Mistress of Justice

saying?”
    “Hey, chill.… I hear you, Sea Bass, I hear you.”
    Then the conversation turned to sports and, stinging with cold, Taylor left them to their banter. She walked inside and rejoined the crowd in front of the fireplace, observing how the conversation grew sedate when she entered the room. She nudged herself into the center of the group and sat on the hearth with her back to the fire until the pain from the cold became a fierce itch and then finally died away.

     
    Around 10 P.M . the drapery man walked through Greenwich Village under huge trapezoids of bruise-purple clouds, lit from the perpetual glow of the city.
    He was concentrating on the buildings and finally arrived at the address he sought.
    At the service entrance, which smelled of sour garbage,he inserted his lock gun and flicked the trigger a dozen times until the teeth of the tumblers were aligned. The door opened easily. He climbed to the fourth floor and picked another set of locks—on the door of the particular apartment he sought.
    Inside, he slipped his ice-pick weapon into his belt, handle up, ready to grab it if he had to, and began to search. He found a bag of needlepoint (one a Christmas scene that sure wouldn’t be finished in time for the holiday), a box of Weight Watchers apple snacks, a garter belt in its original gift box, apparently never worn, cartons of musty sheet music. An elaborate, expensive-looking reel-to-reel tape recorder. Dozens of tape cassettes with the same title:
The Heat of Midnight. Songs by Taylor Lockwood
.
    Inside the woman’s briefcase, in addition to sheet music, he found time sheets, key entry logs and other documents from Hubbard, White & Willis. He looked through them carefully and memorized exactly what they contained.
    He found and read through the woman’s address book, her calendar and her phone bills. He listened to her answering machine tapes. His client had hoped that she’d have a diary but very few people kept diaries anymore and Taylor Lockwood was no exception.
    The drapery man continued his search, walking slowly through the apartment, taking his time. He knew his client would grill him at length about what he’d found here and he wanted to make sure he overlooked nothing.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    Taylor dropped into the chair in her cubicle.
    It was six-thirty, Saturday morning. The gods of the furnace had decided that not even Type A attorneys would be in the office yet and so Hubbard, White & Willis was cold as Anchorage.
    She shivered both from the temperature and from exhaustion too. She and Thom Sebastian had arrived back in the city late last night. The lawyer had been subdued. She’d sensed that he was worried she’d ask about Callaghan and he wouldn’t be able to come up with a credible story. But there was something else troubling him. His jokey self was gone. And once she caught him looking at her with an odd, troubled expression on his face.
    She had an image of herself as a condemned prisoner and him as a prison guard, distancing himself from someone about to die.
    Ridiculous, she thought. Still, she could hear his words in her head:
    Well, don’t get too interested in her
.
    What did
that
mean?
    And how the hell had he known she was a musician?
    She noticed a flashing light on her phone, indicating that she had a message. She picked up the receiver to check voice mail.
    Reece had called again to remind her about dinner at his place that night.
    There was one other message.
    Beep
.
    “Hey, counselor, how you doing? Saw an article about your shop in the
Law Journal.
About the merger. You’ve probably seen it but I’m faxing it to you. Always stay on top of firm politics.…”
    If you only knew, Dad, she thought.
    “We’re planning Christmas dinner and we’ve got an RSVP from a Supreme Court justice; I’ll let you guess who. I’m putting him next to you at the table. Just keep your more liberal views to yourself, counselor. I’m serious about that. Okay, I’ll be in town week after next. Your mother says hi.”
    Supreme Court? Samuel Lockwood never did anything without a purpose. What did he have in mind? Was the dinner table placement intended to help her career? she wondered.
    Or
his?
she appended cynically.
    Taylor found the fax her father had sent about the merger of the firms, scanned it quickly. It described the vicious infighting among the partners at Hubbard, White & Willis—Burdick
v
. Clayton—and how, despite the animosity, the merged firms