Supreme Justice (2 page)

“I always turn to the sports page first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”

Earl Warren, Thirtieth Governor of the State of California, Fourteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Section 21, Lot S-32, Grid M-20.5, Arlington National Cemetery.

TWO

Though patient by nature, Joseph Reeder only truly found peace in one place: Arlington National Cemetery. Strolling those gently rolling grounds, among heroes and patriots, he found a tranquility unavailable to him anywhere else on the planet. Of course, the serenity provided by the endless white markers would be eclipsed in another hour or so—at 8:00 a.m., the cemetery opened to visitors.

Reeder was a member of a very exclusive club: a Secret Service agent—in Reeder’s case,
former
agent—who had taken a bullet for a president of the United States. This granted him, and others like him, special dispensation to wander the grounds at any time that suited him. Those times were mostly very early in the morning, well before others were allowed in.

A shade over six foot tall, five years north of forty, Reeder still had the anonymous look of a Secret Service agent: fit, with regular features that split the difference between rugged and handsome, his dark brown eyes behind sunglasses on this already bright morning.

His most distinctive feature was his short-cropped white hair, which included his eyebrows; he’d gone white before his thirtieth birthday, a family trait, and had colored it during his agent days, not out of vanity but to blend in better. No need for that now.

The quiet, the calm, wasn’t Reeder’s only motivation to visit Arlington. These early mornings also helped him work off the extra ten pounds he carried now that fieldwork was behind him. Or at least that was the idea.

Wearing jeans and a red Washington Nationals windbreaker, cell phone clipped to his belt, Reeder might have been any other tourist. Of course, there were no tourists here yet, and he might have been a ghost haunting the place. Maybe he was. Maybe that was why he felt so much at home here.

As he ambled through ANC, he seemed to sense the souls of the dead walking with him. Fellow ghosts, perhaps. Anyway, they sure as hell didn’t haunt him. They only added to the serenity. Around him, at rest, were men and women who had made a difference—many had given their lives simply in defense of a vague ideal, while others had a more solid intellectual grasp on what had led them into government service. Either way, Reeder appreciated every one of them and relished their company.

As he often did, Reeder—on this brisk April morning, the sun slowly climbing in an almost painfully blue sky—found himself in front of the grave of John F. Kennedy. Not a perfect man, but a great one nonetheless, and a hero.

Most visitors had been taught in school about that day in Dallas. They rightly thought of the assassination as a tragedy, the day America lost its innocence, sixty-some years ago. Although Reeder shared those feelings, the tragedy for him involved Clint Hill as well, the Secret Service agent who ran from the limo behind Kennedy’s to jump aboard the President’s vehicle and help reel Jackie back into the car when she crawled onto the trunk lid to retrieve a piece of her husband’s skull.

Hill, a decorated agent who finally retired in 1975 (a decade before Reeder’s birth), had always been haunted by not making it to Kennedy’s car in time to take the third shot himself.

When his turn to take a shot came, Reeder was there, saving President Gregory Bennett, but he well understood Hill’s frustration.

President Bennett had been shaking hands, pressing the flesh, in the town of Burke, Virginia, on a day not unlike this one, when Reeder saw something. To this day, he didn’t know for sure exactly what tipped him: a narrowing of the eyes perhaps, a subtle shift in body language—
something
—but a millisecond before he saw the shooter raise his pistol, Reeder moved. The only reaction he had time for was to dive in front of the President, taking the bullet. It clipped his Kevlar vest, burrowed into his shoulder, shattered his collarbone, ricocheted, and tore through his rotator cuff.

Two agents took down the shooter before he could fire again, while others hustled President Bennett into his bulletproof limousine and to the safety of the White House.

Reeder ended up at Inova Fairfax Hospital, where surgeons did their utmost to repair the mess that was his shoulder. Weeks of recuperation and physical therapy followed. By leaving him in the hospital, the Service’s hope had been to somewhat derail the media frenzy, at least.

It hadn’t worked.

So many reporters were on hand when he was released, the hospital nearly had to shut down.

Looking at President Kennedy’s grave, Reeder knew that
without question
had he acted a nanosecond later, he would have entered the same living hell as Clint Hill. Instead, Reeder had saved a president.

As it happened, a president he despised, a leader of the Free World who stood against everything that Reeder believed in. That had meant a different sort of hell for him than Hill’s, but like Hill he had done his best. Even been decorated for it.

Like everybody else here in Arlington, though, medals didn’t mean shit to Joe Reeder. Particularly
that
medal . . .

What had he gotten out of it, really? The satisfaction of doing his job? A shoulder that predicted precipitation better than the Weather Channel? The reality that the near martyr President Bennett had been sent swaggering into a second term?

Besides serving as his personal weather vane, that balky shoulder had relegated Reeder to a desk job. This he tolerated for only a month before putting his papers in and retiring on disability. Or anyway, that had been the official reason.

For almost four years, liberal-minded Reeder had stood in the background like any good agent, watching mutely as Bennett and his neocon cronies subverted, and sometimes just flat-out ignored, the Constitution of the United States.

Reeder did not hate Republicans. His father had been a Republican, and a conservative in the best sense of the word. He and his dad would argue themselves blue in the face, but it was always good-natured and he could see where his dad was coming from. Small government, states’ rights, balanced budget.

But he knew deep in his DNA that his fair-minded pop would have hated these excuses for real Republicans.

Even though policy dictated that Secret Service agents be apolitical, Reeder finally could not stomach it anymore, and he had quit. His wound, and the desk job, had simply provided a convenient cover. Still, his resignation had been step one in his becoming a pariah among most federal law enforcement personnel.

Though a hero—and a hero who had saved the President of the United States at that—Reeder had broken the unwritten rule. He had unwisely shared his real reason for leaving with several fellow agents, including his immediate superior. The political basis for Reeder quitting spread like a cancer throughout the Service and eventually all of federal law enforcement.

Finally, the
Washington Post
had written a story for which he had declined to comment—in the eyes of many, an admission of guilt . . .

If there were a Hall of Fame for the Secret Service, Joe Reeder would forever be its Pete Rose—he had accomplished great things, but would spend eternity on the outside.

The cell on his belt vibrated, and forced by some inner sense of courtesy, he turned away and withdrew a few steps from Kennedy’s grave before answering.

“Reeder,” he said, keeping his voice low.

“Peep. Glad I caught you.” The familiar voice belonged to Carl Bishop, a DC homicide detective Reeder had known for the better part of two decades.

The nickname
Peep
had been bestowed on him by his fellow Secret Service agents for his storied ability to read people. The more Reeder discouraged its use, the more it had kept up, until the appellation stuck. Now it seemed everyone called him Peep except his eighteen-year-old daughter, Amy. And his ex-wife, Melanie, when she called him anything at all.

“What’s up?” Reeder asked.

“Seen the morning papers?”

“Not yet. Besides, you know all I read is the sports.”

Without preamble, Bishop said, “Henry Venter was shot and killed last night.”

“Jesus. Where?”

“Verdict Chophouse.”

Reeder took a few more steps from Kennedy’s grave as he tried to process the detective’s news. He stopped before a Japanese flowering crabapple tree surrounded by an army of pink tulips and pale yellow daffodils. A more peaceful setting would be hard to imagine, but right now Reeder’s serenity was as shot to hell as his shoulder.

“Venter murdered,” Reeder muttered. Then, strong: “Do we know why? Who?”

“Hell,” Bishop said. “I forgot. You
knew
the man, didn’t you?”

“I knew him.”

“Oh, shit, Peep, I’m sorry to blindside you like that.”

“Forget it, Bish. We weren’t pals.”

For all his liberal leanings, Reeder considered himself a middle-of-the-road Democrat. The ultraconservative Venter, he considered a borderline fascist. Venter had voted to uphold laws that expanded the Patriot Act and gave law enforcement a no-knock policy so lenient that it allowed the government, from the local police on up, to enter any citizen’s dwelling at any time.

Venter also voted to uphold laws that allowed religious relics on public grounds, sanctioned prayer in school, and advocated the teaching of creationism. He even authored the majority opinion when the Court upheld new legislation resurrecting the Sedition Act of 1798. Congress’s intention had been to make a law banning flag burning. What they ended up with was a law that made it legal to arrest anyone for speaking, writing, or publishing anything against the government of the United States.

Venter’s kind of despotic conservatism would have disgusted Reeder’s late father, who bragged that his first vote for president had been Ronald Reagan.

“How did it go down?” Reeder asked. “Shot going in or coming out, I’d guess.”

“You’d guess wrong. Right at his table, having a drink with one of his clerks—Senator Wilson Blount’s son Nicholas.”

A callow waste of skin
, Reeder thought.

“Two armed holdup men came in and terrorized the place,” Bishop was saying, “and evidently Venter went after one of them. Got shot to death for his trouble. TV news crews are proclaiming Venter a hero. He’ll be James Bond by the end of the news cycle.”

Reeder knew how the media worked and that his friend was right—Venter would wind up canonized. “So why call me about it?”

“ABC handles security for the Verdict, right?”

ABC Security was Reeder’s company. The ABC didn’t stand for anything, other than “easy as.”

“Yeah, they’re a client,” Reeder said with a shrug in his voice.

“Well, you got eyes that see shit other people’s eyes don’t, or can’t. Help out a poor DC homicide cop, why don’t you, and take a look at your own security video.”

Reeder’s Secret Service–schooled ability to read people, as well as his expertise in the field of kinesics—the science of facial expressions and body language—was well known. It made a major selling point for his firm—a good deal of his income came from consulting with law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Reeder sighed. “Where is it?”

“I’m sending a copy to your e-mail.”

“Why isn’t the FBI handling this?”

He could almost hear Bishop grimace.

“They are, or will be,” the cop said. “But right now DC Homicide has it. Joint task force is coming together, or will be before the end of the day.”

“Lucky you.”

“Peep, I just want to get out ahead of this while we’re still in charge. By lunch, hell, by nine-
thirty
, we’ll be warming the bench in this game. The Feds’ll march in here, tell us they’re going to cooperate, then I won’t see any of them until the press conference where they announce they caught the killers. I’d like to for once have half a shot at beating them to the punch. You going to help me out or not? I still have pics of you drunk at our Christmas party three years ago, y’know.”

Smirking to himself, Reeder considered the request. Normally, he would gladly help his friend, but knowing that the FBI, and every other agency in the federal alphabet soup, would be on this made him hesitate. Nobody in that world had anything to say to him, except maybe “Who farted?” when he entered the room.

If he was going to assist Bishop, Reeder needed to get right on it.

“Okay, Bish. I’ll get to the office as soon as I can, then I’ll give you a call.”

“You are a god among men,” Bishop said.

“That’s what my mother always said.”

“I would never contradict a man’s mother.”

Quick good-byes, and they clicked off.

Reeder made the short commute from Arlington to his company’s headquarters in Georgetown in under half an hour. His casual attire surprised no one, since he avoided suit-and-tie unless he had business appointments. He grabbed a cup of coffee from the break room, spoke briefly with Janine (his assistant), then shut himself in his private office.

For the CEO of a high-profile security company, Reeder boasted a surprisingly modest work space. His oak desk sat toward the back, two client chairs in front of it, a large window behind it. One wall was consumed by bookshelves filled with everything from manuals to studies to paperback novels, with trophy-style awards serving as decorative bookends.

The opposite wall held a fifty-inch video monitor, currently off, bordered by citations and plaques ABC had earned for helping law enforcement in communities all around the US, but chiefly on the East Coast.

Conspicuous in their absence were any signs of Reeder’s Secret Service career, with the exception of a single framed
Time
magazine cover with the famous photograph of the agent taking a bullet for the president he despised. Reeder had been pressured to display it because prospective clients needed the reminder of just whose services they were enlisting. He had positioned it on the wall where he couldn’t see the goddamn thing from his desk.

Sunlight flooded through the window, and he hit a wall switch, activating a motorized curtain that slowly drew the room to darkness. Muted overhead lights came on as Reeder dropped into his oversize tufted-leather desk chair, the one real indulgence he allowed himself at work.