“I most certainly do not,” the judge said. “Moreover, I, along with most of the American public, am already well familiar with the allegations made against Ms. Lambert. Mr. Ivins, your objection is sustained. Mr. Harrington, confine your examination to Rule 1.10 and the subject of privileged information and imputed knowledge.”

Harrington gave up without a fight. He had no further questions for Barrett, and Ivins had none at all. Seething, Barrett left the stand and returned to his seat.

Ivins took the stand next. He looked flashy, even in a conservative gray pinstripe. It was his hair. It was too long. Too bright. Like a lion’s mane, a totem of his virility. He smiled up at the judge, and she frowned down at him, a thinly disguised effort to hide her blatant infatuation. A young woman, some puppet from Ivins’s office, conducted his examination. She read from a script that he’d obviously prepared, with each question simply a cue for his next monologue.

He began by disputing the contention that he had no prior relationship with Ms. Lambert. To the contrary, he declared, he came to know her well when she was a rising star at the Jackson firm. In fact, she bested him in an important case and won his great respect and admiration. He lost track of her over the years but instantly remembered who she was when he read about her arrest and imprisonment; he reviewed the evidence against her and became convinced that she was innocent.

“Object, you idiot,” Barrett hissed, and Harrington did. But the puppet was prepared. Since Mr. Ivins’s motive in hiring Ms. Lambert was under attack, the young woman argued, it was indeed relevant to know what he learned and came to believe about her.

Objection overruled.

Ivins resumed. He’d made some further inquiries and learned of Ms. Lambert’s amazing fortitude. He was told that she was a model prisoner and a valuable assistant in the jail’s business office. “And she actually set up a legal aid clinic in the Women’s Unit at Valhalla!” he raved. “She went out of her way to help these young women with their legal problems. Anyone else would have been brought low by false imprisonment, but Shay was just so brave. Which isn’t surprising when you think how hard she fought to prevent that tragic suicide in the elevator.”

Barrett hissed again, and Harrington stood to object on the same grounds of relevance raised by his adversary earlier. The judge, in an effort to appear fair, sustained that objection and instructed Ivins’s puppet to confine herself to the Rule 1.10 issues.

The young woman nodded. That was apparently in her script, too. “Prior to posting Ms. Lambert’s bail, were you aware that she’d worked on the Palmer case?”

“Not at all. Her name never surfaced in any of the filings or correspondence. It’s a big multinational corporation. They must have hundreds of lawsuits going at any given time. There was no reason to suspect she’d worked on Palmer.”