Barton was one of the few Bostonians who didn’t welcome the change in the weather. He was eighty-five years old, and hated change. The break brought with it the certainty that the construction and development that was overwhelming the waterfront district would gather speed. The machinery that had lain silent since Christmas would roar to life again, the joints in the backhoes and cranes and earthmovers stiff from the cold, but eager to continue to remake his city in the image of some modern nightmare. And the Millennials would come … and come … and come.

He sighed. Perhaps, he thought, it was time for him to climb down from the bench. Many of his judicial colleagues, even many much younger than he, had taken their pensions and retreated to homes in New Hampshire or Arizona or Florida. He’d heard their justifications when they took off their robes for the last time. They were tired. They had given all that they could give, and made what small contribution they could make, but the realization that they could not stem the tide of lawlessness and greed that seemed to advance every year notwithstanding their best efforts to hold it back was too much to bear. Baylor understood their feelings. He’d fought those feelings for the better part of three decades. He’d lost his idealism over the job early in his judicial career, and many of those who had departed the judiciary had asked what kept him on the bench. To that question, he had only one answer:

If not I, then who?

Days like today justified that conceited obstinacy. Today he would stand as the protector of the greatest judicial system ever created. In his heart, he knew that Vincente Carpio was guilty and deserved the harshest punishment available to a civil society. In his head, though, he knew that it was not his job to take sides. It was his job to hold the prosecutors to their burden, and to ensure that any verdict reached was the product of a fair and balanced process that protected every man or woman accused of a crime, even the most heinous crimes—especially the most heinous crimes.

Baylor looked out his window, across a construction site out toward the water. It was nearly eight o’clock, and six stories below, he could see two workers climbing over their rigs. They were dressed in bright yellow sweatshirts with the name of their construction company stenciled on the chest, and hardhats decorated with decades of stickers. They were talking and laughing with each other as they inspected their machinery to make sure that it hadn’t been damaged by the cold. Safety—as always in this new world run by insurance companies and plaintiffs’ lawyers—was priority one. And the insurance companies and plaintiffs’ lawyers would make sure that the workers were safe as they constructed the next great gaudy monument to the ego of some rich developer.