Mistress of Justice

stealing documents and bugging offices and even driving people off the road. That’s who Dudley saw. Clayton let him into the firm and he stole the note after you went home.”
    Reece said, “And you think the note’s in that envelope?”
    “I think so. Like you said, he probably hid it in a stackof documents in his office. I’m going to search it. Only we have to wait. He was still at his desk when I left the firm and it didn’t look like he was going to leave anytime soon. I’ll go back to the firm and wait till he leaves for the night.”
    “Taylor … What can I say?” He hugged her, hard, and she threw her arms around him. Their hands began coursing up and down each other’s backs and suddenly it was as if all the compressed tension they’d felt over the past week had been converted into a very different kind of energy … and now suddenly erupted.
    The room vanished into motion: his arms around her, under her legs, sweeping her up. Reece carried her to the huge dining room table and lay her upon it, books falling, papers sailing off onto the floor. He eased her down onto the tabletop, her blouse and skirt spiraling off and away, his own clothes flying in a wider trajectory. He was already hard. He pressed his mouth down on hers, their teeth met and he worked down her neck, biting. Pulling hard on her nipples, her stomach, her thighs. She tried to rise up to him but he held her captive, her butt and leg cut by the sharp corners of a law book: The pain added to the hunger.
    Then he was on top of her, his full weight on her chest, as his hands curled around the small of her back and tugged her toward him. She was completely immobile, her breath forced out of her lungs by his demanding strokes.
    Taylor felt a similar hunger and she dug her nails into his solid back, her teeth clenched in a salivating lust for the pain it was causing.
    They moved like this for minutes, or hours—she had no idea. Finally she screamed as she shuddered, her toes curling, her head bouncing against the table. He finished a moment later and collapsed against her.
    Taylor lifted her hands. Two nails were bloody. She shoved the law book out from underneath her; it fell with a resonant thud. She closed her eyes and they remained locked this way for a long time.
    She dozed briefly.
    When she awoke a half hour later she found that Reecewas at his desk, dressed only in a shirt, scribbling notes, reading cases. She watched his back for a moment then walked to him, kissed the top of his head.
    He turned and pressed his head against her breasts.
    “It’s up to you now,” he said. “I’m going to proceed with the case as if we can’t find the note.” He nodded at the papers surrounding him. “But I’ll hope for the best.”

     
    At three in the morning, wearing her cat burglar outfit of Levi’s and a black blouse, Taylor Lockwood walked into Hubbard, White & Willis.
    Her black Sportsac contained a pair of kidskin gloves, a set of screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, a hammer. The firm seemed empty but she moved through the corridors in complete quiet, pausing in darkened conference rooms, listening for voices or footsteps.
    Nothing.
    Finally she made it to Wendall Clayton’s office and began her search.
    By four-thirty, she’d covered most of it and found no sign of the note. But there were still two tall stacks of documents, on the floor beside his credenza, that she hadn’t looked through yet.
    She continued searching. She finished one and found nothing. She started on the second one.
    Which was when jaunty footsteps sounded on the marble floor in the corridor nearby and Wendall Clayton’s voice boomed to someone, “The merger vote’s in six hours. I need those fucking documents now!”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
     
    He didn’t truly live anywhere but here.
    In murky, echoing rotundas of courthouses like this.
    In marble corridors lit by milky sunlight filtering through fifty-year-old grimy windows, in oak hallways smelling of bitter paper from libraries and file rooms.
    At counsel tables like the one at which he now sat.
    Mitchell Reece studied the courtroom around him, where the opening volley in
New Amsterdam Bank & Trust, Ltd. v. Hanover & Stiver, Inc
. would be fired in a short while. He studied the vaulted ceilings, the austere jury box and a judge’s bench reminiscent of a conning tower on a warship, the dusty flag, the pictures of stern nineteenth-century judges. The room was unlit at the moment. There was