It was just as Mrs. Casco taught me: wear the face you want the world to see, and that’s the way the world will see you.

Today’s invitation came from Joel Edders, my old supervising partner at Jackson Rieders, though he’d moved on since then, too. The firm’s 2008 layoffs had proved insufficient to right their financial ship, so he’d let himself be poached by another firm in 2009.

He ordered a good wine to celebrate—whether my release from detention or my return to the practice of law wasn’t clear. “When this is all over, I hope you’ll consider coming to my shop,” he said, his glass held high. “It’d be great to work with you again.”

I smiled. “When this is all over? You make it sound like beating a murder rap is no harder than passing the bar.”

“Equally a snap for you, I bet.”

We tussled briefly over the check. I wanted to thank him for telling Mark Ivins about me, and he no doubt wanted to make up for how he’d abandoned me five years ago. I let him win.

NEXT STOP WAS Dev Kapoor’s office in midtown. It was on the tenth floor, and as we went up the stairs, I could hear Alice breathing hard behind me. She was in good shape for her age, excellent really, but she was growing weary of the climbs. As was I.

Dev’s office was an unprepossessing space. It had utilitarian furniture and nothing but a potted palm and a few framed prints by way of decoration. Dev obviously felt no need to impress. He was a criminal defense lawyer and his clients were all preoccupied with the charges hanging over their heads; any more decor would have been wasted on them.

He came out himself to greet me when I arrived in reception. He was as unprepossessing as his office, a small dark-skinned man, six inches shorter than I was in my four-inch heels. A first-generation American, he had formal manners and a deferential attitude—an unexpected trait in most lawyers and certainly in one who’d enjoyed such a meteoric rise in the defense bar. He was not yet forty and already famous from coast to coast.

“Good news, good news,” he said, beaming, as Alice took a seat in the waiting room. He led me down the hall to his conference room. Two other men stood up as I entered. The older one was Paul Schechler, an academic type in tweed whom Dev had hired to analyze CDMI’s surveillance videos and HR documents. With him was a young techie named Jon Banoff who was dressed in the techie uniform of logoed T-shirt and Chuck Taylors. Schechler would be the witness on the stand, but Banoff was the one who’d done the work, and he did most of the talking in today’s meeting.

His conclusion: the time stamp had been altered on each of the three video clips produced by CDMI as well as on my so-called termination form. He knew that because of something he called second-precision truncation. Before they were tampered with, the time stamps had hundred-nanosecond resolution, he explained, but the software used to manipulate them had truncated the time to second-precision. He couldn’t say when the videos were actually recorded, or when the HR form had been completed, but he could say with a reasonable degree of scientific certainty that the time stamps had been manipulated.