Mistress of Justice (32 page)

“Mitchell!” Taylor screamed and threw her arms up as trees and plants raced at them at seventy miles an hour. The undercarriage scraping and groaning, metal and plastic supports popping apart. Then brush and reeds were flashing past the car’s windows.

Reece called, “That car, that car! He ran us off the road! He ran us—”

He was braking, trying to grip the wheel as it spun furiously back and forth, the front tires buffeted by rocks and branches. The car slowed as it chewed through the underbrush, the buff-colored rushes and weeds whipping into the windshield.

Taylor’s head slammed against the window; she was stunned. She felt nausea and fear and a huge pain in her back.

Then they were slowing as the slope flattened out. The car was still skewing but the wheels started to track, coming under control.… She heard Reece say reverently, “Son of a bitch,” and saw him smile as the car started a slow skid on the slippery vegetation. Thirty miles an hour, twenty-five …

“Okay, okay …,” Reece muttered to himself. He steered carefully into the skids, braking lightly, regaining control, losing and then regaining it. “Okay, come on,” he whispered seductively to the huge Lincoln.

The car slowed to ten miles an hour. Taylor took his arm and whispered, “Oh, Mitchell.” They smiled at each other, giddy with relief.

But as she looked at his face his smile vanished.

“God!” He shoved his foot onto the brake with all his weight. Taylor looked forward and she saw the brush disappear as they broke out of the foliage and dropped over a
ridge, onto a steep incline that led down to the huge reservoir, a half mile across, its surface broken with choppy waves. The locked wheels slid without resistance along the frost and dewy leaves.

“Taylor!” he called. “We’re going in, we’re going in!” With a last huge rocking jolt, the scenery and the distant gray horizon disappeared. A wave of black oily water crashed into the windshield and started coming into the car from a dozen places at once.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

At eleven that night, in Miami, the phone in Donald Burdick’s hotel room rang.

The partner had been waiting for Ed Gliddick all evening and had fallen asleep, fully dressed, on the couch in his room.

“Yes, hello?” he asked groggily.

“Mr. Burdick?” a woman’s voice asked.

“That’s right. Who’s this?”

“My name’s Jean. I’m calling for Mr. Gliddick.”

Jean? Burdick wondered. Who was this? Ed Gliddick had had the same secretary, Helen, for twenty years and never traveled anywhere without her.

“Yes, Jean, well, I’ve been waiting to see Ed all night. Is he all right?”

“Mr. Gliddick asked me to call you and apologize. He won’t be able to see you, I’m afraid.”

Burdick was angry and disappointed but he said, “Well, it’s late anyway. We can meet for breakfast. I’ll—”

“Actually, sir, I’m afraid he won’t be able to see you at all
this trip. He’s got meetings nonstop for the next two days and then he’s got to get home to Battle Creek.”

Burdick closed his eyes and sighed. So, ambushed by Clayton yet again.

“I see. By any chance was there another attorney from Hubbard, White & Willis in town tonight?”

“I wouldn’t know, sir.”

“Okay,” Burdick said wearily, realizing it would be pointless to call Steve Nordstrom—the coward wouldn’t even pick up the phone. “If you could deliver a message to Ed for me.”

“I’d be happy to.”

“ ‘And you too, Brutus?’ Do you have that?”

“Uhm, I do, sir. Will he know what it means?”

“I’m sure he will.” Burdick dropped the phone in the cradle then picked it up once more to call his wife.

In front of them the huge reservoir extended in faintly lapping waves to the trees on the opposite shore. The moon reflected off the water, broken into a thousand crescents on the textured surface. It would’ve been quite romantic if they hadn’t been wet and freezing.

Taylor Lockwood and Reece sat in the front seat of the rental Lincoln, legs crossed to keep their feet out of the six inches of water that filled the bottom of the car’s interior.

After the skid to the bottom of the hill, with its dramatic conclusion—a braking splash like a Disneyland ride—the Lincoln had settled into about eighteen inches of water and stopped sinking.

The reservoir was huge but here, apparently, very shallow.

They’d laughed—edgy and a bit hysterical—but then the humor wore off quickly when they realized that while they could open the door, they’d have a thirty- or forty-foot trek through freezing water up to a deserted road, where they’d have to wait for help with no way to keep warm.

Reece called the police on his cell phone and then they curled their legs up and huddled in their coats.

The dispatcher had assured them that a squad car and rescue truck would be there in ten minutes. But that had been some time ago and, since Reece had been unable to tell them exactly where they’d run off the road, he guessed their rescue might not be imminent even now.

“Who was it?” Taylor asked.

“The thief, I assume. I didn’t get a good look at him. Middle-aged guy, white, hat, collar turned up. I didn’t even see what kind of car it was. Just a white streak.”

“An accident?”

“No way,” Reece answered. “He was steering for us.”

“Who was at the party—who’d know we were there?”

Reece shrugged. “Thom Sebastian, Dudley. And most of Clayton’s little goose-stepping clones, except Randy Simms.” Then he fell silent for a moment, finally saying, “I’m thinking it’s time to tell the police what happened. Tell them everything.”

“No.” She shook her head.

“I didn’t think this was going to happen, Taylor. I never thought it could turn violent.”

She said, “It wouldn’t make sense to kill us. That’d bring the police in for sure, and he doesn’t want that any more than we do. He didn’t know we’d go off the road. He was just scaring us.”

Reece considered.

Taylor scooted closer to him. “We’re almost there. I can feel it. The trial’s day after tomorrow. Let’s just hold out until then.” She took his head in both her hands. “Just until then?”

“I don’t know.”

But he was weakening. She repeated, “Just until then,” though when she said the words this time, they were not spoken as a question but as a command. He opened his mouth to protest, but she shook her head and touched his lips with her finger.

He leaned close, following the motion of her finger to
her own lips. They kissed hard and their arms wound around each other.

A moment later this embrace was interrupted by several probing flashlights, their fierce halogen beams converging on the car. As Reece and Taylor leapt apart they could hear a laugh and an amused voice. “Whoa, lookit that car! Looks like it’s floating. Hank, lookit! I mean, you ever seen anything like that?”

To which another voice replied, “I surely haven’t. Not in a month of Sundays.”

At lunch on Monday, the day before the New Amsterdam trial, Taylor Lockwood sat in Mc Sorley’s Old Ale House in Manhattan and watched John Silbert Hemming down a mug of ale.

He may not’ve been the traditional private eye who tossed back Scotch on the job but this boy loved his beer. The tall man finished his sixth mug of dark brew and called for three more. “They’re small.”

True, they were, though Taylor was having trouble with her second. She’d drunk more wine than she’d intended at Clayton’s and had not gotten much sleep, thanks to the dip in the reservoir—and Reece’s presence in bed next to her.

She told Hemming about the Supreme Court case that required the pub to allow women in; for many years it had been a men-only establishment.

“Some achievement,” Hemming muttered, looking at the carved-up bare wood tables, the wishbone collection growing a dark fur of dust and the crowds of young frat boys shouting and hooting. He glowered at a drunk, beer-spilling student stumbling toward them. The boy caught the huge man’s gaze and changed direction quickly. With some true curiosity in his voice the detective asked Taylor, “Are we having a date?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ah,” he said and nodded. “How did the fingerprints work out?”

“Not bad. I’ll send you a postcard.”

“If you want I’ll show you how to do plantars.”

“Vegetable prints?”

“Very good but no—feet, Ms. Lockwood.”

“Taylor.”

“Feet.”

Taylor handed him the piece of paper with the information from the invoice she’d found in Wendall Clayton’s desk. “John, have you ever heard of this company?”

He read, “Triple A Security? They’re not around New York. But we can assume it’s a sleazy outfit.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s an old trick to get in the front of the phone book—to have your listing first. Name your company with a lot of A’s. You want me to check it out?”

“Can you?”

“Sure.” A waiter carrying fifteen mugs in one hand swooped past and dropped two more, unasked-for.

“Would somebody from a security service—say, this disreputable Triple A outfit—commit a crime?”

“Jaywalking?”

“Worse.”

“Stealing apples?”

“That category. More valuable than fruit.”

He sat up and towered over her for an instant then hunched forward again. “At the big security firms, like our place, absolutely not. You commit a crime, you lose your license and your surety bond’s invalidated. But these small outfits”—he tapped the paper—“there’s a fine line between the good guys and the bad guys. I mean, somebody’s got to
plant
the bugs that my company finds, right? And planting bugs is illegal.”

“Any funny stuff?”

“That’s not a term of art in my profession.”

“Say, hypothetically, trying to run somebody off the road.”

“Run somebody off …”

Taylor whispered, “… the road.”

Hemming hesitated a moment and said, “This sort of
place—Triple A Security—yeah, you could possibly find somebody there who might be willing to do that. Worse too.”

Taylor finished the bitter dark ale. She opened her purse, pulled out a twenty and signaled the waiter.

“Is there a Mr. Lockwood?” Hemming asked.

“Yes, but you wouldn’t really like my father.”