'You can relax, Chief,' Angelo said. 'She's airtight.'

'I see.'

'Was there anything else?' Ada Delaney said coldly.

'I guess… No, unless you can think of - '

'I can't, Eric. And I doubt that I will. Please don't come back here again.' She got up and left the room.

'Christ,' Eckling said to the lawyer, 'we gotta ask her. She oughtta realize we gotta ask her, y'know, clear her up right off the bat.'

'She has an alibi,' the lawyer said curtly. 'Check it out. I'll advise her to be as cooperative as you need her to be - after you're satisfied she's not involved.'

 'Thanks,' Eckling said.

Across town, the Wild Bunch was gathering for a staff meeting called by Shana Parver. Parver and Stenner were in her cubbyhole office talking on the phone while the rest of the bunch gathered in Vail's office, where doughnuts and coffee were waiting: Meyer; Stenner; Naomi; Hazel Fleishman, the daughter of an abusive, hard-drinking army sergeant, who, at thirty-four, was a specialist in sexual and physical abuse cases and rape and was a ferocious litigator; and Dermott Flaherty, a black Irish, streetwise, former petty thief with a gallows sense of humour. Flaherty had escaped dismal beginnings in the east and was graduated cum laude from the University of Chicago, where he had won a four-year scholarship to law school.

Missing were Bobby Hartford, the son of a black ACLU lawyer, who had spent his first ten years as a lawyer fighting civil rights cases in Mississippi and, at thirty-seven, was the oldest of the Wild Bunch; Bucky Winslow, a brilliant negotiator, whose father had lost both legs in Vietnam and died in a veterans' hospital; and St Claire.

'Where are Hartford and Winslow?' Vail asked Naomi.

'Both in court this morning.'

'St Claire?' Vail looked at Ben Meyer.

'He's checking on something over at the records building,' Meyer said.

'About that hunch of his?' Vail asked. 'Anything to it?'

'Well, uh, nothing yet,' Meyer said, not wishing to comment until St Claire was in the room.

The conversation quickly centred on Yancey's stroke and the murder of John Delaney, the landfill trio taking a backseat to these two new developments. Vail filled them in on the Delaney homicide and assured them that he had no intention of wasting a lot of time playing DA.

'This is where the action is, and this is where I intend to stay,' he insisted as Stenner and Parver finished their phone call and entered his office, she wearing a Cheshire cat grin.

'Okay, Shana,' said Vail. 'What're you so proud of?'

'I think we've got Darby,' Parver said, rather proudly. 'We can blow his story off the planet.'

'Oh?' Vail said. He walked around the desk and sat down. He leaned back in his chair and rolled a cigarette between two fingers. 'Let's hear it from the top,' he said to her. They all knew the facts of the crime, but this was the usual drill: taking it from the top so the rest of the bunch could get the whole run in perspective.

Parver gave a quick summary of the facts: that Darby was having trouble at home with his wife, Ramona, had three bad years on his farm, had lost a subsidy contract with the government, had gone through all his family's money and a fifty-thousand-dollar inheritance Ramona got a year before, and was shacking up with a nude dancer named Poppy Palmer who performed at a strip club called the Skin Game. There was also the insurance policy.

'Darby said last summer he had an accident with a harvesting machine,' she said. 'It rolled back and almost killed him, so he took out a $250,000 insurance policy on himself - and one on Ramona while he was at it.

'Now it's January third, six o'clock in the afternoon. Darby has been hunting with two of his buddies since before dawn. They stop for a couple of beers on the way home.'

Parver stood up, acting out the event as she spoke, substituting a steel ruler for the shotgun. Parver was an actress. She loved visual impact. She leaned with her back against an imaginary wall, the steel ruler pressed against her chest.

Parver: 'He gets home and walks into the house. The CBS news is just coming on. His wife, Ramona, is sitting in the living room. Before he can even say hello, she comes up with his .38 target gun and starts shooting at him. He jumps out of the doorway behind the wall of a hallway leading to the kitchen. She sends another shot through the

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