Trick goes to Panama for some high-stakes card game. He tells nobody , and it's assumed that Rashid had killed him, although nobody really knows. Rashid is arrested for murder, but there's no body. Rashid gets Carmel as a lawyer, and Carmel's a good lawyer. In this book, we see her working out how to impeach the evidence.
Trick gets back from Panama.
Trick is a fun character, and may return. I've gotten a lot of email about this, and people have openly complained on the usenet newsgroups about it. It seems that my dad has lost his mind with regard to people's names. I don't know if this is literally true, but there's a lot of evidence for it, and some of it is unknown to general readers. Now I don't know anyone named Hale, and am hard-pressed to think of anyone I've even heard of with that name.