The Final Judgment

by Richard North Patterson

  “For what?”

  A long, slow look. “He’s dead.”

  Brett began shaking.

  Everything changed.

  Brett stood there, mute, a magnet for strangers. Another female trooper entered, with a Polaroid, took pictures of Brett’s face, her throat and torso, her fingertips.

  A knife in her hand…

  A nurse in a scrub suit snipped a piece of Brett’s hair and then, kneeling, clipped from her pubic hair.

  The images came quicker now. A shadow, turning…

  The nurse scraped flecks of blood from Brett’s skin onto a piece of plastic.

  A soft spray rising from his throat…

  She turned to the trooper. “I need to see someone.”

  A quick careful look. “Who?”

  “The policeman who brought me here.”

  The trooper shook her head. “First we have to finish this. Then we’ll find him.”

  At the trooper’s signal, a mustached doctor approached from the side. Gently, he led Brett to the examining table, explained that he would take a swab from her vagina.

  Brett lay staring at the fluorescent lights. As she opened her legs, Brett remembered the feel of James’s tongue.

  “It’s all right.” The doctor’s voice was soothing, comfort for a patient. “We’re almost done.”

  Brett stood, unsteady. The trooper held out a jumpsuit. “You can dress now.”

  Brett did not try to clean herself.

  When she was dressed, the nurse took one hand, then the other, slipping a scalpel beneath each fingernail.

  James wincing as she scraped his back…

  She had left him there. For minutes, perhaps hours, she had not told them.

  “Please,” she pressed, “I need to talk now.”

  They took her fingerprints and then drove her to the jail.

  The sky was purpling with the first thin streak of dawn.

  Now she recognized the police station.

  They led her to a cramped room with two metal desks. The young cop sat at one desk; somehow he had gotten back his jacket. A stranger sat at another, a tape recorder in front of him.

  He was stocky and red-faced, with pale-blue eyes and an air of calm authority. He understood she wished to talk. Hoped she wouldn’t mind the tape…

  “You have the right to remain silent…”

  Brett waited until he finished, and then she began to tell them all she could.

  When it was over, she searched their eyes, saw nothing. They led her to the cell again, and she was alone.

  Voices came from the next room. “Do you know who her grandfather is?” someone asked.

  Only after a time did she see the man standing in front of her cell.

  He was tall and almost gangly, his black hair flecked with gray. His work shirt and khakis were wrinkled, and he had not yet shaved. Twin creases elongated his face and made the large brown eyes knowing and a little sad. He seemed kind, somehow familiar.

  “Oh, Brett.” His voice was soft with melancholy. “What in God’s name have you done?”

  It was, Brett’s lawyer reflected, precisely the question she wished that she could ask. But she was a defense lawyer and could not.

  “Who was he?” Brett asked her. “The man at the jail.”

  The lawyer hesitated, caught in the scene as Brett was describing it, still wondering how much could be believed. But the tall man’s face was very real to her.

  “It was the prosecutor,” she told Brett. “Jackson Watts. Through college, we were friends.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know.” The lawyer paused, then finished. “The last time I saw him was before you were born.”

  For a moment, Brett looked at her curiously. But she said nothing.

  “Tell me,” the lawyer inquired. “Did the police ask anything else?”

  Brett hesitated. “I think they asked if James had other girlfriends.”

  The lawyer tilted her head. “To which you answered…?”

  “No.” Brett’s voice was angry now. “No.”

  Two

  Two days earlier, the Honorable Caroline Clark Masters had stretched her tan legs in front of her, wriggled some sand from between her toes, and gazed out at the white-capped blue of Nantucket Sound.

  It was summer, and afternoon. Sun glistened on the water; a northeast wind tousled the loose black ringlets of her hair. The ocean was dotted with boats, sailing across the northeast winds to Edgartown. Along the beach, stretching to a faraway point, waves broke onto the tawny sand until they seemed to meet a white mist in the distance, sitting lightly on the water. Caroline’s mind flooded with memories.

  Perhaps it was the boy. A college kid, really—a distant figure now, growing smaller as he walked the surf.

  He had looked, she thought, a little as she remembered David. Not the hair so much. Something about the eyes. Perhaps that was why Caroline, disposed to solitude, had spoken to him.

  “Hello.”

  He stopped on the sand, looking from Caroline to the sprawling house on the bluff behind her. Feeling a little guilty, perhaps, to be walking her private beach.

  “Hi.” He shifted from foot to foot, dressed only in cutoffs, lean and brown and not bad looking. With a certain awe, he asked, “Is this place yours?”

  Caroline smiled, shook her head. “Just renting. For a week.”

  He took that in, nodding. Yes, Caroline had thought, a certain pensiveness in the eyes, the same gray blue. But not the same quickness.

  “I’ve been wondering about this place,” he said. “They say the beach has changed totally, from erosion and storms.” He nodded to the rocks and railroad ties behind her, rising from the beach to the bluff. “A few years ago they nearly lost this house, someone told me.”

  Caroline smiled again. “Thirty years ago,” she said, “you and I would be standing on the lawn. The owner and his family played croquet there.”

  “You knew them?”

  Caroline nodded. “Yes. I knew them.”

  As he looked at her more closely, Caroline sensed him calculating her age. Then he turned, pointing to a spit of sand some distance away. “I saw rocks out there, some pilings. Know what that was?”

  “A boathouse. But it belonged to the place next door.”

  “Know what they used it for?”

  “Storage, sometimes.” There was something else, Caroline saw, the way he tilted his head. “One year, a caretaker lived there.”

  “Hurricane got it, I guess.”

  Caroline made her tone dismissive. “I suppose. It was here the last time I was.”

  The boy was silent, as if reflecting on the transience of things. “I hope you haven’t minded my asking these questions.”

  “Not at all.”

  He tilted his head again. “Do I know you from somewhere?”

  Caroline realized, suddenly, that she was not quite ready to have him leave. Smiling, she decided to flatter him a little. “I think I’d remember you.”

  “I don’t mean it’s like we’ve met.” Vaguely flustered, he seemed to peer at her. “Didn’t you used to be in the movies or something?”

  This tacit reference to her age—which Caroline thought she more than deserved—made her laugh aloud at herself. The grin that came with it had a sardonic quality which was relieved by a dimple on one side of her mouth, a light in her green-flecked brown eyes. “Not that I remember.”

  The boy stepped closer. “No, really.”

  Caroline looked up at him, amusement still playing on her mouth. “No,” she said firmly. “Really.”

  Now she watched him, growing smaller, until he vanished.

  Forty-five, she thought, scraping the wounds of young womanhood. She did not quite understand this: the events that had defined her had made Caroline Masters a distinctly unsentimental woman. Yet she had come here. Sometimes it seemed to her that the central events in her life had not happened in New Hampshire, the home of her girlhood, but in this place,
Martha’s Vineyard, near the water.

  She gazed out at the sound. She did not even know whether David was still alive—a man in his forties who thought of her little or, perhaps, with bitterness. She was past all hope of knowing.

  Perhaps it was the nomination that had jarred the past from dormancy.

  “Is there anything we should know,” the President’s counsel had asked her, “which might embarrass the White House?”

  “No,” Caroline had answered. “Nothing.”

  She had spent twenty years of her life, with rising intensity and ambition, waiting to be asked this question. Perhaps it was inevitable, with the nomination so near her grasp, that she would think about the things that had made her as she was.

  The President was down to two choices, Caroline and a fine Hispanic lawyer. At five o’clock, the phone would ring, and Caroline Clark Masters would—or would not—be appointed to the United States Court of Appeals.

  A step, though the thought made her superstitious, from the United States Supreme Court.

  A giant step, yet perhaps not much farther than the distance she had already come. Caroline had arrived in California at twenty-three, with no friends or family she spoke of. Had put herself through law school, then spent fifteen hard years at the public defender’s office, representing murderers and petty drug dealers with more success than the odds allowed; teaching and lecturing and writing articles on criminal justice to spread her reputation; widening her contacts through women’s groups and a little politics; yet careful, always, to keep a core of privacy.

  And then Caroline was appointed to a minor judgeship, the San Francisco Municipal Court. This much she had planned. But what followed—the Carelli case—was an accident.

  The charge was murder. The defendant, Mary Carelli, was a well-known network journalist; the victim was a celebrated novelist. They were alone in a hotel room when, if Carelli could be believed, she had killed him to prevent a rape.

  Caroline conducted the preliminary hearing. The medical examiner believed that Carelli’s claim of attempted rape did not square with the crime scene or the condition of the body. It was more than enough for a Municipal Court judge to find probable cause for a murder trial in the Superior Court, which—in any other case—would have been Caroline’s only job. But then Carelli’s lawyer decided to use the preliminary hearing to challenge probable cause, and demanded that the hearing be televised.

  For two weeks, Caroline ran the most watched hearing in memory with skill, wit, and, most observers agreed, impeccable fairness. By the end of the hearing Caroline was as much a celebrity as Mary Carelli herself.

  Caroline wasted no time. She appeared on television, gave interviews—long on charm and short on biography—to carefully selected journalists. Offers poured in: the one she took, a partnership in a large San Francisco firm, offered her corporate contacts and wider credentials. When the presidency changed hands and the Democrats began dispensing federal judgeships, the people who interested themselves in these things saw the virtue of putting forward a qualified woman who was so widely experienced and so uniquely celebrated. Just as Caroline hoped they would.

  The meetings began. First with feminist and other groups whose sympathies Caroline shared. Then with a committee of lawyers who screened candidates for the senior senator from California. Then with the senator herself—a meeting that, after some initial nervousness on Caroline’s part, had gone extremely well. The nomination was the President’s to make, and the senator was vying with senators of several other states who put forward their preferred candidates. But the senator’s letter to the White House had been unusually strong, and the President was in her debt. Caroline permitted herself to hope.

  And then, silence.

  Months passed. She was convinced that her nomination was slipping away. A law-and-order group wrote the senator, with a copy to the President, opposing her candidacy; a right-to-life organization labeled her “anti-child” and “anti-family.” Caroline busied herself in the law, long bike trips, a little hiking.

  It really was time, she told herself, to get a dog or something.

  And then the senator phoned. “You’re still on the list,” she told Caroline. “Walter Farris will be calling you—the White House counsel. So be prepared. And call me when it’s through.”

  Farris himself called two days later, a man with a slow, rheumy voice—white-haired and overweight, Caroline knew from his pictures. There were two candidates left, he told her. He had a few questions.

  They went over her background. Family history, education, skimming the surface. Simply a lead-in to his final question: Do you have anything to hide?

  “I think that’s where they are,” the senator told her later. “The other candidate is a leader in Tucson’s Latino community, who is also very qualified, and the senator who recommended him is quite senior on the Senate Finance Committee. If one of you has some problem, it will save the President from having to choose….”

  No, Caroline had answered them both, there was nothing.

  She checked her watch. Three forty-five. In a little more than an hour, Farris would call.

  She gazed up at the house. No, she decided, she was not quite ready to go inside.

  Jutting from the beach was a narrow wooden dock, stretching out into the ocean until it was deep enough for docking. Caroline walked barefoot across the wooden planks to where she had tied her rented sailboat, pulled a bottled beer from an ice chest in the hull, and sat with her legs dangling over the bow.

  She sipped the beer—tart on her tongue, cool in her hand—and idly watched the beads of condensation skitter down the sides of the bottle. The beer was left over from yesterday, when she had packed the ice chest with bread and cheese, beer and mineral water, and set sail in the catboat for Tarpaulin Cove in the Elizabeths, as she once had when she was fourteen. Though Caroline had not sailed the sound for years, she did not need a nautical chart: she remembered each bell and buoy precisely.

  The morning of her sail had been clear; the day—water and sky—was vivid shades of blue. Caroline had grinned into the wind. She was a nature sensualist, she knew—sun and sea exhilarated her, rain depressed her. In this, she was like her mother had been.

  She sailed for the lighthouse where Tarpaulin Cove lay. Docking the boat, Caroline swam to the beach, where she fell asleep in the sun. Only the lapping of the tide at her feet had awakened her.

  As she sailed back, a light skein of fog scudded along the water, and the wind shifted in the Middle Ground. Caroline had fought it a little through the choppy waters, edgy. There had been no real danger. But the pull of memory was strong….

  Caroline turned to the house again.

  It sat near the bluff, a sprawling clapboard dwelling with views on all sides, an amalgam of Cape architecture and gables, surrounded by roses and a white picket fence. The earliest section had been built in the late 1600s, then hauled by oxen two centuries later from the middle of Edgartown to Eel Pond. Her father had added the rest of the house and, somewhat later, the roses. “They grow well near the water,” he had said to the child Caroline. “Like you.”

  And yet, when she had rented the house from its owners, they had associated the name Masters only with Caroline herself. They did not know her family; Caroline had said simply that she was “familiar with the house.”

  And every room in it, she did not say, has memories for me.

  When she climbed the steps to the bluff, entering the house, the grandfather clock read four-twenty.

  Forty minutes.

  She walked through the alcove past the bedroom where Betty and Larry had stayed that last summer; through the beamed dining room, where their family had dined by candlelight, her father at the head of the table; and then into the sunny bedroom she could only think of as her mother’s. Entering the master bath, she imagined a makeup mirror that was no longer there, saw once more her last, enduring image of her mother in life—striking and petite, peering intently at her reflection as she
applied mascara with her left hand and imagined the evening ahead….

  But the bathroom mirror reflected only Caroline, a woman six years older than the woman in the makeup mirror would ever become. A lawyer, perhaps soon a judge, who looked little like her mother.

  Except, Caroline allowed with a slight smile, that she had her mother’s vanity.

  The rest, to Caroline’s regret, seemed to come from her father. The height—at five eight, Caroline was five inches taller than her mother. The auburn-tinted black hair, usually subdued into straightness by brush and dryer. An aquiline face that her Yankee forebears might have described as having “character”: a widow’s peak, high cheekbones, long nose, full even mouth, her chin cleft and strong. Every feature would have been a little too emphatic, Caroline thought dryly, if they hadn’t invented television; it was the media people who began writing, much to Caroline’s public indifference and secret pleasure, about her style and aristocratic good looks. After all, Caroline had thought, it was comfortingly better than “headed straight for menopause, with cellulite lurking around the corner….” Which was not, if you please, a suitable description for a high federal judge.

  Four-forty.

  Why, Caroline asked herself, was this so very important to her? What would she be if her ambitions turned to dust?

  In her heart, she did not wish to know. Her ambition worked for her—it filled her life with interest and challenge. Filled her life, period. Some things should not be tampered with.

  Perhaps, Caroline reflected, she had been foolish to come here. Even now, she was impulsive; she had merely learned to stifle her impulses or, at worst, conceal them. Returning here had been an impulse: almost no one but her secretary knew where she was; no one at all knew that this home had once been hers.

  Slowly, Caroline walked to the screen porch.

  It faced west across the water. Outside, a sea breeze whistled through her father’s roses. Near them, on the lawn, was the smooth, flat rock—larger than a table—that her father had ordered hauled there. On his vacations from New Hampshire, he would sit at the rock, facing the water, writing his opinions in longhand….