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women.
    And this: The final victim, Jenni Martinez, had been a former girlfriend of Wendell’s. Once, after they’d broken up, Wendell got drunk and sang loud love songs beneath her window. He’d left peaceably when the police came.
    “Peaceably!” Tobe noted. These were the actions of a romantic, not a rapist! Besides which, Wendell had an alibi for the night the Martinez girl was raped. He’d been at Cheryl and Tobe’s house, playing cards, and he’d slept that night on their sofa. In order for him to have committed the crime, he’d have had to feign sleep, sneaking out from under the bedding Cheryl had arranged for him on the living room sofa, without being noticed. Then, he’d have had to sneak back into the house, returning in the early morning so that Cheryl would discover him when she woke up. She had testified: He was on the couch, the blankets twisted around him, snoring softly. She was easily awakened; she felt sure that she would have heard if he’d left in the middle of the night. It was, Tobe told the jury, “a highly improbable, almost fantastical version of events.”
    But the jury had believed Jenni Martinez, who was certain that she’d recognized his voice. His laugh. They had believed the prosecutor, who had pointed out that there had been no more such rapes since Jenni Martinez had identified Wendell. After Wendell’s arrest, the string of assaults had ceased.
    After a moment, she tried to tune back in to what Wasserman was saying. She ought to be paying attention. For Tobe’s sake, she ought to be trying to examine the possibility of Wendell’s innocence more rationally, without bias. She read the words carefully, one by one. But what she saw was Wendell’s face, the way he’d looked as one of the assaulted women had testified: bored, passive, even vaguely amused as the woman had tremulously, with great emotion, recounted her tale.
    Whatever
.
    •   •   •
    That night, Tobe was once again in his study, working as she sat on the couch, watching television. He came out a couple of times, waving to her vaguely as he walked through the living room, toward the kitchen, toward the refrigerator, another beer.
    She waited up. But when he finally came into the bedroom he seemed annoyed that she was still awake, and he took off his clothes silently, turning off the light before he slipped into bed, a distance emanating from him. She pressed her breasts against his back, her arms wrapped around him, but he was still. She rubbed her feet against his, and he let out a slow, disinterested breath.
    “What are you thinking about,” she said, and he shifted his legs.
    “I don’t know,” he said. “Thinking about Wendell again, I suppose.”
    “It will be all right,” she said, though she felt the weight of her own dishonesty settle over her. “I know it.” She smoothed her hand across his hair.
    “You’re not a lawyer,” he said. “You don’t know how badly flawed the legal system is.”
    “Well,” she said.
    “It’s a joke,” he said. “I mean, the prosecutor didn’t prove his case. All he did was parade a bunch of victims across the stage. How can you compete with that? It’s all drama.”
    “Yes,” she said. She kissed the back of his neck, but he was already drifting into sleep, or pretending to. He shrugged against her arms, nuzzling into his pillow.
    •   •   •
    One of the things that had always secretly bothered her about Wendell was his resemblance to Tobe. He was a younger, and—yes, admit it—sexier version of her husband. The shoulders, the legs; the small hardness of her husband’s mouth that she had loved was even better on Wendell’s face, that sly shift of his gray eyes, which Wendell knew was attractive, while Tobe did not. Tobe tended toward pudginess, while Wendell was lean, while Wendell worked on mail-order machines, which brought out the muscles of his stomach. In the summer, coming in from playing basketball with Tobe in the driveway,