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committed. Mason had asked for a gangland favor to pressure Judge Carter into letting Blues out on bail so he could help Mason find the real killer.
    The favor was given and Mason cleared Blues’s name. Judge Carter quit the bench the day she released Blues, rumors trailing her like poisonous vapors. The last thing she told Mason still haunted him. She would have granted bail anyway.
    In the years since then, she had quietly rebuilt her career as a private judge specializing in mediation and arbitration, a low-cost alternative to expensive civil litigation. The practice provided a second career for retired judges, and Judge Carter had gradually won a significant following with her balanced handling of cases.
    Mason had taken comfort in her success, his guilt assuaged but not forgotten. He handled a few civil cases from time to time, and when the parties elected alternative dispute resolution, he’d always managed to convince the opposing lawyer to select someone besides Judge Carter. While Kansas City may seem like a small town to those who didn’t know it, it was more than large enough for Mason not to have crossed Judge Carter’s path since that last hearing in her chambers.
    He looked at her now and didn’t know what to say. She filled the void.
    “We have a problem,” she said.

NINE
    “I’m being blackmailed,” Vanessa Carter told him.
    She threw her coat onto Mason’s sofa, draping it over a stack of files Mason was storing against the cushions. She angled one of the low-slung round-backed chairs in front of his desk, sitting down with enough authority that Mason nearly rose and said, Good morning, Your Honor .
    His clients always began by telling him they had a problem. His problem was helping them with their problem, but that didn’t make them the same problem. Their problems came down to freedom or prison, sometimes life or death. His problems were always legal, strategic, and pragmatic. Keep the client free or, at least, off death row. And get paid.
    Vanessa Carter announced that she and Mason had a problem like it was a shared burden. Her simple declaration demanded his next question, one that hovered over his heart, taunting the long scar that dressed his chest. He suspected the answer, even knew what it had to be, but had to hear her say it.
    “By whom?” he asked. His pulse quickened as he struggled to remain neutral.
    “Somebody at Galaxy Gaming.”
    She said it like she was pronouncing sentence on Mason, her words hitting him like a term of twenty-five years to life. There was no statute of limitations on some debts and Mason’s had just been called.
    Galaxy Gaming had purchased the Dream Casino three years ago. It was a riverboat cash cow docked on the Missouri River at the spot where Kansas City had been born more than a hundred and fifty years earlier.
    Galaxy had purchased the Dream from the estate of Ed Fiori, the grantor of the gangland favor Mason had used to force Judge Carter to free Blues. Mason had always suspected that Fiori had secretly recorded his request for Fiori’s help. Whether it was audio or video Mason didn’t know, but he knew it didn’t matter.
    After Fiori’s death, Mason had worried that the casino’s new owners would stumble across the tape, hoarding it until they needed a return favor, explaining to Mason the laws of inheritance that governed secret sins. When no bent-nose pit boss with a Jersey accent knocked at his door over the next couple of years, Mason’s fears had begun to recede.
    Sometimes, he indulged in the fantasy that he’d gotten away with it, just as many criminals got away with their crimes. Other times, he reminded himself that he had had no choice, would do it again if he had to, and would deal with the consequences when the time came, increasingly hopeful that it never would.
    But it had and the fact that the messenger was Vanessa Carter bound the moment in the irony that so often shrouded trouble and justice. The ripple in his pulse spent