“Unfortunately, we don’t have that luxury. The moment the jury hears about your affair with Lauren and sees that last text, every single one of them is going to believe that you killed Lauren Wright. And they’re going to hear that in the prosecutor’s opening statement. That means they very well may make the decision to convict before I even get a chance to speak. The only way we can fight that is if we tell them equally early who actually killed her.”

I nod in agreement. It’s the only way, I tell myself.

“There were only two other people we looked at,” I say. “This guy Lauren prosecuted ten years ago named Donald Chesterman. She tried the case with Ella Broden, actually. He made some threats and just got out of prison, but we didn’t see a way of linking Chesterman to the gun. Besides, we had no idea where he was.”

“Okay. Who’s behind door number two?”

“Drake McKenney,” I say. “Lauren was going to run against him, and Richard claimed that McKenney reamed him out over it, even making some threats. McKenney denied it, though, and then the homeless guy said the man he saw was shorter than McKenney.”

LeMarcus considers this for a moment, no doubt trying to figure out whether it will be easier to get the jury to believe that Drake McKenney murdered Lauren than to convince them Richard pulled the trigger. I don’t point out that my lawyer’s careful consideration of accusing Drake McKenney gives the lie to the idea that we’re going to tell the jury exactly who killed Lauren. More accurately, we’re going to try our damnedest to blame whomever we can most plausibly sell to the jury. In fact, that’s LeMarcus’s job. My freedom depends on his doing it well.

“I’m not worried about the ID,” he says. “The least of our problems is the homeless guy. The jury’s not going to convict on his partial sighting. After I’m done with him, they’ll sooner believe he saw the Easter Bunny. But you can’t cross-examine a cell phone. McKenney has some appeal in this regard because he got custody of Lauren’s phone after the arrest. That means we don’t have to claim that someone else sent the text. Instead, we argue that he framed you by somehow putting that text on her phone after the murder.”

“How could he do that?”

“I have no idea. But, I expect that if we pay enough, we’ll find some expert to say it’s possible. That would go a long way toward establishing reasonable doubt. And I like going after McKenney because he’s not very popular with the minority community. You gotta figure that at least three of our jurors will be people of color.”