The deputy who had dug up the body of little Ilsa Meisner had been a man named Whitey Alverson. He’d been sixty-one years old at the time, with a beer belly and a head of hair to match his nickname. The highway officer who had taken over for Alverson and carried Ilsa out to the coroner’s station wagon had been Rufus Catterson, a dark-skinned black man. At all times thereafter, the body had been transported on a stretcher. All this Jorgensen found out over the course of three weeks and a dozen trips to Pop Crawford’s pay phone. The only thing he didn’t know was where it all left him.

Pop used his fax machine to make copies of the drawing, and Jorgensen sent one off to Boyd’s sister Nell, being careful not to refer to the murder, just in case Nell’s husband were to see it. She wrote back that she had no idea who the man in the picture was.

He sent another copy to Jessica Woodruff. He got a letter back from her (actually, from some intern at the studio), in which she questioned the relevance of the man’s identity to the issues in the upcoming argument. But she promised to have one of their investigators try to track him down, if that would make him happy.

He hunkered down for winter, spent a fogbound Christmas day, and brooded. He knew the Supreme Court’s scheduling order should be out by now, but nobody had told him.

Nobody ever told him anything.

He dug out the envelope in which he kept all of Boyd Davies’s drawings - the ones Jessica had first left with him, the two of himself, the ones of Hattie and Nell, and the latest one, of the man carrying the lifeless body of Ilsa Meisner. He spread them all out on the table in front of him, looking for clues, searching for messages.

“Speak to me,” he said, “help me.” But no answer came. And if someone had happened to be in the lighthouse at the time, standing over his shoulder, August Jorgensen would have been hard-pressed to explain whom he was addressing - the drawings, the faces depicted in them, Boyd Davies, or some god whose very existence he doubted.

Jessica Woodruff was beginning to doubt her sanity for having enlisted August Jorgensen in the first place. “He sent me a copy of some drawing he got from Davies,” she told Tim Harkin and Ray Gilbert on a conference call. “He wants us to tell him who carried the deceased’s body after they discovered it.”

“Why should he think that has any relevance?” Harkin wanted to know.

“Exactly.”

“Are we sure this dude’s still got it together?” Gilbert asked. “I mean, it’s beginning to sound like you picked someone who’s got an advanced case of old-timer’s disease.”

“Don’t you do that to me, Ray,” snapped Jessica. “You guys signed off on him, remember. You said he’d add a measure of gravitas to it.”

“Don’t worry,” said Harkin, “he’ll be okay. So what did you tell him?”

“Tell him? The old coot has no phone, remember? I can’t tell him anything. I had Ginny send him a letter, told him we’d do our best to identify the guy for him.”

“Good, good,” said Gilbert. “Humor him, stroke him. And when we get a month or so away from the argument, we’ll reevaluate the situation, see if he’s up to it. If not, there’s plenty of names out there who’ll jump at the chance.”

“To argue a case like this?” asked Jessica. “On two weeks’ notice?”

Professor Gilbert laughed into the phone. “On two hours’ notice,” he said. “Not everyone’s senile, you know. Or living in some godforsaken lighthouse, surrounded by fog.”

The only fog surrounding August Jorgensen at that particular moment was a mental one. Outside, the air and water temperature were close enough to produce an equilibrium, a truce of sorts that would more or less hold until early spring. Then dry, warmer breezes would drift over the still-cold ocean, producing an instability where the two met, an instability that would set the stage for a whole new season of fog.

Was he deluding himself? Was he so taken by the intricacies of Boyd’s pictures, so fascinated by the paradox of one who couldn’t speak but could draw like a camera, that he’d convinced himself the images could tell him a story when in fact they couldn’t? They were drawings, after all. Nothing more, nothing less. Drawings done by a man who was incapable of conceptualizing, editorializing, or imparting hidden messages. What you saw was what you got, as the saying went. And yet, he couldn’t stop staring at them. Particularly the one of the man carrying the girl.

Jorgensen had always wanted to be a pilot. As a boy, he’d dreamed of flying fighters in the war. Not to bomb civilians below, or knock out MIGs or Zeros, but just to soar. His dreams were always about climbing, banking, rolling, and diving; the killing was never a part of them. But he’d been too young for Europe, too nearsighted for Korea, and too old for Vietnam, and he’d had to settle instead for the cockpit of his living room, devouring every aviation book he’d been able to get his hands on. Of all the things he’d come across, one had stuck with him the longest. He’d been reading a study about young pilots who’d been shot down by enemy aircraft they’d never seen. The common denominator in each case had been this: The pilot had been so intent on scouring the horizon for planes approaching in the distance, that he’d failed to notice one almost on top of him until it had been too late to react. As incredible as it sounded, it kept happening over and over again, often with fatal consequences. Relax, was the lesson the trainers learned from the phenomenon and passed on in flight school, relax and take in the whole picture. The older pilots - the ones who’d somehow learned to do it - swore it worked like magic. And they had their lives to prove it.

So Jorgensen tried relaxing. Looking at the drawing, he stopped squinting, instead opened his eyes wider, allowing the muscles around them to slacken. Stepped back from the table a foot or so, took a deep breath. Exhaled. Took another. Stood there for five minutes like that, trying not to miss anything by looking for it too hard, doing his best to take in the whole picture.

And, like magic, it worked.

At first, he thought his eyes might be playing tricks with him. thought maybe he’d made it up. He looked away, then back again. Counted once, twice, a third time, just to make sure.

He was right, and it was the drawing of the man carrying the girl. If you looked too hard, you missed it every time; but if you relaxed it was plain as day: The way the man was carrying the girl, both of his hands were completely visible. If you squinted and peered and concentrated too hard, you ended up thinking that part of his right hand was obscured by her clothing. But when you stepped back, you saw that simply wasn’t so.

And the thing of it was this: The man’s right hand - the one that seemed to be partially covered by the girl’s clothing, but in fact wasn’t - had only three fingers.

Jorgensen’s first reaction, upon satisfying himself that he was correct, was to wonder if maybe Boyd Davies hadn’t simply made a mistake. But as he considered the likelihood of that, he realized that for that to have been the case, it would have had to have occurred in one of three areas: an error in perception at the time, a lapse of memory over the years, or a failure to accurately reproduce an image on paper. But to Jorgensen, none of those possibilities seemed plausible. Boyd had trouble with all sorts of tasks; you could write a book about the myriad of things he couldn’t do, like speaking and reading and writing and conceptualizing the way other people could. But in terms of seeing something, remembering what he’d seen, and drawing it later on, Boyd had no match among mortals. When it came to those three things, the gods themselves had to be envious.

No, thought Jorgensen, Boyd hadn’t made a mistake; he wasn’t capable of it. If Boyd said so - and his drawing was his way of saying so - then some unidentified, three-fingered deputy sheriff (or state trooper, or other member of the search team) had carried the lifeless body of Ilsa Meisner as Boyd had watched from nearby, crouching or lying on the ground. Sure, all of that had happened sixteen years ago. But how hard could it be to track down a man with three fingers on his left hand, to see what light he could shed on Boyd’s understanding of what he’d just done to the poor girl.

If, indeed, Boyd had had any understanding at all.

Jorgensen wished he could get in touch with Nell, Boyd’s sister. She’d been around at the time the body was discovered; maybe she could be of some help here. But Nell had specifically asked Jorgensen not to contact her, and he’d done so once already. He didn’t want to further risk jeopardizing her marriage to her new husband by letting him know there was a murderer lurking in the family.

So he found Jake and took another ride to the general store. He was beginning to regret not having a phone in the lighthouse, but imagined it would take a good two weeks to get the folks from Horry to come out and install one. By that time, he’d no doubt be ready to have it disconnected. He decided he’d just have to keep making do with the one on Pop Crawford’s wall, at least until he’d exhausted Pop’s patience and his own supply of quarters.

“He’s driving me crazy, Brandon.”

“He?”

“The judge.”

“What now?”

“He just called me from a pay phone. He’s carrying on like he’s The Fugitive, on the trail of some three-fingered man.”

“Calm down, Jessica. You told me yourself, he’s a harmless old man.”

“I know, I know. But all we asked him to do was to stand up in court for forty-five minutes and look dignified. Instead, he’s plugging into the Internet, researching the entire history of autism, running back and forth to that prison, getting Davies to draw all sorts of pictures for him, and God knows what else. Where’s it all going to end?”

“It’s going to end,” said Davidson, “when they uphold the Court of Appeals decision, vacate the stay, and tell some warden to pull the switch.”

“The IV.”

“What?”

“There’s no switch anymore,” Jessica explained. “Virginia’s joined the ranks of the lethal-injection states.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. Too many heads bursting into orange flames, I guess.”

“Do you know,” said Davidson, “that we’re the only civilized nation in the world that still has the death penalty?”

“Actually, you’re wrong about that.”

“Oh?”

“No civilized nation still has the death penalty.”

“Now that,” said Davidson, “sounds more like the Jessica Woodruff I know and love. The fighter. Listen, don’t worry about Johannsen-”

“Jorgensen.”

“-Jorgensen. Let him get his rocks off, running around playing Perry Mason. He’ll get tired of it soon enough. You didn’t lose your cool with him, or anything, did you?”

“No, no,” said Jessica. “In fact, I told him I’d put one of our investigators on it, see if he could track down the mysterious three-fingered man.”

“Good. He’ll be fine, you’ll see.”

But August Jorgensen was anything but fine. He’d found Jessica Woodruff rather dismissive on the phone. When he’d first gotten through to her - he’d reached her on her cell phone, while she was in the back of a cab on the Queensboro Bridge - she’d had trouble understanding the importance of his new discovery. Then, when Jorgensen had explained how finding the man could shed new light on whether Boyd Davies was able to connect his act to its consequences, she’d turned patronizing, promising to assign an investigator to check it out.

Well, Jorgensen didn’t need some investigator to tell him how many fingers the man had; he’d counted them himself, a hundred times already. She was giving him lip service, is what she was doing.

One of August Jorgensen’s admitted shortcomings as an appellate judge had been his inability to delegate responsibility. His budget had allowed him to maintain a staff consisting of two law clerks and a secretary, all full-time employees. A two-year clerkship for a United States Court of Appeals judge was a plum job, and each January graduating law review seniors from Harvard, Michigan, Yale, Columbia, DePaul, and the rest of the country’s top law schools had flooded him with more résumés than he could read. He’d tried his best to hire the best and the brightest, while keeping an eye out for women and minorities (a practice unheard of among his all-male, all-white colleagues). They’d turned out to be genuine scholars - almost every one of them - talented researchers and gifted writers. And yet, somehow, Jorgensen had always ended up in the stacks himself, hunting down some elusive precedent or arcane footnote, or hunched over his typewriter, putting his personal touch into a decision or a dissent (and there’d been no shortage of dissents), long after everyone else had been home in bed.

He just hadn’t been able to help it.

Any more than he could help it now.

It wasn’t that Trial TV didn’t have good investigators; he was quite sure they did. They certainly had enough money to go out and hire retired FBI agents and CIA sleuths and big-city homicide detectives. The best and the brightest, just like Jorgensen’s law clerks. But as capable as they were, they lacked one thing. And that one thing was passion, fire. To everyone else, whether it came down to a matter of writing a legal opinion or picking up a trail grown cold over sixteen years, it was just a job.

To Jorgensen, it would become a mission.

He would go back up to Virginia. He would do it himself. With winter socked in as solid as any fog, what better did he have to do with his time but read and pass the days? He would go to the hill country, to the place where little Ilsa Meisner had had the life choked out of her one September afternoon, long ago. To the place where Wesley Boyd Davies had been arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to die. To the place where folks tended to grow old under the same roof where they’d grown up, and would be likely to remember a law enforcement officer missing two fingers on his right hand.