Stride wondered why a lawyer earning a partner’s income in a corporate law firm would give up hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to prosecute rapists and child pornographers, but he knew the answer boiled down to one word. Politics. Like everyone else whose backside graced a county attorney’s chair, she had her eyes on higher office. That didn’t bother Stride, but it meant that every prosecutorial decision was viewed through the lens of fund-raising and vote-getting.

He waited twenty minutes before Pat’s door opened. She was reading from a legal-sized file folder and looked up at him over half-glasses. “Hello, Lieutenant, come on in.”

He had been here once before on a courtesy call two weeks earlier. At that point, the office still looked as it did when Dan Erickson was the county attorney. Since then, the masculine touch had been erased. Dan’s heavy furniture was gone. Pat preferred glass and Danish maple. The paint was fresh and brightened the room with a peach color. The old carpet had been ripped out and replaced with a light frieze. The whole room smelled of renovation, like a new house.

“Very nice,” he said.

“Thanks. I kept Dan’s bottle of Bombay, if that’s what you’re into. Me, I prefer chardonnay.”

“Nothing for me.”

“Do you mind if I indulge?”

“Not at all.”

“I practiced in London for two years after law school. I started out with the European habit of wine over lunch, and I’ve never been able to break it.”

She put the file folder down on her desk and took off her reading glasses. She opened a stainless refrigerator, pulled out an open bottle, and poured white wine into a small bell-shaped glass. She took a sip and then waved him toward a desert-colored microfiber sofa on the wall. Above the sofa, on a wooden shelf, was a modern steel sculpture on a cinder-block base.

He was wearing jeans, a sport coat, and black boots and felt under-dressed. Pat wore a tailored cream-colored pantsuit with a low-cut jacket and a white shell. A necklace of interlaced metallic squares dangled above the faint line of her cleavage. Her brown hair was short and coiffed, like an ocean wave breaking over her forehead. She was tall and slim, and Stride knew from her bio that she had turned forty years old in January.

Pat sat on the opposite end of the sofa and crossed her legs. She balanced her wineglass on her knee and inclined her head toward the file folder on her desk. “The widow of that golfer who got killed by lightning last month is suing the county,” she told him.

“How is that our fault?” Stride asked.

“It’s not, but a new theory of legal liability is born every day.”

“Golfers are walking lightning rods,” Stride said. “We fry one or two every summer that way.”

“Exactly. He was on a county golf course, and the wife’s attorney says we had insufficient procedures in place to provide shelter from an inevitable and predictable threat.”