First degree - By David Rosenfelt Page 0,78

to the prosecution. He's right: All we've managed to show is that Dorsey was not a choir-boy and hung around with dangerous people. There is absolutely no evidence that those people had anything to do with Dorsey's death, but unfortunately plenty that Laurie did.

Next up is Celia Dorsey, a less important witness for us than she would have been if we were still contending that Dorsey is alive. Her testimony is a self-indictment of a wife looking the other way while her husband descended into a life of crime and violence.

With quiet dignity, she talks about their life together, about his increasing secrecy, the talks with the mysterious other lieutenant that she overheard, and his stealing their money before leaving.

"And he was gone for a week before the murder?" I ask.

"Yes."

"Were the police looking for him?"

She nods. "Yes. I told them that I didn't know where he was. But that if Alex didn't want to be found, they wouldn't find him."

"Why did you say that?"

"He was too smart. And he used to brag about being able to disappear, to blend in so well that he couldn't be seen. Said he learned it in Vietnam."

"But whoever killed him found him," I point out.

She shakes her head. "I don't think so. I think whoever killed him wasn't somebody he was hiding from. It had to have been somebody he trusted."

Dylan objects that this is speculation, and Hatchet sustains.

"What else did you hear him say about how he might disappear?"

"He said he would fake his death. That they might bury his coffin but that he wouldn't be in it."

I've debated with Kevin whether I should open the door to Celia's "fake death" story, and we decided it was something we needed to do, if for no other reason than to have the jury know we didn't create the idea out of thin air.

I turn her over to Dylan, who treats her fairly gently but makes the point that she has no actual knowledge of what happened to Dorsey, just theories.

Hatchet sends the jurors off on their lunch break, after which we catch a break of our own. One of the jurors has taken ill, either a bad stomach virus or food poisoning. Hatchet sends everyone home for the day, giving us some much-needed additional time in the process. A key strategy in our defense will now be hoping that whatever the juror has, it's contagious.

But I have to assume that the worst will happen, that the other jurors will stay healthy. Therefore, I must prepare for tomorrow's witnesses tonight, which will make for an excruciatingly boring evening.

The two witnesses we are likely to get to tomorrow are a blood spatter expert and a retired medical examiner. Their testimony, which I hope will be significant, will also be dry as dust, and Kevin has to force me to concentrate on the nuances of it. He knows this stuff better than I do, and I offer to let him handle at least one of the witnesses, but he thinks I have developed a good rapport with the jury, and to change lawyers, even for one witness, would be messing with that chemistry.

It's not until almost eleven o'clock that he feels secure enough with my grasp of the subjects to head home. I'm not tired, so as I do almost every night, I take paperwork that I have gone through countless times and go through it again.

It is a curiously relaxing part of my routine. I take a glass of wine and the documents into the den, and Tara grudgingly joins me on the couch. I hope to find something significant but don't expect to, since I've been over these things so many times before. So if I uncover a gem, wonderful. If not, my expectations are low enough that I'm not disappointed.

Tonight's no-pressure reading includes the respective military records of the recently murdered partners in the Green Beret firm of Dorsey, Cahill, and Murdoch. There simply has to be a connection between these men; the computer-masked, anonymous tipster was certainly right about that.

I wonder if she knows that by simply giving me Murdoch's name, she caused his death.

I am simultaneously all-powerful and all-oblivious.

The detail in the files is extraordinary. My admittedly uninformed mental picture of the military experience in Vietnam includes jungles, napalm, land mines, snipers, and daring chopper missions. Yet based on the size of these reports, half the people we had there must have been typists. Every hangnail, every training proficiency score, every