He put on his pants and shirt, went upstairs, and closed the windows in the two spare bedrooms and in the room that Madeleine devoted to sewing, crocheting, and cello practice. He came back downstairs, went into the den, and got the plastic shopping bag full of the Spalter case materials Hardwick had left for him, and brought it out to the dining room table.

The heaviness of the bag bothered him. It seemed to be a crude warning.

He began spreading its contents out on the table. Then, remembering Madeleine’s unhappy reaction the last time he took over that table to examine the paperwork documenting the progress of a murder case, he picked everything up and carried it to the coffee table in front of the fireplace at the other end of the room.

The individual items included a full printed transcript of State of New York v. Katherine R. Spalter trial proceedings; the NYSP Bureau of Criminal Investigation case file on the Spalter homicide (including the multisection original incident report with photos and drawings, crime scene inventories, forensic lab reports, interview and interrogation reports, investigatory progress reports, the autopsy report and photos, the ballistics report, and scores of miscellaneous memos and phone call reports); a list of pretrial motions (all perfunctory, all cut-and-pasted out of the capital case motions manual) and their dispositions (all denied); a folder with articles, blog printouts, broadcast transcripts, and a list of links to online coverage of the crime, arrest, and trial phases of the story; a manila envelope containing a set of DVDs of the trial itself, provided by the local cable station that apparently had been granted Court TV–style access to the proceedings; and, finally, a note from Jack Hardwick.

It was a kind of road map—Hardwick’s suggested route through the daunting heap of information spread out on the coffee table.

Gurney had good and bad feelings about this. Good, because directions and prioritization could be time-savers. Bad, because they could be manipulative. Often they were both. But they were hard to ignore—as were the opening sentences of Hardwick’s note.

“Follow the sequence I’ve laid out here. If you depart from the path you’ll drown in a data shit-swamp.”

The rest of the two-page note consisted of a series of numbered steps on the route.

“Number one: Get a taste of the case against Kay Spalter. Get the DVD marked ‘A’ from the envelope and check out the prosecutor’s opening statement. It’s a classic.”

Gurney retrieved his laptop from the den and inserted the disk.

Like some other recordings of courtroom proceedings he’d seen, this one began with an image of the prosecutor standing in the open area in front of the judge’s bench, facing the jury box, clearing his throat. He was a small man with close-cropped dark hair, maybe in his mid-forties.