The Justice Game (27 page)

    “Didn’t think so.” Bella leaned forward. “Your…
girlfriend
—” Bella made quote marks with her fingers—“drove away in a car with Florida plates. I watched out the window while you were back in your office on the phone because I had my suspicions. Now, she’s obviously pretty clever, and she’s got other…
assets
that I don’t have, but what does she know about client trust accounts and generally accepted accounting principles and drafting pretrial orders for Virginia Beach Circuit Court?”

    Now it was Jason’s turn to be a little embarrassed. He gave Bella a tight-lipped and sheepish smile.
Busted.

    “Plus,” Bella said, “you’ve got to wonder whether a girl who dresses like that knows anything about guns and the Second Amendment.” She glanced around and lowered her voice. “I’m packing,” she said conspiratorially. “It’s not one of MD Firearms’s guns, but I’ve got a concealed carry.”

    Jason wasn’t really sure how that struck him. Something about the idea of the firm secretary carting around a gun in her handbag was a little unsettling.

    Bella bent over and reached into her massive handbag. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not going for the gun.”

    She pulled out two manila folder files and placed them on the table. The first one was labeled “research” and the other “deposition summary.”

    “I took the liberty of pulling a few Virginia cases on issues like superseding cause and the definition of ‘aiding and abetting,’ since that’s the language of the exception to the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act,” Bella explained. “This second folder is a deposition summary with page citations for Melissa Davids’s deposition yesterday. I know the court reporter. She sent me a digital file.”

    Jason knew it was important to have depositions accurately summarized so that the lawyers could have easy access to a witness’s prior testimony. Summarizing a six-hour deposition could easily take three hours or more.

    He leafed through the folders. “Impressive,” he said.

    “Now,” Bella said, “can we talk health plans?”

    A fleeting image of Tami Pershing made one last dramatic run through Jason’s mind. It was tempting, but he had a duty to his clients. With Bella in the office, there would be no distractions, no office romance, no drama. The thought of it made him a little melancholy.

    “When can you start?” Jason asked.

Kelly slept very little on Tuesday night. On Wednesday morning, she spent a little extra time on makeup, lipstick, accessories, and what she should wear, but still she was unable to remove all evidence of the dark circles that had formed under her eyes. After three outfit changes, appraising herself in the mirror each time, she settled on a modest gray suit and matching silver earrings. She chastised herself for caring at all about how she looked. When was the last time she had stressed out this much over which outfit to wear?

    It seemed fitting that the day was one of the coldest and windiest of the entire D.C. winter. Banks of clouds blocked a sun that seemed to have lost all its heat in those rare moments when it did break free.

    Kelly’s car was parked nearly a block from her apartment—the price of getting home late from the office the night before. She buttoned the top button on her overcoat and pulled up the collar, but her face still stung from the biting wind by the time she reached the shelter of her Toyota.

    She arrived at the federal courthouse about fifteen minutes early, carrying a thin briefcase as if she had an important motion to argue. She slid into the last row of benches in Judge Shaver’s courtroom and watched him preside over a discovery dispute between two experienced litigators. His eyes caught hers momentarily, a greeting so subtle it would have been lost on anyone else, and then he turned his attention back to the proceedings.

    His face was still square and handsome with the perpetual five-o’clock shadow that Kelly had always found alluring. He had a touch of gray around the temples and wore half-moon reading glasses that were a new addition since the days of Kelly’s clerkship. The glasses alone added ten years to his face.

    She could remember watching him seven years ago presiding over cases, the aphrodisiac of power weaving its spell. She could still recall, with no small amount of shame, how she had marveled at the thought of being a confidant to a man this powerful. Lawyers would jump through hoops to curry favor with him, yet the judge would ask Kelly, in the solitude of his car in front of her apartment, how she thought the most important cases on his docket should come out. They normally saw things the same way, so much so that Kelly had convinced herself they might have been soul mates under different circumstances. A different time. A different place. A younger and unmarried Judge Shaver.

    Her standards had been raised just by being around him.

    She tried to remember when her guilt about the two of them spending so much time together had left her. That was the problem with this type of thing—it was all so gradual. There was no single defining moment, although the night she learned about his wife’s affair was surely a turning point. From then on, Kelly no longer felt she was breaking up a marriage. The ugly truth was that the marriage had been over long before Kelly arrived on the scene.

    How long had it been after that night? A week? Two weeks? Events blurred together between the night of their first touch and the night he asked to come in. Somehow, she had known he was going to ask that night. She had promised herself that she would say no, but she had cleaned the apartment anyway. At the time, it all just seemed so natural, one emotion leading to the next, the excited beat of her own heart, the judge’s sensitivity. They talked for a half hour, and Kelly knew he wasn’t going to leave.

    She didn’t want him to leave. They both knew how it was going to end.

    When he leaned over to kiss her, she closed her eyes and didn’t resist. Later that evening, she took his hand and led him to the bedroom.

    When he left at midnight, guilt arrived in waves.

    He must have been able to read her face the next morning. He called her into his office, shut the door, and told her that the night before had been the most incredible night of his life.

    “It was wrong,” Kelly said in response. “We both know it. We can never let it happen again.”

    He looked devastated. “Are you sure about this, Kelly?” He was thinking about a future together. Somehow, he would make it work.

    It had taken every ounce of moral fiber she had left, but Kelly did not let him dissuade her. She could still picture it clearly in her mind—the look on his face, his quiet pleading, his apologies, and ultimately his pledge to accept her decision.

    To his credit, the judge never raised the issue again during her clerkship. She began taking the Metro. They never spent another unguarded moment alone together. Judge Shaver treated her with professional courtesy and worked hard at rehabilitating his own marriage.

    Two years later, he had called. “They’re talking about a spot on the Fourth Circuit again,” he told Kelly.

    “You deserve it,” she had said. And she meant it.

    “If I’m nominated, they’ll do a careful vetting. They’ll talk to all my former clerks, try to find out whether I’ve done anything that could be used to blackmail me. There’s a chance they might ask about affairs.”

    The thought of it stunned Kelly. FBI agents asking questions about Judge Shaver’s private life. The wrong answers could destroy his chances. “I can’t lie, Judge.”

    “I know,” he said softly. “I wouldn’t ask you to lie.”

    “Then why did you call?”

    The judge inhaled deeply on the other end of the phone. “Kelly, you know how sorry I am about what happened. Lynda and I are still together and trying hard to make it work. I’m just saying, anything you can do short of lying, I would really appreciate.”

    “Maybe you should pull your name,” Kelly suggested. “Family reasons. Not wanting the spotlight. You like being a trial judge. There could be a million reasons.”

    Shaver didn’t respond right away. “I know I could,” he eventually said. “But Kelly, the things you and I believe in are the right things. The right causes. We need judges on our highest courts who are willing to stand up for the most vulnerable in our society. I can’t sell them out just to save myself some potential embarrassment.”

    No longer blinded by her infatuation, the words sounded hollow. The president could find a hundred other judges who shared Shaver’s judicial philosophy. This was about his ego, his opportunity to go as far as he could go.

    “I’ll do what I can,” Kelly had said.

    “That’s all I can ask.”

When the hearing ended, Judge Shaver invited Kelly back to his chambers. He introduced her to his current clerks and waited while Kelly exchanged a few pleasantries with the judge’s secretary. Kelly then followed the judge into his spacious chambers, where he took off his judicial robe and hung it on a coatrack.

    “Can I take your coat?” he asked.

    “I’m fine,” Kelly said, though it was a little warm.

    Shaver’s chambers showed even less wear and tear than the judge himself. Paperwork was neatly stacked. The same pictures and diplomas adorned the walls. Even the kids’ pictures on his desk looked like the same ones Kelly remembered from seven years ago. He had left his office door open, but his desk was on the other side of the massive office from the doorway. If they talked quietly, they wouldn’t have to worry about being overheard.

    The judge made the kind of conversation you might expect when a former clerk stops by. “How’s the law practice?… I read that article about you in the
Post.
… Interesting case you’re handling against that gun company.…” Etc., etc.

    Kelly responded politely, asking her own softball questions. Judge Shaver expected the confirmation hearings to start in a few weeks or maybe months. It was hard to predict. “This is the third time my name’s been floated but the first time I’ve made it this far,” he said. “I’m hoping the third time’s the charm.”

    “Me, too.”

    The judge leaned forward and softened his voice. “Thanks for what you did with the FBI.”

    It was a tone that used to give Kelly goose bumps. Today, she just left the comment hanging. She reached into her briefcase and retrieved the e-mail from Luthor.

    “We’ve got a problem, Judge. This showed up in my inbox last week.”

    She watched Judge Shaver put on his reading glasses, his face darkening as he read the e-mail. He placed the letter on his desk and stared at it.

    “Who knows about us?” he asked.

    “If by that you mean, ‘Whom did I tell?’ the answer is no one.”

    “I wasn’t accusing you, Kelly. I’m just trying to think this through.”

    Kelly looked down at the desk. There was something she had never shared with the judge, preferring to shoulder the pain on her own. She had dealt with it, condemned herself for what she had done, and then willed herself to forget about it and move on.

    “I was pregnant,” Kelly said. She swallowed, her voice suddenly thick. “I took the RU-486 pill five weeks later.”

    She glanced up at the judge and saw nothing but sympathy on his face. She tried to continue, stopped, pulled herself together, and started again. “I went to a clinic and got a prescription. They guided me through the process and had me return to the clinic the day the abortion occurred for some counseling and observation.” She blew out a deep breath. “I expelled the fetus at home. But half a dozen people at the clinic probably know.”

    Saying it out loud brought back a rush of emotions and images. At the time, Kelly had worked hard not to think about the implications, knowing she would probably talk herself out of what she felt she had to do. She took the initial dose of RU-486 at the clinic and suffered through a few hours of nausea, headache, and fatigue. For the next forty-eight hours, she walked around like a zombie, trying not to focus on what she had done.

    She took the Cytotec pill at home and a few hours later began to dilate. According to the information she had read, the fetus would be tiny at this stage, about half an inch or so. She made it a point not to look before she flushed the toilet.

    She was businesslike when she returned to the clinic for observation. But she fell apart when she returned to her apartment, sobbing deep into the night. Just before dawn, emotionally exhausted and weak with grief, she had finally collapsed into a fitful sleep.

    Weeks later, she couldn’t keep herself from researching fetal development. She’d even looked at a few pictures on the Internet. At five weeks old, tiny arm and leg buds would have been formed. The baby’s tiny heart would have been beating. The image of the fetus was burned into her mind.

    “I’m so sorry,” Judge Shaver said. “I had no idea.”

    He got up from his chair and walked over to close his office door. Then he sat down again and handed Kelly some Kleenex.

    “I just wanted to deal with it on my own,” Kelly said. “I wanted to get my life back on track.”

    She pressed her lips together and held back the tears, watching the recognition dawn on the judge’s face. This wasn’t just his and Kelly’s word against the world. Somewhere there was proof that Kelly had been pregnant.

    Kelly had spent the last few days wondering how he would react. Would he question whether the baby was his? be angry at her for not telling him? go immediately into damage-control mode?

    She saw none of those calculations in his eyes. Just an overwhelming sadness and an almost palpable sense of sympathy.

    “I can’t believe you had to go through that alone,” Judge Shaver said. He paused, searching for words. “I can’t change the past, Kelly. I wish I could… but I can’t do anything about that. The thing I
can
do is keep you from suffering any more. It’s not too late to withdraw my name.”

    She appreciated the offer, but he wasn’t thinking this through. “That won’t really change anything, Judge. If the press gets hold of this, they’ll still run the story to explain why you withdrew. The coverage might not be as intense, but it would be out there just the same. My statements to the FBI have already been made. Everyone we care about would be hurt. Your family. My family.”