The Nomination (4 page)

“Fine,” she said. “I quit, then.”

Del peered at her for a minute. Then he took his glasses off his face, pinched the bridge of his nose, and said, “Howie Cohen, huh?”

Jessie nodded.

“Something happen?”

“No,” she said. “Not yet.”

“But they didn't use your real name in the paper. You were Carol Ann Chang, kick-ass hero, in that story.”

“It's the picture that worries me,” she said.

He stared at her for a long moment. Then he nodded. “Okay. I hear you. I got an insurance thing in Mill Valley, if you want it.”

“I'll take it,” said Jessie.

“Be careful, huh?”

“I'm always careful.”

He shook his head. “I know you are. That's why you're the best. That's why you'd be great with Sharon. This is such a fucking waste, babe. Waste of an awesome client, waste of a great talent, waste of an unbelievable PR opportunity. But, hey, I don't blame you for wanting to keep a low profile for a while, and if that's what you're thinking . . .”

He let it dangle there like a question, hoping, of course, that his flattery plus the logic of it would change her mind.

She looked at him, smiled, and shook her head.

“I mean it,” he'd said. “Be careful.”

Del was right, of course. Her talents were wasted on insurance and divorce stakeouts. You didn't need brains or resourcefulness or strength or quickness for that work. You didn't need to be able to scan a hostile crowd and spot the one guy with the handgun. You didn't need to be able to move quickly enough to disarm him before anybody got hurt. All you needed for stakeout work was patience.

Having Sharon Stone for a client would be huge for Del. Jessie felt bad, having to turn him down. It sounded like a lot of fun, actually, traveling around Europe with Sharon, staying in highclass hotels, eating in the best restaurants, hobnobbing with famous people. They'd make a striking pair, Sharon's classic sexy blonde, Jessie's exotic brunette.

But there would be cameras everywhere they went. Jessie Church, no matter what name she used, couldn't risk any more exposure, if it wasn't too late already.

So now she was slouched in her old Civic, waiting for Anthony Moreno to make his mistake, quite content to be invisible and anonymous.

People
magazine. The morning talk show at the local CBS affiliate. The newspapers and radio stations. Even some guy claiming to be a Hollywood agent. They all wanted to make Carol Ann Chang a star.

They should see her now, in her green Oakland A's cap with the visor pulled low and her wraparound sunglasses and grungy old Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. Glamorous as hell.

Before she'd stopped answering her phone, she told them all the same thing: Please, I'm no hero. I was only doing my job, what I've been trained for, what they pay me for. Millions of people go to work every day and do their job, and nobody hounds them for interviews or wants to take their pictures. Their phones don't keep ringing so persistently that they have to stop answering. They don't feel they must wear sunglasses and caps with the visors pulled low over their foreheads whenever they go to the supermarket.

Go do a story about a schoolteacher or a social worker or a beat cop or an EMT. They're heroes. They save lives every day. They deserve publicity. They'd probably welcome it.

Don't write about me. Please.

They had, of course. They'd written about Carol Ann Chang, the reluctant hero, and they'd reprinted the
Chronicle
photo that showed her kneeling beside the guy she'd just defeated, barely in the nick of time, saving the doctor's life. She had her arm raised up and she was looking straight at the camera, and her mouth was in the shape of the letter O, as if she was shouting, “Wow!” or “Yeow!”

From the photo, you'd think Jessie was exulting at her conquest of the assassin.

In fact she'd been yelling at the guy with the camera. “No! No! Please don't!”
Please don't take my picture
, she meant.

Now Jessie Church was spooked.

Four years earlier she'd quit the Baltimore cops. She drove across the country, about as far as you could get from Howie Cohen and his crew without crossing an international border, to make herself a new, anonymous life in San Francisco. She'd changed her name, bought the fake documents from her old friend Jimmy Nunziato in Chicago, got the job at BSI, and found a nice one-bedroom apartment on 24th Street in Noe Valley near the farmers' market. She liked the neighborhood and had made some friends, though she didn't let anybody get too close. She liked working for Del. She liked being Carol Ann Chang. Life was pretty good. Once in a while she even found herself relaxing.

Howie Cohen was behind bars. “Safely behind bars” was the way the newspapers put it, whatever “safely” meant, and after four years of doing investigations for Del Robbins, Jessie had almost managed to convince herself that the Howie Cohen thing really was in the past.

But now, with her picture in the paper, it had started up all over again. Howie Cohen had loyal friends and relations and business associates with long memories everywhere. In her eighteen months of undercover back in Baltimore, Jessie had gotten to know them all way too well.

Then she'd betrayed them.

Cohen was locked away. So maybe it was stupid to wake up ten times a night imagining somebody was creeping around in her bedroom. Maybe it was neurotic to mistrust every guy she passed on the sidewalk or saw standing in a checkout line or heard on the other end of the telephone. Maybe she was paranoid. Probably she was. Nothing stupid about it, though. Paranoia kept you alive.

Bodyguarding Sharon Stone was the last thing she needed.

What she needed was witness protection, except they didn't do that for undercover cops after they testified at the trials of men who kidnapped runaway children in American cities and sold them to rich Middle Eastern pedophiles.

What they did for undercover cops after they testified was take them off the street and assign them to a desk.

Jessie had lasted two months on the desk in Baltimore. She probably could've tolerated the dreary walls and the mindless paperwork and the lousy coffee and the sexist jokes for several more months. She was adaptable and patient. She had a high tolerance for boredom.

What she couldn't tolerate was the powerful apprehension that she was being watched, followed, stalked, and that sooner or later, at his whim, Howie Cohen would reach out through his prison bars to wreak his revenge.

When she'd stepped down from the witness stand and glanced at Cohen, sitting there beside his lawyers, a paunchy sixty-year-old guy with a bald head and big ears and horn-rimmed glasses, he'd smiled at her, pressed his two fingers to his lips, then wiggled them at her.

Kissing her off. Telling her she was dead.

That awful smile still haunted her dreams.

So she quit the cops, packed her stuff, which wasn't much, into her Civic, and headed west. She left no forwarding address. Couldn't, since she didn't know where she was going.

She ended up in San Francisco and presented herself to Del Robbins, the president of Bay Security and Investigations in Oakland. Del talked with her for about ten minutes, made one phone call, and hired her on the spot.

Perfect, Jessie had thought at the time. For an ex-cop there was no more anonymous, behind-the-scenes job than private investigating. The whole job was about not being noticed or recognized.

Unless you save a public figure from being assassinated in front of a mob of people and reporters, that is. And unless some lucky cameraman is there to shoot you kneeling beside the creep with one hand squeezing his balls and the other arm raised and a look of triumph on your face, and the photo is so good that it gets reprinted in newspapers across the country and makes the rounds on the Internet.

So now Jessie Church was looking over her shoulder again. Some Cohen friend or relative or business associate or customer was bound to spot that newspaper photo and recognize her, phony name notwithstanding. Sooner or later, inevitably, Howie Cohen would send somebody to track her down and kill her.

So far, it hadn't happened. Not yet. Nobody could tail Jessie Church without her knowing it.

But it would happen soon.

She guessed it was about time to think about loading up her Civic again. Time to change her name again, change her habits, change her look. Get a job in an office somewhere. Couldn't be worse than sitting in a car waiting for Anthony Moreno to make a mistake.

JUDGE THOMAS LARRIGAN hung up his robe, slumped into his desk chair, and sighed. Another long, tense day on the bench. He rubbed his good eye, stretched his arms, then quickly jotted some notes on a yellow legal pad. He had to hand down an admissibility ruling when court convened the next morning. It raised a couple of tricky questions, and Larrigan didn't want to blow it. Not now. Not with a Supreme Court nomination on the horizon. It wouldn't look good if an appeal was granted because Judge Larrigan had misapplied the law.

But if he erred, he knew enough to err on the side of the victim; in this case, a two-year-old girl whose skull had been fractured by an unemployed pipefitter while her mother lounged on the sofa in the same room watching the Home Shopping Network. The search of the apartment had turned up a stash of marijuana, an assortment of barbiturates, and two grams of cocaine. The problem was, the warrant had neglected to mention drugs, and they hadn't been in plain sight when the police entered the apartment.

Larrigan would, of course, rule the drugs admissible. His problem was to justify that ruling with case law. Then, even if he were overturned on appeal, his reputation would not be tarnished. These days, a jurist's reputation hinged less on his even-handed application of the law than on what he seemed to believe.

Larrigan believed in the fair application of the law. He believed justice should be blind.

But he also believed that the war on drugs should be fought aggressively and that criminals should be punished. He had the reputation of being a tough judge. He'd nurtured that reputation. He'd earned it. That reputation had put him on the president's short list for a seat on the Supreme Court.

It had been a week since Pat Brody had come to Boston. Larrigan wondered what would happen next.

Nothing, probably. As Brody had told him, there were hundreds of names, hundreds of top-notch judges and lawyers. Even if he was on what Brody called the president's “personal list,” even if he'd played golf with the president a couple times, Larrigan knew he was still a long shot.

Still, he couldn't help wanting it, tasting it . . .

He swiveled around in his chair to stare out his office window. Black roiling thunderheads were building out over the harbor. They'd burst open any minute, he figured. Just in time to rain out his late-afternoon golf match in Belmont with Jonah Wright, which was disappointing. Larrigan enjoyed golf, and he liked playing with Jonah. The man had a flamboyant, erratic game. He hit the ball a mile, usually into the rough, which set up both his occasionally spectacular recoveries over, around, and under trees and his more frequent double bogies. Wright tended to sink long serpentine putts and miss two-footers.

He was a challenging opponent but, of course, no match for Larrigan's steady, methodical game, and even giving three shots a side, Larrigan rarely lost to him. For that matter, Larrigan rarely lost to anybody. When he played the president, he beat him, too. Larrigan believed that the president admired the fact that the judge didn't hold back, that he was a competitor, that he refused to lose.

But that's not why Larrigan didn't want to miss his weekly match with Jonah Wright. Jonah was a well-positioned State Street investment banker, a Boston power broker, an ally. Larrigan hadn't figured out how yet. But sooner or later Jonah Wright would be able to do him a favor.

Of course, when the Supreme Court appointment went through, Larrigan wouldn't need any Jonah Wrights ever again.

Meanwhile, he did not intend to burn his bridges.

He glanced at his watch. Four o'clock. They'd planned to tee off at five. Nine quick holes, just the two of them sharing a cart, and back in the clubhouse before seven. Gin-and-tonics for Jonah, iced tea for Larrigan, then a Bibb lettuce salad, club steak, and baked potato. Coffee on the veranda, a chance to catch up, see who was who and what was what these days in Massachusetts politics, and home by eight-thirty or nine, in time to tuck the kids in before holing up in his office to write up his ruling on the admissibility of those drugs.