Mistress of Justice

AUTHOR’S NOTE
     
    Two of my most heartfelt beliefs about writing suspense fiction are these: First, it’s a craft—a skill that can be learned and refined and improved with practice. Second, we writers of suspense fiction have a duty to entertain and to—as the other moniker for the genre suggests—
thrill
our readers.
    In rereading the first version of this book, which I wrote thirteen years ago, I realized that, while it was a perfectly acceptable dramatic, character-driven study of life on Wall Street, it didn’t make my—and presumably my readers’—palms sweat.
    It didn’t, in other words, thrill.
    I considered just letting the book stand as a curiosity among the suspense novels I’ve written but I felt the nag of the second belief I mentioned above—that overarching duty to readers. I know how much I enjoy the experience of reading a roller coaster of a story and I felt that the premise of this novel and the characters I’d created would lend themselves to more of a carnival ride of a book. Hence, I dismantled the book completely and rewrote nearly all of it.
    I had a chance recently to write an introduction to a new edition of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
and during the course of researching her work I learned that she significantly revised the novel thirteen years after it was first published (how’s
that
for a coincidence?). Many of the changes in the later edition of
Frankenstein
reflected the author’s altered worldview. Not so in the case of
Mistress of Justice
. The current edition stands true to its view of Wall Street in the chaotic era of the 1980s—takeover fever, uncontrolled wealth, too-chic-for-words Manhattan clubs, ruthlessness in boardrooms and bedrooms … and the many hardworking lawyers who wished for nothing more than to help their clients and to make a living at their chosen profession.
    My special thanks to editor Kate Miciak for giving me this chance and for helping this book realize its potential.
    —J.D., Pacific Grove, CA, 2001

ONE
Conflicts of Interest
     
    “Let the jury consider their verdict,” the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
    “No, no,” said the Queen. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards.”
    —Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
     

CHAPTER ONE
     
    The drapery man had been warned that even though it was now well after midnight, Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, there would very likely be people in the firm here, attorneys and paralegals, still working.
    And so he carried the weapon at his side, pointed downward.
    It was a curious thing—not a knife exactly, more of an ice pick, but longer and made of a blackened, tempered metal.
    He held it with the confidence of someone who was very familiar with the device. And who had used it before.
    Dressed in gray coveralls bearing the stencil of a bogus drapery cleaning service and wearing a baseball cap, the big, sandy-haired man now paused and, hearing footsteps, slipped into an empty office. Then there was silence. And he continued on, through shadows, pausing for a long moment, frozen like a fox near a ground nest of skittish birds.
    He consulted the diagram of the firm, turned along one corridor and continued, gripping the handle of the weapontightly in his hand, which was as muscular as the rest of his body.
    As he neared the office he sought, he reached up and pulled a paper face mask over his mouth. This was not so that he wouldn’t be recognized but because he was concerned that he might lose a fleck of spit that could be retrieved as evidence and used in a DNA match.
    The office, which belonged to Mitchell Reece, was at the end of the corridor, not far from the front door of the firm. Like all the offices here, the lights were left on, which meant that the drapery man wasn’t sure that it was unoccupied. But he glanced in quickly, saw that the room was empty and stepped inside.
    The office was very cluttered. Books, files, charts, thousands of sheets of papers. Still, the man found the filing cabinet easily—there was only one here with two locks on it—and crouched, pulling on tight latex gloves and extracting his tool kit from his coverall pockets.
    The drapery man set the weapon nearby and began to work on the locks.

     
    Scarf, Mitchell Reece thought, drying his hands in the law firm’s marble-and-oak rest room. He’d forgotten his wool scarf.
    Well, he was surprised he’d managed to remember his coat and briefcase. The lanky