Mistress of Justice

a phone call from his boss.
    “Of course.”
    “I’m aware of people asking questions around the firm, Sean. Anybody been asking you questions?”
    “Uh, no.”
    “You are making sure you cover tracks? Being a good Boy Scout or nature guide or something?”
    “Yeah, I’m not stupid, Wendall.”
    “No, of course you’re not. Just make sure everything’s covered up carefully, no way to trace what you and I’ve been up to. You know legal defense fees can be
so
expensive. They can eat up all one’s savings in a flash.”
    The boy’s silence told him that the threat had been received.
    Clayton looked up into the doorway, where a young woman stood at attention. “Better go, Sean. Be in early tomorrow. Snip any ends, okay?”
    “Sure.”
    The partner hung up, his eyes on the woman. She was one of the night stenographers from the word processing department. Her name was Carmen and she was slim and had a complexion like a week-old tan. She wore tight blouses and dark skirts that would be too short for the day, but on the evening shift the dress code was more relaxed.
    “I got your call, Mr. Clayton. You need some dictation?”
    Clayton looked at her legs then her breasts. “Yes, I do.”
    Carmen had a five-year-old son, fathered by a man who was currently in prison. She lived with her mother in the Bronx. She had a patch of stretch marks on her lower belly and a tattoo of a rose on her left buttock.
    “Why don’t you close the door,” he said. “We don’t want the cleaning staff to disturb us.”
    She waited until he’d taken his wallet from his suit jacket pocket and opened it up before she swung the door shut and locked it.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    It was nearly 8 P.M . but for some reason the closing of a corporate merger that had begun at 2 that afternoon ran into difficulties and was not yet completed—some delay in Japanese regulatory approvals.
    The Hubbard, White & Willis lawyers and paralegals working on the case, clutching stacks of documents, scurried back and forth between the several conference rooms devoted to the closing like ants stealing bread crumbs from a picnic though with considerably more content faces than their insect counterparts—presumably because ants don’t make a collective $4,000 per hour for carting around bits of soggy food. The clients, on the other hand—the
payers
of those legal fees—were nothing but frustrated.
    Back from her trip to Lillick’s apartment, Taylor Lockwood had learned many intimate details about the closing because she’d been dodging the lawyers and clients for the past hour. Like the clients in the delayed deal, Taylor had her own frustrations.
    John Silbert Hemming had neglected to tell her that dactyloscopy powder didn’t come off.
    She’d just finished fingerprinting Reece’s burglarized file cabinet and painstakingly transferring the sticky tape of the two dozen latents she’d found to cards. She thought back to what Hemming’d told her. Yes, he’d mentioned the different kinds of powders. He’d mentioned how to spread it around and how to brush, not blow, the excess away.
    But he hadn’t told her the stuff was like dry ink.
    Once you—once
one
—dusted it onto the surface the damn stuff didn’t wipe off. The smear just got bigger and bigger.
    She wasn’t concerned about the file cabinet that had contained the note. She was concerned about Mitchell Reece’s coffee mug, emblazoned with “World’s Greatest Lawyer,” which she’d dusted to get samples of his prints to eliminate those from the ones she lifted off his cabinet.
    Fingerprinting powder coated the mug like epoxy paint. She did her best to clean it then noticed she’d gotten some on her blouse. She pinched the midriff of the shirt and fluffed the poor garment to see if that would dislodge the powder. No effect. She tried to blow it away, and—as her tall private eye had warned—spit into the smear, which immediately ran the powder into the cloth. Permanently, she suspected.
    Taylor sighed and pulled on her suit jacket to cover the smudge.
    She hurried down to Ralph Dudley’s office, where she lifted samples of his fingerprints, then on to Thom Sebastian’s, where she did the same.
    Finally, back in the paralegal pens, she took samples of Sean Lillick’s prints from several objects in his cubicle. Then back in her own cubicle she put the fingerprint cards in an envelope and hid it under a stack of papers in the bottom drawer of her desk.
    She found the phone number