Mistress of Justice

thirty-three-year-old associate, having had only four hours’ sleep, had arrived at the firm around 8 A.M . yesterday, Saturday, and had worked straight through until about an hour ago, when he’d fallen asleep at his desk.
    A few moments before, something had startled him out of that sleep. He’d roused himself and decided to head home for a few hours of shut-eye the old-fashioned way—horizontally. He’d grabbed his coat and briefcase and made this brief pit stop.
    But he wasn’t going outside without his scarf—1010WINS had just reported the temperature was 22 degrees and falling.
    Reece stepped into the silent corridor.
    Thinking about a law firm at night.
    The place was shadowy but not dark, silent yet filled with a white noise of memory and power. A law firm wasn’t like other places: banks or corporations or museums or concert halls; it seemed to remain alert even when its occupants were gone.
    Here, down a wide wallpapered corridor, was a portrait of a man in stern sideburns, a man who left his partnership at the firm to become governor of the state of New York.
    Here, in a small foyer decorated with fresh flowers, was an exquisite Fragonard oil painting, no alarm protecting it. In the hall beyond, two Keith Harings and a Chagall.
    Here, in a conference room, were reams of papers containing the magic words required by the law to begin a corporate breach of contract suit for three hundred million dollars, and in a similar room down the hall sat roughly the same amount of paper, assembled in solemn blue binders, which would create a charitable trust to fund private AIDS research.
    Here, in a locked safe-file room, rested the last will and testament of the world’s third-richest man—whose name most people had never heard of.
    Mitchell Reece put these philosophical meanderings down to sleep deprivation, told himself to mentally shut up and turned down the corridor that would lead to his office.

     
    Footsteps approaching.
    In a soldier’s instant the drapery man was on his feet, the ice pick in one hand, his burglar tools in the other. He eased behind the door to Reece’s office and quieted his breathing as best he could.
    He’d been in this line of work for some years. He’d been hurt in fights and had inflicted a great deal of pain. He’dkilled seven men and two women. But this history didn’t dull his emotions. His heart now beat hard, his palms sweated and he fervently hoped he didn’t have to hurt anyone tonight. Even people like him vastly preferred to avoid killing.
    Which didn’t mean he’d hesitate to if he were found out here.
    The steps grew closer.

     
    Mitchell Reece, walking unsteadily from exhaustion, moved down the corridor, his feet tapping on the marble floor, the sound occasionally muffled when he strode over the Turkish rugs carefully positioned throughout the firm (and carefully mounted on antiskid pads; law firms are extremely cognizant of slip-and-fall lawsuits).
    In his mind was a daunting list of tasks to complete before the trial that was scheduled in two days. Reece had graduated from Harvard Law fourth in his class, largely thanks to lists—memorizing for his exams volumes of cases and rules of law and statutes. He was now the firm’s most successful senior litigation associate for much the same reason. Every single aspect of the case—the civil trial of
New Amsterdam Bank & Trust, Ltd. v. Hanover & Stiver, Inc.
—was contained in a complicated series of lists, which Reece was constantly reviewing and editing in his mind.
    He supposed he’d been reviewing his lists when he’d neglected to pick up his scarf.
    He now approached the doorway and stepped inside.
    Ah, yes, there it was, the tan cashmere given to him by a former girlfriend. It sat just where he’d left it, next to the refrigerator in the coffee room across from his office. When he’d arrived that morning—well, make
that yesterday
morning at this point—he’d stopped first in this canteen room to make a pot of coffee and had dropped the scarf on the table while getting the machine going.
    He now wrapped it around his neck and stepped outinto the corridor. He continued to the front door of the firm. He hit the electric lock button and—hearing the satisfying click that he’d come to know so well, thanks to his thousands of late hours at the firm—Mitchell Reece stepped into the lobby, where he summoned the elevator.
    As he waited it seemed to him that he heard a noise somewhere in the