"So the killer could have been a right-handed midget for all we know."

I don't get a response from Schwimmer, at least not a verbal one.

"Not to make light of the victim and what she lost," I say, "but the fact is that all your testimony about the pain and suffering, the fear and agony brought out by Mr. Tannery in his direct, all that would be similarly in error if the victim had been rendered unconscious by one or more sharp blows to the head. Isn't that a fact?"

"Yes. But we don't know if she was rendered unconscious."

"We don't know that she was not, do we?"

"No."

"All we know is that someone killed her. We don't know how tall he or she was, or which hand he or she used." I don't make a question of this, something he can argue with.

"That's all, Your Honor."

chapter.

four.

she sits on her mom's lap and looks at me with big brown eyes under a mop of s.h.a.ggy hair that hasn't been clipped in months. Penny Boyd doesn't like having her hair cut, and given her condition, her mother no longer makes her do things she doesn't like. Penny is nine. She will be lucky if she sees her next birthday.

I first met her with her mom and dad at a PTA function almost a year ago. At the time, Penny seemed fine, just another healthy fourth grader. Her parents, Doris and Frank Boyd, have two other children: twelve-year-old Jennifer, my daughter Sarah's best friend, and a boy, Donald, who is seven. But Doris and Frank harbor a terrible secret. The family lives under a dark cloud that Penny and her siblings still do not comprehend. I have had to keep the specifics from Sarah and develop codes when talking to other parents when she is around.

A few months before I met them, Penny had a problem. The Boyds were at an amus.e.m.e.nt park. The kids were watching the orcas do their thing, when a wave overshot the side and splashed the front rows. Children went screaming and giggling up into the stands looking for cover, all except Penny, who lay on the concrete floor in convulsions. She had suffered a seizure of some kind. Doris and Frank raced her to the hospital, where doctors conducted a series of tests and held her for observation. After no further recurrences, the doctors were at a loss. They released her, but told her parents it was possible that Penny had epilepsy. They were wrong.

Over the next few months, Penny began to show disturbing signs of withdrawal. She had always been an outgoing child with strong social skills, and quick to learn. Now she began to regress, to turn inward. She stopped playing with other children and began having difficulties with her studies. Teachers identified her as having what they termed learning disabilities. The family tried a private tutor, but the problem got worse. They took her to the family doctor, a pediatrician who had cared for all three of the Boyd children since birth. He was stumped.

Penny ended up at the university medical center for a battery of tests. A specialist finally found the answer. Penny Boyd had Huntington's ch.o.r.ea, a hereditary disease that strikes the brain and central nervous system. In time, it results in loss of brain tissue, an inability to control muscles and, ultimately, death. The only positive aspect of the disease is that it rarely strikes children. Penny was the exception.

It is likely that she might never have been diagnosed, except for the fact that recent advances in genetic medicine had resulted in a diagnostic test for Huntington's disease.

In the last year I have learned more about the genetics of Huntington's disease than I ever wanted to know. The mutation of the gene that causes the disease resides on chromosome 4. A total absence of the gene results not in Huntington's disease, but another deadly ailment, Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. This kills its victims at an even younger age.

Life is an alphabet soup made up of only four letters: A,C,G and T. You would think this could get boring. Instead, it has led to a code of life more complex than any cipher crafted by supercomputers at the National Security Agency.

The four molecules, adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine, produce amino acids. These in turn give rise to proteins, which lead to enzymes. The enzymes carry out the necessary functions of chemistry to sustain life on the planet.

When the intricacies of chromosome 4 were finally untangled, what scientists found was that C,A,G, three of the four letters of life, were repeated in a kind of chemical poetry on the chromosome. It is the number of repet.i.tions in that sonata that determined the fate of Penny Boyd.

If the word CAG were repeated ten times or twenty times or even thirty times, she would be fine. But spin the wheel and come up thirty-nine times or more, and Nature cleans the table in life's bet-you lose.

It gets worse. In a kind of bizarre formula that is both precise and unforgiving, geneticists can now determine with near precision exactly when you will get the disease. We may now learn things we don't want to know. Get fifty repet.i.tions and at age twenty-seven you will grow unsteady on your feet, begin to lose your intellectual abilities, be confronted by uncontrollable palsy of your limbs and slowly lose your mind. In Penny's case she has more than seventy repet.i.tions.

Until recently, all this, who got Huntington's disease and who escaped, had been viewed as some unfathomable mystery, an accident of fate. Now we know what causes the problem, but we can't fix it. Perhaps ignorance is bliss.

The Boyds are now faced with the question of whether it is better to live in ignorance or to have the other children tested. So far, they have declined to run the tests.

This afternoon, I greet Penny with a smile and touch her cheek. She doesn't recognize me. Sitting on her mother's lap, gangly legs, her feet dragging on the carpeted floor of the living room, she puts one finger in her mouth. A string of saliva quickly forms between finger and tongue. The girl seems mesmerized by this. She now has the mental abilities of a four-year-old, her growing body belying the regression of her brain.

I have only known Doris Boyd for about a year, and in that time she has aged a decade. A manager for a temporary personnel firm, she no longer goes to work, uncertain how much time she has left with her middle daughter, or for that matter any of her children. This is now taking a toll on her marriage.

"Is Frank home?"

She shakes her head. "He comes home later every night. Can you blame him?"

I have come to pick up my daughter, Sarah, who is working on a school project with Jennifer, the Boyds' oldest child. We talk a little, pa.s.s the time of day, avoid the obvious: the dying child in her lap.

She asks me how the case is going. For the parents of most of Sarah's friends, what I do for a living is a novelty. The appearance of my name in the local paper on occasion in a.s.sociation with someone charged in a murder case has given me an unwonted notoriety. She has watched the news on TV. Doris Boyd has a personal interest in the outcome. Strangely enough, she is how I met David Crone.

"We have good days and bad days. Sort of like Penny," I tell her. This she understands. "Ask me in a week."

"They don't make it look good on television," she says.

"I've seen some of the coverage," I tell her. I've also grown weary of seeing the same worn images in other cases, some lawyer in a crowded corridor with a microphone stuck up his nose telling the world that when the evidence comes in, his client will be exonerated, acquitted. They always use the same words. "I have every confidence." The same tired denials broadcast to an increasingly cynical public, followed by the same shopworn a.n.a.lysis from media types whose idea of gathering news is to hang out on the courthouse steps with boom mikes and cameras waiting for a public confession. One day, some freaked-out lawyer will blow his fuse and tell them-"My f.u.c.king client did it. So what?"

Fortunately for us, the judge has seen fit to bar cameras from the courtroom. Even so, the trial is a growing media circus. The press has dubbed it the "Jigsaw Jane Trial," a tag line placed on the case by the gallows humor of the coroner's people before they identified the victim from her body parts.

The city's leading television station, a local network affiliate, airs the same image every night, projected on a blue screen over the shoulder of their anchor: a rip-off of the fifties jacket cover from Anatomy of a Murder. This shows an anatomical stick figure with disconnected body parts with jagged cuts and splotches of blood. Give them any story and they can come up with a logo in twenty seconds.

Crone's trial leads the six-o'clock news every night unless there is a ma.s.s killing, a nuclear meltdown or some other carnage that can be quickly packaged and labeled. It invariably opens with the same words: "And today in the Jigsaw Jane murder case of Dr. David Crone . . ." Whether he realizes it or not, and regardless of the trial's outcome, Crone will wear this scarlet letter for life. If he is convicted, he will no doubt become the "Jigsaw Jane Killer."

"I suppose they have to do something to keep people watching," says Doris. Her interest is more than casual. There are fewer than fifty cases of juvenile-onset Huntington's disease in the country. Because of that, there are no clinical tests to research cures for children. I could not believe this when they first told me. We were having coffee one night, and Frank Boyd explained the problems they were having.

They were worn to a nub, fighting with insurance companies and creditors. Trying to pay mounting medical bills had become a battle of attrition, and they were losing. Their only real hope was to enroll Penny in new clinical trials that held the prospect, no matter how remote, of a cure. Trials were planned at the university medical center. Battles were ongoing for funding, federal and private money. But even if they got the money, these programs were not available to Penny Boyd. She didn't fit the protocol. She was too young. The studies were only taking patients between the ages of thirty-six and fifty-six.

We spend our lives pursuing aspirations, career, family, money, always postponing those silent promises to ourselves that someday we will make a difference, we will reach out and get involved, lend a hand simply because it is the right thing to do. That evening, something spurred me to action, something I do not normally do. I am not by nature altruistic, but the Boyds were drowning.

The next day I stepped into a world I didn't understand, one that was populated by physicians and laboratory technicians, most of whom turned a deaf ear if not a hardened heart as soon as they read the t.i.tle on my business card: Attorney at Law. This conjured up things they did not want to think about: the perennial enemy of all in the healing arts, the bloodsucking lawyer.

They were not anxious to help, or even to talk. I got enough doors slammed in my face to become an expert on hinges and k.n.o.bs. I was the pariah. I started leaving my briefcase at home, wearing polo shirts and slacks instead of a suit, just to get through the door. Several times I was mistaken for a patient, and owned up to the truth only after they produced a sharp needle and were getting ready to draw blood. I would have gone all the way, but I knew that as soon as the little gla.s.s vial turned blue, the jig would be up-lawyer's type O. I could be transfused only with the blood of a shark.

As I was being led out, I always offered the same spiel, that I wasn't suing anybody, just trying to get help for a sick child, while I left claw marks on the frame of their door. This went on for weeks. It included letter writing and phone calls to state lawmakers, one of whom was an old friend, a member of the Senate Health Committee. He finally put me in touch with some hospital administrators, and after eating my way up the food chain I found myself in the office of Doctor David Crone.

I am imbued with all the law-school notions about doctors. That they subscribe to a different view of social stratification than the rest of us. In their eyes they are at the top of any pecking order. Don their white smocks, and the waters must part for them. Underlying all this is the notion that since medicine is grounded on good intentions, bad results should be ignored. This starts with the scrub nurse and ends with the hospital administrator, for whom the fudging of a few medical records is considered a virtue.

In my first meeting with Crone, I sensed that he was different. He was canny in the way that most successful people are. He did not want to offend the politicians who had put me in touch with him, but wanted to ease me to the door without wasting too much of his valuable time. I sensed that he had seen enough death in his time that the pa.s.sing of one more child wasn't going to keep him up at night. It wasn't that he was hard-hearted, only that he was a creature of statistics, and Penny Boyd's chances on the scale of probabilities were dismal. On that point he had me.

He was a man of research science, which meant that if the issue didn't fit into a statistical standard deviation, his mind began to wander. Yes, the child was condemned to death. It happened all the time, all over the world. The fact remained that there were not enough children afflicted with Huntington's ch.o.r.ea to justify statistical inclusion of children in the current therapeutic studies.

As the director of clinical studies for genetic research, he'd make the call on whether Penny would be admitted. Crone explained that the protocols had already been written. These were tied to grants, private and federal money that was rigorously monitored by auditors. Then there was the question of liability. If he were to look the other way and allow Penny to slip through the gate and something went wrong, the university, and Crone himself, could be on the hook.

He was a man with a history of controversy. In the late seventies he came under fire for research that led him into the political minefield of racial genetics. He had published two scholarly papers on the subject and found himself the target of student demonstrations and stern rebukes from administrators who didn't need that kind of attention.

So when I approached him regarding Penny, Crone had a veritable bookful of arguments, none of them the kind of answers I could take back to the Boyds. Increasingly their concern was for the other two children. Though I got the sense that Frank never really accepted this, I could tell that in Doris's mind Penny was already gone. She loved the child, but she was losing her and there was nothing she could do. She saw Penny dying by the inch. Frank and Doris hoped that Penny could be admitted to the study. No matter how slim, it was her only chance. If she didn't make it, at least she was of the same genetic strain as the other two Boyd children. Anything the researchers learned might be used to help them-that is, if they tested positive for the disease.

Crone had a zillion arguments why he shouldn't do it at all, a boatload of downsides, not the least of which was the fact that it might un-track the studies that were soon to start and were already funded. It would require a major infusion of new research money. I stopped arguing. There was nothing I could say. In my own mind, I was headed for the door. I started making small talk, changing the subject, when he looked at me, smiled and said: "You give up too easily."

I was dumbfounded.

"Have you ever written a grant proposal?" he asked.

I said no.

"Actually, it would take an amendment. Would you like to learn?"

I smiled, almost laughed out loud, and for six weeks through the fall and early winter we spent evenings and weekends hunched over a computer in my office, typing. I was useless. Crone did it all. Dictated the language, showed me the pitfalls, and finally sent the bundle to the G.o.ds of funding in the university administration. In the end it was all for naught, but not for want of trying.

Harry and I have had our problems with Crone, but for me it always comes back to the same issue: How do you question a man who has done this? Put his body on the blocks for a child he didn't even know. It may be stupid, but it is the reason I cannot believe he killed Kalista Jordan.

Our efforts went up in smoke. Competing applications for grant money on other research dried up the funds that might have been available for the children's portion of the Huntington's study. A few weeks later, Crone was arrested for Jordan's murder and the rest is history.

"Never thought I'd be pulling for a man accused of murder," says Doris. Then she thinks of what she's just said to the man who is defending him.

"No offense. It's just that I've never been involved with anyone arrested before. How long could this last?"

"It could go on for weeks, perhaps months. And if he's convicted . . ."

"You don't think that'll happen?"

"I don't think he did it, but I can't predict what a jury will do."

"Maybe he could talk to somebody at the university? Get them to take another look at the funding request?" she says.

"Unfortunately, he lost whatever pull he had within the university when they arrested him."

"Oh." Her expression sags in a way that tells me she has been harboring this hope for a few days.

"He's been placed on unpaid leave pending the outcome of his trial."

Fortunately, Crone is financially independent, able to pay my fees without strain. I am told he has family wealth, eastern roots. His great-grandfather was one of the railroad barons of the mid-Atlantic states. All I know is that my bill, computed on an hourly basis, is paid every month without question by an accounting firm in the Big Apple, and the checks don't bounce.

"Maybe if he was out on bail the university would see it differently?" she says.

I explain to her that the court has already denied bail. And even if they did let him out pending trial, the university would never reinstate him as project director. Not while the case is pending. Crone is charged with killing a fellow employee of the university. This has implications. A possible lawsuit for damages.

"Oh."

I can't get into the details, but the fact that Kalista Jordan filed a s.e.xual-hara.s.sment claim before she was killed places the employer on thin ice. Their lawyers are already conjuring thoughts of civil liability, wrongful death with the university as a party on grounds that they permitted a hostile work environment.

This leaves only one thought in Doris's mind: that I must win the case, and do it quickly.

I'm not even sure this will change the landscape. "You should steel yourself to the possibility that none of this may help," I tell her. "The funds are probably gone. The study may be too far along for them to change it at this stage."

"I don't want to think about that." Doris is in denial.

"We may not be able to get her in, and even if we do, effective gene therapies may be a long way off."

"I know. But I can't think about that."

"There's something else," I tell her. "The possibility that even if Dr. Crone is acquitted, the university may not reinstate him."

This is something she hasn't considered.

"Why not? Why wouldn't they?" Her eyes are now large and round with indignation. Crone is the only person in a position to help her child, and I am now telling her that even this may be an illusion.

"Embarra.s.sment. Public humiliation. The university may want to stay clear of the scandal even if the jury is not convinced that Crone killed the woman. It's a fact that reasonable doubt is not the same thing as a social seal of approval. Crone is going to be carrying a lot of baggage when this is over, no matter what happens."

"So what do we do?" she says.

"We may have invested too much hope," I tell her.

"What else can I do?" Parent hanging from a frayed thread.

I have no answer.

chapter.

five.

he was wrong," says Crone.

"Who?" Harry is sitting at the table, the one bolted to the floor of the small conference room near Judge Coats's courtroom.

Crone is busy readying himself for court, running a comb through long wisps of thinning dark hair so that he doesn't look like the mad professor. He peers into a stainless-steel mirror on the wall to make sure his tie is straight, this despite the fact that the ends are uneven. He is not what you would call a natty dresser. Even with these final acts of preening there is a certain professorial slouch in his stance and a slept-in appearance to his clothing. He doesn't wear a suit. Instead, he opts for the less formal appearance of a corduroy sport coat over a plaid shirt, and gray Dockers, none of which he has allowed to be pressed. It is as if seamless trousers and wrinkled cloth were a badge of academic honor, a message to the world, and the jury, that he flies by some other convention. A generation ago this might have been a problem. Today half the jury pool shows up in T-shirts and jeans and has to be scanned for weapons before they are admitted to the jury commissioner's waiting area.