"I'm... not equipped to identify the best criminal defense lawyer in the star system."

"I am even less so equipped! We'll start with a criminal defense lawyer."

"Okay..."

Eventually he turns up somebody from Federated Stations.

They'll send an email.

She will also write a note to Maitimo.

...I'll see what I can do.

It has occurred to him that the Elf criminal justice system, which treats murder about the same as assault, is inappropriate to the case of species which die, uh, permanently. It seems that the human justice system's handling of murder might similarly be unfairly harsh in punishing murders of Elves, since after all the Elves can go on their way in twenty minutes without the memory of dying if they noted in their will that they preferred not to remember dying. Can he possibly arrange some negotiations with everyone he's established relations with, to establish as a point of law that the murder of people who actually permanently die is legally distinct from the murder of people who are immediately restored to good health? Does the GCP, which prosecutes some murders, want to send a representative?

The Federated Stations lawyer is a fangirl of this one lady on Mars who in her personal opinion is the best criminal defense lawyer in the system.

Various negotiating authorities are willing to acknowledge as mitigating factors a) being alive and healthy after b) going about your business c) having as an option not remembering the experience and d) having expected this in advance, for purposes of threats and so on.

That's good. 

Cam, I think at this point the advantages of humans knowing they have an afterlife outweigh the disadvantages. 

...Cam reviews the prompting event. You realize they're going to completely champion the birth parents over the demon adoptive mom.

Kid doesn't have to answer a summons.

Yeah, but they can lay down 320 circles for a runaway as sure as they can for a murderer.

They would do that? To force a child to return to a living situation they're voluntarily avoiding?

I mean, you also don't know that she wouldn't prefer her original parents. But yes.

If she'd prefer her original parents then that's a reason for them to know she's alive. But - their treatment of demons is so fucked up I have no faith in the ability of a typical Revelation family to lovingly parent one.

They might figure it out quick if it was their kid.

Maybe.

And is the best defense lawyer in the star system interested in discussing a murder case with her?

For six thousand Martian dollars an hour sure!

He has money.

She's not even entirely clear on what it is. But the lawyer gets paid. 

"So here's what happened: the defendant had just completed the adoption of a five-year-old girl. She went to work, asked to quit, was told she couldn't quit on short notice, and was locked in there; she pleaded with them to let her go and was refused; they gagged her and left her there; she killed someone escaping. She went home to her daughter. She was arrested two years later, convicted of murder and sentenced to fifty years in prison. The complication is that she's a demon."

The lawyer looks really interested until the demon part. Then she looks fascinated. "How did she manage to adopt a child?"

"Child demons appear in Hell sometimes. It's very rare but it happens. When they do, they have lots of interested adoptive parents, and Olivia - the child - liked Celendra - the defendant. Celendra had a long-term summons doing communications conjuration on Mars; she arranged a babysitter for her daughter and showed up to the summons to let them know she'd adopted a child and was quitting. They refused to dismiss her. They stopped talking to her, and she had a gag so she couldn't speak when she wasn't being spoken to. Eventually she killed her summoner so she could go home."

"What's your interest in the case?"

"I'm a variant kind of Elf with telepathy. We've been on Ganymede talking to the demons - because they're all gagged in prison, they can't write for example their daughter or their spouse or an attorney, they technically have internet access but they can't produce letters or words so in practice they don't. We can take dictation for them, we can notify friends or family of why they abruptly went missing and that they're not expected home for sixty, seventy years - Elven law doesn't permit gagging people for decades, see, so we're going to have telepaths continually accessible to the demons until the Ganymede Circling Police see fit to reconsider their own treatment of prisoners - anyway, she told me her story and I thought that if she were human it'd be a clear-cut case of self-defense, killing your kidnapper -"

"Hm - where was this?"

"Mars."