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  Graham turned to Jamie and smiled. It looked forced.

  "Now," Judge Roarke explained, "the defense claims that the defendant should be excused from conviction by reason of insanity at the time this act was committed. The legal definition of insanity means that at the time, the defendant did not understand the nature and the quality of his act."

  Jamie saw one of the jurors, the artist he had thought to be on his side, nodding in agreement.

  "If you find this to be the case," Roarke continued, "you also need to decide if the defendant understands the nature and quality of his acts today." He bobbed his head, as if he was satisfied with himself. "There must be unanimity in your decision. If you have any questions about the law or about your duties, if you need testimony reread or want to see the evidence again, please contact the clerk, and perhaps I'll be able to help you." He picked a piece of paper off the desk before him. "When you come to your decision, this ballot will help clarify your answers." He smiled benevolently at the jurors, as if they had already done something very, very good. "This is the most important part of the trial, ladies and gentlemen. I urge you to remember your sworn duty." He furrowed his brow for a moment. "You can give your lunch orders to the clerk on your way down the hall. Thank you."

  Graham had started to walk outside with Jamie, but there were so many reporters smoking and jawing on the front steps that he realized it would be like throwing him into a lion's den. "Let's try up here," he said, dragging Jamie up two flights of stairs to the offices in the Pittsfield Superior Court.

  He hated this part of the trial. Now he could do nothing, absolutely nothing, except rerun his witness testimonies and cross-examinations in his mind and find every possibly flaw. In Jamie's case, they had won some battles, and lost others. But the outcome of the war was still in question.

  He looked at Jamie, wishing there was something to say, and

  Jamie watched the jurors slip through the side door like a string of matched beads. He put his head down on the defense table and closed his eyes. He stayed that way for a long time, until all the buzzing reporters had left the courtroom and Allie had given up trying to get him to answer her and the spectator rows were empty. Then Graham put a hand on his shoulder. "We're going for a walk," he said.

  JURY BALLOT

  STATE V. James MACDONALD INDICTMENT NO. 1098-96 ( ) 1. We find the defendant GUILTY

  of murder in the first degree. ( ) 2. We find the defendant NOT GUILTY

  of murder in the first degree. ( ) 3. We find the defendant GUILTY of

  manslaughter in the first degree. ( ) 4. We find the defendant NOT GUILTY of

  manslaughter in the first degree. ( ) 5. If you have found the defendant NOT

  GUILTY of murder, did you find him

  NOT GUILTY by reason of insanity

  at the time of the offense? ( ) 6. If you have answered YES to No. 5:

  Does this insanity continue?

  knowing that there was nothing right now his client wanted or needed to hear. Jamie was staring out a yellowed window into the parking lot. Graham stepped up behind him and watched the attendant lean into someone's car window and point down the block, offering directions.

  "If I forget to tell you, Counselor," Jamie said, still staring outside, "you did good."

  Graham shook his head. "I haven't done anything yet."

  "Still."

  "Can I get you something?" Graham said. "Coffee? Food?"

  Jamie turned around and dug his hand into his trouser pockets. "If they take me away, who gets the suit?"

  Graham was silent, shocked speechless. "They hold it for you. With your watch and money and things like that."

  Jamie glanced out the window again. "I just wondered."

  hen Graham left him, ostensibly to go to the bathroom although Jamie knew it was because he was lousy company, Jamie wandered off down the hall of the third floor of the superior court. Most of the doors had a smoky glass pane in the center, which made you want to see inside but obscured everything from view. A good number of the rooms were dark, and most were locked tight. It made Jamie smile. At a courthouse, God only knew what kind of criminals prowled the office floors.

  He started absently trying the doors. Not because he wanted to get in, but because he could think of nothing else to do, and there was a rhythm to it: two steps, wrist out, twist; two steps, wrist out, twist. When doors opened, he peeked his head in and gave his best good-citizen smile. "Sorry," he'd say to the startled secretaries. "Wrong number."

  He wondered if there was a difference between being locked in and being locked out.

  The last room on the left-hand side was a copy room. He could see the neon-blue flashes underneath the edge of the door. Someone was in there, Xeroxing something. He thought he might go in, act like a lawyer, wait until they were finished, and then photocopy his hands or his face. He had done that once in graduate school--his cheek and lips pressed against the glass while the flash went off behind his eyes like a rocket. He had done it over and over, trying for the perfect reproduction; but no matter how he shifted position, in black and white he had always looked as if he was in pain.

  He opened the door and saw nobody at first, just the copy machine itself, emitting blue rays as if it had gone haywire. He reached over to the green button and shut the machine off, and then he glanced up and saw Maggie.

  She was sitting on top of the copier, wearing a sleeveless black turtleneck and jeans, and he did not understand how she wasn't freezing to death like that in January. His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, and he was vaguely aware of the door to the room closing, sealing him inside. A million questions bubbled up in his throat: Do you miss me? Did it hurt? Are you healthy now? Do you love me? But he found himself silent, choked by his own curiosity.

  So instead, he watched her smile. He drank in the tilt of her lips and the sorrow in her eyes like a man who has never before known beauty. He thought, Is she an angel? And when she nodded slightly, he grinned. Nothing had changed between them. She could still read his mind.

  He understood then that heaven was what you made of it, that it differed for everyone, and that you could find it in the most unexpected places. He had been looking so hard for Maggie he had not bothered to notice her when she appeared, thinking that without a requisite halo and a star in the palm of her hand, she was nothing more than a memory. But Maggie, his Maggie, with a rip in her jeans and a smudge of powdered doughnut on her cheek, well, he had been seeing her like this for weeks: in the reflection of a dinner plate at Ellen's house, or staring back from behind the bathroom mirror when he was trying to shave.

  "You found me," he whispered, and he slid down the wall to a sitting position.

  Allie and Cam were two floors below Jamie, sitting at the end of the hall on a bench and waiting for the jury to return a verdict. Allie was hunched over, her mind running through all the dramatic court scenes she'd seen on TV. The scenario that stuck with her showed a big, burly guard dragging Jamie from the defense bench-- to where, Attica?--with his hands cuffed behind him, while he raised his face to the ceiling and yelled out Maggie's name.

  Cam had been rattling away about Angus's estate--as if that was what she wanted to discuss just then--for the better part of three hours. Something about the house, which Cam had rented for Angus when he came from Scotland, and the lease that was coming up. She listened to Cam ask himself questions about security deposits and rental agencies and realtors. "Can I ask you something?" she said finally. "Why are you talking about this now?"

  Cam didn't skip a beat. "Because it'll keep you from thinking about what the jury's doing. You're wound so tight I'm afraid to sit next to you."

  Allie smiled a little. "I don't really care about leases. I just want to brood." She looked up at him. "But it was nice of you to try."

  "I learned from a master," Cam said quietly, and Allie thought of all the times he had come home from the station, thinking of the one who got away, or of sexual abuse worming its way into a go