“Can I come in?” Jack asked.

“You’d better,” Laurie snapped. “And you’d better explain yourself.”

Jack pulled over a chair and sat next to Lou. He looked Laurie in the eye. She stared back defiantly.

“Paul Sutherland is an arms dealer,” Jack said. Laurie’s blue-green eyes swept back and forth between Jack and Lou. “How do you know that?” she demanded in a voice that had lost a shade of its anger.

“Lou found that out at the same time he found out about the cocaine possession,” Jack said.

Lou nodded guiltily. He looked down at his hands in his lap.

“What do I care if he’s an arms dealer?” Laurie said airily, trying to make it sound as if it didn’t matter.

Neither Jack nor Lou responded. Knowing Laurie as well as they did, they weren’t fooled.

“What kind of arms?” Laurie asked.

“At the moment I’m not sure,” Lou said. “But as recently as 1994 he specialized in AK-47 assault rifles of Bulgarian manufacture.”

The color drained from Laurie’s face.

“Lou and I argued about who should tell you this,” Jack said. “But one way or the other, we thought you should know, given your feelings about gun control.”

Laurie nodded, sighed, and looked off. Jack wasn’t sure if she was angry or sad or both. For a full minute no one spoke. Finally, Laurie broke the silence: “Thank you, gentlemen, for discharging your civic duty. I’ve been informed. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a lot of work to catch up on.”

Jack exchanged a glance with Lou. They both got to their feet and put their chairs back where they thought they should go. They said their goodbyes, but Laurie didn’t respond. She’d already pulled the contents of one of her uncompleted cases from its file folder and seemed to be absorbed in it.

The two men walked down the hall toward Jack’s office. They didn’t speak until they thought Laurie couldn’t hear.

“I was going to congratulate you on your courage in talking to Laurie,” Jack said, “until I realized you’d cleverly engineered it so that I had to spill the real beans.”

“Thank God you arrived,” Lou said. “She was making me feel like dirt, which wasn’t hard, since I was already questioning my own motives.”

“I still think it was the best thing for Laurie,” Jack said, “even if there’s a chance we did it for ourselves as well as for her.”

“I suppose I can try to look at it like that,” Lou said without enthusiasm.

“Listen, you got a moment? I want to tell you about a case.”

Lou glanced at his watch. “As late as I am, I suppose another half hour doesn’t matter.”

“It won’t take that long,” Jack said.