second blow four times. Then she opened a fresh pad and wrote, at the top of the first page, the
sentence with which she began every file that frightened her a little: What would this look like if
the victim drove a ten-year-old sedan? She underlined it once. The answer, she already knew, was
that it would look like a felony with excellent video, and that the whole of the coming month would
be devoted, by men of talent, to making it look like anything else.
Caleb Rowan, meanwhile, was doing the hardest work of his professional life, which was
nothing, in public, repeatedly, while being watched. On Monday he drove to Richmond in the sedan
and sat, before he touched his own docket, in the office of his section chief, and then, at the section
chief's direction, in the office of the United States Attorney's ethics adviser, and he laid out the
whole of it — the house, the car, the father-in-law, the injunction, the referral — in the flat
sequence he would have used for a defendant, and he asked for, and received, the instruction he had
come for and would spend six weeks obeying like a liturgy: he was a victim and a witness in a state
matter; he would have no contact with the Commonwealth's Attorney's office except through his
own retained counsel and in response to formal request; he would make no statement, public or
private, in his official capacity or out of it, about the merits; he would refer every inquiry, from
press, from neighbors, from colleagues whose curiosity wore the clothes of concern, to Daniel
Osei; and if any person suggested, in any room, that his office might take an interest in the
Halloway Ridge Homeowners Association, its management company, or its towing contractor, he
would leave the room and memorialize the conversation before the hour was out. He wrote the
instruction down. He signed the recusal memorandum the adviser drafted, which walling him off
from any federal matter touching the association was, strictly, a wall around an empty field, since
no such matter existed — but Caleb understood, as the adviser understood, that the wall was not the
point. The paper was the point. Paper was always the point. Somewhere across the river of the
coming weeks, Victor Lasky would stand up in a courtroom or sit down at a microphone and say
the word setup, and when he did, Caleb intended the answer to exist already, dated, signed, and
filed before the accusation had finished being a thought in Lasky's head.
June, who had no ethics adviser and needed none, imposed the domestic version of the same
discipline, and imposed it first on herself. She did not discuss the case at the clinic. She did not
discuss it at the bus stop, where the Ridge's true parliament sat each morning among the backpacks.
When a neighbor she liked — and she liked most of them, which was the Ridge's complication and
not its excuse — stopped her at the mailbox with the opening she came to recognize as the overture
to a confidence, I just think it's awful what's happening, June learned to hear the second sentence
coming underneath it, which was some version of but, and to answer both sentences with the same
mild deflection: "We're letting the process work, same as anybody would." It cost her. She was her
father's daughter in this if in nothing else: she believed a thing said plainly at a mailbox was worth
three things said through counsel, and the discipline of not saying it sat in her like a stone in a shoe.
What she said instead, at home, at night, after the chronology had been updated and the children
were down, was the sentence she said perhaps a dozen times that month, to Caleb, to the kettle, to
the dark kitchen window above the wounded car: "He hit it twice, in daylight, in front of the sheriff
of the county, and somehow we are the ones who have to be careful." And Caleb, who was careful
for a living, would say, "Yes," and neither of them pretended that the yes was fair. It was merely
true, which in their household outranked fair, and had to.
Victor Lasky arrived in the case on Wednesday, by letter, which was his preferred method of
arrival in any matter he intended to make expensive: a letter has no temperature, can be quoted
without its context, and frightens exactly the people it is designed to frighten, who are never the
people it is addressed to. The letter, on Richmond letterhead heavy enough to hold an edge,
informed the Commonwealth's Attorney that he represented Gordon Pruitt and, separately, the
Halloway Ridge Homeowners Association; that his clients welcomed a fair review; that the review
would, to be fair, have to account for the complaining witness's position as a federal prosecutor, the
investigating sheriff's position as that witness's father-in-law, a civil injunction obtained ex parte on
a Saturday morning, in chambers, before any representative of the association had been heard, and
a mirror whose pre-existing condition was attested by the association's compliance records; and
that his clients reserved all rights, a phrase Lasky used the way other men used a signature. He was
sixty-three, silvered, courteous in the manner of a man who has never once needed to raise his
voice because other people raise theirs for him, and he had built a practice, over thirty years, on a