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nearly 200 miles from either one. He immediately ruled out assigning the case to one of his own staff attorneys. The next option was the public defender for the county. But Ottawa County was so sparsely populated that it had none. Doyle quickly found himself down to his final option: locating a private attorney in the geographical area who had been trained to take these cases.
    As encyclopedic as Kevin Doyle’s mind is, as he studied the road map that afternoon, not even he could think of anyone from the area who had been through the training sessions. He was forced to call one of the office secretaries who lived in Manhattan, prevail upon her to go downtown, unlock the office, pull out the roster books, and phone him back. Then he had her read off the names of every private lawyer who was qualified to handle capital cases in the five counties closest to Flat Lake. Not that it took her very long to do so: There were only six names.
    The first five names failed to ring a bell with Doyle, but he jotted down their phone numbers as they were read off. It was only the sixth name that brought a wry smile to his face.
    “Bingo,” he said softly.

 
    MATTHEW FIELDER was out behind his cabin splitting firewood when the call came in. He heard the phone, but chose to let it ring away - that was what the answering machine was for, after all. Besides which, Fielder had a hard time imagining that the call could be from anyone he wanted to talk with.
    At forty-four, Matt Fielder was a dropout of sorts. A criminal defense lawyer with the Legal Aid Society in Manhattan for sixteen years, he’d been good enough to have earned a promotion to the rank of supervisor. What that meant was, they’d taken him out of the courtroom - which was the only place he’d ever felt at home - and put him behind a desk, where he was supposed to push paper. When the Society had gone up against the mayor two years later over a contract dispute, the results had been disastrous. Instead of pay increases, there had been cuts. When it became obvious that heads would have to roll, Fielder had willingly offered up his own. He’d taken a buyout package consisting of the pension he’d accrued, plus three months’ severance pay. The total amount came to $43,562.19. The public-service version of a golden parachute.
    With the check, he’d paid off the last of the alimony arrears he owed his ex-wife, taken care of a couple of long-overdue credit-card balances, and bought back his rusting Suzuki Sidekick from the finance company, who’d repossessed it for the third time the month before. With a little over $18,000 left from the buyout, he’d come across an ad offering ten-acre parcels of undeveloped land in the Adirondacks for $1,000 an acre. The photo showed deer drinking from a crystal-clear pond, surrounded by a forest of evergreens. Sight unseen, he’d written out a check and mailed it off.
    Next he’d gotten himself appointed to the Assigned Counsel Plan, qualifying him to represent indigent defendants - the only thing he knew how to do after eighteen years of lawyering. The cases paid a whopping $40 an hour for in-court work, and $25 an hour out-of-court. He was responsible for his own overhead: office rent, phone, fax, copy machine, library, insurance, stationery, postage, and medical coverage. Because he couldn’t afford to hire a secretary, he bought a second-hand computer and did his own paperwork.
    The first year he netted $4,562.38.
    Just when Fielder was consoling himself with the good news - that at least he’d owe little or nothing in the way of income taxes - he received a notice from Internal Revenue informing him that since he’d neglected to roll over his pension fund, he now owed them an additional $11,000.
    It was about that time that he decided to pull the plug.
    He called the Assigned Counsel Plan to tell them he was packing it in. Laura Held, the administrator of the Plan, got on the phone. Matt and Laura had been colleagues at Legal