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chair. Tina and Lydia were sitting with their backs toward me. They both hadlong auburn hair in ponytails, and both of them were wearing sundresses. They were slender, dark-shouldered, scrubbed women, and in the curve of their necks and the tapering of waist and erectness of posture and tilt of head as they lifted forks to their mouths, you could see they were intelligent and radiated warmth. And if I hadn’t known them but was merely seeing them for the first time—eating and laughing together—I’d have recognized that they were sisters, and I probably would have envisioned getting to know them and perhaps falling in love with one of them. I picked up my phone and snapped a picture.
    Across from them, facing me, sat Henry. Lydia first brought Henry over for dinner half a year earlier. I remember thinking how like her it was to not even see the disfigurement but just the man. We liked him right away. Tina and I talked about what a relief it would be if Lydia settled down with this stable and intelligent lawyer who might be able to calm the chaotic waters of her life.
    It turned out Henry had just passed the bar exam and was clerking for a state court judge, but he hadn’t been able to land a job after his clerkship ended. If Henry and Lydia had been married or engaged when he applied for his job in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, I probably couldn’t have hired him. Nepotism. And maybe if things had been better between Tina and me, I wouldn’t have hired him. It wasn’t because I didn’t like him or that I thought him unqualified, it was just that I might have been wary of having my brother-in-law working for me. But when Lydia first introduced me to this new guy she was dating, I had already felt some ominous oscillations in the status quo of my marriage (which I attributed to the emotional impact of Tina’s lumpectomy). So I was especially eager to please Tina and to do anything I could to make her see me as an indulgent and valuable husband.
    At my suggestion, Henry had dropped off his résumé at my office.
    I went back out to the picnic table. Henry was laughing, retelling the story of Kendall Vance’s switcheroo. He was hamming it up. I handed the beers around and joined in the telling, feeding him lines but keeping him in the spotlight, making it his story.
    Henry and Lydia left. Henry said he wanted to read over my draft of the memo for Judge Baxter. Lydia said she had a few errands she needed to do. We would meet at the park later. I carried the sleeping Barnaby to his bed. The longer he slept in the afternoon, the less cranky he’d be during the concert and fireworks.

C HAPTER 4
    R okeby Park lies at the southern end of town paralleling the river. The land was ceded to the city a century ago by one of the big mill families, but it remained undeveloped woodlands until twenty years ago, when a public interest group discovered that a huge chunk of money had been left in trust for the city to develop the park “for the enjoyment of all.” The money was long gone. A lawsuit followed, and the resulting consent decree created a system of trails, recreational areas, groomed woodlands, and an outdoor amphitheater.
    In my years as a prosecutor, I’ve read the name Rokeby Park in scores of police reports and investigative summaries. In different epochs of the city’s tortured economic history, the park has seen homeless camps, gang wars, meth and heroin shooting galleries, and a thriving economy of drugs and prostitution. It has hosted the predictable continuum of bodies discovered under leaves or in shallow graves, sexual assaults, muggings, abductions, and suicides. How many times have I driven by one of the entrances at night and noticed the vehicle barriers removed, and seen, from deep inside the woods, the evening mist beautifully illuminated by the strobing of blue and red police lights?
    But that’s just a prosecutor’s view of things: