Mr. Justice (26 page)

Clay broke the silence: “At least drink some water.”

Kelsi did. In fact, she drank the entire bottle. She was parched. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “If I remember correctly, you’re from Charleston, right?”

“Right. Why?”

“My dad lives there. Or at least he used to. I’ve never met him, but I found out recently that he’s from there.”

Clay smiled. “A southern belle, eh?”

“No. Charlottesville is as far south as I’ve ever been. I’m from Wisconsin. My mom’s from Goose Creek, though. She met my dad during a high school football game. She was a cheerleader from the visiting team. He was the buddy of one of the players on the home team. There was a party afterwards. One thing led to another, and my mom got pregnant with me.”

“How’d you end up in Wisconsin?”

“My grandparents sent my mom to live with her grandparents. You know, to avoid the embarrassment of a high school pregnancy.”

“How old was she?”

“Fifteen.”

“How old was he?”

“Seventeen.”

“Is his name Shelton, like yours?”

“No. Shelton is my mom’s name. My father’s name was …
is
—I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead—Collier … Billy Joe Collier.”

Clay almost dropped his Sierra cup. He knew whether Kelsi’s father was dead or alive. He was the one who had killed him.

CHAPTER 88

Brian Neal jumped out of his car and hurdled up the stairs to Kelsi Shelton’s apartment. He pounded on the door. It was three o’clock in the morning, but he was desperate. He needed to know. Had Kelsi made her choice? He knew it was
Kelsi’s
choice. Beautiful women always got to choose. Beautiful women always had a parade of men chasing them… . Guys were almost never in control.

Neal continued to pound on the door. A light from the apartment next to Kelsi’s flickered on. A disheveled young man—a UVA student, almost certainly—opened his door and said, “What the hell, man? It’s … it’s, like, four o’clock in the morning.”

Neal said, “It’s three.”

The sleep-deprived student said, “And that’s supposed to make it OK to bang on my neighbor’s door in the middle of the night?” He slammed his door in Neal’s face.

Neal waited for the student to switch off the light. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a paperclip. He straightened one end, inserted it into the lock on Kelsi’s door, and jimmied his way into her apartment. He had learned how to do it while he was being trained to become a Secret Service agent. The bodies that agents were assigned to protect were sometimes the targets of kidnapping plots, and locked doors sometimes had to be accessed. But Neal never imagined that he would use what he had learned to try to track down a girlfriend who was suddenly incommunicado.

“Kelsi,” he said as he stepped over the threshold. “It’s me … Brian.”

Nothing. The apartment was as quiet as a morgue. Neal flipped on the lights. Still nothing. Still no sign of where Kelsi might be. He walked to her bedroom and pushed open the door. Kelsi wasn’t there, and her bed hadn’t been slept in. Neal’s mind raced through a series of possibilities: she was pulling an all-nighter at the law library … she was sleeping with Justice McDonald … she was spending the night at Sue Plant’s apartment… .

Neal quickly dismissed the first possibility because Kelsi had told him as recently as the day before that exams were more than a month away and that she was caught up on the work she had missed when she was in the hospital. The thought of the second possibility—that Kelsi was having sex with Justice McDonald—made him sick to his stomach. He prayed it was the third. He jumped back into his car to find out.

Sue Plant was more polite than Kelsi’s neighbor had been when Brian Neal appeared at her door in the wee hours of the morning. She was equally puzzled, though. “Is everything OK?”

Neal said, “Sorry to wake you, Sue. But is Kelsi here?”

Sue rubbed sleep from her eyes. “No. Why would she be?”

“I thought maybe you two were watching a movie or something. She said she’d call, but she never did… . She’s not at her apartment.”

Sue was Kelsi’s best friend, and she obviously knew that Kelsi had been having dinner with Justice McDonald earlier that evening. She also knew what sometimes came after dinner, and it wasn’t merely dessert. “I don’t know what to say.” She did, but she didn’t want to say it. She also didn’t
need
to say it. She patted Neal on the arm and watched him walk away.

Clay Smith waited until Kelsi Shelton was asleep and then quietly stepped away from the campsite. He didn’t stray far. He needed to keep an eye on her.

He punched the power button on his cell phone and hoped he got a signal. He did, albeit only two bars worth. One reason he had selected the Trout Pond Campground was that it was remote, but not so remote as to be completely outside the range of a cell phone tower. The other campgrounds at which he had stayed in the past were dead zones.

He retrieved the scrap of paper from his wallet on which he had scribbled the telephone number he was about to call. He entered the digits: 1-434-555-7094. He placed the phone to his ear. It rang and rang and rang … six times, seven times, eight times.

Finally: “H … hello.” The recipient clearly had been asleep.

Clay said, “Are you alone?”

“Wh … who is this?”

“Are you alone?”

“Ye … yes. But who is this? And wh … what time is it?”

“It’s three-thirty. It’s Clay Smith.”

“Clay! Where are you? What do you want? What are you doing?” So much for groggy …

“None of that matters at the moment. The only thing that does is that I’ve got Kelsi. If you want her returned safely, you’ll do what I say.”

“Whatever you want.”

“Good. I was hoping you would see it that way. I don’t wanna hurt her. I don’t. But I will if I have to. I think you know that.”

Peter McDonald said, “I know it. I watch the news. Now what do I have to do?”

“Rewrite your opinion.”

“What are you talking about? I haven’t written any opinions. I just joined the Court.”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Professor.” McDonald was still
Professor
to Clay. “We both know that’s not true. We both know that I’m talking about your opinion in
Tucker v. University of South Carolina
.”

“The Court hasn’t released an opinion in that case, let alone an opinion written by me.”

“I’m losing my patience. You’re making me angry. And I don’t wanna get angry. I might do something we’ll both regret if I get angry. I read the draft. I need for you to rewrite the draft. The case needs to come out the other way.”

“The draft? How did you get your hands on the draft? The courthouse is like Fort Knox.”

“Don’t worry about
how
. It’s the
what
that matters now …
what
you say in the opinion.”

“It’s not going to be as easy as you think, Clay.”

“Why not?”

“You need five votes. The vote at conference was six to three. If I switch my vote, it’ll still be five to four against Senator Burton’s family.”

An unanticipated obstacle had been placed in the way of Clay’s plan. He was silent for a moment. He glanced over at Kelsi. She was still sleeping. He finally said, “I guess you better bone up on your skills in the fine art of persuasion. Justice Brennan was a master at persuading his colleagues to see it his way. The legacy of the Warren Court depended on it. Kelsi’s
life
depends on it this time.”

CHAPTER 89

Peter McDonald took a quick shower, threw on a suit, and headed for Washington. His Charlottesville home faded into the horizon of his rearview mirror. He wondered whether he would ever see it again. His life was very different now from when he and Jenny had purchased the house shortly after he had received tenure at UVA. Now, there was no Jenny. Now, there was no Megan. Now, there was no UVA. Why should there be a dream house? His life was mostly nightmares now.

McDonald maneuvered his car through the early morning traffic and onto the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge. He pondered the biographies of his eight Supreme Court colleagues. Of the five who had joined with him at the post-argument conference to vote against Senator Burton’s family, four were partisan Democrats. Although the canons of judicial ethics forbade federal judges from participating in political events, the four were frequently spotted at Democratic fundraisers. He knew he would be wasting his breath if he tried to persuade them to switch their votes. You can’t teach a yellow dog a new trick, he said to himself as he negotiated the well-planned streets of the nation’s capital. Affirmative action was the sacred cow of the Left. But Donald Lowry was a different story. Donald Lowry was worth a shot.

At eighty-seven years of age, Donald Dickinson Lowry had served on the Supreme Court for nearly four decades. Nominated by a Republican president and confirmed by a Democratic Senate in the closest vote in modern American history, the Court’s senior associate justice had become increasingly liberal over the years. He tended to side with the federal government when challenges were raised that the law at issue was beyond the government’s power to enact; with regulators who wanted to reign in the free market preferences of the capital class; and with libertarians on free speech, the relationship between church and state, and the rights of those accused of crimes. But his most surprising vote by far was his decision to join a sharply divided Court in reaffirming, for the umpteenth time in a generation, the 1973
Roe v. Wade
abortion case. Not only was Lowry a Republican, he was a Catholic. He was chastised by the Right for turning his back on the pro-life movement that had worked so vigorously to ensure his confirmation, and he was excommunicated by the pope himself for violating God’s law that all life was sacred.

Justice Lowry had never publicly explained his vote. He had been pressed to do so many times over the years during the Q & A portion of the speeches he had delivered at a myriad of bar conventions and law school symposia, but his response was always the same: it was inappropriate for a judge to explain a decision issued by his court outside of the four corners of the written opinion itself. He insisted that this was especially true for a judge on a multimember court such as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Peter McDonald had long respected Justice Lowry for sticking to his guns, no matter how intense the pressure was on the elderly jurist to give the public what it wanted. Unfortunately, Lowry’s willingness to fend off pressure would make McDonald’s task of persuading him to switch his vote in
Tucker v. University of South Carolina
even more difficult than it otherwise would have been. But McDonald had to try. Clay Smith couldn’t have been clearer: Kelsi Shelton’s life depended on it.

Brian Neal had decided to double back to Kelsi’s apartment the moment he arrived at his motel.  A sudden tsunami of dread explained his decision. His insecurities aside, he knew that Kelsi wouldn’t sleep with Justice McDonald. She had told him she wouldn’t. She had
promised
him, and he believed her. Only one explanation remained: something terrible had happened to Kelsi; something horrific had been done to her again.

The same neighbor who had greeted Neal with grief when Neal first appeared at Kelsi’s door tried to give it to him again. This time Neal didn’t bother to try to win the neighbor’s favor. This time he flashed his badge and told the kid to stay out of the way.

Neal felt guilty snooping around Kelsi’s apartment, but he had no choice. The person who had tried to kill Kelsi remained at large, and there was no reason to believe that he wouldn’t try again. In fact, the strong likelihood of a repeat performance explained why Neal’s superiors at the Secret Service had permitted him to remain on the case. Of course, they would have decided otherwise had they known that Neal and Kelsi were sleeping together.

Much of what Neal discovered in Kelsi’s apartment didn’t strike him as unusual. The kitchen was stocked with fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, yogurt—food that a busy but health-conscious student would enjoy. The living room was equipped with a big-screen TV and a DVD player. A dozen of Kelsi’s favorite movies were stacked nearby. Neal had watched most of them with Kelsi and a bottle of wine. The bathroom was clean and decorated with scented candles and matching towels and washcloths. The bedroom was adorned with framed posters of major European cities—Neal knew that Kelsi liked to travel—and photographs of friends and family. Neal smiled when he noticed his picture prominently displayed on Kelsi’s nightstand. The clothes in her closet were organized by season and style.

Neal returned to the living room and sat on a leather armchair that Kelsi had recently purchased from a local furniture store. He reached for his back as he remembered how heavy the chair had been to move from the roof of her car. He chuckled at how she had convinced him that he was strong enough to carry the chair himself. “You’re strong, Brian,” she had said. “You can lift it.” She had added with a mischievous smile, “You’ll also be saving me forty bucks in delivery charges.”

Good memories, no doubt. Good times. But they did nothing to help Neal locate Kelsi
now
. He reached for the remote so he could check the news—so he could find out whether anyone had reported Kelsi missing—but just as he was about to press the
POWER
button he spotted a set of MapQuest driving directions to the Trout Pond Campground in the George Washington National Forest. The automatic stamp at the bottom of the paper indicated that the directions had been printed six hours earlier. Neal stuffed the directions into his pocket and raced to his car.

CHAPTER 90

Cat Wilson circled the Waffle House and refilled the coffee cups of a dozen grateful patrons. She had returned from D.C. and her manager was kind enough to assign her to the breakfast shift, which was the most lucrative time of day as far as tips were concerned. Cat was always strapped for cash, and her sojourn to the nation’s capital had only exacerbated the problem.