecution testimony from none other than one of the victims himself. Niall O’Henry, Blondell’s son, now a grown man, was changing his story and saying that he was mistaken when he pointed a finger at his mother in the courtroom and, with tears streaming from his eyes and his tiny chin wobbling, had sobbed and whispered, “Mommy had a gun.” Across the screen of her memory, Nikki saw him as he’d been: a scared boy, blinking in surprise, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just said. Then as the courtroom grew silent, every ear straining, he’d forced himself to say more, his little lips moving awkwardly as he struggled with the horrid words. He’d looked at the prosecutor and caught the slight nod; closing his eyes, he’d added, “Mommy shot Amity.”
     
    “I can’t believe it!” Sylvie Morrisette raged as she took a corner a little too fast and the police cruiser’s tires chirped. They were heading back to the station, and she was doing a good ten miles over the limit on Victory Drive. “That bitch should be locked up for the rest of her life!” She slid a glance at Reed and eased up on the accelerator. “Even that would be too good for her. I say, fire up old Sparky again and let her fry.”
    “Nice,” Reed commented as they sped along the tree-lined street. Giant palms rose in the median of the boulevard, and large antebellum homes and live oaks draped with Spanish moss graced the sides of the street. “Were you on the force when she was convicted?”
    “Hell no! That was twenty years ago.” She buzzed around a green pickup that was loaded with landscaping tools and lumbering slowly. “How old do you think I am? I was still in Texas, probably mooning over Bart or some damned thing,” she said, mentioning her ex-husband, with whom she had a contentious relationship. “But I remember it—boy, oh, boy, do I.” Her West Texas drawl was becoming more pronounced, just as it always did when she was agitated. “She’s an abomination to women, that one. Beautiful. Smart. And deadly as a cottonmouth, I’m tellin’ ya.” Reluctantly Morrisette slowed for a light, but her fingers held the wheel in a death grip.
    She was a little bit of a thing, tough as nails, not an ounce of fat on her, mother of two and always, it seemed, pissed off at the male population as a whole. With spiky platinum hair, little makeup, and a quick temper, she was a definite force to be reckoned with. She’d given up her eyebrow studs and toned down her bad language as her two kids had gotten older, but she was still, as Kathy Okano, the assistant district attorney, had said often enough, “a pistol” in her ever-present snakeskin boots and bad attitude.
    “You have to remember the case,” she said, sliding him another glance. “You’re a Georgia boy.”
    “I was in San Francisco at the time.”
    “It was freakin’ national! All over the news, for Christ sakes. What were you, hiding under a damned rock?”
    He didn’t honor the question with an answer. “So refresh my memory.”
    She stepped on the gas and made short work of a Volkswagen Beetle that wasn’t as quick on the draw. Whipping around the smaller car, she said, “The long and the short of it is that Blondell took her three kids up to a cabin for the weekend or something. Two younger kids up in a loft, Amity, the teenager downstairs, I think. Blondell claimed that an intruder with a gun came in, a struggle ensued as she confronted him, and everyone, including Blondell, ended up wounded. Of course, there was no phone in the cabin, and it was twenty years ago, before everyone and their toddler had a cell, so she tried to get the kids to a hospital, almost wrecked the car, and the