He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask If he wanted to dance; he had a face like a mask. Somebody said from the bible he'd quote. There was dust on the man in the long black coat. — Bob Dylan, "The Man in the Long Black Coat"

I

Gargoyles. I hardly notice them anymore. Gargoyles are a part of your life when you've spent your entire career in the criminal courts. The creatures you see leering out at you from the Halifax Courthouse on Spring Garden Road are technically known as grotesques, fang-baring faces that were set in stone when the building was constructed in 1863. A plaque on the building describes the "vermiculated" stonework; it looks as if worms tunnelled through it. I'm not surprised.

Thursday, March 1, 1990 was a typical day at the courthouse. I had managed to get my client off unexpectedly at the conclusion of a three-day trial on charges of assault, extortion and uttering threats against his old girlfriend's new boyfriend. His gratitude lay unspoken between us. He swaggered from the building, trailed by three teenage girls in leggings and stiletto heels.

"Congratulations on the acquittal, Monty!" I turned at the sound of a voice as I was leaving the courthouse and saw our articled clerk coming out behind me. Petite, sharp-faced and keen, Robin Reidwore a lawyerly black suit that looked too big on her. I nodded absently in response. "Though I have to say," she went on, "I didn't think much of the judge's remarks about our client. 'Well, Mr. Brophy, you're free to go. The system worked. If I see you in my courtroom again you may not find the system so benign.' What kind of attitude is that to take to a man he just declared not guilty?"

"It's the attitude of a judge who knows I outlawyered the prosecution and knows he'd be overturned on appeal if he convicted my client."

Robin and I left the courthouse and crossed Spring Garden Road to the city library, where someone had built a snow fort around the statue of a striding, heavily masculine Winston Churchill. I was on a hopeless quest for a children's book with a character named Normie. My wife and I, in the afterglow of a magnificent performance of Norma at La Scala, had named our baby Norma after the noble druid at the centre of the opera. With sober second thought, neither of us liked the name for anyone under forty. The best we could do was "Normie" after that. Now seven and wondering why she wasn't named Megan like everybody else, she had looked askance at my brave assertion that there were lots of Normies in the world. She issued a demand: "Find me a book with somebody named Normie in it. It can be an animal; it can even be a bug. But," she warned darkly, "it better not be a boy!" I was met with a sympathetic shake of the head yet again at the children's desk.

As we left the library, Robin returned to the acquittal of our client, Corey Brophy. "But Corey didn't do it, Monty! You demolished the Crown witnesses on cross-examination; their stories fell apart."

I looked at her with surprise. "Of course he did it. You haven't seen the file and you've never met the client. But that's over and done. Now, tomorrow we have — Well! I spoke too soon. Looks as if you're going to meet Corey after all."

Robin turned to follow my gaze across the street and saw my newly released client being manhandled by two police officers in the driveway of the courthouse. He twisted around and caught sight of me. "Are you just going to stand there, Collins? You're my lawyer, for fuck's sake. Get over here!"

I sighed and crossed the street. Short, skinny, and scabious with a patchy goatee, Corey was the picture of belligerence.

"What's going on, Frank?" I asked one of the cops.

"Mr. Brophy is under arrest for assaulting his ex-girlfriend."

"Corey, give me a call after you're processed," I told him. "In the meantime, keep your mouth shut. No statements." The other cop bundled him into the cruiser for the trip to the station.

"This must be a record for you, Monty," Frank remarked. "Your client reoffending —"

"Allegedly reoffending!"

"— What is it, twenty-five minutes after he was released?"

I didn't tell him my record was a guy reoffending twenty-five seconds after his release; he had been overheard threatening one of the witnesses before he even left the courtroom.

I glanced at Robin as we started back to the office, and was about to speak when she said: "You've got that 'Robin, you're such a bleeding heart' expression on your face again. You think all our clients are guilty."

"And yet I defend them. Year after year after year." I looked into her eyes. "So come on now. Who's the bleeding heart?"

Yes, criminal practice had its aggravations. But at least with the usual run of petty criminals, I could forget their existence as soon as I was out of sight of the gargoyles. In the kind of case I dealt with, there was no mystery involved; you knew all too well what went on at the crime scene. You knew your client was there. Your only hope was that he had kept his mouth shut when the police showed up. Soon, although I didn't know it yet, I would be involved in a case I would not be able to shake when I left the building. Or even when I closed my eyes to sleep. For the first time in my career I would be flying blind, unable to fathom what was behind the brutal murder of a young woman whose body had been carved with a religious sign and dumped beneath a bridge. And the client? My mother had a saying: "Be careful what you wish for." For years — decades! — I had been longing for a client a cut above the poor, uneducated, hopeless, heedless, unstable individuals I usually represented. A client more like ... more like me. Well, I was about to have one. Be careful what you wish for.

The next day my firm's senior partner, Rowan Stratton, slipped me an envelope containing newspaper clippings about the murder and said we'd speak about it on the weekend.

The victim was Leeza Rae and she was twenty years old when she was killed. On February fifteenth, a Department of Public Works crew spotted her body on scrubby, rocky ground beside a service road under the A. Murray MacKay Bridge, still known, twenty years after its construction, as the "new bridge." It is one of two bridges joining the cities of Halifax and Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. The crew radioed the information to the Halifax Police Department just after three in the afternoon. Leeza was wearing an oversize black plastic raincoat with a hood. This had not been her attire when she was last seen alive, leaving a dance at St. Bernadette's Youth Centre in downtown Halifax. News stories gave the cause of death as a fractured skull, believed to have been caused by a heavy, blunt instrument. The police stated that the victim had not been killed in the spot where she was found; the body had been dumped there after death. One report quoted an unnamed source as saying the body had been "tampered with."

I skimmed the clippings and put them aside. Rowan had asked me not to discuss the murder with anyone until we spoke. Why the secrecy, I wondered.

II

Saturday morning was bright and crisp, a beautiful day for a family outing. I picked up the phone.

"What?" came her answer.

"Well, I see today is starting off like all your other days."

"And I see you are still in need of a remedial class in, one, when to call and, two, when not to call. It is eight-thirty in the...