AN ICY RAIN accompanied Matt Fielder on his drive to Cedar Falls that Friday morning. The rain was just heavy enough so that he needed his wipers, but light enough so that if he kept them on, the windshield would begin to streak. The Suzuki was a base model: four cylinders, five speeds, two doors, and not much else. He’d passed up shelling out an additional $2,000 for something they called a “convenience package,” that would have given him tinted glass, a rear-window defroster, intermittent wipers, a locking center console, a lighted vanity mirror, and a couple of other things that had struck him at the time as totally frivolous. He’d have liked the intermittent wipers, but naturally they wouldn’t sell him those without the rest of the deal - they knew what they were doing. So now he drove with one hand on the steering wheel and one on the wiper control, flicking it on and off every five seconds or so, so that the blades would make a single pass across the windshield before returning to rest. Manual intermittent wipers, he called them.

The icy rain had turned to the regular variety by the time Fielder reached the courthouse, but he saw right away that it hadn’t kept the public away. He had to drive around the corner to find a parking place, finally settling for a spot in front of the jail. By the time he made it back to the entrance, his suit was spotted, and his socks were soaked through his loafers.

The court appearance was brief but significant. Gil Cavanaugh presented the indictment he’d obtained from the grand jury. To nobody’s surprise, it charged Jonathan Hamilton with two counts of murder in the first degree, as well as various lesser included crimes - second-degree murder, burglary (for illegally entering the victims’ home with the intent of committing a crime), and the illegal possession of a weapon (the knife) with the intent to use it unlawfully.

Asked how the defendant pleaded, Fielder responded on Jonathan’s behalf. “Not guilty,” he said.

Next, Cavanaugh handed up a motion requesting that the defendant be required to submit to the taking of blood and hair samples, as well as having his footprints taken, all, no doubt, to compare to evidence recovered at the scene. Fielder asked for time to respond, but he knew this was one round he was going to lose. Unlike statements, which may be refused under the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition against compelling an individual to give testimony against himself, the items Cavanaugh was seeking were “non-testimonial.” Unless Fielder could show that supplying them endangered his client’s life (as he might be able to do, for example, if the issue was one of removing a bullet lodged near the brain) or “shocked the conscience” (such as pumping the contents of his client’s stomach), all Cavanaugh had to do was demonstrate that there was “probable cause” to believe that the defendant had committed a crime - something the grand jury conveniently now had done for him by voting its indictment.

Turning to the offensive, Fielder submitted papers of his own - the motion to dismiss the indictment, based upon Cavanaugh’s failure to give the defense a reasonable time to decide whether to have Jonathan testify before the grand jury, and to prepare him to do so. But there, too, Fielder knew he had a loser. Still, he was doing what he had to do. What was reasonable in an ordinary case might turn out to be unreasonable in a capital case. One of Fielder’s jobs was to make a record at every step of the proceedings, so appellate courts could one day decide just how different death was going to be in New York. Even in non-capital cases, every lawyer’s nightmare is the discovery that his client’s rights were in fact violated - but, that in failing to preserve the issue by registering a proper and timely objection, the defense waived the defect.

Prisons are full of defendants whose lawyers didn’t bother to object.

With no further business, Judge Summerhouse adjourned the case for three weeks, for each side to respond in writing to the other’s moving papers.

THE RAIN DID little to dampen Cavanaugh’s impromptu press conference, held on the courthouse steps following the arraignment. “Today is September twelfth,” he said into the microphones. “As the district attorney elected by the citizens of Ottawa County, I have 120 days from today to decide whether it is my intention to seek the ultimate penalty in this case. As horrible as these murders are, and as defenseless as these poor victims were, I am going to extend to the defendant a courtesy that he certainly never offered the victims. I am going to hold off a bit, to give the defense the opportunity to try to convince me why I should not seek the death penalty in this case. I will consider anything they present to me in the next three weeks. I’m a tough man, but I’m also a fair man. So, you see, I’ve now served public notice. The burden’s on them.”

As cameramen jockeyed for position, Cavanaugh stood under an umbrella held by an aide and answered a few softball questions lobbed at him by reporters. No, he had never seen a more gruesome crime in all of his years in public service. Yes, he was certain the right man was locked up, and yes, the good folks who lived in the county could sleep well at night. No, offhand he couldn’t imagine anything the defense could possibly tell him that would persuade him not to ask for death, but he wanted to give them the chance, just the same. And yes, he expected to be reelected handily the following November.

Then he excused himself and left, with his entourage in tow.

When the reporters made their way over to Fielder, who’d been watching the performance from one side, he held up a hand and told them he had no comment for them. He hated to do it. For one thing, reporters can be helpful: They live in a world where information is currency and are generally eager to trade a good lead for a bit of background material and an unconfirmed rumor, with maybe a future piece of gossip thrown in. Besides that, Cavanaugh’s antics infuriated Fielder, who would have loved to be able to say something to balance the scales. But what was he going to tell them? That his client didn’t know whether he was guilty or not? That he was having trouble remembering if he’d murdered his grandparents? Or maybe, that if he’d done it, he couldn’t say why?

“Sorry,” he said three or four times.

“Are you going to try to talk the DA out of asking for death?”

“Sorry.”

“Is there anything good about your client?”

“Sorry.”

“When will you talk with us?”

“I’ll have a statement at the appropriate time,” was about all he came up with. Public relations has never been Matt Fielder’s strong suit.

He broke away from them and made it around the corner to his car, just in time to see a uniformed officer placing a parking ticket underneath one of his manual intermittent wiper blades.

He was starting to get the feeling that it wasn’t his day.

AROUND THE SAME time Matt Fielder was beginning the drive back to his cabin near Big Moose, a technician was getting to work some 150 miles to the west, in the Rochester suburb of Rigney Bluff. The technician’s name was Yvonne St. Germaine, and she worked for a company called Gen Type. Gen Type is a commercial testing laboratory that had been in business only three years at the time, but was already employing eighty-five people and grossing over $7 million a year in receipts. Along with a handful of similar labs like CellMark, LabCorp, and BioTest (it was beginning to become apparent that a prerequisite to success in the field was having a two-syllable name that could be cleverly SplitUp), GenType’s claim to fame was that it was a well-known and widely accepted tester of DNA samples.

Less than a decade earlier, the discovery of the value of deoxyribonucleic acid as a nearly unique genetic marker had revolutionized the science of identification. And only two years ago, a celebrated West Coast trial had made DNA a household term. The fact that few people even knew what the initials stood for, and that fewer still had any inkling of the theory behind the application, made no difference; it was no longer sufficient simply to tell a jury that something looked like blood, or was blood, or was human blood, or was even type AB - human blood. By 1997, every prosecutor in America knew that henceforth it would be necessary to explain to the jurors that DNA testing had been performed, and had conclusively established that the odds of the blood’s having come from anyone other than the accused were precisely one in 46,351,562,837. And, so long as the accused wasn’t some sort of a celebrity golf player, chances are, that would pretty much do the trick.

Yvonne St. Germaine opened the Express Mail package that had arrived that morning from someplace called Cedar Falls, New York. Inside, she found an inner container that, when slit open, revealed twenty-seven small items. Each item was separately wrapped. Each contained either a cotton swab, a red smear on a slide, a small swatch of cloth, or what appeared to be a human hair, complete with the follicle. Each was marked with a number. The numbers were all different, but each was preceded by the letter X. In Yvonne St. Germaine’s language, X stood for “unknown.” She also found, separately protected in plastic bubble-wrap, two test tubes containing blood. From the fact that the test tubes were plugged with purple stoppers and the blood inside them was still liquid, she knew that it had been properly mixed with an anticoagulant. The tubes were marked K-l and K-2. The K designation meant that these were “known” samples for comparison against the unknown ones.

Finally, there was a letter typed on the letterhead of the Ottawa County District Attorney, requesting analysis of all the items, and explaining that additional samples, to be collectively labeled K-3, would be forwarded to GenType in several weeks.

Yvonne checked her watch, entered the exact time in her notebook, and, using a sterile forceps, lifted the first item, X-l, from its envelope. To Yvonne, it looked like a small portion of terrycloth material, perhaps snipped from a towel or a bathrobe. The material itself may have been white at one time, or perhaps a light gray or beige. It was hard to tell for sure, though, so thoroughly was it soaked in what certainly appeared to Yvonne’s trained eye to be blood.

MATT FIELDER SPENT Saturday pouring the footings for a small barn he hoped to raise before winter set in, and cooking up a large pot of chili. To anyone watching Fielder cook - and nobody was - it would have been apparent that he was having company for dinner, and that the company was female.

They would have been only half right.

The chili recipe was something that had evolved gradually since Fielder’s meat-eating days, now some ten years behind him. It called for dried lentils and soaked black beans, fresh onions, leeks, celery, carrots, tomatoes, and whatever wild mushrooms were to be found. A half dozen different varieties of peppers, ranging all the way from sweet red bells to chemically unstable black habaneras, provided both depth and fire. By the time it was ready, it was thick enough to stand a fork up in it and so dark and rich that vegetarians drew back from it in disbelief.

The truth was, Fielder certainly could have used a little female company. Married at twenty-three, single again by thirty, he’d been on his own ever since. There had been women in his life, to be sure, but something in him had always managed to keep them at arm’s length. Perhaps it had been the trauma of divorce, or the comfort he took in retreating into his own protective shell, or the multitude of little idiosyncrasies he’d developed over so many years of doing things his way. Whatever it was, those who knew him well - and there were precious few in that category - had pretty much given Fielder up as a “lost cause” who was destined to live out his days alone. His sister, herself happily married and surrounded by a houseful of kids, joked that he was searching for the perfect “elationship,” so afraid was he of the “r-word.”

But that Saturday, Fielder wasn’t looking for an elationship. The chili he’d prepared was for a business dinner. The business at hand was Jonathan Hamilton, and the dinner guest was Fielder’s investigator, Pearson Gunn.

Gunn showed up around seven, driving a ‘57 Chevy Impala, the kind with the huge seagull-wing tail fins. It brought with it a cloud of blue smoke, which would hang in the air a good ten minutes after the engine had been killed. Gunn climbed out, a gallon of red wine suspended from one index finger, which looked like it barely fit through the glass ring at the neck of the jug. Fielder, whose own taste in reds ran to dry merlots and cabernets, noticed that when Gunn swung the bottle, the wine didn’t slosh around so much as it oozed, the way a heavy-duty motor oil might do in the middle of winter. He accepted the offering graciously, but refrained from looking at the label, just in case it turned out to be from someplace called Valvoline Vineyards, or Château Chevron.

In the vouchers for payment the two men would submit many months later, they would claim to have worked only two hours that evening, but it is likely they were simply being prudent about the way in which they billed. The fact is that they ate around nine, drank until midnight, and sat up well past three, reviewing what they knew about the case, what they didn’t know, and what they needed to do next.

Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton had no known enemies. Both were well into their eighties at the time of the murders. Since the deaths of their son and daughter-in-law in the fire a decade earlier, their world had gradually closed in around them. In recent years, they had seldom ventured beyond the stone walls of the estate. They had few friends they hadn’t outlived, and those they kept in touch with by phone, or through the occasional exchange of letters.

Gunn had thoroughly investigated the Armbrusts, the German couple who lived on the estate and had been taking care of the Hamiltons. Everything about them checked out. They’d worked for the family for close to thirty years, tending to the needs of the land and three generations of its owners. Klaus had had one arrest, at age seventeen, for driving without a license; Elna had no record whatsoever. By all accounts, they’d gotten along well with Jonathan’s grandparents, and were not only grief-stricken by the murders, but appropriately concerned for their own safety. Financially, their needs were modest and had always been met. It seemed they had nothing to gain from the deaths, and everything to lose.

Gunn had spoken briefly on the phone with Bass McClure. McClure was the one Jonathan had reached by phone the morning of the killings, and it was McClure who’d been the first person to view the crime scene, other than Jonathan himself. Gunn knew McClure, and liked him. He also sensed from his undisclosed law-enforcement contact (again, this was almost certainly Captain Roger Duquesne) that the prosecution was less than happy with McClure. Whether this displeasure was simply the result of McClure’s failure to safeguard the integrity of the crime scene, or whether it went beyond that, was something Fielder wanted Gunn to look into further. A reluctant prosecution witness can sometimes turn out to be the defense’s best friend.

Finally, the conversation focused on Jonathan Hamilton himself. Neither Fielder nor Gunn came right out and said it, but both men were privately convinced that Jonathan had committed the murders. What they didn’t know was why. Furthermore, they had every reason to believe that the prosecution was in exactly the same position. Other than Jonathan, no one alive had witnessed the killings. There was Jonathan’s “confession” to Deke Stanton, but that had been oral, unpreserved on tape, and not witnessed by anyone other than Stanton. It was consequently somewhat limited in terms of its value, even if the prosecution could convince Judge Summerhouse that it was admissible. Except for that, Gil Cavanaugh was left with a purely circumstantial case.

Just why prosecutors worry about circumstantial proof is somewhat a case of the tail wagging the dog. Proof can be divided into two types, direct and circumstantial. Direct proof is an eyewitness account: I saw that it was raining. Circumstantial proof is the proof of some fact which, once established, leads to a logical inference of a second fact: I saw water on the pavement, and there were people carrying open umbrellas.

It turns out that the vast majority of what we call “miscarriages of justice” occur in direct-evidence cases. The culprit is almost always human error - faulty eyewitness identifications, lapses of memory, or imperfect accounts of observations. In contrast, there is nothing stronger than a compelling set of circumstances that point inexorably at the accused.

But juries don’t think so.

Somewhere along the line, somebody juxtaposed the words “purely” and “circumstantial,” and trials have never quite been the same since. For some reason, a jury will accept the word of a confused, traumatized, biased, and error-prone witness who gets up on the witness stand and insists under oath that he’ll “never forget that face,” over a trail of scientific evidence and deductive logic that leads to an accused with almost mathematical certainty.

And prosecutors have learned this. So, lacking an eyewitness, they cringe in fear over the possibility that the jury will reject their case as “purely circumstantial.” They instinctively look for what they consider to be the next best thing to an eyewitness identification.

A motive.

A motive is something that never has to be proved. In that respect, it is not to be confused with intent. Many laws, including murder, may require proof of intent. But “intent” merely refers to a person’s immediate objective: The defendant shot the victim with the intent of causing his death. “Motive,” on the other hand, refers to what produced the intent in the first place: The defendant, motivated by his anger at having been betrayed, shot the victim with the intent of causing his death.

But a prosecutor without a motive is left feeling a little something like a lion without a mane. Sure, he’s got his claws, his teeth, his strength, his speed, and his cunning. But no mane? Panic immediately sets in. And, the more important the case, the greater the panic becomes.

FIELDER POURED SOME more wine from the gallon jug. In a moment of weakness, he’d peeked at the label and noticed the modifiers Ruby Red, followed by a third R beginning yet another word. He’d immediately looked away, not wanting to know just what it was he’d been drinking all night. But the mind loves to fill in blanks: Ruby Red Rotgut? Ruby Red Roof Tar? Ruby Red Rain Sealant? Ruby Red Rear Axle Grease?

“You better believe Cavanaugh and his team are worrying about motive jush as hard as we are,” Fielder said.

“Jush?” Gunn wasn’t going to let Fielder’s slurring go unnoticed.

Ignoring him, Fielder pressed on. “We’ve got to beat him to the punch on this,” he told Gunn.

“Hey, no problem,” said Gunn, watching the reflection of the fire in his glass. “I’ll get on it. So what if it’s fuckin’ impossible? You want it, I’ll do it. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

Fielder, who was by that time lagging behind Gunn by a good quart or so of Ruby Red, and an equal amount of mental clarity, tried hard to digest what he’d just heard, but his mind refused to cooperate.

“Whajoosay?”

Alcohol was Pearson Gunn’s briar patch: He was never more at home than when he was seriously tanked. Now he simply pressed some internal button and rewound his mind to the spot that had been requested. “I’ll get on it,” he repeated. “So what-”

“No, no.” Fielder sat up. “The last part.”

Gunn fast-forwarded a bit. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

“That’s it.”

“What’s it?”

“A will,” Fielder said. “These were wealthy people. They’ve gotta have wills lying around somewhere. Sooner or later, even a clown like Cavanaugh’s going to figure that out and try to find ‘em, see who they left their money to. If it turns out to be Jonathan - bango! There’s his motive.”

“‘Bango’?”

IN TAKING THE MEASURE of his adversary, Matt Fielder had formed an initial impression shared by most of Gil Cavanaugh’s opponents, both before and since. Having watched the district attorney pirouette before the cameras and pander shamelessly to his constituents, Fielder had sized up Cavanaugh as half demagogue, half buffoon. That was a serious underestimation on Fielder’s part. For all of Cavanaugh’s theatrics, he is a smart man who misses very little and knows how to play the angles.

Even as Fielder and Gunn sat in front of their fire, pleased at their cleverness in having stumbled upon the notion of a last will and testament as a possible motive for the killings, Gil Cavanaugh slept soundly in his bed, seventy-five miles away. He’d thought about a will a full week earlier and already had had one of his assistants move for an ex parte court order to gain access to it.

Not only that, but Cavanaugh was well ahead of Hillary Munson, too, in terms of subpoenaing records relating to Jonathan Hamilton. Still unknown to the defense was the fact that, as part of the initial “processing” of his prisoner, Deke Stanton had had Jonathan sign a number of forms. Included had been several fingerprint cards and a personal-property receipt, both standard-enough stuff. Not so standard were the blank authorization forms, the same type of forms Hillary Munson had presented to Jonathan a week later. The only difference was that Hillary had explained to Jonathan exactly what it was that he was agreeing to, and why it was important that he do so; Stanton had simply instructed him to sign his name on the dotted line. Jonathan, with his limited reading skills and compliant nature, had of course done as he’d been told. Stanton had turned the signed forms over to Cavanaugh, who promptly stapled them to subpoenas and had them served on the appropriate agencies.

FIELDER WOULD FIND out about all of this in due time, when recipients of his own subpoenas began calling him to tell him they’d already furnished the material he was looking for to the district attorney. The discovery would lead Fielder to fire off an angry letter to Cavanaugh, rescinding his client’s prior authorization. Which was, of course, a little like closing the barn door after the horses had left. It would also cause him to change his estimation of Cavanaugh, and to realize, soberly, that the defense investigation was running well behind that of the district attorney.

But as annoying as that realization might be, it would hardly be a novel position in which Fielder would find himself. The truth is, the defense almost always lags behind the prosecution; it’s the very nature of the process, in which the prosecution tends to act, while the defense tends to react. But, ironically enough, it’s also one of the aspects of the game that appealed to Fielder and got his competitive juices going. Being cast in the underdog role was one of the things that had drawn Matt Fielder to criminal defense work in the first place. Like many defense attorneys, he takes pride in the knowledge that he does some of his best work when things look bleakest and when the odds against his succeeding seem absolutely overwhelming - right around the time the prosecutor is thinking about putting a bottle of champagne on ice for his victory party.

“Man, you’re some cook.” Pearson Gunn’s voice brought Fielder out of his trance. “What kind of meat did you use to make that chili so rich?”

This from a man whose investigative prowess Fielder was counting on in order to save a man’s life.

“Venison, I bet, huh?”

So there they sat, the captain and co-captain of a ragtag, three-member pickup team who’d never played a game together in their lives, up against a seasoned, all-star roster of veteran heavy-hitters. Not only were they seriously overmatched, but they were also playing in the other team’s ballpark, in front of a hostile crowd, and under the eye of a biased umpire. And before long they’d find out they’d already spotted the home team a couple of runs before even coming up to bat.

The way Matt Fielder figured it, pretty soon he’d have Gil Cavanaugh right where he wanted him.