Mistress of Justice - Jeffery Deaver - Mass Market Paperback

CHAPTER ONE The drapery man had been warned that even though it was now well after midnight, Sunday morning of the Thanksgiving holiday, there would very likely be people in the firm here, attorneys and paralegals, still working. And so he carried the weapon at his side, pointed downward. It was a curious thing--not a knife exactly, more of an ice pick, but longer and made of a blackened, tempered metal. He held it with the confidence of someone who was very familiar with the device. And who had used it before. Dressed in gray coveralls bearing the stencil of a bogus drapery cleaning service and wearing a baseball cap, the big, sandy-haired man now paused and, hearing footsteps, slipped into an empty office. Then there was silence. And he continued on, through shadows, pausing for a long moment, frozen like a fox near a ground nest of skittish birds. He consulted the diagram of the firm, turned along one corridor and continued, gripping the handle of the weapon tightly in his hand, which was as muscular as the rest of his body. As he neared the office he sought, he reached up and pulled a paper face mask over his mouth. This was not so that he wouldn't be recognized but because he was concerned that he might lose a fleck of spit that could be retrieved as evidence and used in a DNA match. The office, which belonged to Mitchell Reece, was at the end of the corridor, not far from the front door of the firm. Like all the offices here, the lights were left on, which meant that the drapery man wasn't sure that it was unoccupied. But he glanced in quickly, saw that the room was empty and stepped inside. The office was very cluttered. Books, files, charts, thousands of sheets of papers. Still, the man found the filing cabinet easily--there was only one here with two locks on it--and crouched, pulling on tight latex gloves and extracting his tool kit from his coverall pockets. The drapery man set the weapon nearby and began to work on the locks. Scarf, Mitchell Reece thought, drying his hands in the law firm's marble-and-oak rest room. He'd forgotten his wool scarf. Well, he was surprised he'd managed to remember his coat and briefcase. The lanky thirty-three-year-old associate, having had only four hours' sleep, had arrived at the firm around 8 a.m. yesterday, Saturday, and had worked straight through until about an hour ago, when he'd fallen asleep at his desk. A few moments before, something had startled him out of that sleep. He'd roused himself and decided to head home for a few hours of shut-eye the old-fashioned way--horizontally. He'd grabbed his coat and briefcase and made this brief pit stop. But he wasn't going outside without his scarf--1010 WINS had just reported the temperature was 22 degrees and falling. Reece stepped into the silent corridor. Thinking about a law firm at night. The place was shadowy but not dark, silent yet filled with a white noise of memory and power. A law firm wasn't like other places: banks or corporations or museums or concert halls; it seemed to remain alert even when its occupants were gone. Here, down a wide wallpapered corridor, was a portrait of a man in stern sideburns, a man who left his partnership at the firm to become governor of the state of New York. Here, in a small foyer decorated with fresh flowers, was an exquisite Fragonard oil painting, no alarm protecting it. In the hall beyond, two Keith Harings and a Chagall. Here, in a conference room, were reams of papers containing the magic words required by the law to begin a corporate breach of contract suit for three hundred million dollars, and in a similar room down the hall sat roughly the same amount of paper, assembled in solemn blue binders, which would create a charitable trust to fund private AIDS research. Here, in a locked safe-file room, rested the last will and testament oDeaver, Jeffery is the author of 'Mistress of Justice - Jeffery Deaver - Mass Market Paperback' with ISBN 9780553297331 and ISBN 0553297333.