Twisted

without a doubt that the bullet that killed the victim came from the defendant’s gun. . . .”
    “I sold that weapon to the man sitting there—the defendant, Ray Hartman. . . .”
    “The victim, Mr. Valdez, had gone to the police complaining that the defendant had extorted him. . . . Yes, that’s a copy of the complaint. . . .”
    “I’ve been a police officer for seven years. I was one of the first on the scene and I took that particular weapon off the person of the defendant, Ray Hartman. . . .”
    “We found gunshot residue on the hand of the defendant, Ray Hartman. The amount and nature of this residue is consistent with what we would’ve found on the hands of someone who fired a pistol about the time the victim was shot. . . .”
    “The victim was shot once in the temple. . . .”
    “Yes, I saw the defendant on the day of the shooting. He was walking down the street next to Mr. Valdez’s shop and I heard him stop and ask several people where the defendant was. . . .”
    “That’s correct, sir. I saw the defendant the day Mr. Valdez was killed. Mr. Hartman was asking where he could find Mr. Valdez. His coat was open and I saw that he had a pistol. . . .”
    “About a month ago I was at a bar. I was sitting next to the defendant and I heard him say he was going to ‘get’ Mr. Valdez and that’d take care of all his problems. . . .”
    By introducing all this testimony, Tribow established that Hartman had a motive to kill Valdez; he’d intended to do it for some time; he went looking for the victim the day he was shot, armed with a gun; he’d behaved with reckless disregard by attacking the man with a pistol and firing a shot that could have injured innocent people; and that he in fact was the proximate cause of Valdez’s death.
    “Your Honor, the prosecution rests.”
    He returned to the table.
    “Open and shut,” said Chuck Wu.
    “Shhhh,” whispered Adele Viamonte. “Bad luck.”
    Danny Tribow didn’t believe in luck. But he did believe in not prematurely counting chickens. He sat back and listened to the defense begin its case.
    The slickest of Hartman’s lawyers—the one who’d been in Tribow’s office during the ill-fated plea bargain session—first introduced into evidencea pistol permit, which showed that Hartman was licensed to carry a weapon for his own personal safety.
    No problem here, Tribow thought. He’d known about the permit.
    But Hartman’s lawyer had no sooner begun to question his first witness—the doorman in Hartman’s building—than Tribow began to feel uneasy.
    “Did you happen to see the defendant on the morning of Sunday, March thirteenth?”
    “Yessir.”
    “Did you happen to notice if he was carrying a weapon?”
    “He was.”
    Why was he asking this? Tribow asked himself. It’d support the state’s case. He glanced at Viamonte, who shook her head.
    “And did you notice him the day before?”
    “Yessir.”
    Uh-oh. Tribow had an idea where this was headed.
    “And did he have his gun with him then?”
    “Yes, he did. He’d run into some trouble with the gangs in the inner city—he was trying to get a youth center started and the gangs didn’t want it. He’d been threatened a lot.”
    Youth center? Tribow and Wu exchanged sour glances. The only interest Hartman would have in a youth center was as a venue to sell drugs.
    “How often did he have a gun with him?”
    “Every day, sir. For the past three years I’ve been working there.”
    Nobody would notice something every day for three years. He was lying. Hartman had gotten to the doorman.
    “We got a problem, boss,” Wu whispered.
    He meant this: If the jury believed that Hartman always carried the gun, that fact would undermine Tribow’s assertion that he’d taken it with him only that one time—on the day of the murder—for the purpose of killing Valdez. The jury could therefore conclude that he hadn’t planned the murder, which would eliminate the premeditation element of the case and, with it, the murder-one count.
    But if the doorman’s testimony endangered the first-degree murder case, the next witness—a man in an expensive business suit—risked destroying it completely.
    “Sir, you don’t know the defendant, do you?”
    “No. I’ve never had anything to do with him. Never met him.”
    “He’s never given you anything or offered you any money or anything of value?”
    “No, sir.”
    He’s lying, Tribow thought instinctively. The