“Richard is here, but I haven’t spoken to him yet,” Gabriel says. “I just heard about this and wanted to tell you right away. I’m told, though, that he claims he had no idea Lauren wasn’t sleeping beside him when the bad-news call woke him.”

Another Good Samaritan, an elderly woman, stoops over me. “Can I help you, dear?”

“Thank you, but no,” I whisper. “I’m fine.”

A chilling thought hits me like a smack to the head.

Donald Chesterman.

Like a Pavlovian reaction to the mere thought of the man, I feel a knot form in my stomach. If he killed Lauren, I doubt he’ll stop with her. It’s me he really hated. I was the one who did the stand-up work in court.

Donald Chesterman has been invading my subconscious from time to time ever since we put him away. Thoughts of him were like a squirrel that claws its way into the attic, wreaks havoc, and quickly leaves.

I sometimes wonder whether Donald Chesterman would have had such a lasting impact on me if he hadn’t been my first major case. Lauren had already seen it all by then, though, and even she said she’d never had a case like his. Perhaps there are some crimes so horrible that it doesn’t matter how grizzled you are, you simply can’t imagine that type of evil. When you’re confronted with its existence, it leaves an indelible mark on your soul.

Everything about the case seemed incongruent, starting with the man at its center. Donald Chesterman was a well-respected partner in a midtown real-estate firm. He lived in a prewar, three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive. He sent his children to private school. His wife, Donna, had a law degree from Fordham, although she didn’t practice; she spent much of her time volunteering at the assisted-living community a few blocks from their home. I must have spoken to a hundred neighbors, business colleagues, and friends. To a person, each described a mild-mannered man and a family that was out of a Norman Rockwell painting. In other words, Donald Chesterman was the very last person who you’d think was terrorizing his family.

But terrorize his family he did. Over and over again. Beatings and rape—all three of them. Donna took the brunt of it, a conclusion I reached not based on anything she said but from the abject fear in her eyes. She steadfastly refused to testify against her husband. It might have ended there, or more accurately, the trial might never have even begun, if Chesterman’s son, Donald Jr., who went by his middle name of Raymond, hadn’t been so courageous. He was twelve, and adamant that he needed to do something to protect his sister, Jennifer, who was eight. That’s why he called the cops.