Rough Justice raa-5

by Lisa Scottoline

  "Tom, the pacifiers!"

  He dashed to the two Toys "" Us bags beside the two cribs. The white bags bulged like Santa's sack. A long receipt was stapled to the bag and Tom looked at the sticker in shock. Two hundred bucks!? He ripped into the bag. Two animal mobiles to make the babies calm. Two black-and-white cubes to make them smart. Two blue bunnies to make them sleepy. Two pacifiers to shut them up.

  "Tom, hurry!"

  Tom tore out of the room with the pacifiers and raced down the stairs. How would they afford two kids on his salary? Twice as many tuition bills. Double the doctor bills. Twice the clothing bills. Two weddings. Tom handed off the pacifiers, his wallet reeling.

  "Tom! Get a water bottle!"

  Tom ran to the kitchen where Marie sat at the table, engulfed by her sister and father. She winked at Tom from the center of their freckled circle. Everybody in Marie's family winked like they had Tourette's. Tom winked back and twisted on the tap. He had long ago stopped recognizing his wife, whose slim body vanished with their sex life. Marie had retained enough water to fill a swimming pool. Tom ran a shaking index finger under the tap.

  "Tom! Tom! In here!"

  Tom spun on his wingtips like a gyroscopic father. He didn't know where the sound was coming from, which demand to meet, the twins or the Macy's-balloon wife's or the bitchy mother-in-law's. Tom! Tom! Tom!

  "Tom! The phone! The office!"

  "Shit." The office? The jury? The judge? The pacifiers? Tom left the water running and raced into his study, where the two other devils were drawing on his briefs with a crayon. SHIT FUCK PISS, they were writing. "Sean, Colin, stop that," Tom said. He took the crayon out of Sean's hand and gave him a scissors, then handed Colin a letter opener and shooed them both out of the room. Tom picked up the bottle, uh, the phone. "Hello?"

  "TOM!" boomed a man's voice over a speaker-phone. It was Bill Masterson, district attorney of the City of Philadelphia. Masterson's basso profundo echoed like the Wizard of Oz. Tom went weak in the knees. Oh, no. The only time Masterson called his assistants was to fire them. "Tom, you're not here!" Masterson bellowed.

  "I will be. I'm on my way."

  "I'm in, but you're not. I don't get it. Where are you, Moran?"

  "At home."

  "Why are you there? Get your ass here!"

  "Uh, they're still plowing me out." Tom squinted out the window. Two cops were directing a snowplow down his street. The blade had fallen off the first plow and they had to jerry-rig another. "I'll be right in."

  "Why the fuck were you there in the first place?"

  "My wife had twins, sir."

  "I don't care. Get in here. Steve told me you'd be here an hour ago."

  "They sent a car for me, but it couldn't get through—"

  "I don't care. You shouldn't have left the office."

  "I thought I had time. The jury was out."

  "I don't care. Don't you get it? Why the fuck did you leave the office?"

  "To check on my wife and babies."

  "I don't care. Why do you think I care?"

  Tom broke a sweat. The twins howled in the background. "Tom!" someone yelled. "TOM!"

  "Tom!" Masterson barked. "You tried Steere, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "So why am I the one in the office? I don't get it. You tried the case, but I'm in the office. You work for me, yes?"

  "Yes."

  "You work for me, but I'm the one in the office. I don't get it, do you?"

  "No," Tom said. "Sorry—"

  "Look, I don't care. Steve took a call from Judge Rudolph's law clerk. There's an emergency hearing scheduled. Get your ass to the office. You hear?"

  "Yes."

  "You hear me, Tom?" Masterson said, and the speakerphone clicked off.

  "TOM!" someone yelled, and he picked up his briefcase and ran.

  44

  Marta sat in the truck with her flashlight, the nautical map, and a skinny ruler she'd found in one of Christopher's tool chests. The ruler was double-edged and easy to read, even if it reeked of whatever comes off the bottom of horses' hooves. She checked the time. 4:15 in the morning. Oh no. She was running out of night. Would Christopher change the jury's vote? Could he turn the tide?

  Marta squinted at the calculations she'd made in the map's margin. The numbers swam before her eyes. Her logic had gone fuzzy a half hour ago. She'd tried to calculate the yards from the coastline to the pinhole, then stopped when she realized how witless that was. She had no idea where the coastline was, with the tides and the storm and the spin of the earth's rotation and the moon in the seventh house. Her brain had melted to yogurt. Her head thundered from her wounds and the sheer effort of staying awake.

  Hold on. There was another way. She could go back to Steere's home office and find the deed, which would describe the plot of land exactly. Using it, she'd be able to calculate the yards from the house to the pinhole. That could work. It had to. She set the stuff aside, twisted on the ignition, and turned the truck around toward Steere's house.

  * * *

  SSSHUNK! The shovel hit the first icy chunk of snow and Marta started digging. The storm had lessened but was still blowing off the sea. The surf crashed behind her. She could barely see the shovel in the light from the flashlight, stuck in the snow like a floor lamp. Digging for treasure may have been crazy, but Marta preferred to think of it as a long shot. She sensed something was under there and had to believe that her calculations, made from a reconciling of deed, blueprint, and nautical map, weren't that far off. So she'd dragged Christopher's horse manure shovel out to the middle of the beach, over dune and erosion fencing, and had begun to dig. There was no more time for geometry or numbers. There was no time for anything but action.

  Marta pressed the shovel into the snow and drove it deeper with the bottom of her boot. Every muscle in her torso ached, but she had grown accustomed to the pain. She lifted the shovel, but she'd piled on too much snow in her haste and the snow slid off. Marta had shoveled snow in her childhood, but never in the dark before, or in a blizzard. By the ocean. With a man she'd killed down the beach.

  Marta jabbed at the top layer of snow for a lighter load and threw it to the side successfully. The wind blew it off the nascent pile and carried it away from her hole. She went in for another load. The snow grew wetter the deeper she dug and felt heavier on the shovel. No matter, she told herself. She'd dug out three shovels of snow. Only 398,280 more to go.

  SSHUNK! Marta tried not think about it. Bogosian, up the beach. Darning, his face frozen in death. Steere, and how she'd been fooled, or her other cases and clients. How she'd come to be on a beach in the middle of nowhere, attempting the impossible. She tried to convince herself she wasn't dead tired, desperate, or a fool. At least she had done one thing right in this case; she made sure those girls were safe. Carrier and DiNunzio were probably home asleep in their beds.

  Marta dug deeper, but was still into snow. When would she hit sand? A foot more, two? Then how far down would the treasure be? Two feet, three? She took another scoop. Her back was as sore as her ribs. She bent from the knee and took another heap of snow. Then another ten and another ten after that.

  SHUNK! Sharp pains wracked her lower back and her arms felt like they were about to fall from their sockets. She was drenched with sweat under her coat. Her neck felt clammy where snow had melted under her collar. Wetness sluiced down her face and cheeks. Still she kept digging. Marta would dig all night if she had to. She might be wrong and she might be crazy, but she would not be denied.

  * * *

  Marta stared at the empty hole in the purplish light of dawn. Her body sagged and her faint shadow drooped on the snow. Her hair was drenched and her face was soaked. Salt air stung her eyes, and she told herself that was why tears kept welling up in them. It was almost dawn, probably about six o'clock. Marta had run out of time. Out of luck. It had all come down, it was all coming apart.

  The hole was empty. A good four feet of dark, soggy sand, with water in the bottom, lik
e a pool for a child's sand castle. Marta had dug it out, then clawed it out. When her gloved hands slowed her, she stripped them off and used her bare hands until they were scraped raw and insensate. Nothing. There was nothing there. No treasure, no papers, no clue. No treasure chest full of incriminating evidence. It was all over. There was only emptiness.

  The sky was bright now that the storm had passed. Soon the sun would climb the clouds and the world would wake up. Coffee machines would gurgle and toasters would ring. Fax machines would awaken convulsively. Computer screens would crackle to life, obeying encrypted instructions. Telephone lines were probably being repaired this very minute and roads plowed clean. The morning was a beginning to everybody else, but to Marta it seemed like the end.

  The night had been dark and under its cover she had been free to move, to run. To search and dig. But dawn would bring police and questions. They would find Bogosian's body. They would want her to account for the security guards at the office. They would want answers. It was all over. Steere had won. Marta had lost. There would be no justice.

  She let the shovel fall to the snow. The sky was dim, the atmosphere thin. A frigid wind whipped off the sea, a blast so cold and dry Marta imagined it could kill germs. Disinfect the world, eradicating virus, disease, pestilence. Hate, grime, blood. Murder. The surf crashed behind her like someone tapping her on the shoulder. Marta answered, turning.

  The ocean glimmered, barely visible. The waves that had seemed black as india ink last night were jade green, and the sea foam was tinted ivory. Whitecaps broke on the shore, one after the other, and sea bubbles raced in all directions and vanished. In the distance Marta could see the lighthouse and a rocky jetty near Steere's beach. The sight was desolate and beautiful, and she felt like it had been scrubbed as clean and raw as she was. As if God had taken a stiff wire brush to the world.

  Marta considered walking into the waves just then. Leaving the fucking shovel on the ground and strolling right in, as if she were walking into a courtroom. Taking over. Striding into the Atlantic like she owned it. Marta could do that. The waves would welcome her and take her in and suck her up, her soggy coat and her aching back and her numb fingers. She even knew the depths of the water by the shore, if indeed that was what those precisely etched numbers on the nautical map had meant.

  Marta pictured herself walking in to three feet and starting to float at six feet and by fourteen feet she could tread water, just for show. By sixteen feet she'd begin to dip below the frigid waves and they'd knock her around a little, but by eighteen feet she'd have them licked like she licked everything else. After all, she was undefeated.

  Marta turned for a last look at Steere's house, in the light of a new day. It was majestic and serene. She owned no house like that anywhere. Not New York, Boston, L.A., or Cape Cod. She was never home anyway. She was never anywhere. She was always in motion. Marta knew where the VIP waiting room was in any USAir hub. She could work the cruise control on a rental Taurus without asking. She kept the fax numbers of every Four Seasons Hotel in her bulky Filofax.

  Marta's wet gaze lingered on Steere's house. What a thing a house was! To think that she could walk into the Atlantic without ever having owned a real, honest-to-God home! And Steere's was a nice one, worth every zero. She imagined herself as its buyer, waltzing through for the first time. The house was set so beautifully, nestled alone among the dunes. Location, location, location.

  Now that the sky was brighter, Marta could see how high the dunes rose in front of the house, tall and bright white in the new sun. No wonder they had been so hard to run on, they were steep. The wooden erosion fences crisscrossing them had done their job. Marta could see the wooden fence that had caught her coat last night. It crossed the beachfront in two directions.

  She blinked against the glare. Funny. One fence ran down the beach from the upper left of Steere's property, and one ran from the upper right. Only the tops of the wooden posts showed, and Marta could see them clearly as the sun rose and a warm golden blanket slipped over the snowy beach. The two wooden fences met at the side of the house, about forty feet from where Marta stood. The tops of the slats made two dotted lines. And where the two dotted lines met, smack dab in the center, was a rather distinct X.

  Was she exhausted? Was she crazy? Was her mind playing tricks on her? Marta wiped her eyes with the back of her sleeve, but the X was for real. An X, right next to Steere's house. X marks the spot! The pinhole in the map must have been a backup, in case the fences shifted. Marta bent over and grabbed her shovel.

  45

  A large, chilly presence, Bennie Rosato stood just inside Judy's apartment door as the associate gushed an explanation, from color blindness to a handwritten motion for a mistrial to Darning's white notebook. Bennie remained unmoved, stiff in her Gore-Tex jacket, unwilling to set foot in the apartment. As the managing partner of the law firm that bore her name, Bennie needed to maintain a professional distance from her employees, precisely because of times like this. Times she dreaded. "So what I'm hearing," Bennie said slowly, "is that you have been gathering evidence to incriminate Elliot Steere."

  Judy nodded so eagerly that hair slipped from her headband. "I'm working on it. The notebook means something; I just can't figure it out yet. It's full of numbers. I think it has something to do with street money."

  "You're missing my point, you're gathering evidence against one of our clients."

  "Well, against Elliot Steere." Judy stood behind the canvas futon and leaned on its back. In her hand was the notebook.

  "Run that by me again, Carrier. Are you making a distinction between Elliot Steere and our other clients?"

  Judy blinked. "Yes. Of course. Elliot Steere is a killer. A murderer. He sent somebody to kill Mary and Marta."

  "You have proof of this? Of any of it?"

  "Not yet, but—"

  "Not yet?" Bennie struggled to restrain herself. The associate seemed to have no idea how dangerous this game was. It was like watching a toddler play with an assault rifle. "Do you realize what you're doing? You're Steere's lawyer. Even if you had proof of his wrongdoing, the only ethical thing you could do is file a withdrawal from the case. You get to bow out, not sabotage his murder trial."

  "The judge wouldn't have granted a withdrawal."

  "You didn't even try. You should have come to me. I could have filed something with the court. We could have fought it together. Legally. Even if we couldn't, you still have no right to be gathering evidence against your own client. It's the D.A. who has to prove the case against Steere, and if he can't, Steere deserves to go free. Period."

  "But he's a murderer!"

  "What is this, Ethics 101? Elliot Steere is a client of our law firm, my law firm. Last time I saw one of his checks, it was made out to us, for a very large retainer."

  Judy shook her head in disbelief. "So what? What does he buy for his money?"

  "Loyalty, without apology or reservation. He buys all our efforts and skill, everything we know about the law and courtrooms. He paid for it, he's entitled to it. There is no shame in that, none at all. That's business. My business."

  Judy felt sick inside as Bennie spoke. She could never agree with Bennie and regretted telling her about Darning's notebook. Time to correct the error. Judy didn't think Bennie had focused on the notebook, so she let it slip from her fingers. It fell to the rug behind the futon and Judy nudged it underneath its canvas skirt with her toe.

  "Didn't you stop and think?" Bennie asked, her temper giving way. "Didn't you realize you have an ethical obligation here?"

  "My loyalty to Steere ended when Mary got shot. My hands had her blood all over them, they still do." Judy held out her palms, but Bennie wouldn't even look.

  "That makes no difference."

  "It makes all the difference in the world! What's in your veins, Bennie? Ice?"

  Bennie stood tall. "You're a lawyer in my employ, Carrier. I hired you to work on this case, handpicked you and DiNunzio. It was a choice assignment, the m
ost significant case in our office. Steere was supposed to be our calling card."

  "I understand that, but the case has gone wrong."

  "Nothing was wrong with the case until you filed that motion for a mistrial— without the client's authority. Before that, it was outside the record that Mary is in the hospital. It was outside the record that Marta is missing and that you found some magical notebook. As far as the case was concerned, nothing outside the record even existed."

  "I can't divide my brain that way. Outside the record, inside the record."

  "Bullshit!" Bennie shouted. "You're supposed to be a trial lawyer. You filed motion papers against a client's express orders. He gets to define the scope of his representation, not you. If Steere is as smart as I think, he's gone forward on his own or hired someone else. You got my firm fired, and for conduct so egregious we could all be disbarred."

  "I was trying to find out who tried to kill Mary, and why."

  "Are you insane? That's not your concern. That's not your job. You got me fired, you got us fired, and so I have only one recourse."

  "Go ahead. Fire." Judy grinned crookedly even though she felt like crying.

  "You're fired. I'll send you the termination forms as soon as possible. I'll also send you some forms to report this to the disciplinary board. If you don't file them yourself, I'll file against you. Don't make me do it."

  "I'll think about the disciplinary board a little later, if you don't mind. I'm more worried about Mary than myself right now."

  Bennie couldn't let that pass. "Don't think I'm not worried about Mary. I'm the one who sat there with her parents. But what you're doing— and what she was doing— was wrong. Ethically wrong."

  "But not morally wrong."

  "That's not your judgment to make. I took on Steere's representation, and you work for me. What happens to the legal system if each lawyer makes his own judgments about a client's morality?"

  "Justice. Finally." Judy stared at Bennie, who returned her gaze with equal fury.

  "No. Nobody will have a lawyer they can trust. And justice doesn't have a chance." Bennie yanked her jacket zipper up and turned to go. "Enough. Clean out your office as soon as possible. Don't talk to the press."