“Will he be able to say anything?”

“I’m afraid so. He’ll be allowed to make a final statement for the record.”

She patted the leather-bound book in her lap. “I’m not going to listen. I’m going to read the Good Book then.”

“That sounds like a good idea.” Killers often asked forgiveness at the end, but that wasn’t Hanratty’s style.

That was the moment that the door at the back of the room opened. Some reporters in front of me turned around, and recognition and amazement lit their faces. I turned and froze, confronted by the most unlikely vision I thought I would see at midnight in Texas.

John Portman looks like a walking advertisement for Brooks Brothers: thin and strong but a bit stiff, handsome with a longish face framed by hair gone gracefully gray. He was fifty-five when he and I crossed swords over Arthur Lee Hanratty, but he looked forty. He scarcely looks older now. I’ve always sensed a Dorian Gray aura about him, as though he were committing secret sins that never registered on his countenance.

I can’t imagine what he’s doing here. There’s no upside for him. None that I can see, anyway. Maybe it’s as simple as revenge. His experience with Hanratty almost derailed his juggernaut career, and Portman definitely knows how to carry a grudge. Watching Hanratty die might give him a great deal of satisfaction.

While his guards take up positions against the wall, he walks straight to the front row and sits in the empty chair next to Joe Cantor, who looks as surprised as the rest of us. I half expect Portman to turn and give me a grim smile, but he stares straight ahead at the curtain beyond which Arthur Lee Hanratty will soon take his last breath.

As we wait in silence, I realize I’m listening for the ring of a telephone. Conditioned by movies—and by a couple of real-life experiences—I run through the dramatic possibilities: the last-minute pardon, the hard-won stay courtesy of some crusading young lawyer from the ACLU. But that won’t happen tonight. Even the mob of placard-bearing demonstrators outside the walls looked smaller and more subdued than usual as I passed through it. A few hundred people chanting dispiritedly in the Texas rain. Arthur Lee Hanratty is a poster boy for capital punishment.