He threw the hat out the window and looked at his reflection. His hair was pushed back from a high forehead and fell in waves around a gaunt face. He had a nose like a blade and hollow cheeks, but he had a sensual mouth — many women had told him that. However, it was his eyes they usually talked about. They were dark brown, almost black, and people said they had a forceful, staring quality that could be mesmerizing. Priest knew it was not the eyes themselves, but the intensity of the look that could captivate a woman: he gave her the feeling that he was concentrating powerfully on her and nothing else. He could do it to men, too. He practiced the Look now, in the mirror.
“Handsome devil,” Star said — laughing at him, but in a nice way, affectionate.
“Smart, too,” Priest said.
“I guess you are. You got us this machine, anyway.”
Priest nodded. “And you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
2
In the Federal Building at 450 Golden Gate Avenue in San Francisco, early on Monday morning, FBI agent Judy Maddox sat in a courtroom on the fifteenth floor, waiting.
The court was furnished in blond wood. New courtrooms always were. They generally had no windows, so the architects tried to make them brighter by using light colors. That was her theory. She spent a lot of time waiting in courtrooms. Most law enforcement personnel did.
She was worried. In court she was often worried. Months of work, sometimes years, went into preparing a case, but there was no telling how it would go once it got to court. The defense might be inspired or incompetent, the judge a sharp-eyed sage or a senile old fool, the jury a group of intelligent, responsible citizens or a bunch of lowlife jerks who ought to be behind bars themselves.
Four men were on trial today: John Parton, Ernest “Taxman” Dias, Foong Lee, and Foong Ho. The Foong brothers were the big-time crooks, the other two their executives. In cooperation with a Hong Kong triad, they had set up a network for laundering money from the Northern California dope industry. It had taken Judy a year to figure out how they were doing it and another year to prove it.
She had one big advantage when going after Asian crooks: she looked Oriental. Her father was a green-eyed Irishman, but she took more after her late mother, who had been Vietnamese. Judy was slender and dark haired, with an upward slant to her eyes. The middle-aged Chinese gangsters she had been investigating had never suspected that this pretty little half-Asian girl was a hotshot FBI agent.
She was working with an assistant U.S. attorney whom she knew unusually well. His name was Don Riley, and until a year ago they had been living together. He was her age, thirty-six, and he was experienced, energetic, and as smart as a whip.
She had thought they had a watertight case. But the accused men had hired the top criminal law firm in the city and put together a clever, vigorous defense. Their lawyers had undermined the credibility of witnesses who were, inevitably, from the criminal milieu themselves; and they had exploited the documentary evidence amassed by Judy to confuse and bewilder the jury.
Now neither Judy nor Don could guess which way it would go.
Judy had a special reason to be worried about this case. Her immediate boss, the supervisor of the Asian Organized Crime squad, was about to retire, and she had applied for the job. The overall head of the San Francisco office, the special agent in charge, or SAC, would support her application, she knew. But she had a rival: Marvin Hayes, another high-flying agent in her age group. And Marvin also had powerful support: his best friend was the assistant special agent in charge responsible for all the organized crime and white-collar crime squads.
Promotions were granted by a career board, but the opinions of the SAC and ASACs carried a lot of weight. Right now the contest between Judy and Marvin Hayes was close.
She wanted that job. She wanted to rise far and fast in the FBI. She was a good agent, she would be an outstanding supervisor, and one of these days she would be the best SAC the bureau had ever had. She was proud of the FBI, but she knew she could make it better: with faster introduction of new techniques like profiling through the use of streamlined management systems and — most of all — by getting rid of agents like Marvin Hayes.
Hayes was the old-fashioned type of law enforcement officer: lazy, brutal, and unscrupulous. He had not put as many bad guys in jail as Judy, but he had made more high-profile arrests. He was good at insinuating himself into a glamorous investigation and quick to distance himself from a case that was going south.
The SAC had hinted to Judy that she would get the job, rather than Marvin, if she won her case today.
In court with Judy were most of the team on the Foong case: her supervisor, the other agents who had worked with her, a linguist, the squad secretary, and two San Francisco Police Department detectives. To her surprise, neither the ASAC nor the SAC was there. This was a big case, and the result was important to both of them. She felt a twinge of unease. She wondered if something was going on at the office that she did not know about. She decided to step outside and call. But before she got to the door, the clerk of the court entered and announced that the jury was about to return. She sat down again.
A moment later Don came back in, smelling of cigarettes: he had started smoking again since they split. He gave her shoulder an encouraging squeeze. She smiled at him. He looked nice, with his neat short haircut, dark blue suit, white button-down shirt, and dark red Armani tie. But there was no chemistry, no zing: she no longer wanted to muss his hair and undo his tie and slide her hand inside the white shirt.
The defense lawyers returned, the accused men were walked into the dock, the jury entered, and at last the judge emerged from his chambers and took his seat.
Judy crossed her fingers under the table.
The clerk stood up. “Members of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
Absolute silence descended. Judy realized she was tapping her foot. She stopped.
The foreman, a Chinese shopkeeper, stood up. Judy had spent many hours wondering whether he would sympathize with the accused, because two of them were Chinese, or hate them for dishonoring the race. In a quiet voice he said: “We have.”
“And how do you find the accused — guilty or not guilty?”
“Guilty as charged.”
There was a second of silence as the news sank in. Behind her, Judy heard a groan from the dock. She resisted the impulse to whoop with joy. She looked at Don, who was smiling broadly at her. The expensive defense lawyers shuffled papers and avoided each other’s eyes. Two reporters got up and left hastily, heading for the phones.
The judge, a thin, sour-faced man of around fifty, thanked the jury and adjourned the case for sentencing in a week’s time.
I did it, Judy thought. I won the case, I put the bad guys in jail, and my promotion is in the bag. Supervising Special Agent Judy Maddox, only thirty-six, a rising star.
“All stand,” the clerk said.
The judge went out.
Don hugged Judy.
“You did a great job,” she told him. “Thanks.”
“You gave me a great case,” he said.
She could tell he wanted to kiss her, so she stepped back a pace. “Well, we both did good,” she said.
She turned to her colleagues and went around them all, shaking hands and hugging and thanking them for their work. Then the defense lawyers came over. The senior of the two was David Fielding, a partner in the firm of Brooks Fielding. He was a distinguished-looking man of about sixty. “Congratulations, Ms. Maddox, on a well- deserved win,” he said.
“Thank you,” she said. “It was closer than I expected. I thought I had it buttoned up until you got started.”
He acknowledged the compliment with a tilt of his well-groomed head. “Your preparation was immaculate. Were you trained as a lawyer?”
“I went to Stanford Law School.”
