Deadly Sins (4 page)

The man bent his head over the clipboard and ran his pen down the list of names on it. A moment later he looked up. “Your interviewees will be shown to the justices’ dining room on the second floor. I’ll take you up.”

“Second,” Jaid muttered to Adam as they fell in step behind the young officer and Shepherd as they were led to an elevator. “The justices’ chambers and the clerks’ offices are on the main floor. Wonder who’s in charge of searching Reinbeck’s?”

“You were busy on the trip over,” he observed.

“Googled the building. Haven’t been here since I was a kid. You?”

“It’s been decades,” he admitted, without adding details. Which was par for the course. She’d always had to pry to elicit the slightest hint of personal information from him. Which had just made every nugget gleaned seem more valuable.

A part of her squirmed inwardly at the naïveté of the woman she’d been. Green and overeager, both in the job and in their relationship. She never would have survived as an agent or as a female if she hadn’t finally heeded his advice to guard her emotions. Harness her control. There was no better model of both than Adam Raiker.

But Jaid had never been particularly grateful to the man for the lesson.

She watched him now from the corner of her eye as they stood waiting for the elevator doors to open. He’d despise sympathy, so she allowed herself to feel none at his altered appearance. His hair was still dark, his remaining eye a vivid laser blue. The black eye patch covering the other gave him the look of a modern-day pirate. John LeCroix had been responsible for its loss eight years ago, as well as the scars that marked Adam. The nerve damage that had resulted from the wounds to his leg had him relying on a cane for support, and she knew him well enough to realize how much he must hate that.

But his shoulders were still wide, his back still straight. And as the elevator doors opened and the lone woman inside exited, the look she sent Adam was pure female appreciation. Because the years had only polished the aura of command shimmering off the man. Had only enhanced his devastating attractiveness.

She wedged herself into the corner of the elevator and gave silent thanks that she had long since grown immune to both qualities.

When they’d been shown to the large dining room with its gleaming paneling, the officer said, “All four of Justice Reinbeck’s clerks have arrived. Do you want to interview them in a certain order, or should I just show one in?”

The three looked at each other, and Shepherd shrugged. “Any order will do.”

Jaid sat between the two men and placed her briefcase on the long polished table. Popped it open.

“Okay if we rotate taking the lead in the interviews?”

She looked at Tom Shepherd, a little surprised at the diffidence in his voice. Jaid didn’t know the man well, but his self-confidence used to border on cocky. Originally coming out of cyber crimes, his rise in the agency had earned him the nickname Midas. Every case he touched came out golden. Until his team had failed to resolve a kidnapping of a multimillionaire’s daughter. It was Adam who’d eventually cracked the child-swapping ring a couple years later, when one of his agency’s cases intersected. He’d been credited for the safe return of that girl and dozens of other children. From what she’d heard, Hedgelin had banished Shepherd to the field office in North Dakota, likely because of the resulting embarrassment to the division. She wasn’t sure how he’d landed back in DC, but apparently his tenure in the frozen north had taught him a little humility. “Fine with me.”

Adam only nodded.

A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. “Lawrence Dempsey,” the officer announced.

A tall, exceedingly thin man with a headful of strawcolored hair entered. “This is horrendous. Absolutely horrendous.” His blue eyes, below brows so light they were nearly invisible, were troubled. “Justice Reinbeck was a brilliant jurist. A scholar. He was doing great things for our country. That something like this could happen is a staggering commentary on second amendment rights run amuck in our nation today.”

“Please sit down, Mr. Dempsey.” When the man took a chair across the table from them, Shepherd made introductions and began leading the man through his educational background and employment history. They already had that information in a dossier on each of the people they would interview today, but the man visibly relaxed during the recounting of the familiar. It wasn’t until Shepherd got to the questions regarding his work relationship with Reinbeck that he showed any signs of discomfort.

“What was Justice Reinbeck like to work with?” Shepherd asked.

“Awe-inspiring,” was Dempsey’s prompt answer. “His mind . . .” He shook his head, as though words failed him. “He needed only a couple paragraphs of a memo to get the grasp of a petition. He could summarize the most complicated brief in just a few incisive, articulate sentences.”

“I knew Byron for a long time,” Adam put in. His blackon-black pin-striped suit was almost a twin to the one Dempsey was wearing. But where the younger man’s looked like an effort to appear more polished, Raiker’s gave him a deceptive sheen of civility that all but the unwary would immediately mistrust. “His brilliance is undeniable. But he was unwavering in his convictions. And I’m told he could be something of a task master.”

“He had an admirable work ethic,” Dempsey said stiffly, picking a barely visible speck of lint from his lapel. “Of course all of us who clerk for him wanted to support him in any way we could.”

“So you worked late last night, too?” Shepherd rolled the pen he held between his thumb and index finger.

The other man bobbed his head. “Of course. Justice Reinbeck was selected to write the dissenting opinion of one of the recent votes. Some of the justices have a clerk write the first draft for them, and then they make changes, put their own stamp on the opinion. But not Reinbeck. He likes . . . liked”—he seemed to stumble on the selfcorrection—“to do the writing himself. So even though we knew he had an engagement in the evening, we figured on staying until he finished. In case he needed some research done to be referenced in the opinion. We never lack for something to work on, so it was no hardship.”

“No hardship?” Jaid queried. “What if you’d had plans?”

Dempsey shook his head. “You don’t apply for a clerkship because you want to check out the DC nightlife. It’s for the experience. Part of the job is putting in the same or more hours than the justices do.”

“And all of you share that view?”

The man didn’t hesitate at Shepherd’s question. “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be here.”

“What about threats? Did you ever hear Justice Reinbeck mention any he’d received since joining the court?”

“That’d be the jurisdiction of the marshals, but no.” Sadness flickered across Dempsey’s face. “Judge Reinbeck never said anything about that.”

“Would he?” Jaid interjected. She waited for the man’s attention to shift to her. “Was he the type of person who would have shared that with those who worked most closely with him?”

The clerk hesitated. “He may not have,” he finally said with some reluctance. “He was great to work for. Not just because he was brilliant, but also because he genuinely cared about people. He was always asking after our families or giving advice about our futures. He might not have wanted to worry us, although if he thought any of us were in danger, we would have been alerted.” He shook his head then. “But I think we would have noticed something different in his demeanor if something like that were bothering him. I don’t think he could have hidden it from everyone. And no one has mentioned anything about him seeming off.” His jaw quivered a moment before he deliberately set it. “Believe me, I would have heard about it if someone had.”

The second interview was almost a duplication of the first, although the clerk this time was female. Krista Temple was a diminutive blonde. Articulate, with a rapid-fire manner of speaking, her intellect was obvious. So was her fascination with Raiker. She appeared unable to tear her gaze away from him, and Jaid suspected her enthrallment was only partially due to the fact that he was leading this interview.

“Flowers?” The woman was shaking her head. “I didn’t know anything about that. I’m not surprised to hear that Justice Reinbeck regularly stopped for roses for his wife though. He was pretty thoughtful. But very private. That wasn’t something he would have shared with his staff. He was interested in our lives and our opinions, but he didn’t reveal much about his own family.”

“So no one working with him knew that he occasionally stopped at the same vendor on the way home to pick up flowers?”

Temple’s shoulder-length hair swung when she shook her head. “I didn’t know. And if one of his own clerks didn’t realize it, it’s doubtful the knowledge was widespread around here. We’re sort of a close-knit group, even though there are nearly forty clerks working for the various justices.”

“How close-knit?” Jaid inserted.

The woman flicked a quick glance at her before addressing her answer to Adam. “We tend to socialize together. We share common interests, after all. That’s what brought us here. It’s not uncommon for a group of us to head downtown after work once or twice a week.”

“So.” The slight smile Adam graced Temple with had the woman’s eyes widening a little. “Close-knit bunch. Frequent get-togethers. I imagine the topic often revolves around work. Like you said, it’s what you all have in common.”

“I . . . yes . . . I mean . . . mostly of course.” The woman seemed to regain her composure by tearing her gaze away from Adam’s face and focusing on Shepherd. “But we talked about other things, too. National politics, family, our career plans.”

“And office gossip?”

The woman bristled at Jaid’s question. “We’re professionals in highly sensitive positions. We don’t sit around like old ladies in a coffee clatch and discuss the justices’ private matters. To suggest anything else is . . .”

“Relax.” Adam’s ruined voice could never sound soothing, but the woman responded to the note in it, regardless. “We’re not suggesting otherwise. But I can’t imagine that it’s any different than cops on the same task force sitting around with their buddies. Eventually the topic of the current case is going to come up, right?” He waited for the woman’s reluctant nod before going on. “So I’m guessing you’d all talk about how your justices might vote on a particular case they were hearing or one that was on the docket.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“And just from interacting with the other clerks over time, you probably got a pretty good idea of the personalities of the other justices. Even if you didn’t work directly for them.”

With a sideways look at Jaid, Temple answered, “We knew their politics before taking the job, of course. But sure, you get to know which of the justices are the workhorses. Who’s a health nut. Who uses the gym daily. That sort of thing.”

“So it’s fair to say that the other justices’ clerks knew similar things about Reinbeck.”

“I’m sure they do. Although it’s doubtful any of them would know that he stopped at that place for flowers, since I don’t think any of us did.”

But they’d know Reinbeck was writing the dissenting opinion yesterday. Jaid recognized where Adam was leading the woman. And it would be common knowledge that his clerks worked late when he did. Given the man’s penchant for privacy, would anyone realize his wife was giving a dinner party that evening? And extrapolate from there that his workhorse habits would have him running late for it? It seemed a long shot.

But there had to be some reason the shooter had chosen that particular evening to take up position on that rooftop. Once an attempt on Reinbeck’s life had been made, the assassin wouldn’t have gotten another opportunity before the justice had been surrounded by a protective contingent of marshals.

“I understand that Byron was a private man,” Shepherd put in. “Who was likely to know the most about his personal life?”

“Mara Sorenson,” came the unhesitating reply. “She’s his administrative assistant and came here from the circuit with him. I think they’ve worked together for over ten years.”

“When did you hear about Justice Reinbeck’s death?”

“On the news.” The memory had tears filling Krista’s cornflower blue eyes. “I couldn’t believe I’d heard correctly. I called Sam . . . Samantha Kingery to ask if she’d heard.” Kingery was another of Reinbeck’s clerks. “She hadn’t. She was out at dinner with a friend. Then I called Larry Dempsey and Cort Phillips, the other clerks. They’d heard the same thing.” Her chin wobbled. “We all met at the Black Diamond, a place we hang out a few blocks from here about an hour later.” Tears streamed freely down the woman’s face. “We just couldn’t believe it. Who would want Justice Reinbeck dead? He’s worked his whole career to help people.”

Which was, Jaid thought, as the woman struggled to compose herself, the million-dollar question. After a few more questions, Temple was dismissed. When the door had closed behind the woman, she asked, “How good did the shooter have to be to make that shot?”

“A lot better than average,” Adam mused. “But certainly not sniper quality. He had a clear angle. No wind to compensate for yesterday. With the high-powered scopes they make these days, he didn’t have to be an expert.”

Not, she thought with a pang, like the one who had almost killed him a few months ago.

“But he had to be very skilled,” Shepherd put in. “And maybe we shouldn’t read too much into the ease of yesterday’s shot. We don’t know what conditions the shooter could have been successful in.”

“Easier to lie in wait for someone and plan the kill at your leisure, in surroundings that guarantee you a measure of privacy.” Adam went silent, as if thinking for a moment. “But the Reinbecks had great security. A walled property with private gates to the drive. Bulletproof glass in all the vehicles they drove and in the windows of their home.” And he knew that because he’d discussed the precaution with Byron and Mary Jo years earlier. “Which means the shooter had to do it out in the open, publicly, when Byron was exposed.” He stopped then, picked up his pen, and jotted a note on the yellow pad in front of him.
Phone
. Jaid tried, and failed, to make the connection.