CALL it a skeptical hunch. Go ahead, call it paranoia. Whatever name best labels it, a nagging suspicion kept telling me that Dumont’s district attorney was somehow involved in the Carrol Cantrell case—if not in the murder itself, then possibly in planting the extortion note that had thwarted the investigation, “outed” Doug Pierce, and threatened to influence the outcome of an important local election. After all, the impending obscenity trial gave Harley Kaiser a clear conflict of interest in all this. What’s more, Roxanne Exner, a shrewd judge of character with an insider’s view of the law biz, had derided Kaiser’s hot-dog tactics before she’d even met him. So…I invited the man to lunch. My purpose, of course, was not to break bread with Kaiser, but to sound him out. Perhaps over a meal, one-on-one, he would let slip a detail or two that could shed light on his true role in this. When I phoned him that Thursday morning to extend the invitation, I needed some pretext (chummy we weren’t), so I told him that I felt the need to atone for interrupting his lunch with Pierce on Monday when Roxanne and I joined them at their table.
