THERE IS A TINY speckled chameleon, indigenous to the very northern reaches of the Adirondacks, called the spotted darter. If you watch one of them for any length of time, you come away convinced that it is physically incapable of moving forward in a straight line. Instead, it zigs first this way and then that, frenetically advancing three steps, only to retreat two. It seems such a study in pure paranoia that the local Franch Canadians have dubbed it le lézard lunatique, “the crazy lizard.”

With the discovery of the existence of Porter Hamilton Jr., the defense team members began acting very much like spotted darters. On Tuesday, after speaking with Pearson Gunn and learning for the first time that Jonathan had a brother, Fielder assigned Gunn the task of locating Porter. It was a natural-enough selection, given the fact that Gunn was the team’s fact-investigator. Besides which, Fielder needed Hillary to continue helping him with the mitigation letter.

On Wednesday, Fielder pulled Gunn off the detail and replaced him with Hillary. He’d decided Hillary might be in a better position to track Porter down, inasmuch as tracing family members was one of her specialties. He told Gunn to help him assemble facts for the letter.

By Thursday, when Porter still hadn’t been found, Fielder put Gunn back on it, figuring that with Hillary and Gunn working on it together, they couldn’t fail. He’d write the mitigation letter himself.

HILLARY MANAGED TO COME up with a birth certificate, reflecting the fact that a Porter Hamilton Jr. had been born at Mercy Hospital in Cedar Falls, on June 26, 1964. From there, she came up with a social-security number, a driver’s license, and a stack of school records, which she sifted through for some clue to Porter’s current whereabouts. Meanwhile, Gunn went back to the Flat Lake estate and re-interviewed Klaus and Elna Armbrust, the caretaker couple who lived on the grounds.

Gunn had found in his first meeting with the Armbrusts, that they were people who didn’t tend to volunteer a lot of information. Once again he had to prod them to find out what they knew. Yes, they told him, they did remember Jonathan’s older brother, whom the family had always referred to as “Junior.” He’d been a bit of a troublemaker, according to Elna Armbrust, an angry boy who’d “got into the drugs” as a teenager. He’d left home sometime around 1985 or 1986, which would have made him twenty-one or twenty-two at the time. No, they hadn’t seen or heard of him since.

Anyone who was angry and “into the drugs” ought to have a rap sheet, Gunn theorized. He called a source (and once again, we are invited to speculate that it might have been Captain Roger Duquesne of the state police, though it is reasonable to believe that, as a private investigator, Gunn had other contacts capable of helping him out in this area), and asked for a name and date-of-birth check. He got his response sometime Saturday afternoon. To his surprise, it came back negative: the New York State Criminal Justice System computer in Albany had no record of any Porter Hamilton, Junior or Senior, let alone one with a DOB of 06/26/64.

Stymied for the time being, out of habit Gunn headed for familiar surroundings. The Dew Drop Inn is not only the place where Gunn does his best drinking; it is also the place where he does some of his more creative thinking, and almost all of his networking (not that the nineties term “networking” has a place in Gunn’s vocabulary, any more than does Fielder’s term for it - “schmoozing”).

As Gunn sat at his customary table with his familiar pitcher and glass, the usual Dew Drop denizens came and went. As luck would have it, one who came in that afternoon was Bass McClure. McClure and Gunn knew one another and got along well enough. Gunn already had interviewed McClure regarding the early-morning telephone call from Jonathan the day of the murders, and McClure’s subsequent visit to the Flat Lake estate. Both men were aware that, as the first person on the scene other than Jonathan himself, McClure was a prosecution witness. Whether or not at that point Gunn actually knew that McClure had testified at the grand jury is uncertain; in any event, something of an arm’s-length relationship had resulted, with each man just a bit wary of the other.

But alcohol has been known to lower inhibitions on occasion, and on this particular Saturday afternoon, Gunn hesitated only a moment before inviting McClure over to join him at his table. And if McClure had any second thoughts about the idea, he didn’t seem to show them.

The two traded small talk for a while, noting how the days were already getting shorter and the leaves beginning to turn, and how it wouldn’t be too long before there’d be snow in the air. They compared notes on the coming hunting season, the level of water over in Stillwater Reservoir, the bald-eagle nests up at Wolf Pond, and the relative merits of full-time four-wheel drive versus part-time. Those topics of great importance out of the way, they fell silent.

Gunn figured it was as good a time as any. “What do you know ‘bout Jonathan Hamilton’s older brother?” he asked.

McClure shrugged. “Junior?”

“Yup.”

“Haven’t seen him in ages,” McClure said. “He cut out a couple a years before the fire, if I remember correctly.”

“Any idea where I might find him?”

McClure furrowed his forehead.

“Background info,” Gunn explained, “that sorta stuff.”

That seemed good enough for McClure. “Not really,” McClure said. “Last I heard, he’d got himself jammed up on a series of robberies of some sort.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Syracuse area maybe,” McClure said. “Or Rochester. Someplace like that.”

“What kinda time did he get?”

“Dunno.”

And that was all McClure knew. Fifteen minutes and a beer later, he was on his way.

HILLARY MUNSON WASN’T doing much better. She’d checked social-security records, but according to those, Porter Hamilton Jr. hadn’t worked in almost ten years. On the books, anyway. Nor had he filed a state or federal tax return, registered a car in New York, or renewed his driver’s license. He had no post-office box or telephone (listed or unlisted) in the dozen upstate counties she checked, wasn’t on the welfare rolls, and hadn’t applied for Medicaid or food stamps. None of the branches of the military knew of him, other than the fact that he’d registered for the draft when he’d turned eighteen, back in 1982.

It was as though he’d left Flat Lake eleven or twelve years ago and promptly fell off the face of the earth.

WHILE HILLARY MUNSON and Pearson Gunn were exhausting their leads, Matt Fielder sat in front of his fire, putting together the first draft of his mitigation letter.

Reducing an emotional appeal to a written presentation is an art, and it is an art that Fielder happened to be very good at. He’d been doing it in one form or another for all of his professional life - in pre-sentencing and pre-pleading memorandums, and in letters to prosecutors, judges, probation officers, and parole boards. He’d reached the point where he could write so persuasively that he’d invariably end up convincing himself of the merits of his position, no matter how tenuous that position might be.

Now, reading the pages over, Fielder found himself succumbing to the old magic once again. How could anyone fail to agree with him? How could anyone seriously think of seeking the death penalty against this overgrown child-man, who’d never harmed anyone before, who’d turned himself in to the authorities, and who barely seemed to understand what he’d done? Surely even a Gil Cavanaugh would have to see how totally inappropriate death would be for this case.

Around eleven, Fielder fell asleep on the floor in front of his fire, daring to believe in the persuasive power of his words. In his efforts to persuade Cavanaugh to spare Jonathan’s life, the evening would mark perhaps the highest point in terms of Fielder’s optimism, and certainly the lowest point for his realism.

SITTING WITH HIS third and final pitcher of ale shortly before midnight, Pearson Gunn was truly perplexed. How could it be that an angry, drug-abusing man - for some time now old enough to be treated as an adult in the eyes of the law - could get “jammed up on a series of robberies of some sort,” and yet still not come back with a criminal record? Especially when the robberies had been committed in Syracuse or Rochester, both of which were definitely within New York State, last Gunn had heard.

He emptied the last of the pitcher into his glass. No matter how he looked at it, it just didn’t make any sense. One robbery you might beat. Even two, if you were lucky enough. But a series? He drained his glass. Nobody beat a series of robberies. That just didn’t happen - it was the kind of thing you could take to the bank.

Gunn’s jaw dropped open, in a move that might have gone largely unnoticed but for the fact that his mouth happened to be full of ale at the time.

“That’s it!” he gurgled.

Anybody who turned to look in his direction would have seen him drooling ale from his beard onto his lap. But Pearson Gunn couldn’t care less. The robberies were bank robberies, he’d suddenly realized. Almost all banks are insured by the FDIC, which means the U.S. Government shares jurisdiction over them along with the states.

The reason New York had no record of Junior was suddenly very clear.

The feds had him.

FOLLOWING GUNN’S SATURDAY-NIGHT epiphany, locating Porter Hamilton Jr. was almost anticlimactic. On Sunday, Gunn telephoned the U.S. Bureau of Prisons and convinced someone to punch a name and date of birth into his computer; in less than a minute, Gunn learned that Porter was a guest of the Federal Correctional Institution in Atlanta, Georgia.

“What’s he doing?” Gunn asked.

“Stamping out D.C. license plates, probably,” came the reply.

“No,” Gunn said. “What kinda time?”

“Oh.” There was a pause, punctuated by the sound of more computer keys being hit. “Three hundred sixty months.”

Which translated to just over twenty-six years, if you took time off for good behavior. Just as Gunn had figured all along: Nobody beats a series of robberies. Especially against the feds.

FOLLOWING THE CALL, Gunn had reported to Fielder, who fired off a letter to Porter the very next morning, informing him that his brother Jonathan was in serious trouble, and asking that Porter call collect at his earliest opportunity so that arrangements could be made to have a member of the defense team fly down to interview him.

Porter called three days later, to say he’d be happy to meet with whoever came down. Fielder declined to fill him in on the nature of the trouble Jonathan was in, explaining that the call was probably being monitored. The truth was, Fielder didn’t want to reveal what had happened; he wanted whoever flew down to be able to confront Porter with the news face-to-face, in order to gauge his reaction. Despite the fact that everything about the murders pointed to Jonathan, Fielder knew that he, of all people, had to try to keep his mind open to other possibilities. Sure, Porter’s involvement was a long shot. But when your chances are down to slim and none, you go with slim.

Later that day, Fielder took a drive over to Cedar Falls. It was a spectacular afternoon, crisp and cloudless, and the sun lit up the colors of the turning leaves the entire way. He passed red sumacs, purple maples, orange oaks, yellow birches, and a variety of other tans, ochers, and browns, all interspersed among the evergreens, which in turn ranged from darkest green to palest blue-gray.

He found Judge Arthur Summerhouse in his chambers and presented him an order authorizing travel expenses for Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson to interview a witness in Atlanta.

“What’s the matter, he can’t fly up?” the judge joked. “You going to tell me he’s indisposed, or something like that?”

“Something like that.” Fielder smiled.

“Why do they both have to go down there?”

Fielder had anticipated this question, ever since he’d decided against making the trip himself. On the one-in-a-million chance that Porter were to say something incriminating to himself, Fielder didn’t want to be the one to hear it. He didn’t want to risk becoming a witness to some aspect of the case, and end up having to recuse himself as Jonathan’s lawyer. The next best thing, he’d decided, was to send both Gunn and Hillary; that way there’d be two witnesses, and not just one, to anything Porter might say.

“Actually,” he now told Judge Summerhouse, “I should be going with them. I was hoping to save the taxpayers a few dollars. But now that I think of it-”

“That won’t be necessary,” said the judge, hastily signing the order before Fielder could add his own name to it.

FOUR DAYS LATER, Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson sat side by side in a small cubicle, facing a Plexiglas partition and holding telephone receivers to their ears. The man who sat across from them on the other side of the Plexiglas, holding his own receiver to his own ear, bore little physical resemblance to Jonathan Hamilton. To his visitors, Porter James Hamilton Jr. - or Junior (or “P. J.,” according to both his stated preference and the crude tattoo that adorned the two middle knuckles of his left hand) - looked pretty much like Hollywood’s idea of a typical thirty-something, burned-out white convict. Sean Penn might have gotten the call, or maybe Kevin Bacon. P. J. was blond, like Jonathan; but while Jonathan was clean-shaven, this man sported a wispy mustache and matching chin whiskers. In place of Jonathan’s clear blue eyes were smoky gray ones that peered out darkly beneath sleepy, hooded lids. An old scar that began at one corner of his mouth disappeared somewhere under his jawline, vaguely suggesting that his chin might be mechanically attached to the rest of his face, like that of a ventriloquist’s puppet.

Mostly, it was the man’s size that hinted at the family relationship, but even that resemblance disappeared when P. J. slouched back on the visiting-room chair.

“So, Saint Jonathan’s got himself jammed up, huh?” were P. J.’s first words, following the introductions.

“That’s right,” Gunn acknowledged. “Your brother’s been arrested.”

“What kinda beef?”

“Murder.”

P. J. shifted into an upright position. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

“We didn’t fly down here to shit you,” Hillary assured him.

“Who’d he do?”

Hillary was momentarily put off by the con talk, but Gunn didn’t miss a beat. “They claim he ‘did’ your grandparents,” he said.

The hooded lids disappeared, and P.J. stared wide-eyed and open-mouthed, in a display of astonishment that Gunn and Munson would later agree was so authentically spontaneous as to be almost comical. The “No fuckin’ way!” that came from P. J.’s lips was all but superfluous.

They spent a few minutes filling him in on some of the details, before turning to the subject of P. J.’s own troubles. If his reaction to the news hadn’t been enough to convince them of his lack of involvement, there was also the little matter of his alibi: P. J. had been picked up outside of Syracuse in October 1996 and had been in custody ever since. He’d finally copped out to four bank robberies, but they’d pinned another dozen on him. Even with his guilty plea, it had added up to thirty years under the guidelines.

“Coulda been worse.” He shrugged. “At least I’m in a federal joint. Food’s better. Hey, they coulda sent me to Marion, Illinois, to give blowjobs to John Gotti. Pardon my French,” he added with a crooked smile, for Hillary’s benefit.

They pumped him for information about Jonathan’s formative years, anything that might prove useful to Matt Fielder in his attempt to establish mitigating circumstances. It seemed to them that P. J. wanted to be helpful. It was clear he considered his younger brother something of a pampered brat - calling his brother “Saint Jonathan” had established that at the outset. Still, he tried his best to help, particularly after they told him that Jonathan was a candidate for the death penalty. But the truth was, there wasn’t too much he was able to tell them. Just as Elna Armbrust had said, P. J. had begun abusing drugs, as well as alcohol, early in his teens, at a time when Jonathan was still a boy. By the age of twenty, Junior had already committed a dozen petty offenses, but had yet to be arrested. At twenty-two, he’d left home, never to return. He’d learned of his parents’ deaths three years later from an item on the TV news. He’d tried to get to the funeral, but was in jail somewhere in northwestern Pennsylvania at the time, and they refused his request for an accompanied furlough.

“If they woulda, I was goin’ to make a break for it,” he admitted with a smile.

There seemed to be nothing left to talk about. “Well,” Hillary said, putting her pen into her briefcase, “we appreciate your help.”

“Glad to be of service to you, ma’am.”

“Not that you were an easy guy to find,” Gunn added. “For a while there, we didn’t even know you existed. We thought Jonathan was an only child.”

“Oh, no,” P. J. said. “There was the three of us.”

AROUND THE SAME time that Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson were finding it was their turn to open their eyes wide and let their lower jaws drop, Matt Fielder was sitting at his computer, putting final touches on his mitigation letter to Gil Cavanaugh. He’d read it over so many times that he knew it by heart. He’d faxed a copy of it to Kevin Doyle at the Capital Defender’s Office, to make sure he wasn’t including anything that might be used against Jonathan in any way. Doyle had phoned him with his approval, but also with a sobering comment.

“It’s a great letter, Matt,” he’d said. “But from everything I know about Cavanaugh, he’d go death against his own mother if it’d get him reelected.”

But, hey, what did Doyle know? After all, he was only the leading authority, the number-one capital defender in the state. Who was he to say?

Fielder printed out a final draft, signed his name at the bottom, and folded it into an envelope. Then he took a drive into Big Moose, where he handed it to the postal clerk.

“I want this sent by Express Mail,” he told her. “Overnight. Return receipt requested.”

“The works, huh?”

“The works.”

“We don’t get too many of those,” she admitted. “Must be a matter of life and death or something, huh?”

“You might say so,” said Matt Fielder.

“THREE OF YOU?” said Pearson Gunn and Hillary Munson in tandem.

“Sure,” P. J. replied, looking surprised at their ignorance. “There’s me, there’s Jonathan, and there’s Jennifer.”

“Jennifer?”

Hillary retrieved her pen from her briefcase. The interview would continue for another half hour.

Jennifer was the middle of the three Hamilton children, born in 1967, making her thirty-three years younger than P. J., but still two years older than Jonathan. Physically she was said to favor Jonathan, in that she was blonde and fair and - at least according to P. J. - “drop-dead gorgeous.” Then again, it had been some time since P. J. had seen her, and also some time since he’d seen any “snatch” (as he so eloquently phrased it) at all.

Like her older brother, Jennifer was apparently something of a black sheep in the Hamilton family. From the bits and pieces P. J. had picked up over the years since his departure, he was able to report that she, too, had left home never to return, about two years after he did. Last he’d heard, she was living somewhere in Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire, under a different name. He didn’t know just where, and couldn’t remember what the name was. About the best he could do was supply her birthday, September 6. But he seriously doubted that she had a criminal record.

“Not that kinda black sheep.” He smiled.

“What kind, then?” Hillary asked.

“You know,” he said, looking her up and down, and smiling crookedly. “She always had a little bit of a taste for things.”

And that was about it. Jennifer Somebody, thirty years old, living somewhere in Vermont, or maybe New Hampshire. With a little bit of a taste for things.

SITTING TOGETHER ON the last leg of their flight back to Albany, Gunn and Munson compared notes. They’d certainly learned enough to rule out P. J. Hamilton as a suspect; that much they could tell Fielder. But when it came to shedding any new light on Jonathan, Junior had proved to be of very little use. On the other hand, he’d surprised them by revealing the existence of a third sibling. But once again, he knew so little about her that it seemed all but certain she’d turn out to be nothing but another dead end.

That is, if they were ever lucky enough to find her.

Gunn suddenly leaned across Hillary to get the attention of a passing flight attendant. “Excuse me,” he said. “I’ve got this medical condition. Do you happen to have any ale on board?”