“You can mind the judge later. Right now you’re minding me. We just endured enough excitement for the next ten years. And I want the neighbors to see you coming right back home where you belong.”

“All right,” Dad says, a note of surrender in his voice. “Jack Kilgard sure stood up for me, didn’t he?”

“What’s he talking about?” I ask.

A warm smile lights my mother’s face. “When the deputy handcuffed your father and started walking out to the car, Jack blocked Sheriff Byrd’s way and gave him a piece of his mind.”

A transplanted Yankee, Jack Kilgard is a retired naval engineer who worked for fifteen years at the Triton Battery plant. He probably knew all the Double Eagles personally.

“All six foot five of him,” Dad says. “Jack cussed up a blue streak, and I don’t think I’ve heard him cuss in the forty years I’ve known him.”

Mom shakes her head. “He told Billy Byrd he’d be out of office as soon as the next election came around.”

Dad laughs. “He kept calling the jail the ‘pokey.’ I honestly think he scared Billy.”

“Come on, Tom,” Mom says, knowing that all this bravado counts for nothing in the sausage grinder of the legal system. “We won a battle, not the war. Let’s get home.”

As they walk away, Dad glances back at me, and I signal that he should call me as soon as he gets a chance.

He nods and continues on.

As I watch my mother’s Camry pull away, one thing comes clear. By asking that my father be held without bail, Shad Johnson has obliterated any residual illusion that he means to cut me a break in this case. He is, as Caitlin predicted, going after my father with everything in his arsenal. What I don’t understand is why, when he knows I can end his legal career by e-mailing one photograph to the bar association.

“Penn?” says a voice from behind me.

I turn and find Shad looking up at me, a faint cloud of condensation coming from his mouth with each breath.

“I guess my bond request took you by surprise in there.”

“You could say that.”

He turns up his palms like a man dealing with events beyond his control. “I had to do it. This is the most racially charged case I’ve handled since taking office.”

“That’s why you want my father to sit in a cell for nine months? What the hell, Shad? You know there’s zero risk of him trying to flee.”