Mistress of Justice

“Don’t talk to me about things you can’t understand. I live with the law, I’ve made it a part of me.”
    Burdick said, “There’s no way you can justify it, Mitchell. You killed a man.”
    Reece rubbed his eyes. After a moment, he said, “You get asked a lot why you go to law school. Did you go because you wanted to help society, to make money, to further justice? That’s what people always want to know. Justice? There’s so little of it in the world, so little justice in our lives. Maybe on the whole it balances out; maybe God looks down from someplace and says, ‘Yeah, pretty good, I’ll let it go at that.’ But you know the law as well as I do, both of you. Innocent people serve time and guilty ones get off. Wendall Clayton killed Linda Davidoff and he was going to go free. I wasn’t going to let that happen.”
    Taylor said, “The suicide note—Clayton’s. ‘Men of most renowned virtue …’ How does it go?”
    Reece said, “ ‘Have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.’ ”
    “You meant it about you, then, not Clayton.”
    Reece nodded solemnly. “It’s about me.”
    “Mitchell,” Burdick whispered, “just put the gun down. We’ll go to the police. If you talk to them—”
    But Reece walked slowly over to Taylor. He stood two feet away. She didn’t move.
    “No!” Burdick shouted. “Don’t worry about the police. We can forget what happened. There’s no need for this to go beyond this room. There’s no need.…”
    Reece glanced at the partner briefly but didn’t speak. His whole attention was on Taylor. He touched her hair, then her cheek. He nestled the muzzle of the gun against her breast.
    “I wish …” He cocked the gun. “I wish …”
    Taylor wiped the thick tears. “But it’s me, Mitchell.
Me
. Think about what you’re going to do.”
    “Please, Mitchell,” Burdick said. “Money, do you want money? A fresh start somewhere?”
    But it was Taylor who raised her hand to silence the partner. “No. He’s come too far. There’s nothing more to say.”
    At last there were tears on Reece’s face. The gun wavered and rose. For a moment it seemed to be levitating; maybe he intended to touch the chill muzzle to his own temple and pull the trigger.
    But his deeper will won and he lowered the black weapon to her once more.
    Alice, in this dreadful world on the other side of the looking glass, remained completely still. There was no place to go. All she could do was close her eyes, which is what she now did.
    Mitchell Reece, practical as ever, held his left hand to his face to protect himself from the blast—and her spattered blood—and then he pulled the trigger.

CHAPTER FORTY
     
    In the hushed conference room the metallic click was as loud as the gunshot would have been.
    Reece’s eyes flickered for a moment. He pulled the trigger three more times.
    Three more clicks echoed throughout the room. His hand lowered.
    “Fake,” he whispered with the tone of someone observing an impossible occurrence. “It’s fake?”
    Taylor wiped the streaming tears from her face. “Oh, Mitchell …”
    Burdick stepped forward and firmly lifted the gun away from him.
    Taylor said, “The gun’s real, Mitchell, but the bullets’re just props.” She shook her head. “All I had was speculation. I needed proof that you did it.”
    Reece leaned against the wall. “Oh, my God.” He was staring at Taylor. “How?” he whispered. She’d never seen such shock in anyone’s eyes—pure, uncomprehending astonishment.
    “A lot of clues I finally put together today,” she said. “What got me wondering was the poem, Linda’s poem.”
    “Poem?”
    “The one that Wendall left as her suicide note. I read it in the hospital and, you know, everybody
thought
it was a suicide note. But nobody really understood what it was about. It was a
love
poem. It wasn’t about killing herself, it was about leaving solitude and loneliness and starting a new life with somebody she loved. Anybody who was going to kill herself wouldn’t leave that as a suicide note. Danny Stuart, her roommate, said she wrote it just a few days before she died.”
    He was shaking his head. “Impossible. You couldn’t make that kind of deduction, not from the suicide note back to me.”
    “No, of course not. It’s just what put the idea in my head that maybe she didn’t kill herself. But then I started to think about everything that’d happened since you’d asked me to help you find the