While Justice Sleeps

by Stacey Abrams

  A strangled cry reached Avery’s ears. “Momma?”

  “Don’t do it, Avery,” Rita cried. “Whatever they want—”

  The crack of a hand against flesh carried as clearly as a voice. “That’s not what I told you to say, Rita.”

  “What do you want?” Avery demanded as her hand clenched the phone. Ling steadied her while Noah rushed to the door to get Agent Leighton.

  Jared stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Wait.”

  “You have a simple choice, Ms. Keene. By tomorrow at five p.m., either Howard Wynn dies or your mother does.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  The phone fell from Avery’s nerveless fingers. What have I done? A single, devastating answer reverberated through her taut body. She’d protected everyone except the woman who gave her life. Because of her, Rita would die unless she killed the man she’d just fought to save.

  She stared blindly at the carpet and marveled that her knees held her upright still. As if waiting for the cue, they gave way beneath her. Blackness encroached as she went down hard, her limp body doing nothing to stop the fall.

  “Jared!” Ling caught and half dragged a trembling Avery to the sofa. Her light brown skin had gone chalky. Ling shifted to track her friend’s pulse. Way too fast, just like the stuttering breaths coming from lungs that sounded desperate for air. Plucking up Avery’s hand, Ling found the skin clammy, and the fingers moved restively in her hold. Ling diagnosed the basic symptoms of shock in a woman whose stoicism was rivaled by no one she’d ever known.

  Jared knelt beside her, brushing her forehead with his fingers. “Who was on the phone, Avery?”

  “He’s got her.” The admission escaped on a strangled whisper. She shuddered once, her throat a desert choked with sand. “He said they’ll kill her.”

  He braced a hand at her shoulder, as much for stability as comfort. The fragments of the call came together. “Someone has taken your mother?”

  “He said he had Rita. She was crying.” Avery could hear the crack of his hand against Rita’s cheek, and her eyes squeezed closed as she remembered the horror. “He hit her when she told me not to do it.”

  Ling caught Jared’s look. “Not to do what, Avery?”

  “Kill your father.” Didn’t I tell them already? The thought was distant, remote. Murder Justice Wynn to save Rita. Her entire body had gone numb, but not her mind. Her thoughts spun like a crazed pinwheel, retracing every step, every decision. Every mistake.

  Why hadn’t she seen this coming and demanded more protection for Rita? When the FBI had failed to find her, she’d thought nothing of it. Nothing of her missing mother while she hunted for killers and protected a dead man.

  “My fault. This is my fault.”

  “Avery, focus.”

  All Avery could hear were internal accusations, loud and damning. She’d sent her mother away the last time. Outside her apartment, when all Rita wanted was money. She’d sent her away and let them take her.

  “Avery.” Jared framed her face to hold her attention. “You’re whispering. I can’t understand you. What exactly did they say to you?”

  “They want me to kill him.” Stricken, she gripped his wrist in a vise. “If I don’t take Justice Wynn off life support by five p.m. tomorrow, they’ll kill her. Vance will kill my mother.”

  Jared’s curse punctured the air as he sprang up from the sofa. A couple of strides carried him to the door. “Stay with her,” he told Ling. “I’ll call Agent Lee.”

  “No!” Avery lunged from the couch, her eyes wild. “No FBI.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Ling stood as well. “I know you’re terrified, Avery, but this isn’t the time for us to go it alone.”

  “This is my mother’s life, Ling!”

  The quiet, bald statement had Jared lifting his hand from the doorknob. “And my father’s. What are you going to do?”

  Avery headed for the window that overlooked the cars streaming by on the interstate. Somewhere out there, beyond the twists of asphalt, men were holding her mother for a life’s ransom. Again, Rita’s sobs ripped through her, and she laid her forehead against the cool glass. “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll get her back, Avery,” Jared said.

  She lifted her gaze to meet Jared’s. Fresh guilt twisted. His father for her mother. “How?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Her brain swirled with recrimination and fear, doubling and redoubling on itself. She was missing something. She, who had made her way by always being able to outthink the others. Didn’t matter who. But now, when her mother’s life was at stake, she couldn’t hold a steady thought. Rita would die because of it. But Rita couldn’t die. She wouldn’t lose them both—Rita and Justice Wynn. Save them.

  Then, suddenly, the solution dawned on her. She took another breath, this one steadying and determined. “I do know.” Her lips drew down into a flat, menacing line. Justice Wynn had picked her for a reason: because she was more than book-smart; she had street smarts. And she didn’t scare easy. Shoving aside the panic that still threatened to strangle her, Avery murmured, “I’ve got the documents. Leverage.”

  Jared rejected the idea. “Even if you return the documents, there’s nothing to stop you from implicating Stokes later. They need my father off the bench so Stokes can name his replacement. Hold the Court hostage until he gets the votes he needs.”

  “Which is why I know that killing Justice Wynn won’t get my mother back.” She spoke the truth aloud, acknowledging what had already occurred to Jared. “If they know I have proof, their only recourse is to finish all of us.”

  Noah spoke for the first time: “The Chief as much as admitted that the Court wouldn’t move without you taking action. The president and Vance are desperate. They’ve got no choice but to come after us.”

  “To tie up loose ends.” Jared added, “They’ll probably set a meetup for Avery. Lure her in and take both her and Rita out. The three of us will be next.”

  Ling’s gasp was matched by Noah’s imprecation. “What in the hell can we do? Either way, we’re dead. We’re out of options.”

  “No, we’re not.” Avery moved past Jared and made her way to the door. “Agent Leighton?”

  “Yes?”

  “We need to go out. Now.”

  The agent reached for her communicator. “Where to?”

  “Bethesda Naval Hospital.”

  * * *

  —

  Ling and Noah sat in the waiting room, joined by Agent Leighton. Down the hall, Avery and Jared entered Justice Wynn’s hospital room. The muted whirring of respirator and monitors provided the only sound.

  “He looks so frail,” Jared murmured. This was his first time seeing Justice Wynn in the hospital. His image of his father, a vibrant force of a man, had been winnowed away, replaced by the sickly, wiry body prostrate on a bed that looked too large for him. “Like a different man.”

  A cue tripped in Avery’s brain, but she couldn’t quite access the message. She murmured the lines from the letter: “If I had accepted absurdity and given smallpox to my child, I would not be mourning him today. It’s not quite right.”

  “We’ve searched for the phrases, Avery. No one said it.”

  She raked her hand through her hair. “Smallpox refers to you, to Boursin’s. He blames himself for passing it on to you. The atrocity is the research conducted by Hygeia. But he had no connection to them.”

  “No connection? He knew what our government did, but he still kept his mouth shut and never told anyone what he’d found.” Jared added grimly, “None of this would be happening if he’d recused himself and revealed the truth. No one should have died.”

  “He had an answer, Jared. All I have to do is find it.”

  “There’s nowhere else to look.”

  “There must be.” She’d dissected the letter an
d every bit of information she’d collected. The riddle, she thought, had been too clever. Perhaps more clever than she was. “I don’t know where else to look, but there’s an answer. He would tell me that we’re in the endgame now. The most important pieces are in play, and I’ve got only a few moves left.”

  “What are they? Because I’m not seeing many.”

  Avery hesitated. “Your father taught me more than any professor about the law and reasoning. This puzzle is like a ruling. Usually, we get the case and we let the record and the questions guide the answer. But when he has a long-standing posture on an issue, it’s up to his clerks to find the evidence to support the outcome.”

  “How would you do that?”

  “Research.” What she’d done nonstop since the day she learned her new role. “I’ve read case law and journal articles and unpublished rulings on every aspect of this issue. I don’t know where else to look.”

  Jared returned his gaze to his father. “Maybe you’re going too deep.”

  “In what way?”

  He thought quietly for a moment. “When we used to go to the cabin, I’d beg him to take us out in a boat. Then, after we got a ways from the dock, I’d pester him to go even farther out. So far we could barely see the cabin.”

  “And he wouldn’t?”

  “Nope. I remember one time, I threw a fit and threatened to jump out of the boat and swim to the center of the lake.”

  “I can only imagine his reaction.”

  Jared smiled fondly. “He didn’t tell me no. But he warned me that I might not be ready for what would happen. That while I was a strong swimmer, sometimes the question wasn’t what a person could do. It was what waited in the unknown. The judge said that the wisest minds understand not simply the depths and the surface, but everything in between.”

  “The space in between.”

  “Yes, the space in between.” A rueful grin quirked his lips. “I always thought it meant he was too lazy to row that far or too stingy to buy a motorboat.”

  Her mind returned to the strange conversation in his office all those months ago. The space in between. Eighteenth-century physicians. Just quit and suffer the consequences. French literature. “God, I know where it is.”

  “Where what is?”

  “The clue. The last clue. It’s at his house.” Avery leaned past Jared to stroke the immobile arm that lay on the sheet. “Justice Wynn, I’ve got it.”

  * * *

  —

  The alarm trilled as Avery punched in the code. Jared followed her inside, trailed by Noah and Ling. They looked at Jared as they entered the house.

  “Do we know what she’s looking for?” Noah asked Jared.

  “She does.” At least, he assumed she did. She’d been mostly silent on the ride over, only asking that he call the others, and he could fairly hear her mind working. They entered the library, and she headed for the far wall of books. He joined her, staying a few paces away. “Can we help you look?”

  “No. I’ve got it.” She walked along the shelves, tracing titles as she went. Midway across, she stopped. Slowly, she inched out a volume. The cover was dusky rose, embossed with gold lettering. “Voltaire.”

  “Why are you looking for a French philosopher?” Jared came alongside her. “How will he help us figure out what the judge wanted?”

  “It’s not Voltaire,” Avery explained as she opened the book. The spine creaked slightly as she opened it. The book fell open to reveal a hollowed-out segment. “It’s not Voltaire. It’s the space in between.” With a murmur of triumph, she identified the contents—an envelope addressed to Ms. Avery Keene and a plastic bag.

  “How did you know where to look?” Jared asked, amazed.

  “François-Marie Arouet, better known as the French philosopher Voltaire. He wrote thousands of works, including essays on scientific experiments in the eighteenth century during the Enlightenment period.” As she spoke, she moved to the desk in the library. She set the volume on the desktop and rummaged for a letter opener, aware of the three pairs of eyes that followed her. “When Justice Wynn called me into his office in January, he asked me about my studies in college.”

  “Which one?” Ling teased. “You had a dozen majors.”

  “Six. Including, for one semester at Oberlin, a major in French. In his office, he asked me my favorite French writer.”

  “Voltaire?” Noah joined her at the desk. “But how did you leap from that to this?”

  Avery located an opener and slit through the envelope. “Ling told us about European physicians and their disdain for inoculation. Voltaire once wrote an essay on the women of Circassia who also performed primitive inoculations on their children. He’d also written about infamy, and how those in power convinced the rest of us to ignore their violence and accept it as good. I’d forgotten about it, but my memory hadn’t. Justice Wynn knew I’d remember it eventually.”

  The bag contained a pill bottle, with the word FINGERPRINTS written across the bag in black marker. She ignored the bottle and instead slit open the envelope, removing a single sheet of paper. Her attention immediately focused on the signature scrawled at the bottom. “This is what he had me sign in his office. What he had me witness,” she explained as she skimmed the contents. As she suspected, Justice Wynn had anticipated this final act. “This is what Ani sent him. He couldn’t quit without atoning first.”

  She handed the letter to Jared. “This is how we’re going to save my mother and your father. And bring down the president.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  At Avery’s apartment, Agent Leighton punched the button on the newly secured elevator and radioed their position down to the idling Expedition. The doors slid open, and she led them down the short hall, her charges buffered by additional men brought in for the occasion. Following Lee’s protocol, she used Avery’s key to get inside, motioning for them to stay on the threshold while she checked out the interior.

  “All clear.” Agent Leighton emerged from the bathroom. “We’ll be outside, Ms. Keene.”

  “Thank you.” Avery found her apartment in pristine condition. Even the dishes she’d left in the washer had been put through their cycles. “Home sweet home.”

  “Are you sure it’s safe to be here?” Ling asked the prearranged question, but the note of fear was real.

  Avery walked into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. “Agent Lee said we’d be fine.” She took a gulp, readying for her act. “Do you think I made a mistake?”

  “By not telling the FBI about your mom?” Jared asked on cue. “No, you have no choice. We have no idea who has her and what the kidnappers would do if the feds got involved.”

  “I know you’re right, but maybe he could help me figure out who has her. Maybe I could negotiate.”

  “With what?” Noah asked. “You’ve got no leverage, Avery.”

  With the listening devices transmitting every word, Avery replied, “I could resign him from the Court. As his guardian, I can take any actions I deem necessary for his protection. I can’t imagine President Stokes refusing to accept his resignation. Then whoever wants him off the Court will have what they want.”

  “Would that really work?” The question came from Ling. “Can she resign a Supreme Court justice from his position, Noah?”

  “I don’t see why not,” he answered thoughtfully. “Legal guardians have pretty broad powers. As long as she can demonstrate that resigning is in his best interests, she’s on solid ground. Besides, who’d protest it? Celeste wanted him dead.”

  “And I don’t want to lose him to save your mother.” Jared had been assigned the trigger line. “All of this is a moot issue, though, if we can’t get in touch with the men who have your mom. The five-o’clock deadline is only twenty-four hours away.”

  “I can’t kill him.” Avery made the plea to the hidden microphones, her voice cracking s
lightly. “They have to call.”

  * * *

  —

  “How’s Mrs. Keene?” Vance entered the warehouse. The rank odor from the river seeped into every board and crevice.

  Phillips sat on an overturned crate and reassembled his firearm. “She won’t shut up.”

  In the corner, Rita whimpered steadily. “Please,” she begged of the new voice in the darkened space. Her blindfold shut out time and reality, but her hearing told her she had another opportunity to make her plea. Turning her head blindly toward the footfalls, she pleaded, “Don’t do this to Avery. She’s a good girl. Don’t make her kill that man for me.”

  “I may not have to.” Vance crouched next to Rita. “Your daughter is a fine attorney. Brilliant. She came up with one solution none of us thought of.”

  Phillips turned to his boss. “You think it will work?”

  “It should. All we want is Justice Wynn off the Court now. The vote will remain split, Congress will have to go on recess, and President Stokes will make an appointment in August. Our man will caucus with the other four, and GenWorks will be dead.”

  Phillips scowled. “What about the others? They know too much.”

  “I imagine there will be a tragic fire in her apartment while they are visiting. Old buildings catch fire often in the early summer. We can dump our guest’s body there, for effect.”

  In her corner, Rita’s whimpers faded to the occasional sob. Vance heard the shift to utter despair. “You’ll die with your daughter, Mrs. Keene. Family should stay together.”

  * * *

  —

  Less than a minute before midnight, Avery answered her cell phone. “Avery Keene.”

  “I have a proposal for you.” Vance had engaged the voice modulator. On his wrist, he set a timer. Any trace on the cell line would ping a number of towers, which gave him sufficient time for his task. “At seven in the morning, you will call the White House at this number.” He rattled off digits that rang directly to the Oval Office. “Request a meeting with President Brandon Stokes.”