Jeffery Deaver - Mistress of Justice

Two of my most heartfelt beliefs about writing suspense fiction are these: First, it's a craft – a skill that can be learned and refined and improved with practice. Second, we writers of suspense fiction have a duty to entertain and to – as the other moniker for the genre suggests – thrill our readers.

In rereading the first version of this book, which I wrote thirteen years ago, I realized that, while it was a perfectly acceptable dramatic, character-driven study of life on Wall Street, it didn't make my – and presumably my readers' – palms sweat.

It didn't, in other words, thrill.

I considered just letting the book stand as a curiosity among the suspense novels I've written but I felt the nag of the second belief I mentioned above – that overarching duty to readers I know how much I enjoy the experience of reading a roller coaster of a story and I felt that the premise of this novel and the characters I'd created would lend themselves to more of a carnival ride of a book. Hence, I dismantled the book completely and rewrote nearly all of it.

I had a chance recently to write an introduction to a new edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and during the course of researching her work I learned that she significantly revised the novel thirteen years after it was first published (how's that for a coincidence?) Many of the changes in the later edition of Frankenstein reflected the author's altered worldview. Not so in the case of Mistress of Justice. The current edition stands true to its view of Wall Street in the chaotic era of the 1980s – takeover fever, uncontrolled wealth, too-chic-for-words Manhattan clubs, ruthlessness in boardrooms and bedrooms and the many hardworking lawyers who wished for nothing more than to help their clients and to make a living at their chosen profession.

My special thanks to editor Kate Miciak for giving me this chance and for helping this book realize its potential.

– J. D., Pacific Grove, CA, 2001

The drapery man had been warned that even though it was now well after midnight, Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, there would very likely be people in the firm here, attorneys and paralegals, still working.

And so he carried the weapon at his side, pointed downward.

It was a curious thing – not a knife exactly, more of an ice pick, but longer and made of a blackened, tempered metal.

He held it with the confidence of someone who was very familiar with the device. And who had used it before.

Dressed in gray coveralls bearing the stencil of a bogus drapery cleaning service and wearing a baseball cap, the big, sandy-haired man now paused and, hearing footsteps, slipped into an empty office. Then there was silence. And he continued on, through shadows, pausing for a long moment, frozen like a fox near a ground nest of skittish birds.

He consulted the diagram of the firm, turned along one corridor and continued, gripping the handle of the weapon tightly in his hand, which was as muscular as the rest of his body.

As he neared the office he sought, he reached up and pulled a paper face mask over his mouth. This was not so that he wouldn't be recognized but because he was concerned that he might lose a fleck of spit that could be retrieved as evidence and used in a DNA match.

The office, which belonged to Mitchell Reece, was at the end of the corridor, not far from the front door of the firm. Like all the offices here, the lights were left on, which meant that the drapery man wasn't sure that it was unoccupied. But he glanced in quickly, saw that the room was empty and stepped inside.

The office was very cluttered. Books, files, charts, thousands of sheets of papers. Still, the man found the filing cabinet easily – there, was only one here with two locks on it – and crouched, pulling on tight latex gloves and extracting his tool kit from his coverall pockets.

The drapery man set the weapon nearby and began to work on the locks.

Scarf, Mitchell Reece thought, drying his hands in the law firm's marble-and-oak rest room. He'd forgotten his wool scarf.

Well, he was surprised he'd managed to remember his coat and briefcase. The lanky thirty-three-year-old associate, having had only four hours' sleep, had arrived at the firm around 5 A. M. yesterday, Saturday, and had worked straight through until about an hour ago, when he'd fallen asleep at his desk.

A few moments before, something had startled him out of that sleep. He'd roused himself and decided to head home for a few hours of shut-eye the old-fashioned way – horizontally. He'd grabbed his coat and briefcase and made this brief pit stop.

But he wasn't going outside without his scarf – 1010 WINS had just reported the temperature was 22 degrees and falling.

Reece stepped into the silent corridor.

Thinking about a law firm at night.

The place was shadowy but not dark, silent yet filled with a white noise of memory and power. A law firm wasn't like other places banks or corporations or museums or concert halls, it seemed to remain alert even when its occupants were gone.

Here, down a wide wallpapered corridor, was a portrait of a man in stern sideburns, a man who left his partnership at the firm to become governor of the state of New York.

Here, in a small foyer decorated with fresh flowers, was an exquisite Fragonard oil painting, no alarm protecting it. In the hall beyond, two Keith Harings and a Chagall.

Here, in a conference room, were reams of papers containing the magic words required by the law to begin a corporate breach of contract suit for three hundred million dollars, and in a similar room down the hall sat roughly the same amount of paper, assembled in solemn blue binders, which would create a charitable trust to fund private AIDS research.

Here, in a locked safe-file room, rested the last will and testament of the world's third-richest man – whose name most people had never heard of.

Mitchell Reece put these philosophical meanderings down to sleep deprivation, told himself to mentally shut up and turned down the corridor that would lead to his office.

Footsteps approaching.

In a soldier's instant the drapery man was on his feet, the ice pick in one hand, his burglar tools in the other. He eased behind the door to Reece's office and quieted his breathing as best he could.

He'd been in this line of work for some years. He'd been hurt in fights and had inflicted a great deal of pain. He'd killed seven men and two women. But this history didn't dull his emotions. His heart now beat hard, his palms sweated and he fervently hoped he didn't have to hurt anyone tonight. Even people like him vastly preferred to avoid killing.

Which didn't mean he'd hesitate to it if he were found out here.

The steps grew closer.

Mitchell Reece, walking unsteadily from exhaustion, moved down the corridor, his feet tapping on the marble floor, the sound occasionally muffled when he strode over the Turkish rugs carefully positioned throughout the firm (and carefully mounted on antiskid pads, law firms are extremely cognizant of slip-and-fall lawsuits.)

In his mind was a daunting list of tasks to complete before the trial that was scheduled in two days. Reece had graduated from Harvard Law fourth in his class, largely thanks to lists – memorizing for his exams volumes of cases and rules of law and statutes. He was now the firm's most successful senior litigation associate for much the same reason. Every single aspect of the case – the civil trial of New Amsterdam Bank & Trust, Ltd v Hanover & Stiver, Inc – was contained in a complicated series of lists, which Reece was constantly reviewing and editing in his mind.