Shaw said, “Let me tell you how this’ll work. You don’t pay a penny of expenses. That’s out of my pocket. If I find proof Jude is innocent, and he’s released, then you owe me the money. But not until then.”

The husband and wife regarded each other. He said, “Seems fair.”

“More than fair.”

Arnie said, “We might be able to add to it, the reward, I mean. A cousin of mine is—”

“No, the reward’s fine. Twenty-six hundred’s what you offered. That’s what’s on the table.”

The husband gave a perplexed look. “You got a funny way of running a business, mister.”

Shaw smiled. He produced a notebook and his favorite fountain pen, an Italian model, black with its trademark three orange rings.

For an hour the parents talked about their son and the case, and answered Shaw’s questions, during which time Jewel kept the coffee mugs filled and Arnie would step outside every so often for a smoke. Shaw took copious notes, writing in small elegant letters, with each line perfectly horizontal although the notebook was not ruled. This was not a skill he worked at; he’d inherited it from his father. Curiously, his sister, Dorion, and brother, Russell, did not get the calligraphy gene.

Slowly a picture of the young man emerged.

Jude didn’t do well in school. He suffered from attention deficit disorder. “He was hyper a lot of the time,” Jewel said. “Just going, going, going. All the time. It could be exhausting to be around him. Of course, this frustrated him too and made him angry. He’d tend to act out a lot.”

The school counsellor recommended therapists, but the Sterlings were unable to afford anyone other than a strip-mall psychopharmacologist, who saw Jude once every two months to prescribe and monitor his various medications. Success with the drugs was hit-or-miss.

Jude got into some fights in school. “Like we all did, like everybody did,” Arnie said defiantly. He was suspended a few times because of it. Only once, in the ninth grade, were the police called. It was bad fight and the other boy was bloodied. But the prosecutor declined to take the case to trial and Jude was let go. He faced several trespass and shoplifting charges but there was never the evidence—or maybe the energy—to pursue those cases either.

While his grades were not good, he showed talent in art and talked often about creating a superhero comic book series or graphic novels. (English and art were the only courses in which he ever received a grade as high as a B.) He didn’t do well at team sports but competed successfully in track and field; his sport was long-distance running, and for a year he held his school’s record for the ten-thousand-yard run. He still jogged regularly.