The 7th Canon by Robert Dugoni

appointment. Now was not the time. He set it aside and read a treatise Ruth-Bell had opened to criminal arraignments. He’d grasped the procedural aspects, which were not complicated, but he would go through the treatise and his notes again for the nuances. Lou had taught him the courtroom was a stage, with lawyers and judges the actors. It didn’t just matter what you said; it mattered how you looked saying it. He suspected Ramsey and St. Claire would attempt to make him look inexperienced in front of Milton Trimble, and Trimble had a reputation of devouring young, unprepared lawyers.
    Ruth-Bell had also been accurate in her assessment of the arraignment. The key was to not enter a plea but to waive time to allow the defense attorney the chance to review the evidence and prepare a defense. That would eventually be either Lou, who right now needed as much time as Donley could get him, or if Lou didn’t make it back, someone with more experience, like Larry Carr.
    The strain of the prior two days made Donley’s head heavy. He contemplated the empty coffeemaker, but remembered Ruth-Bell’s admonition that caffeine would make him edgy and decided against it. Instead, he lowered his head. He’d take a five-minute nap to rejuvenate. Then he would go over his notes again.

    September 1978
    Donley flicked the tubular-shaped fuse and watched it tumble over the stair edge, clattering down the staircase and rolling across the hardwood floor to a darkened corner near the front door. Beads of perspiration trickled down his face and ringed the collar of his white T-shirt—an Indian summer had brought soaring temperatures and the kind of dry, windless days San Franciscans quietly called earthquake weather.
    He sat halfway up the staircase, waiting, listening to the clock in the living room tick off the seconds. His eyes had long since adjusted to the dark, and he peered between the bannister slats at the golden football trophies his mother kept prominently displayed on the entry table for the recruiters. Part of the facade. His high school football coaches told the recruiters that determination and hard work had made Peter Donley one of the best high school football players in the country.
    They were wrong.
    Football didn’t drive Donley to lift weights to near exhaustion. It was rage. The anger built inside him like compressed air, which Donley vented in the weight room, at practice, and during games. It was the only thing that kept him from exploding.
    Just above the trophies, black-and-white photographs hung on the wall. In one, a young man in a tuxedo looked as if he were about to fall face-first but for an arm draped around his bride’s shoulders. Donley didn’t recognize the man or the woman in that picture. In the ensuing eighteen years, his father’s lean and angular face had become pale and fleshy, and his six-pack stomach now hung well over his belt. The James Dean curl in the picture no longer sat atop his head like a rooster’s crown but drooped like a beaten dog’s tail.
    Donley’s mother had once been beautiful, lustrous dark hair, blue-green eyes, and soft features. At thirty-six, her hair had streaked prematurely gray, and her smile was missing two teeth. Her figure had grown thin and frail.
    The familiar sound of the Impala’s engine drew Donley’s attention back to the front door. It still caused a Pavlovian chill to trickle down his spine. As a child, that chill caused him to slide beneath his bed. But he was no longer a child. And he was no longer scared.
    The car’s headlights pierced the shuttered windows, casting slatted shadows on the wall.
    The clock chimed twice.
    The man was nothing if not predictable.
    The car jerked to a stop at the curb, the engine sputtering and finally dying with a last gasp from the carburetor. The driver’s side door creaked open—a dent had creased the panel—then slammed shut with the same forced snap.
    Donley stood.
    The familiar sound of heavy boots trudged up the