The only problem was that on this night when he came back to life, he was thinking of Noel Greer. That was when he knew it was time to act.
* * *
Two days later, Derek and Sabrina were in David Cottrell’s office in New York. Actually, they weren’t in his office, per se, but in the computer room of his law firm. Derek was at the keyboard of one of the half-dozen computers. Sabrina was in a chair close by his side.
“This,” Derek told her, “is LEXIS.” He keyed in one cue, waited for new directions to appear on the screen, then keyed in another. “If we had all the time and patience in the world, we would be sitting in the law library poring through yearly volumes of the Supreme Court Reporter, but I don’t have all the time and patience in the world, so we’re doing it this way.” He was continuing to type responses to prompts on the screen.
“What are we looking for?” Sabrina asked in a whisper.
“The connection between Ballantine and Greer,” Derek said in a voice low enough not to carry beyond their station. “If we theorize that Greer had a personal enough stake in at least one Supreme Court case to warrant his bribing Ballantine, we have to find those cases where Ballantine’s might have been the deciding vote.”
“How do we do that?”
“LEXIS’ memory contains all of the cases decided by the court, along with the date of the decision and the vote, by Justice. We’re looking for those decisions made during Lloyd Ballantine’s years on the bench in which Ballantine voted with the five-member majority—split decisions, five votes to four, where Ballantine voted with the five.” He studied the screen, entered another command on the keyboard.
“Okay,” Sabrina conceded. “We’ll know if Ballantine voted with the five. But will we know whether his was actually the deciding vote?”
“No. We have no way of knowing that. All we’ll know is that Ballantine voted in Greer’s favor. You can hardly call it evidence, but it’s a start. Particularly…” He faltered, eyes narrowed on the screen, and his words grew distant. “… if we can find more than one case.” He took a breath. “Here we go. Got a pencil?”
“Right here.”
Derek read the citation by volume, date and page. Sabrina wrote it down, even though it didn’t appear to relate to Greer.
“We’ll note them all,” Derek explained. “If we don’t need them, that’s fine. On the other hand, if we come up with zip, we may have to look more deeply into those that initially sound improbable.”
And so they sat side by side, Derek manipulating the computer, Sabrina compiling a list of cases from those he read off. At one point, when they took a short break, David snagged her in the hall on her way back from the ladies’ room.
“How’s it goin’?” he asked.
She gave him a feeble half-smile. “Okay, I guess. Not that anything earth-shattering has popped off the screen yet.”
“Patience, girl. Patience.”
“Mmm, that’s what I keep telling myself. Derek doesn’t have that much, but compared to me he’s loaded.”
“Derek has learned patience the hard way. The passage of time today is a drop in the bucket compared to the days, weeks, months he spent locked up just thinking of doing what he is now.”
“Still, he’s incredible.”
“Think so, do ya?”
She smiled. “Yes, I do.”
“I’m mighty glad to hear that, ma’am, since he thinks pretty much the same about you. But frankly”—he grew more serious —“I’m surprised you’re letting him do this.”
“Letting him? Do you think I had a choice?”
“You’re his wife.”
“That’s right, his wife, not his keeper.”
“Still,” he scratched his cheek with a single finger, “I’d have thought that after everything you’ve been through, you’d prefer a more peaceful life.”
“I would. But I fell in love with Derek, and all this somehow came with the package. Derek is determined to see it through. I can’t stop him.”
“Have you tried?”
“Sure, I have,” she said with the kind of quiet serenity that had drawn Derek to her from the start, “but I gave in because I realized something else—not realized, maybe accepted is a better word. Derek needs to do this. Right now, he’s haunted. There are times when he can push it all to a corner of his mind, but inevitably it comes forward again. He’s haunted by the boy he was—growing up as his father’s son—and he’s haunted by the man Noel Greer would see him be. I wish there were some other way, because revenge is ugly. But he needs to be free. We need to be free.” She paused, then said sadly, “Many a prison bar isn’t made of steel.”
David Cottrell stood silently before her for the space of several breaths. Then he let out a whoosh and shook his head in admiration of the woman his friend had been lucky enough to catch.
By midday, Sabrina and Derek had a sizable list of those split-decision cases in which Lloyd Ballantine had voted with the majority. One of those cases concerned Noel Greer and the network he had founded and built and of which he had become chairman of the board.
Citation in hand, Derek went to the volumes on the shelves of David’s law library. There he learned that the case was a libel suit that had been decided in Greer’s favor with Lloyd Ballantine’s vote in support.
While Sabrina was pleased as punch that Derek’s theory was proving to have merit, Derek was more cautious. “There should be more,” he said, brooding, “if, in fact, Lloyd Ballantine committed suicide. Think about it. Barring some sudden, shocking turn in his life, a man is usually heading downhill for a while before he gets to the drastic point of taking his life. This case was decided four months before Ballantine died—long enough to eliminate sudden shock, not all that long for a real downhill slide. I’ll bet the relationship between Ballantine and Greer goes further back.”
“To the days before he was on the bench?”
“Possibly.”
“Ballantine first came to Washington to serve as attorney general. He’d certainly have had something to offer Greer in that capacity.”
Derek frowned, looked down, slowly shook his head. He raised a pained look to Sabrina. “It’s right there. I can almost taste it, but it stays on the edge of my memory. It’s been that way for so long that I’m not sure I didn’t just dream it up to begin with.”
“Dream what up?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. Mind spending some time in the library?”
“Of course not.”
Some time turned out to be the rest of that day and most of the next, but when they finally finished with the microfilms, Derek had what he needed. Walking briskly, with Sabrina’s hand held tightly in his, he led her to the coffee shop where they were to meet the man Derek had spoken with moments earlier on the phone.
Jonathan Sable had been the chief of the antitrust division of the Department of Justice under Attorney General Ballantine. He confirmed what Derek and Sabrina had read—that during his tenure, Noel Greer had been the subject of an antitrust investigation that had been terminated at the intervention of the attorney general. The case against Greer had been strong, Sable claimed. No one had been more surprised—or angry—than he when it had been dropped, and he’d resigned his position soon after. Frankly, he confessed, he was surprised no one had investigated the matter sooner.
Back in Vermont, Derek told Justin and Ann about his search for the Ballantine files. He’d given it much thought, had discussed it with Sabrina. J. B. already knew; it was one of the many things he and Derek had talked about when they’d been working together in the barn. And as for Justin and Ann, Derek knew he could trust them. He wanted their feedback.
Sabrina had another reason for wanting Derek to take Justin and Ann into his confidence. When she thought of feedback, she thought of additional voices telling Derek that he was overstepping the bounds of reason—if, indeed, it ever got to that. In short, she wanted allies.
She knew she had them in Justin and Ann. They h
ung on every word Derek said, but then, rather than yessing him, they asked questions. They played devil’s advocate, and they could get away with it, since that was largely how brainstorming sessions had been back when they all worked together in New York.
After hours of intermingled talk and thought, they agreed that Derek was headed in the right direction. They agreed that while there was still a possibility that Lloyd Ballantine’s support of Noel Greer’s causes might have been innocent, Greer had had much, much to lose without that support. They agreed that Greer’s nearly violent reaction to Derek’s proposed investigation of Ballantine smacked of a cover-up and that if, indeed, Ballantine had accepted a bribe, there had to be a reason. A weakness. Which was how Noel Greer worked. They agreed that the next step to finding the Ballantine files, was finding that weakness—and that the first step to finding that weakness was to interview the man’s family.
They did not agree on who would do the interviewing. Justin and Ann wanted to help. They could leave right away, they said. They would be relentless but discreet. They would uncover as much about Lloyd Ballantine in his hometown as there was to be uncovered, and they could do it quickly.
Their last argument was the most tempting for Derek. He had already decided to stay in Vermont for at least a week or two before heading out again. For one thing, he didn’t want to alert anyone who might be watching his movements that he was hot on a trail. For another, Sabrina was tired. She argued with him on that point, but he could see it. Faint shadows had appeared under her eyes, and she was having more trouble getting up in the morning. He worried that his tossing was keeping her awake during the night, but she denied that it was. He could only conclude that she was feeling the emotional strain of his quest.
Since he wasn’t about to give up on the quest, and since she wasn’t about to let him pursue it without her, and since he couldn’t, just couldn’t let Ann and Justin do it for him, his only option was to wait that week or two and see that Sabrina got plenty of rest before continuing.
Yes, he was sorry to lose the time. No, he didn’t regret pampering Sabrina. She was his mate, his wife. She was his responsibility, and he took that very seriously—which was easy to do, since he adored her. He knew that if she’d had her druthers, he wouldn’t be after the Ballantine files at all. He figured that the least he could do was intersperse his search with more quiet, peaceful times for them both.
So he tried. He tried not to think about Greer, not to listen to televised reports about his campaign, not to follow the coverage in Time or Newsweek. Instead, he took Sabrina to Boston for two days of laziness in a posh hotel, then brought her home for another two of laziness in and around the farmhouse, then took her to see Nicky, which she’d been wanting to do.
He enjoyed pampering her, and found that as long as he did it with a minimum of fanfare, she enjoyed it, too. It helped that Ann had taken command of the kitchen and was preparing the kind of culinary treats that the tiny kitchen of her closet-of-an-apartment in New York had been unsuited for.
That wasn’t all Ann was doing. Under Derek’s tutelage, she and Justin had begun work on several of the stories that had interested them. They’d equipped their makeshift barn-office with desks and telephones, and between time spent there and at the college library, they were on their way.
Sabrina worried that J. B. was in their way. Each time she ventured to the barn, he was out of his own office and sitting in Ann’s. When she asked about the status of his book, he told her to worry about her own, after which point she rarely asked again. She did ask Ann—the two women had developed an easy relationship—about whether J. B. was being a pest and was told with a shy smile that he wasn’t.
That was more than Derek could say about Maura, who dropped by for another visit during those two weeks. Derek couldn’t quite put his finger on what bothered him about Maura—whether it was the history she and Sabrina shared, or the fact that she took up large chunks of Sabrina’s time or that she rarely stopped talking. She was forever asking questions, and that annoyed him. For Sabrina’s sake, though, he was always polite. For his own sake, he was always happy to see Maura leave.
When Sabrina got the rest Derek had prescribed for her and still the shadows beneath her eyes didn’t disappear, Derek decided that they were related to tension. Knowing the source of that tension and that the only way of relieving it was to solve the Ballantine puzzle, he went ahead and booked two seats on a flight to Chicago.
Chapter 16
BERNICE BALLANTINE lived in a beautiful Tudor home in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. If her late husband had been wanting for money, there was no evidence of it in what he’d left behind. The widow Ballantine was a bona fide member of upper-class society.
Calling her from their hotel soon after he and Sabrina had arrived, Derek set up a meeting for the following day.
“You gave her your real name,” Sabrina said after he’d hung up. “Won’t that be a tip-off?”
He’d given that earlier thought, knew it would be a recurring problem during the course of his search, but still decided against use of an alias. “One of the things I learned over the years was that the average person isn’t tipped off so quickly. He—she, in this case—isn’t coming from where you and I are. She doesn’t know what’s in our minds. Unless Greer has already gotten to her, which I doubt he has or she’d never have allowed for this meeting, Mrs. Ballantine assumes nothing but what I told her—that we’re doing an independent story on her late husband and want to ask her some questions—which is, in fact, the truth. The less we lie, the less we risk stumbling over our own deceit.”
Sabrina considered that for a minute, then broke into a dazzling smile. “Well put,” she said.
“Besides,” he added less nobly, “what choice did I have? She’d probably have recognized me anyway.”
Bernice Ballantine did recognize him. She commented that she’d watched him many a time, and that she was glad to see him back at work. He did nothing to correct that misperception—which was only indirectly a misperception. He was back at work. He was an investigative journalist interviewing a source, in search of information that would send him farther down the road. This was what he’d always done and he did it well. Even aside from the personal stake he had in this particular subject, he felt the thrill of the chase lighten his blood.
Unfortunately, Bernice Ballantine was of little help. She confirmed the standard biographical facts that Sabrina and Derek broached merely for the sake of their cover. She painted a picture of a family man, a devoted husband and father whose primary weakness was a lack of aptitude for mechanical things.
Under Derek’s questioning, she said that she’d been proud of her husband, and that though he hadn’t been on the bench long enough to make so great an impact as some of the others, he’d taken his job with due gravity. Under Sabrina’s questioning, she admitted that she’d never felt completely comfortable living in Washington, which was why she’d returned to Lake Forest as often as she had.
Yes, she felt that the justices were underpaid, but she stressed that she was thinking of some of the others—since, of course, she and her husband had been financially secure. No, she had no knowledge of corruption in the Court. Yes, her husband had on occasion been burdened by the emotional pressures of his work. No, there were no other papers—beyond those already bequeathed to the University of Chicago Library—left behind when he died.
At the conclusion of the interview, she commented that she wished Derek were back at the network. Unable to resist, Derek asked what she thought of Noel Greer’s bid for a Senate seat, to which she answered that even if she were a resident of New York, she wouldn’t vote for Greer because he was a womanizer, and she couldn’t abide infidelity.
“She sounds like the Girl Scout to match her late husband’s Boy Scout,” Sabrina remarked when they’d returned to the privacy of their rental car.
“Not terribly inspiring,” Derek agreed. “Still, it wasn’t a total loss. Either I’m a poor ju
dge of character, or that woman was telling the truth. I do believe that she had no knowledge of any misconduct on Ballantine’s part.”
“Which doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any. She said that she spent a good deal of time in Lake Forest while her husband was in Washington. That opens the door to all kinds of possibilities.”
“They say the wife is always the last to know—”
“Or the first. But not in this case.”
“Maybe her daughter is more enlightened.”
If Pamela Stanger was more enlightened about misbehavior on the part of her father, she was not about to share it. Married, she lived in a high-rise on Chicago’s shoreline, but she refused to meet with Derek and Sabrina there, choosing instead the impersonal conference room of the firm for which she worked as an architect.
Rather formal, though civil, Pamela was a woman of few words. She answered questions as succinctly as possible, volunteering little by way of insightful information. Sabrina found her arrogant; Derek found her defensive. They came away from the meeting, though, sharing an awareness of two things. The first was that Pamela Stanger did not enjoy talking about her father. The second was that her name, embossed in gold among those of her partners at the entrance to the firm, read “Pamela E. Stanger.” There was no B for Ballantine, which was odd. Most women whose fathers had made it to the Supreme Court would be proud as punch of the name. Apparently, this one wasn’t.
Peter Ballantine, the late justice’s only son, was less tight-lipped than his sister. Though he chose his words with care, a certain cynicism came through. Twice married and twice divorced, he clearly had an ax to grind. Why he had chosen to share his feelings with Sabrina and Derek, they didn’t know, but they weren’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Quite bluntly he said that while his father had been attentive when he’d been with them, that hadn’t been often. Lloyd Ballantine had liked his freedom. By the time his children reached the age of fifteen, they had been enrolled in exclusive boarding schools. As a lawyer practicing out of Chicago, Ballantine had traveled often—leaving his wife behind. As attorney general, he had insisted on keeping the Lake Forest house, and he’d done the same when he was appointed to the Bench, though, theoretically, that appointment was for life.
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