The Final Judgment
Page 1
Praise for Richard North Patterson and his bestselling novels…
The Final Judgment
“Compelling … very possibly Patterson’s best.”
—USA Today
“Dazzling … the pages almost seem to turn themselves…. The plot culminates in a classic courtroom confrontation.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“The novel builds to several breathtaking surprises.”
—People
“Absorbing … Patterson brings us slowly and with consummate skill into a story that wends this way, then that, before coming to a fully satisfying halt…. One of those books you race to finish even though you don’t want it to end … A great read.”
—New York Daily News
Silent Witness
“Intense courtroom drama … As startling as the bang of a gavel.”
—People
“This generation’s best writer of legal thrillers … his strongest fiction to date.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Patterson hits the first line at a dead run…. He never slows down…. Everything is marvelously plotted.”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
“Enthralling … the denouement is powerful.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Chilling.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“Hypnotic … [Patterson] is at his finest when he gives the emotions of [his] characters, who are connected by a lifetime of love and resentment, full rein in the courtroom. These are the scenes that his fans will anticipate most eagerly, and they are as explosive and revealing as anyone could wish.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“An absorbing read.”
—New York Daily News
Eyes of a Child
“Gripping … the intelligent reader’s John Grisham.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Masterful. Eyes of a Child dazzles … right up to the very end.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A taut nail-biter … [that] provides the thrill of a legal hunt.”
—USA Today
The Spire
“Patterson grabs the reader by the scruff of the neck and holds him until the very last page … The Spire might just be his best to date.”
—Tucson Citizen
“Intriguing … we can’t read fast enough to reach the finale.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Gripping … A page-turner with multiple twists and a well-earned conclusion at once shocking and inevitable.”
—Richmond Times Dispatch
Degree of Guilt
“ A page-turner.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“ Compulsively readable.”
—People
“One intense courtroom clash after another … An intelligent and gripping thriller.”
—The Washington Post
“Flamboyant and entertaining.”
—Boston Globe
“ Electrifying.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“One of the year’s best thrillers … Superb characterizations and intense dialogue make this utterly compelling reading.”
—Library Journal
Eclipse
“Passionate … exciting [and] eye-opening, page by page.”
—Washington Post
“Compelling and credible … guaranteed to rouse you to thought.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“This stellar legal thriller both informs and entertains … Patterson has exerted all his considerable skill in creating a nightmare atmosphere that will cling to readers long after the last page is turned.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Nearly flawless—by the time you realize how well Patterson is writing, you are already caught up in this novel.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
The Race
“An electrifying page-turner.”
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Patterson has redefined himself as a writer willing to take risks.”
—USA Today
“Absorbing and suspenseful.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Required reading.”
—New York Post
For Alison Porter Thomas
Contents
Part I: Two Women
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Part II: The Return
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Part III: Summer 1964
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part IV: The Witness
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part V: Summer 1972
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Part VI: The Hearing
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part VII: The Final Judgment
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Acknowledgments
Part I
Two Women
One
Two days after the murder, listening to Brett Allen’s tale of innocence and confusion, the lawyer wavered between disbelief and wonder at its richness, so vivid that she could almost picture it as truth.
The lawyer looked at Brett in silence, taking in the oval face, the delicate cleft chin, the curly ungroomed hair, the small breasts and almost too slim body of a late bloomer who, at first glance, looked younger than twenty-two. But what struck her was the bright greenness of the eyes, a gaze so intuitive and direct that it unnerved her.
As Brett described it, the night had been crisp, windless. Moonlight refracted on the still, obsidian waters of the lake and traced the pines and birches and elms surrounding it. The only sound Brett heard was the rise and fall of James’s breathing.
They were naked. Brett straddled him, as she had when making love. The cool night chilled her nipples, dried the wetness on her skin. As she shivered, James, flaccid and unconscious, slid from inside her.
She felt a spurt of anger. And then the nausea returned, mingling the acrid taste of marijuana with the torpor of too much wine. All at once, the night burst into shards—images without connection, freeze-frames of color amidst a black jumble she could not reme
mber.
That explained how she had acted with the police, she told her lawyer—pot and wine, shock and paranoia. Dope was really James’s thing. As Brett said this, her lawyer saw a sheen of tears, as if the young woman had remembered some fond detail. For days after, as the lawyer grew to believe that Brett Allen was a murderer, the moment haunted her.
Before the dope, Brett told her, her memory was sound.
James had called her parents’ home, where she was staying for the summer. They had talked a little; then, fearing that her mother might listen in, Brett had suggested that they go to the lake, take some cheese and wine. She had a favorite place, and they would be alone.
Whatever James had to say, she sensed, should not be heard by others.
Brett made her excuses. She saw the tight look in her mother’s thin face, the cool gray eyes filling with things she did not say. For a moment, Brett was torn between pity and the desire to confront her, and then she decided that this was pointless. She left the house, its dark mass looming behind her.
She drove to the college for James. In the car, he was quiet, intent. His face was a study in black and white—pale skin, dark ringlets of hair, shadows on his sculpted face. One of his acting teachers, with mingled derision and admiration, had once called him “Young Lord Byron.” The teacher, Brett pointedly recalled, was a woman.
They drove winding roads, wooded and silent, saw occasional headlights cutting the silver darkness, then the steady glow of a lone car behind them, traveling neither slower nor faster. Abruptly, they turned down a dirt road, hacked so narrow between looming pines that it was pitch black. The car lights behind them passed the trailhead, and vanished.
Hitting the brights, Brett slowed to a crawl, following the headlights as they carved a path between the rough-barked trunks of trees.
Then the path ended.
Brett stopped there. Silent, she opened the trunk of her battered black Jeep, took out the gym bag with the wine and cheese, then tucked a rough woolen blanket under her arm. James followed her into the trees.
Suddenly, there was no sky.
They edged through trunks and branches down a gradually sloping hill, feet sliding on the hardened ground, the result of two dry weeks after a rainy spring. A branch lashed at her face; in the darkness, Brett felt diminished, like some primitive amidst the mysteries of nature.
“Where are we going?” James murmured behind her. “To play Dungeons and Dragons?”
Why was it, Brett wondered, that people whisper in the darkness? She did not answer.
And then they reached the clearing.
A glade of grass, opening to a moonlit lake. She stopped there, looking out.
Behind her, James was quiet again.
“This is yours?” he said at last.
Can you leave this? she felt him ask. But she answered only the question he spoke aloud.
“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s mine. If I still want it.”
She did not mean the lake. It was a mile across and nearly that wide; on the far shore were a few fishing camps and summer houses, unseen in the darkness. But since her birth her family had held the parcel where they stood for Brett. It was a fact as certain as her grandfather’s love.
Brett gazed out at the water, postponing by her stillness the moment when they would begin to talk.
She could sense, rather than see, the platform where she had first learned to dive. Yet she could have swum there as surely as in daylight. Just as she could remember standing on the rocky inlet between the glade and the water, holding aloft the rainbow trout, speckled in the sunlight, so that her grandfather could see it.
Turning to James, Brett put down the gym bag and held out the wool blanket so that he could help her spread it on the glade. Laying it down, she could feel the dampness of the grass.
They settled onto the blanket, Brett sitting cross-legged, James lying on his side, head propped on one hand. Woods surrounded them on three sides; in front of them was the smooth black sheen of water. Far across the lake, Brett heard the faint cry of a heron. They were utterly alone.
“What is it?” she asked him.
James brushed the hair back from his forehead. Brett knew this as a temporizing gesture, a sign of hesitancy.
“I want us to go to California,” he said at length.
Her voice was level. “I know that.”
“I mean soon.”
It was hard to read his face. But beneath the casual pose, so characteristic of James, Brett felt his anxiety.
“Why soon?”
He was quiet for a time. But in their year together, Brett had learned the uses of silence. She waited.
“That dope I sold,” James said finally. “I never paid for it.”
Brett despised James’s business. They had fought about it for two months: James was adamant that this was the way for him—left without money or family to speak of—to pay his way through what he had sardonically labeled the “poison ivy league.” It was, he promised, temporary.
“Never paid for it…,” Brett repeated in a flat voice. “I didn’t know your friends gave credit.”
“I need the money. We need the money. To leave here.” James’s voice rose. “Sure as hell your family won’t give you any. Not for that.”
“Why should they?”
“No reason to.” His tone softened. “It’s just that I had to do something—start a life.”
He was trying to make her complicit, Brett knew. “Without asking me?” she shot back. “You’re supposed to do what you want, and I’m just supposed to react to it?”
James sat up now, facing her. “I owe a little over thirty-five hundred.” He leaned forward in entreaty. “I made almost forty-three selling the stuff. Enough to drive to the Coast and still have first and last months’ rent.”
Brett knew his dream. He would work part time and look for acting jobs; Brett would break from home and family—the stifling effect she felt of too many years of expectations—and write the books she believed she could. But this image seemed more vivid to James than to her.
“I have a life, James. A real one. And not all of it is with you.” She shook her head in impatience. “My parents are work, all right—especially my mother. But I have one quarter of school left, and I owe it to them to finish, owe it to myself if I decide to get a master’s degree. And my grandfather—who I love a lot, though I understand it’s hard for you to get that—has a heart condition. What I do about them, I have to live with. Just like I have to live with me. This isn’t about you, okay? Or even me writing the Great American Novel.” She paused, finishing more quietly: “You never had a family, for bad or good or in between. It’s more complex than you think.”
James expelled a breath. Taking her hand, he said softly, “You’re my family.”
It was meant to touch her, Brett knew. But she perceived what James could never admit: that beneath his calculation was the loneliness of a seven-year-old whose mother was dead and his father vanished, his future a series of foster homes that took him in for money.
Conflicted, Brett watched his eyes, searching for the person who lived behind them.
Suddenly, James flinched. He was half standing before she heard the sound.
Underbrush rustling, perhaps the cracking of a branch. James went rigid; in that moment, Brett saw how scared he was.
It was that which raised the gooseflesh on her skin.
“What was that?” he said in a low voice.
Watching his face, thin and strained, Brett listened.
Nothing.
Slowly, she turned from him, saw pale branches at the edge of the glade, then darkness.
“Well,” she said with a trace of humor, “they say the timberwolves are coming back from Canada. There are all sorts of animals in the woods at night. Everything but people.” When he did not answer, she lowered her voice. “How much trouble is this?”
James clasped her shoulders. “He’s been calling me,” he said. “My supplier.”
“He wants his money. I said I didn’t have it yet.”
Brett felt her eyes close. She was part of a deadline, she realized, that James had created for himself. “Then give him the money, that’s all.”
She heard him exhale. “Too late. He knows I lied to him.”
To Brett, the phrase had an incomplete sound. When she turned to him, he was still looking over her shoulder. “They broke into my apartment, Brett. Last night. The place was torn up, and the sheets slashed.”
Brett stared at him. Reflexively, she asked, “Did you call the police?”
He gave her a faint, crooked smile. With a strange mix of bitterness and affection, he said, “You really are the judge’s granddaughter, you know.”
Her voice rose. “It can’t be too late, James. All they want is money. What good does it do to hurt you?”
“That’s not how it works, Brett. Please believe me.”
She shook her head, turning away. “There are too many surprises, too close together. I just can’t deal with this….”
Her voice trailed off. He had grown up protecting himself, she thought; he wasn’t used to closeness.
Alone, Brett walked to the water’s edge.
After a time, she heard his footsteps behind her, then saw his faint reflection in the water next to hers, a slender profile with hands jammed in pockets. He made no move to touch her.