Veronica arrived at 1:00 p.m. the next afternoon with lasagna from Mama Leone’s and a smile and took the elevator up to the sixth floor, where Cliff McCormack’s office was situated. Cliff and her dad had been friends for almost twenty years now, and Mars Investigations had cleared more than a few of his clients of wrongdoing. Of course, evidence gathered by Mars Investigations had also put a handful of his clients away—but that was life in the seedy underbelly of the criminal justice system. Sometimes you had to defend the indefensible. As far as she knew, there wasn’t another McSomething working for the Public Defender’s Office. Which meant that Cliff, the low-rent local lawyer near and dear to her heart, was her best shot at getting access to Willie Murphy’s statement. But as cynical as Cliff pretended to be, he sometimes got a tiny bit hung up on ethics—especially on sticky little issues like attorney-client privilege. Veronica hoped the piping hot lasagna currently turning the white bag translucent would coax him toward a moral gray area.
