It was a countenance totally without remorse or caring or any other
positive emotion. It was also a face without hope, an observation
substantiated by his background history, which read like a horror story
of a childhood. But that was not her problem. It seemed like the only
one that wasn’t.
midnight. She went to pour some more coffee; her focus was starting to
wander. The last staff attorney had left five hours ago. The cleaning
crew had been gone for three. She moved down the hallway in her stocking
feet to the kitchen. If Charlie Manson were out and doing his thing now,
he’d be one of her milder cases; an amateur compared to the monsters
roaming loose today.
Cup of coffee in hand, she walked back into her office and’ paused for a
moment to look at her reflection in the window.
With her job looks were really unimportant; hell, she hadn’t been on a
date in over a year. But she couldn’t pull her eyes away. She was tall
and slender, perhaps too skinny in certain areas, but her routine of
running four miles every day had not changed while her caloric intake
had steadily dwindled.
Mostly she subsisted on bad coffee and crackers, although she limited
herself to two cigarettes a day and was hoping with luck to quit
altogether.
She felt guilty about the abuse her body was taking with the endless
hours and stress of moving from one horrific case to another, but what
was she supposed to do? Quit because she didn’t look like the women on
the cover on Cosmopolitan? She consoled herself with the fact that
their job twenty-four hours a day was to make themselves look good- Hers
was to ensure that people who broke the law, who hurt others, were
punished. Under any criteria she reasoned she was doing far more
productive things with her life.
She swiped at her own mane; it needed to be cut, but where was the time
to do that? The face was still relatively I that much Ion er. And like
so many things you took for granted or dismissed as unimportant, being
able to quiet a room by your mere entrance was one she knew she was
going to miss.
That her looks had remained strong over the last few years was
remarkable considering she had done relatively little to preserve them.
Good genes, that must be it; she was fortunate. But then she thought of
her father and decided that she wasn’t very lucky at all in the genes
department. A man who stole from others and then pretended to live a
normal life. A man who deceived everyone, including his wife and
daughter. A man you could not depend on to be there.
She sat at her desk, took a quick sip of the hot coffee, poured in more
sugar and looked at Mr. Simmons while she stirred the black depths of
her nighttime stimulus.
She picked up the phone, called home to check messages.
There were five, two from other lawyers, one from the policeman she
would put on the stand against Mr. Simmons and one from a staff
investigator who liked to call her at odd hours with mostly useless
information. She should change her telephone number. The last message
was a hang-up. But she could hear very low breathing on the end, she
could almost make out a word or two. Something in the sound was
familiar, but she couldn’t place it. People with nothing better to do.
The coffee flowed through her veins, the file came back into focus. She
glanced up at her little bookshelf. On top was an old photo of her
deceased mother and ten-year-old Kate.
cut out from the picture was Luther Whitney. A big gap next to mother
and daughter. A big nothing.
“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED States sat up, one
hand covering his limp and damaged priivates, the other holding the
letter opener that a moment before was to have been the instrument of
his death. It had more than just his blood on it now. “Jesus Fucking
Christ, i Bill, you fucking killed her!” The target of his barrage.”