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Mace James spent the days after Antoine Marshall’s execution trying to make good on his oath to vindicate his dead client’s name. Mace was no psychiatrist, and he didn’t know the DSM-IV criteria for an obsessive disorder, but he was pretty sure his focus on Antoine Marshall qualified. He had other clients, but he spent nearly every waking hour working on Antoine’s case. Something wasn’t right about this case, but after all these years, Mace still couldn’t put his finger on it. Now Antoine was dead. Yet how could he just close out the file? What if he had allowed an innocent man to die?

He started by rereading the entire case file, looking at the matter from a different perspective. In the past few years, he had focused on errors in the trial court’s rulings in order to get his client a new trial. But now he searched the file for clues about who the real killer might be, the way he had when he first got involved in the case. Once the police had zeroed in on Antoine, they had never really pursued the kinds of questions Mace was re-asking now.

What if this wasn’t a random breaking and entering? Who might want Laura Brock dead? What if the real target was Robert Brock? Who were his enemies?

Mace started running down all the cases where Laura Brock had testified. Next, he looked at the high-profile cases that Robert Brock handled. And because he had always been suspicious of Snowden, he started studying her other decisions as well. Why had she bent over backward to protect Robert Brock? What did she have against Caleb Tate? What other cases had Caleb handled in front of Snowden?

He did some additional digging into the scientific research in order to understand how Marshall could have passed a lie detector test but failed the BEOS. He called some scientists in India who were on the forefront of the BEOS procedure and who swore to its reliability. Lie detector tests, on the other hand, had well-known credibility problems.

Mace had downplayed the reliability of the BEOS test to Antoine during his client’s final days because it seemed like the right thing to do. But now, the more he researched, the more Mace became convinced that the BEOS test was reliable. Maybe Antoine had it right. Maybe he had been so drugged that he had no conscious memory of that night and could pass a polygraph. But Mace couldn’t talk himself into closing the file just based on the BEOS test. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Mace had watched a client die. He couldn’t just move on to the next case while he still had doubts.

One thing that intrigued Mace was the number of times Caleb Tate’s clients had passed a polygraph. That fact, coupled with Tate’s own on-air performance on the lie detector, caused Mace to investigate Dr. Stanley Feldman, the polygraph expert who had tested Tate.

Mace left no stone unturned. He spent hours combing through files in the Milton County clerk’s office. He went to the jail and interviewed defendants who had been involved in the cases. He talked to lawyers and expert witnesses and made charts and spreadsheets about what he found. He went to bed thinking about his research and woke up with new ideas to pursue.

He felt close to a breakthrough, like he was onto something, something that eluded him, something just beyond his reach. But he couldn’t quite figure it out. And sadly, even if he did, it would all come too late to save his client’s life.