Supreme Justice

by Phillip Margolin

  "Yeah, I know; the president guy. You're famous."

  Brad blushed. "I wish I wasn't. Being a celebrity isn't all it's cracked up to be, believe me. It's actually a big pain in the butt."

  "Oh, come on. Bringing down a president has got to be a rush."

  "Not really. Mostly, I was in a state of terror. So, whom do you clerk for?" Brad asked, desperate to change the topic. Willie wasn't the first clerk who had tried to pump him for inside dope about the Farrington scandal.

  "Millard Price. You clerk for Justice Moss, right?"

  Brad nodded.

  "My boss is pissed at her."

  "Oh?"

  "Something she did at conference with the Woodruff cert petitions upset him."

  Brad's mental alarm went off. Horst was the second of Price's clerks to talk to him about Woodruff.

  "What did she do?" he asked.

  "I don't know. He was just muttering about Justice Moss when he got back to chambers, and he looked concerned. Your boss didn't mention Woodruff when she got back from the conference?"

  "Not to me. I didn't work on that one. I don't even know what it's about."

  Willie looked directly into Brad's eyes, making him more nervous than he was already. Then she thrust the ball at him.

  "Want to go one-on-one?"

  Willie's voice sounded huskier than it had been moments before. Brad felt something stirring bellow his belt line and tried to control his panic. He looked over Willie's shoulder at the clock. It was almost eight.

  "I should be going. My fiancee is probably waiting to have dinner with me."

  "Maybe some other time?" Willie said, her voice full of promise. She was apparently unfazed by the revelation that Brad had a significant other.

  "Not if I want to preserve my dignity," Brad answered with a nervous laugh. "You'd probably kick my ass."

  Willie smiled. "It would be fun to try. Say, I've heard that Justice Moss's chamber is decorated with really interesting civil rights memorabilia."

  "It is."

  "Any chance you can give me a tour some evening, after work, when she's gone?"

  "Uh, sure, maybe."

  "Good."

  "I really have to go. Ginny's probably starving."

  "Right. Nice talking to you again."

  Brad left the gym sweating more than he had when he was working out. The questions about Woodruff had raised a red flag. Something was up, and he decided he should tell his boss about his conversations with Millard Price's clerks as soon as he had a chance.

  Brad took a quick shower, then headed down to his office to call Ginny.

  "Are you up for dinner?" he asked when he got through to her.

  "I would love to have dinner with you, but General Tso asked me first."

  "Ditch the takeout. I can be at your office in fifteen minutes."

  Ginny sighed. "I can't. One of the partners dumped a file on my desk at six and needs a memo first thing in the morning. You remember what that's like."

  "Unfortunately, I do," Brad said as he flashed back to the bad old days at the law firm in Portland.

  "I love you, and I'll see you at home."

  "You'll probably be too tired for wild sex," Brad said, half joking and still aroused by his encounter with Willie Horst.

  "Or any other kind."

  Brad laughed. "Just kidding. I'm pretty beat myself. You're the best."

  They traded kisses and Brad hung up. He smiled. Willie Horst might be sexy, but she was no Ginny Striker.

  Ginny hung up the phone and sighed. In front of her was a sixty-page contract so boring that it would put a speed freak to sleep. To her right, a pair of chopsticks stuck out of a carton of greasy General Tso's Chicken. She would have given anything to be in her pajamas, snuggling on her couch with the man she loved while they watched a great old movie on the Turner Classics station. Unfortunately, she owed thousands of dollars in student loans and also found it necessary, for some strange reason, to eat and put a roof over her head. Ah to have been born a royal princess or heir to an industrialist's fortune. Life was definitely not fair.

  Ginny plucked a piece of chicken out of the carton and washed it down with a swig of Coke. Then she slapped her cheeks to get her adrenaline going. She made it through the contract a little after nine and e-mailed her memo to the partner at 10:15. At this hour, Rankin Lusk Carstairs and White was a ghost town inhabited by the cleaning crews that moved silently through the plush offices of the partners and the Spartan broom-closet-size spaces occupied by oppressed associates who, like Ginny, had been saddled with last-minute assignments by their sadistic masters.

  Ginny was almost to the elevator when she heard the ding that signaled the arrival of a car. A woman stepped out, followed by Dennis Masterson. Ginny was not surprised to see Masterson with a female. He had a well-deserved reputation as a womanizer. As new as she was to the firm, Ginny knew of two associates who'd had to fend off his advances. What did surprise Ginny was how ordinary the woman looked. She was dressed in a severe beige business suit and had thin, pinched features and mousy brown hair. Her eyes were her best feature, and they examined Ginny without emotion, the way a computer might if it could stare.

  Masterson nodded at Ginny as he passed her on his way to his sprawling corner office. Ginny wondered if the woman was a client, then wondered why she would be meeting with Masterson in his office at this hour. She considered the possibility that the meeting was a tryst but discounted it. If Masterson was going to make love to the woman, they would be in a hotel room. Ginny was too tired to give any more thought to the pair, and they were forgotten by the time the elevator doors opened in the garage.

  Chapter Nine

  Inverness, a sleepy college town of roughly thirty thousand in northern Wisconsin, was founded by Scotch immigrants who migrated west from New York in the mid-1800s. The population of the town more than doubled each fall when the students at Inverness University and Robert M. La Follette School of Law started the fall semester, and it swelled again during hunting and fishing seasons. Hiking and camping were popular diversions for Inverness students, and the university orientation package contained maps highlighting the hiking trails that started at various points on the outskirts of the campus, and the location of the many lakes that could be found in the verdant forest that surrounded the town and the university.

  Daphne Haggard was a redhead with green eyes and freckles but without the stereotypical fiery temper. She'd been one of five officers in Chicago's police department with an Ivy League degree when she arrived in the Windy City after her husband was accepted into the PhD program at the University of Chicago. She had moved to Inverness when her husband was hired to teach history at Inverness University. Her law-enforcement career had been on the ascendancy, and the decision to move had been difficult, but not as difficult as her husband's efforts to find a good job at a good college. Brett had been miserable working as an adjunct professor with no hope of tenure, who supplemented his income by teaching courses at a community college. Daphne loved her husband, and she'd been willing to make a sacrifice to see him happy.

  Daphne's business card identified her as the chief homicide inspector of the Inverness Police Department, but she was usually working on crimes that had nothing to do with dead people, because there weren't many murders in Inverness, and it usually didn't take much sleuthing to solve them when they did occur. Inverness had never been the scene of a bizarre serial killing, and no one could recall finding a murder victim sealed in the locked room of an eerie mansion. Once or twice a year, someone who had too much to drink would hit his wife too hard and too often, or a bar fight would end in tragedy, and Daphne would make the arrest. There was usually a teary confession and a slew of witnesses, and the skills she'd developed in the Chicago PD were rarely needed.

  Early one Saturday afternoon, however, the Inverness Police Department received a call from a terrified coed concerning a body part she'd stumbled over in the forest surrounding the campus. Daphne, an officer, and
a forensic expert met Tammy Cole at the trailhead. The coed was dressed in running shorts and a sports bra. Her complexion was ashen and her arms were wrapped around her body despite the unseasonably warm weather.

  Daphne showed the frightened girl her credentials. "Miss Cole, I'm Detective Haggard. This is Officer Pollard and Officer McCall. Can you tell us what happened?"

  The girl swallowed. "I usually go for long runs around this time of day. I run different routes. There's a stream about five miles in on the trail I picked for today's run. I got thirsty. The underbrush is thick in spots and I tripped over a root. When I . . ."

  Cole stopped and took a deep breath.

  "Take your time," Daphne said.

  "I threw out my hands to break the fall," Cole said when she was calm enough to continue. "It was soft, not like ground. There were insects, and it smelled rancid."

  "What did?"

  "I'll show you."

  "It's human," Douglas McCall, the forensics expert, said after a brief examination.

  The thigh presented Daphne with the only interesting case she'd had since she'd moved to Inverness--a chance to do some real detective work--but she suppressed her excitement for fear that McCall would think her ghoulish.

  "Man or woman?" asked Daphne, who was squatting beside him.

  "Tough to tell. Lots of men and women weigh in the neighborhood of 150 pounds, and their thighs would look similar after decomposition because the hair gets lost and the skin turns green, like it has here."

  "Isn't there any way to tell who we've got? What about DNA?"

  "You could send the thigh to NamUs, the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. It's run by the Department of Justice, and they have a database they use to identify missing persons."

  "How does that work?"

  "We'd send a tissue sample to the University of North Texas, where they do the DNA testing. Their people can extract DNA from soft tissue, like the deep muscle in the thigh, and do nuclear testing on it."

  "Make it radioactive?"

  McCall laughed. "I thought you were the cop with the Ivy League degree."

  "Spare me the wit. My degree's in English lit."

  "Hey, that rhymes. I bet you aced poetry."

  "Fuck you, Doug," Daphne answered with a grin.

  "I didn't know you were so sensitive. Anyway, the term refers to the cell nucleus. That's where they get the DNA from. You can do that type of testing with blood, hair. When they extract the DNA, they put the sample in their database and try to get a match. But it takes a while."

  "What's a while?"

  "If this was a high-priority case you could get them to act pretty fast, but I'm guessing, realistically, we're talking three months at a minimum."

  "Shit."

  "Of course, the easiest way to do it is to find the rest of the body. Get me a hand, and we can print it; a pelvic bone, and I can give you the sex."

  Daphne studied the grisly evidence. Who are you? she wondered. Then she stood up and looked around. Normally she would have found the shushing sound the stream made and the deep green of the forest restful. Today the woods had become a sinister place where the rest of the unknown victim might be hidden.

  Daphne dialed headquarters on her cell phone. It was lucky that they were in a quiet time of the year, because she was going to need a lot of help searching the woods for the rest of Mr. or Ms. X. They'd have to mobilize the Explorer Scouts, get some cadaver dogs from the state police. It would be a logistics nightmare.

  Daphne briefed the chief and told him what she needed. It was only after she hung up that she remembered the weather forecast. A storm was coming in, the first of the year. If they didn't find the rest of the body quickly, the parts might be buried under snow by tomorrow night.

  Chapter Ten

  Court had been in session, so Brad didn't get a chance to talk to Justice Moss until late in the day. When he walked into chambers, the judge was writing a draft of an opinion in longhand on a yellow legal pad. A computer stood on a worktable in a corner of the room, gathering cobwebs because Moss, who maintained that she was an old dog who could not learn new tricks, insisted on working with pencil and paper as she had during much of her legal career.

  "What can I do for you, Mr. Miller?"

  Brad sat in a high-backed, black leather chair across from his boss. "Something odd happened, and I thought you should know about it."

  Moss laid down her pencil and gave Brad her full attention.

  "Last night, I was working out in the gym, and Wilhelmina Horst, one of Justice Price's clerks, struck up a conversation. During it, she mentioned that Price was upset about something you did in conference that concerned the Woodruff petition for cert. Then she asked me what you were going to do in the case."

  "What did you say?"

  "I told her I didn't know anything about the case, which is true. I wouldn't have thought much about the conversation, except that earlier in the day, while I was eating lunch, Kyle Peterson, another of Price's clerks, did the same thing. I told him what I told Horst, and he dropped the subject, but I had the distinct impression that they were trying to pump me for information about your vote on the cert petition."

  Justice Moss frowned and went quiet. After a bit, she looked across the desk.

  "Justice Price and I had a disagreement during the conference, and the clerks probably overheard him venting. Thanks for telling me about the conversations, but I'm not concerned."

  Brad started to leave. He was halfway to the door when Justice Moss spoke again.

  "Don't mention this to anyone else, Brad. Millard shouldn't have talked about something that went on in conference, and I don't want anyone to know what goes on there."

  "Don't worry. I've forgotten what happened already."

  When Brad entered his office, it was empty. Harriet never left work this early, so he assumed that she had gone for a run. He continued to work on a memo outlining his views of the legal issues in a case he'd been assigned. After working steadily for three quarters of an hour, he took a break and printed out a section of the memo. Then he went on the Internet and Googled Millard Price's name. A long list of hits appeared, and he clicked on a biography on Wikipedia. The first thing that caught his eye was Price's long friendship with Dennis Masterson, a partner at Rankin Lusk, whom Brad had met at a party at the firm during Ginny's first week as an associate. With Masterson as Dartmouth's quarterback and Price at halfback, the Two Amigos, as they were nicknamed by the press, had won an Ivy League championship and had earned All-Ivy honors.

  The friendship had continued at Yale, where they attended law school, and at Rankin Lusk, where Price ended up after law school and Masterson was hired after his service in Vietnam. Price had taken time off from his firm to serve as solicitor general of the United States, then returned to the firm until President Nolan appointed him to the Supreme Court.

  "What are you doing?"

  Brad turned quickly, startled by Harriet's silent return to the office. She was wearing a tight-fitting track suit, and her face was damp with perspiration.

  "Don't sneak up on me like that," Brad complained.

  "Sorry. Is that a biography of Millard Price?"

  "Yeah."

  "How come you're reading up on him?"

  "I've been reading biographies of all the justices," Brad lied. "Aren't you curious about how everyone got where they are?"

  "Studying the justices was part of my preparation when I applied for my clerkship."

  "Did you apply to more than one chamber?" Brad asked, pretending that he hadn't noticed the subtle dig. Unlike every other clerk, with the possible exception of Kyle Peterson, Brad had been handed his job at the court.

  "No, only Justice Price."

  Brad was confused. "If you only applied to clerk for Justice Price, what are you doing here?"

  "He hired too many clerks. There was some mistake. So he asked Justice Moss if she'd take me so he could keep Willie. Each justice is entitled to four clerks, and Jus
tice Moss only had three after she hired you. She took me on as a favor to Justice Price because he didn't want to have to let me go after promising me the job."

  "That would have been rough."

  "What was rough was being shunted aside for that slut," Harriet said bitterly.

  "Willie?"

  "Is there any question why she was hired? Price has been divorced three times, and he always has one clerk with tits bigger than her IQ."

  "Horst went to MIT."

  "Is that what she told you?"

  "She was on the basketball team."

  "Her freshman year. Then she transferred to UMass. That's where she graduated."

  Harriet stopped. "I shouldn't be talking like this. Sorry. I'm tired and it just slipped out. I'm going to shower."

  "You coming back?"

  "Yeah, I still have some stuff to do."

  Harriet left, and Brad thought about what he'd learned about Willie. She'd never told him she was an MIT grad. All she'd said was that she was on the MIT basketball team, which was true. And she had to be pretty smart to get into MIT in the first place, plus she had been hired as a Supreme Court clerk, which was further proof that she wasn't a dummy, as Harriet had suggested.

  Brad put all thoughts of Willie Horst out of his head and got back to his memo. He'd been working for fifteen minutes when someone tapped their knuckles on the doorjamb. Brad turned and found Willie Horst standing in the doorway. Her hair was down and she was wearing a tight-fitting black skirt and a white silk blouse, open at the neck, displaying the tanned and tantalizing curve of her breasts. Brad flushed, embarrassed by the sexual arousal Willie elicited. He also could not help entertaining the irrational idea that his visitor knew that he had been discussing her with Harriet.

  "I came to take you up on your invitation to show me the memorabilia in Justice Moss's chambers," Willie said.

  Brad didn't remember extending an invitation, but he wasn't certain he hadn't.

  "Uh, OK. Let me log out."

  Justice Moss had left the lights on in her chambers for the cleaning crew. Brad stepped back, and Willie walked in. Brad felt uncomfortable alone with Horst, and he wanted the tour of the office to go as quickly as possible. He started by pointing out the quote from Justice Bradley.