Jeffery Deaver - Mistress of Justice

A bit of emotion blossomed in his face at this – like the first cracks in spring ice. Reece took a Kleenex from his pocket and began rubbing the trigger guard and grip and frame of the gun. He nodded. "You won't believe me if I tell you that what happened between us wasn't part of the plan."

"Bullshit! You tried to kill me."

His eyes grew wide. "I didn't want to hurt you! You should have stopped when you were supposed to!"

Burdick said, "But Mitchell, how could you risk it? You love the law. You'd risk everything for this, for revenge?"

He smiled with a look as bleak as a hunting field in December. "But there was no risk, Donald. Don't you know me by now? I knew I'd get away with it. Every nuance was planned. Every action and reaction. Every move anticipated and guarded against. I planned this exactly the same way I plan my trials. There was no way it wouldn't work." He sighed and shook his head. "Except for you, of course, Taylor. You were the flaw. Why didn't you just let it go? I killed an evil man. I did the firm – hell, I did the world – a favor."

"You used me!"

Donald Burdick sat heavily in a chair, his head dipping. "Oh, Mitchell, all you had to do was go to the police. Clayton would've been arrested for the girl's death."

The young lawyer gave a harsh laugh. "You think so? And what would've happened, Donald? Nothing. Any half-assed criminal lawyer could've gotten him off. There was no witness, no physical evidence. Besides, you of all people ought to know how many favors Clayton could've called in. The case wouldn't've even gotten to the grand jury."

His attention dipped for a moment to the gun. He flipped it open expertly and saw six cartridges in the cylinder. Then from his pocket he took the note that Taylor Lockwood had written to him, the note about going to confront a killer. He folded it into a tight square, stepped forward and stuffed it into her breast pocket.

She whispered, nodding at it, "I wrote my own suicide note, didn't I? I kill Donald and then myself. Oh, my God."

"It's your fault," he muttered. "You should've just moved on, Taylor. You should've let Clayton stay in hell and let the rest of us get on with our business."

"My fault?" She leaned forward. "What the hell happened to you? Has it all caught up? Finally? Pushing, pushing, pushing years and years of it. Win the case, win the goddamn case – that's all you see, all you care about! You don't know what justice is anymore. You've turned it inside out."

"Don't lecture me," he said wearily. "Don't talk to me about things you can't understand. I live with the law, I've made it a part of me."

Burdick said, "There's no way you can justify it, Mitchell. You killed a man."

Reece rubbed his eyes. After a moment, he said, "You get asked a lot why you go to law school. Did you go because you wanted to help society, to make money, to further justice? That's what people always want to know. Justice? There's so little of it in the world, so little justice in our lives. Maybe on the whole it balances out, maybe God looks down from someplace and says, 'Yeah, pretty good, I'll let it go at that'. But you know the law as well as I do, both of you. Innocent people serve time and guilty ones get off. Wendall Clayton killed Linda Davidoff and he was going to go free. I wasn't going to let that happen."

Taylor said, "The suicide note – Claytons 'Men of most renowned virtue…' How does it go?"

Reece said, '"Have sometimes by transgressing most truly kept the law.'"

"You meant it about you, then, not Clayton."

Reece nodded solemnly. "It's about me."

"Mitchell," Burdick whispered, "just put the gun down. We'll go to the police. If you talk to them -"

But Reece walked slowly over to Taylor. He stood two feet away. She didn't move.

"No!" Burdick shouted. "Don't worry about the police. We can forget what happened. There's no need for this to go beyond this room. There's no need.

Reece glanced at the partner briefly but didn't speak. His whole attention was on Taylor. He touched her hair, then her cheek. He nestled the muzzle of the gun against her breast.

"I wish." He cocked the gun. "I wish…"

Taylor wiped the thick tears. "But it's me, Mitchell. Me. Think about what you're going to do."

"Please, Mitchell," Burdick said. "Money, do you want money? A fresh start somewhere?"

But it was Taylor who raised her hand to silence the partner. "No. He's come too far. There's nothing more to say."

At last there were tears on Reece's face. The gun wavered and rose. For a moment it seemed to be levitating, maybe he intended to touch the chill muzzle to his own temple and pull the trigger.

But his deeper will won and he lowered the black weapon to her once more.

Alice, in this dreadful world on the other side of the looking glass, remained completely still. There was no place to go. All she could do was close her eyes, which is what she now did.

Mitchell Reece, practical as ever, held his left hand to his face to protect himself from the blast – and her spattered blood -and then he pulled the trigger.

In the hushed conference room the metallic click was as loud as the gunshot would have been.

Reece's eyes flickered for a moment. He pulled the trigger three more times.

Three more clicks echoed throughout the room. His hand lowered.

"Fake," he whispered with the tone of someone observing an impossible occurrence. "It's fake."

Taylor wiped the streaming tears from her face. "Oh, Mitchell."

Burdick stepped forward and firmly lifted the gun away from him.

Taylor said, "The gun's real, Mitchell, but the bullets're just props." She shook her head. "All I had was speculation. I needed proof that you did it."

Reece leaned against the wall. "Oh, my God!" He was staring at Taylor. "How?" he whispered. She'd never seen such shock in anyone's eyes – pure, uncomprehending astonishment.

"A lot of clues. I finally put together today," she said. "What got me wondering was the poem, Linda's poem."

"Poem?"

"The one that Wendall left as her suicide note. I read it in the hospital and, you know, everybody thought it was a suicide note. But nobody really understood what it was about. It was a love poem. It wasn't about killing herself, it was about leaving solitude and loneliness and starting a new life with somebody she loved. Anybody who was going to kill herself wouldn't leave that as a suicide note. Danny Stuart, her roommate, said she wrote it just a few days before she died."

He was shaking his head. "Impossible. You couldn't make that kind of deduction, not from the suicide note back to me."

"No, of course not. It's just what put the idea in my head that maybe she didn't kill herself. But then I started to think about everything that'd happened since you'd asked me to help you find the note, everything I'd learned. I thought about you nudging me away from the other suspects and toward Clayton. I thought about what kind of strategist you were, about Clayton's womanizing, about how it would be easy for you to get a gun from one of your clients in the criminal pro bono program. Your trips to Linda's grave. I had my private-eye friend check out your mother. Yes, she was a paranoid schizophrenic. But she died four years ago. Oh, Mitchell, you looked me right in the eye and lied. I felt like crying when you told me about your mother." Still, he held her eye, not a flicker of remorse in his. "Then," she continued, "I called the Boston US attorney's office. Your friend Sam hasn't worked for them for four years. You faked that call to him from the street in front of your loft, didn't you?" Her anger broke through. "You're a pretty fucking good actor, Mitchell."

Then, calming, she continued. "Hard evidence? You yourself helped me there – that first day I met you, when you mentioned that the records in law firms reveal all kinds of information about where people've been and how they spend their time. I went through the time sheets going back a year and figured out exactly what happened. It's all right there. You and Linda working together, taking time off together, logging travel time to clients on the same date, joint meal vouchers. Then Linda's time drops and she takes sick leave and files insurance claims because she's pregnant. And not long after that she dies."