Jack McCoy sat in his office, running through a case file that had already taken him three days to write up and put together, when someone knocked on the door.  "Mr McCoy?"

          "Yes, come in!" Jack called without looking up from his desk.

          One of the secretaries walked into the office and placed a slip of paper with a name and number scribbled onto it.  Jack looked from the paper to the secretary, twisting his face into a look of confusion.

          "It's the name and office number of your new assistant.  She's supposed to be here in an hour," the secretary said in reply to McCoy's silent question.

          "Oh, right," Jack said, putting the slip of paper off to the side.  "Come and get me when she arrives."

          "No need!" a young voice called from the door.  Jack looked up with a slightly annoyed expression on his face, but the expression quickly melted away.  Walking into his office was a woman, no older than 30, with bright blue eyes and shoulder length brown hair.  He sighed.  It was torture, the people Arthur hired to be his new assistant.

          "Jack, this is Audra Dalle," the secretary said, forcing back a smile when she saw her boss' expression soften.

          "I think we narrowed that down," Jack said as his eyes followed Audra from the door to the couch off to the side of the office.  Faint memories of Claire escaped from his caged mind; he shook his head clear of the thoughts that still left a pang in his heart.

          "It's such an honor to be working with you, Mr McCoy," Audra said as she placed her bag and jacket next to her on the worn leather sofa.

          "Well, it's great to have you on board," Jack replied.  "And it's 'Jack' not 'Mr McCoy'. The only people who call me that are either in jail or should be."

          Audra laughed and smiled.  "I've heard your reputation for putting people behind bars is quite high," she said.  "I've also heard that you support the death penalty."

          "And I've gotten a lot of crap from some previous assistants about it, too.  It's totally ok if you don't support it; our work together will just be a lot more difficult when it comes to pleas," Jack explained.

          "Oh, I support the death penalty, its just the way that I believe it should be administered is probably different than yours," Audra said.

          "Then work should go at least a little bit smoother than it has for a few years."  Jack took the paper with Audra's name and office number in his and crushed it into a ball before tossing it into the trash bin.  "So you went to Harvard?" he asked, looking down at her resume.

          "Yeah.  My mom was a professor there, so I got in pretty cheap," she answered.

          Jack nodded and tried to pry his eyes back to the resume in front of him, but they were glued to Audra.  "And you took a law course in high school?"

          Audra nodded and stood to look at the degree from NYU on the wall.  She looked around the office; the leather couch she had been sitting on looked like it had been through years of wear and tear.  The bookshelves were loaded with cases and law books; scarce picture frames lined Jack's desk.  The office seemed like her co-worker lived in it; the blanket underneath the couch suggested that he sometimes did.

          "Something wrong?" Jack asked, his eyes continuing to follow Audra around the office.

          "No," Audra said, looking at Jack and making her way back to the couch.

          Jack smiled.  "What law course did you take in high school?"

          "'You and the law'.  It was really fun," Audra answered.  "I took it as a sophomore."

          Jack's eyes widened.  Most high school students he knew didn't get into law until their senior year.  "How many other kids took the course?" he asked, sliding the case file he had been looking at earlier into his bag.

          "About ten, but most of them were just taking it for credits.  I had read a few books in my freshman year that had a lot to do with the law, and I volunteered at the police department over the summer," Audra explained.

          Jack looked thoroughly pleased.  He also noticed that Audra had been accepted to the police academy, but hadn't passed.  He wondered if she was doing this for personal reasons as well as to get a good job.  He leaned back in his chair and put his feet on his desk, continuing to stare at Audra.  He hardly noticed that Audra was staring back.  Only a knock on the door broke the silence.

          "Come in," Jack said.

          Audra looked away and stared down at her hands.  She tried to pull herself together as she realized that they were shaking.  Gripping them tightly, she looked up and over at the door, where the Lieutenant of the police department was standing.

          "Am I interrupting anything?" the woman asked, closing the door behind her.

          "Not at all," Jack said, standing and taking the paper the woman handed to him.  "Audra Dalle, this is Anita Van Buren, Lieutenant of the 27th precinct.  Anita, this is Audra Dalle.  She's taking over for Serena."

          "Oh, well it's nice to meet you," Anita said, shaking Audra's hand.

          "You too," Audra said.

          "How is the suspect search coming along?" Jack asked, his eyes running over the list of names for possible suspects that Anita had handed him.

          "We have one guy that Lennie and Ed are trying to catch right now.  With any hope, we'll have him by the end of the day," Anita replied.  "If we have him, I'll give you a call."

          "Thanks," Jack said as Anita left.

          "Did I come in the middle of a case?" Audra asked, turning to Jack.

          "Just about," he answered.

          "What happened?"

          "A young man was found outside his apartment," Jack said.  "Half his face was ripped off and his heart was above his head.  Ed said Lennie almost had a heart attack."

          "Jesus," Audra said.  "How much evidence do we have to get an indictment?"

          "They found his prints on the floor around the victim and on the knife he had used, which was lying next to the heart," Jack explained.  "But there's a funny thing the police found that none of us really understand yet."

          "What?" Audra asked, taking a seat on the couch again.

          Jack smiled.  This girl hadn't been working for him for more than 5 minutes and already she was completely wrapped up in the case she knew almost nothing about.

          "What is it?" she asked again.

          "Two quarters were found on top of the man's eyes; another quarter was found in the victim's mouth.  All with the perp's prints on them.  Sound familiar to you at all?" Jack described, sitting next to Audra at a respectable distance.

          She nodded but looked confused.  "The ancient Greeks used to do that."

          "Do what? Cut people's hearts out?"

          "No! They used to put coins either in the mouths or over the eyes of the deceased so they could pay the ferryman to cross the river Styx and continue on to the afterlife," Audra explained, "but nobody's done that for centuries."

          "Maybe our perp has a thing for history? Maybe he's Greek?" Jack suggested, still not sure of where his new assistant was coming from.

          "Maybe.  Or he could have been following a ritual.  But who knows.  We won't know until we talk to him," Audra said as the phone rang.

          "McCoy," Jack said as he answered it.  "Yeah?  All right…Yep…we'll be right over."  He hung up the phone and smiled at Audra.  "We got him.  Come on, your first criminal interrogation!"

          Audra laughed at pulled on her jacket, following Jack out to the elevator. She liked him.  He was nice, funny, attractive, and seemed like he was going to respect her.  She looked forward to a really fun and challenging time.

          Jack held the taxi door open for Audra and they walked into the 27th Precinct.  Jack recognized many of the officers as they walked through the office area to where Lennie Briscoe was standing.  He smiled at them and nodded over to Audra with a lost expression.

          "New assistant," Jack said as he put his back and jacket down on the floor.

          "Detective Briscoe, but most people call me Lennie," he said.  "Nice to meet you, Audra."

          "Nice to meet you too Lennie," Audra said.  "Who's in there?" she asked, peering through the one-way window.

          "The guy sitting in the chair is Robert Blake.  We caught him asleep in his apartment.  Three empty Jack Daniels bottles were lying on the ground next to him," Lennie answered.  "And the other man is Detective Ed Green.  Partner in crime, in a sense."

          Audra laughed and stared at the victim.  "Blake looks like he came from high up-bringing.  What the hell is he doing cutting people's hearts out?"

          "He went to Yale, studied history.  Mainly--"

          "Greek?"

          Lennie nodded.  "Apparently he thought that it would work on his brother."

          Audra looked disgusted.  "His brother?" she turned to Jack, "You never told me that our perp murdered his brother!"

          "Slipped my mind," Jack said offhandedly as he listened closely to the conversation going on inside the interrogation room.

          "What happened, Blake?"  Ed asked, staring Blake in the face.

          Sighing, Blake said, "Ralph was trying to kill me.  He had been planning it for months.  He was angry at me, because I was the smart one, the one who got all the money the work I had done, even when he had done three times as much work as I had.  He didn't like having to live as a middle class citizen," Blake explained.  Ed stared at him cynically.  "It was in self defense, I swear!"

          "Bullshit," Audra cursed under her breath.  Jack peered over at her and smiled.

          "You're lying, Blake!  Nobody cuts out their brother's heart in self defense and then remembers to leave seventy-five cents in his mouth and on his eyes!" Green yelled.  "Why did you kill your brother?"

          "Excuse me, Mr McCoy," Anita said as she came around the corner with another woman.  "Blake's lawyer, everyone."  A woman in her early forties pushed her way past Audra and opened the door to the room.

          "Don't say another word, Robert.  Just come with me," she said, pulling Blake out of the room and out of sight.

          "Who was she?" Audra asked as she pulled her office door closed that evening.

          "Bailey Morris," Jack replied, tugging his coat on.  "Great defense attorney, until she starts to lose.  Then she starts to crack; she asks the questions that lead to her client's sentencing."

          "Oh," Audra said.  "Why would anyone hire her then?"

          "Because of the 'great defense attorney' part.  Not everyone knows that Bailey cracks when she's under pressure," Jack answered.  "You just have to know how much pressure to apply."

          Audra smiled as they waited for the elevator.  She pulled on her black jacket and put her hair up to get it out of her face.  The elevator doors pulled open and she and Jack stepped in.

          "Do you need a ride home?" he asked as the doors closed.

          "No, thanks.  I'll get a cab.  I only live a few blocks down the road," Audra replied.

          Jack nodded and leaned against the wall of the elevator, thinking.  'What are you, crazy, Jack? You know what happened the last time.  Claire's dead…'  He closed his brown eyes only to see images of Claire.  He opened them again and looked at Audra, half-smiling, half-frowning.

          The elevator stopped and he and Audra left, walked down the stairs of the DA Building and went their separate ways.

          Audra waited out front to hail a taxi, but then decided that it was still light enough to walk.  After five minutes of slowly dragging her high-heeled feet down the sidewalk, she heard a motorcycle pull out of the alley beside the DA's office.  The man on the bike waved; Audra started to laugh when she realized that it was Jack.

          "What are you, crazy?"  she called, but he was too far away to hear her.  She laughed and kept walking.

          'Jack's a really nice guy,' she thought.  She knew his reputation; he had had affairs with four of his other assistants.  He married one and had fathered a child to her before filing for divorce.  Another, Claire Kincaid, had been killed in a car accident because of a drunk driver.

          But then again, she had sat in on some of the trials he had prosecuted, and he always seemed very determined.  She didn't always agree with some of the opinions he presented, but his methods were strong.  He had earned the title "Death Trap Jack" in some of her classes at Harvard, but since she supported the death penalty, she didn't agree with the title.

          When Audra arrived at her apartment, her landlord was standing on the stoop holding a rose and a card.  "Some guy on a bike drove up and told me to give these to you," he said as he handed the gifts to Audra.

          "Thanks," she said, taking them in her free hand and walking up to her apartment.  She tore open the card and smiled as she read:          Congratulations on surviving your first day as an ADA.  ~ Jack 

She put the rose in a vase, threw her bag down on her kitchen table and fell asleep.