“It was a race between finding out what I wanted to know and Lacour getting up the nerve to jump me right there in the office. Whenever I was alone, I’d search the place. I brought my lunch every day, told them I was dieting. File room, computers, his personal cabinets, closets, everything. A lot of the stuff had combination locks. It took five weeks to find out where everything was, and another week to copy it all.”

“What did you find?”

“Lacour handled a lot of adoptions. All privately arranged, always white babies. And for real money. Thirty-five thousand dollars changed hands when I was adopted. You believe that? I went through all his records and finally found the Jennifer Doe birth certificate. I’d always been called Jenny, every home I went to. So I copied the file and studied it at home. I found out I’d been adopted on the day I was born, by a childless rich couple from New Orleans. Lacour had made notes in the file. He thought the couple was trying save their marriage by adopting a baby. He turned out to be right. They divorced when I was two, and neither one wanted custody. I went into the state system. I was adopted by another family, but . . .” Her eyes glaze to opacity as she trails off. “I don’t really want to go into that. It was . . . an abuse situation. I ended up in the foster care system, and that’s where I stayed until I was eighteen.”

She doesn’t have to go into it. As a young assistant district attorney in Houston, I handled cases arising out of foster care that are still burned into my heart.

“All that mattered,” she says, “was that the file contained the name of my birth mother. Olivia Marston. It also contained the name of another lawyer, the one who’d brought me to Lacour’s attention.”

“Leo Marston,” I say softly.

“Yes. Judge Marston and Clayton Lacour went way back. They’d done a lot of deals together. Oil leases, real estate, you name it. What had happened was obvious. Marston’s daughter got pregnant when she was eighteen, and he arranged to get rid of the baby for her. I was that baby. What I couldn’t figure out is why she didn’t just have an abortion.”

“The Marstons are big Catholics.”

Jenny gives me the jaded stare of a runaway who has seen it all. “What’s your point?”

She’s right, of course. Livy’s sister had an abortion when she was in college.

“What did you do after you found that out?”

“I quit Lacour. But before I did, I stole everything pertaining to Marston. Most of it was files. The rest were tapes.”

“Tapes?”