He’d found it in one of the head pervert’s alias email accounts. A Dropbox link, a trove of encrypted files and finally a video of the guy sodomizing his own nephew. That sordid bonanza had compelled him to cut a deal and flip on his partners in slime. It also enabled Charlotte to keep all the kids he’d abused from having to recount their horrific stories on the witness stand. Mitzvah Two in her book.

Hence, Double Mitzvah Man.

Leo had met Charlotte’s husband, Drew, at a dinner to celebrate the conviction. Nice guy, told bad jokes, taught criminal law at John Jay College. As Leo recalled, he would be diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer two months afterward. Right around when Charlotte learned she was pregnant.

Drew Pemstein never got to see his only child. He would know it was a girl, and he and Charlotte would name her after his grandmother. But he died weeks before she came into the world.

Leo recalled seeing Charlotte come apart at his funeral, and then in her home at the shiva, the seven days of mourning and prayers after the burial. But never again. After maternity leave, she just went back to the AG’s office with her usual unconquerable attitude. She had told him and Carol that she owed it to her unborn child to stay positive, that it could be harmful to the baby if she gave in to depression while carrying her. Leo would never forget that.

Nor would he forget when Charlotte asked the big question. Rachel was probably eighteen months old, and they had teamed up on another case, a gang of drug traffickers that had been reeling in teens on social media. One day during pretrials, she just put it to him over lunch in Chinatown. No lead-in, no warnings, no hint she was going there with the conversation. They had been comparing notes on the evidence and gotten their dumplings delivered to the table, and out it came.

“I want you to be Rach’s godfather. Would you consider it?”

Leo had been lifting a dumpling off the plate with his chopsticks. It stalled under his chin.

He asked, “Why me?”

She said, “Who better?”

He’d shaken his head.

“Charlie, I’m not Jewish,” he said. “I thought it’s all about teaching the kid religion if something happens to you.”

“Not for me,” she said. “For me it’s about someone having her back and teaching her right from wrong. And it doesn’t hurt that she adores you. So I repeat...who better?”

He had sat there with the dumpling suspended below his mouth. “Rachel won’t need me to teach her anything,” he said. “You’re gonna stick around long enough to be a great-grandma.”

She had smiled at him. “I’ll try, Leo. But I need some peace of mind. You know what they say. Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”