Justice

by Karen Robards

  “Dustin Yamaguchi?” Jess began briskly. It was protocol, a means of confirming ID.

  “I got a lady lawyer now?” Yamaguchi’s eyes moved over her in a way that made Jess glad that she was not, in fact, his lawyer. “Good deal.”

  Mark took the phone out of her hand before she could introduce herself, as she had intended to do next.

  “Morning, Gooch,” he said into it. “Remember me?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Until that moment Yamaguchi had been busy eyeing Jess, paying no attention whatsoever to the man lounging at her side. Now he met Mark’s gaze and his brows twitched together. Glancing at Mark, Jess saw that his face had hardened until it was all jutting planes and sharp angles. His eyes had turned to steel. This was a side of him she had glimpsed only rarely, and it reminded her that underneath the handsome, laid-back exterior was a man she had seen kill.

  “Well, if it isn’t Agent Ryan. Why aren’t you off catching bad guys?”

  “Most of ’em are so dumb they’re already caught. Like you. But today you’re luckier than the rest of the dumbasses, because I’m about to hook you up with the deal of the century.”

  “Do tell.”

  By the time they left, Yamaguchi had agreed to think over the deal Mark had, with Jess’s help on the legal details, presented to him. When he was approached by prosecutors, as he would be that afternoon, he could take the deal they offered him, admit that he had indeed been hired to kill Tim Keeler, and then finger Kathleen Keeler as the person who had hired him. In return for his testimony against Kathleen Keeler, the death penalty would be taken off the table and he would be given a sentence of twenty years to life, which would make him eligible for parole in about seven years. If he did not agree, he would wind up taking the fall as Kathleen Keeler, who would be offered a similar deal by prosecutors, testified against him, and his voice, which had been isolated on the 911 call, was used to seal the deal.

  “Or I could take my chances with a jury,” Yamaguchi suggested, watching Mark through the glass. “I hear there’s a real strong case against that Whitney guy, especially if a smart lawyer wanted to argue that the tape you’re talking about was doctored to make it sound like my voice is on there when it isn’t. I might even walk.”

  “You might,” Mark agreed.

  Jess stepped in. “Speaking as your temporary lawyer, I feel I should advise you that if you ever want to see the light of day again, you’ll take the deal we’ve described when it’s offered. As soon as it’s offered. You’re lucky the prosecutors want to nail the person who hired you more than they want you.”

  “What can I say? I’m a lucky kind of guy.”

  To Jess that didn’t sound all that promising, but Mark seemed well satisfied with it.

  “He’ll take the deal,” he said as they left.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s a psychopath, but he isn’t stupid.”

  They were back in the Suburban pulling out of the parking garage when Jess’s cell phone rang. She frowned at the number, which was unfamiliar, but answered.

  “Jessica Ford.”

  “Oh, um, hi.” The female voice sounded hesitant. “This is Paloma DeLong from Shelter House. Lenore Beekman gave me this number. I understand that you’re going to be taking Allison Howard’s place as our legal advisor?”

  “Yes.” According to the files Jess had thumbed through, Shelter House was where Allison Howard had been doing her firm-mandated pro bono work. (Ellis Hayes believed its lawyers should give back to the community. Or, to put it more accurately, should be seen to be giving back to the community.) Which meant that Shelter House was where Jess was going to be doing her firm-mandated pro bono work, at least for the foreseeable future. “How can I help you?”

  “We’ve just been served with a lawsuit. Two of our girls, um, ran away, and one of their families is apparently suing us for negligence for letting it happen. I’ve got the papers right here, but I don’t know what to do.”

  “Are you at Shelter House now?” Jess glanced at the dashboard clock. It was 11:47. If she hurried, maybe she could deal with this now, on what was supposed to be her lunch hour, and then get back and make a good start on the brief Pearse wanted before her meeting with him and Mrs. Shively at three. “I can come by and look at them for you.”

  “I’m just on my way out the door. I’ll be back at three, and then I’ll be here until somewhere around eight.”

  Jess suppressed a sigh. “I’ll try to make it around seven thirty, then.”

  “Thank you.” The woman hung up.

  Mark looked a question at her.

  “I have to be somewhere around seven thirty tonight. Since you’re babysitting, I assume you’re chauffeuring as well?”

  “Wither thou goest …”

  “Good. I’m goest-ing to Shelter House about six forty-five. It’s a residential facility for troubled teen girls, I’m volunteering to do their legal work, and they’ve just been served with a lawsuit.” Jess was mentally organizing her schedule. Since there was nothing else she could do at this moment except possibly bicker with Mark, now would probably be a good time to see about getting a dress to wear to Mr. Dunn’s party. Given her connections, acquiring one should be a relatively quick and painless procedure, even for a woman as organically opposed to shopping as she was. Trusting Mark to get her safely back to the office without the need for any input from her, she called Grace.

  “I need a long dress,” she said to her sister without preamble when Grace answered with the name of her very high-end consignment shop, Past Perfect, which was located in the hallowed precincts of Georgetown. “For Friday night. Do you have anything?”

  “You need a gown?” Grace sounded as if the request was mildly mind-boggling, which Jess supposed, coming from her, it probably was. “Where are you going?”

  “Ellis Hayes’s managing partner is having a party. Apparently it’s this huge deal. I have to go, and I have to have a gown. Do you have anything? Can you get anything?”

  “Hmm.” There was very little her sister loved more than the idea of dressing Jess up. This hadn’t changed since high school, when Grace had first decided her older sister had been in dire need of fashion assistance. It was the challenge, Grace told her every time Jess let her do it, that fascinated her, the artistry of turning a (sorry, sister) sow’s ear into a silk purse. Or Skipper into Barbie. “I actually do. There’s a hot pink Marchesa …”

  “Not pink,” Jess objected, casting an evil look at Mark, who was starting to smile.

  “What do you want, black?” Grace responded tartly. “Of course you do. I keep telling you, black is not your color.”

  “Black’s professional,” Jess said. “I want to look professional. It’s a party, it’s a long dress, but I want to look professional.”

  “You need color. Warm tones.” Grace’s voice held the impatience of someone who had said the same thing many times before.

  “Nothing bright,” Jess insisted. “Or slinky. Think conservative. Tasteful.” Remembering some of the outfits Grace had put together for her before, she frowned admonishingly at her absent sister. “No strapless, no backless, minimal skin. Think something a female Supreme Court justice would wear to, say, the White House.”

  “Think something somebody’s grandma would wear, you mean,” Grace retorted. “Is our air conditioner still broken?”

  “What?” It took Jess a moment to remember the lie she’d told their mother, which apparently Judy had passed on to Grace. “Oh. No.”

  “I take it you didn’t tell Mom about the mugger in our front yard? Because she didn’t mention it when I talked to her.”

  Jess had texted a warning to Grace from their mother’s house before going to bed the previous night, just in case Grace’s date hadn’t worked out and she’d decided to go home. Grace had texted back asking if Jess was okay, Jess had said she was, and that had been the end of that. She’d hoped.

  “What do you think?”

  That so
clearly didn’t require an answer that Grace moved on. “I hear Mark’s back in the picture.”

  Jess slanted a look at the man in question. From his expression, she was pretty sure he could hear a good part of Grace’s side of the conversation as well as her own.

  “Kinda-sorta.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Grace said. “Just so you know, I called him a low-life bastard when he answered your phone last night. Among other things.”

  “That’s okay,” Jess assured her.

  “He’s right there, isn’t he?” Knowing her sister well, Grace had clearly picked up on something in Jess’s voice. “We’ll talk about this later. Oh, um, if I didn’t come home tonight, would you be all right?”

  “Is he cute?” Jess’s voice was dry. She, too, knew her sister well.

  “Divine. But if you need me to keep you safe from muggers or whatever, I’m there.”

  “Oh, what are you going to do? Slam ’em with your kung fu?” Grace had been taking martial arts lessons for the last few weeks. Jess suspected the mystery man was someone she’d met in the class.

  “Two women with 911 on speed-dial are better than one.”

  Jess laughed. “True. But I don’t need you. I promise, I’m perfectly safe.”

  “You’ve got Mark, huh? Okay, then, I probably won’t be home. I’ll see what I can do about the dress. Steer clear of muggers.”

  “I will,” Jess said. “Thanks.” Then she hung up.

  “Nice to know your sisters love me.” A faint smile curved Mark’s lips.

  “My sisters are on my side.”

  “Your mom’s on mine.”

  “I wouldn’t get excited. She’s got a real weakness for hot guys.”

  He sent her a wickedly teasing glance. “Did you just say something nice to me?”

  Jess felt a flush of heat. How had that slipped out?

  “Just so you know, what my mom thinks and what I think are not necessarily the same thing.”

  “You think I’m hot. Come on, Jess, admit it.”

  Rescue came as she glanced out the window and registered where they were. “You’re driving past the building! Pull over.”

  “I’m taking you to lunch. At Rafferty’s, around the corner.”

  “I don’t have time.”

  “It’s lunchtime, I’m hungry, and you’re stuck with me, remember? Don’t worry, this place is quick.”

  Rafferty’s was a busy storefront café with lots of windows looking out onto New Jersey Avenue. It was less than a block from Ellis Hayes, so Jess didn’t know why she was unprepared to find the place full of familiar faces when they walked in.

  “It’s Death and Taxes,” she murmured to Mark in surprise as she spotted two young women lawyers she knew from Ellis Hayes seated side by side at the counter. One was blond, the other was a redhead, and both were gorgeous. Then she did a double take as her gaze swept past them to snag on a grim-faced, fifty-something brunette in a powder blue blazer sitting at a table for two in the corner with a lean, bald-as-an-egg old man in a lawyerly gray suit. “And, oh my God, the Queen of Torts! And she’s with Mr. Dunn.”

  Jess said that last with as much awe as she might have had she announced the other woman had been with God.

  “You realize I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Clearly unimpressed, Mark was looking around for a table. Fortunately, a hostess was coming toward them, menus in hand, presumably to help them find a seat. As the smell of grilling meat and some kind of tomato-based sauce and fresh bread wafted beneath her nostrils, Jess realized to her own surprise that she was hungry, too. Since the noise made it impossible to be heard at any distance, Mark held up two fingers to the hostess, who nodded.

  “Death works in the estate division and Taxes works in the tax division. They’re both on four, they’re best friends, and word in the building is they spend their nights trolling the bars for rich men so they can retire and spend the rest of their days producing little rich babies.” They were following the hostess by that time. She was leading them through the center of the restaurant toward an available table somewhere. Mark was so close behind Jess that they were practically touching, and Jess was looking up at him over her shoulder as she talked. “The Queen of Torts is what we call Mary McGarvey. Her group’s on seven. They’ve won so many cases that the partners just bought her a Bentley to show their appreciation. And then there’s—”

  “Jess!”

  At the sound of her name, Jess glanced around in surprise. Andrew waved at her from a table by the window. Sitting with him were Hayley, Pearse, and Lenore.

  “Well, lookee there,” Mark muttered behind her. Lifting her hand in an answering wave, Jess assumed he was seeing the same thing she was.

  “Come join us,” Andrew called. Pearse beckoned to them, and Lenore beamed and scooted closer to Pearse as if to make room. Only Hayley looked less than pleased. Or at least she looked less than pleased until she looked past Jess and saw Mark. Then her expression changed to one of conflicted interest.

  “Time to do some schmoozing,” Mark murmured in her ear, his hand light on the side of her waist as he steered her toward the table. Overcoming her initial flicker of instinctive shyness, Jess mentally put up her chin, pasted on a smile, and took the seat that was offered her.

  Lunch was, as Mark had promised, fast, but surprisingly enjoyable. They talked, and laughed, and ate, and even Pearse perked up when Mr. Dunn, who was tall and stoop-shouldered with unexpectedly kind blue eyes, stopped by their table on his way out of the restaurant to congratulate them again on winning the Phillips case. Jess actually shook hands with the great man, since it was the first time she had met him in person. By the time the meal was over, she realized she was beginning to feel like part of the team.

  The afternoon passed in a blur of work. She pulled out Allison’s appointment calendar, transferred the things she was supposed to cover to her own calendar, and noted in passing that today’s date had a big red ink star drawn on it with the words Shelter House and a time of 12:30 written inside it. Allison had obviously considered the appointment important. But as it was already after 12:30, it was too late now to even try to do anything about it, so Jess put it out of her mind and got down to work. The brief Pearse wanted required a ton of research, and Jess was feverishly pouring through precedent-setting cases that might apply when three o’ clock rolled around. Hotfooting it to Pearse’s office, she reached his side scant seconds before one of the women from the secretarial pool, recruited to take Lenore’s place for the afternoon, escorted Mrs. Shively back.

  Mrs. Shively—Camilla to Pearse—was around thirty, outrageously blond, outrageously beautiful, and outrageously stacked. Her lips were scarlet, her eyes outlined in kohl, her lashes false. Her triple-Ds (Jess was guessing here) were barely contained by a flimsy white blouse that was unbuttoned to the point where her lacy black bra showed with every move she made, which was probably the point. Her skirt was a teeny-tiny black ace bandage that barely reached the tops of her thighs, and if she was wearing anything beneath, it didn’t show.

  When Pearse stood up to greet her, she cast herself into his arms and started weeping copious tears all over him. Not having had time to sit down, Jess watched wide-eyed for a moment before she remembered that she was there to protect Pearse from Mrs. Shively’s touchy-feely tendencies. Spotting a box of tissues on Pearse’s desk, obviously kept for just this type of emergency, Jess pulled a couple free.

  “Would you like a tissue, Mrs. Shively?” she asked politely, holding the tissues out.

  Mrs. Shively stiffened. Her head came up. As she frowned at Jess and the introductions were made, Pearse was able to get her into a seat, press the tissues into her hand, and retreat behind the safety of his desk. After Pearse broke the bad news, Mrs. Shively spent the rest of her appointment sobbing repeatedly as she protested her complete and utter innocence and insisted that she had loved “horny ole Frank” with all her heart and soul. As a sidebar, she kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. For Jess
, who was seated slightly behind Pearse, this provided way too much confirmation that, indeed, nothing came between their client and her skirt.

  When they were finished at last, Pearse walked her to the elevator with Jess, his faithful shadow, in tow. While Mrs. Shively bade him farewell by kissing his cheek and giving him a big, full-body-contact hug, Jess pressed the down button.

  Pearse’s eyes rolled in Jess’s direction when he was released. Stepping into the breach, she stuck out her hand.

  “It was so nice to meet you, Mrs. Shively.”

  “You too, hon.” As Mrs. Shively shook Jess’s hand, the elevator arrived. The relief on Pearse’s face when the elevator door closed on their still teary-eyed client was palpable.

  “If she has to go before a jury, God help us,” Pearse said to Jess as they both turned away to head for their respective offices. “If we’re not able to tone her down, the prosecution won’t have to say a word.”

  But that was a problem for another day, and Jess promptly put it out of her head as she settled in and got back to work. She checked her messages: nothing from Tiffany. Quickly she placed calls to Tiffany’s home number, where voice mail picked up, and to her cell once more, with the same result. Then she resumed wrestling with the brief. Her concentration was slightly affected by the occasional unpleasant sensation that someone was watching her from behind, and the subsequent need to whip her head around just to reassure herself that nothing more unsettling than the ficus was there. The sensation was creepy enough that, by the time she was pounding out the last few words of the brief, she was vowing to have maintenance remove the plant first thing in the morning.

  Because the shadow she thought she kept catching out of the corner of her eye had to be something to do with the way the light hit the damned plant.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Jess’s cell phone rang just as she was e-mailing the finished brief to Pearse.

  “You ready to go? I’ve got the Suburban double-parked out front.”

  It was Mark. A glance at her watch told her the time was already six forty-five. She groaned.