'Mind reader,' Vail said.
'I sometimes have a moment…' Stenner started but never finished the sentence.
'I'm sure we all do from time to time,' Vail said, turning back to his paper.
To Vail, on that chilly morning, the landfill case was a curiosity, an annoyance, something else to clutter up the already crowded agenda of the district attorney's office. In fact, the landfill mystery would lead to something much bigger. Something far more terrifying than the decomposed bodies in the city dump. Something that would force Martin Vail to come to terms with his past.
A name that had haunted Vail for ten years would soon creep back into his mind.
The name was Aaron Stampler.
Shana Parver rushed through the frigid morning air and climbed the steps of the county criminal courthouse. Overly sentimental and idealistic by nature, although she shielded it with a tough, aggressive facade, Parver always got a rush when she saw the front of the hulking building. 'The law is the only thing that separates us from animals,' Vail had once said. Of course, he had added his own cynical postscript: 'Although, these days, you'd never know it.' But looking up at the Doric columns soaring above the entrance, each surmounted by allegorical figures representing Law, Justice, Wisdom, Truth, Might, Love, Liberty, and Peace, reassured her faith in the sanctity of the law and reaffirmed her belief in the profession she had chosen while still in grammar school.
She was early this morning. In forty-five minutes she would be face-to-face with James Wayne Darby, and while it wasn't a courtroom, the interrogation was the next best thing, a chance to match wits with the flabby, smart-alec chauvinist. She would take a few last minutes to prepare herself mentally for the meeting.
Naomi Chance had beat her there as usual. The coffee was made in Vail's giant urn, and she was at her desk ready to do battle when Parver burst in at eight-fifteen. Naomi was always the first to arrive, walking through the sprawling office, flicking on lights before making Vail's coffee. Her look was regal and intimidating. She was a stunning ramrod-straight woman, the colour of milk chocolate, almost Egyptian-looking with high cheekbones and wide brown eyes, her black hair cut fashionably short and just beginning to show a little grey. A widow at fifty, she had the wisdom of an eighty-year-old with the body of a thirty-year-old. She was a quick learner and a voracious digger. Give her a name and she'd come back with a biography. Ask for a date and she'd produce a calendar. Ask for a report and she'd generate a file. She could type 80 words a minute, take shorthand, and had earned her law degree at the age of forty-six. Her devotion to Vail superceded any notion of practising law. She had taken care of him from the beginning, knew his every whim; his taste in clothes, movies, food, women, and wine; and was, without title, his partner rather than his associate prosecutor, a title he had invented for her because it was nebulous enough to cover everything and sounded a lot more important than executive secretary. Naomi gnawed through red tape as voraciously as a beaver gnaws through a tree bole, had no use for bureaucratic dawdling, knew where to find every public record in the city, and acted as surrogate mother and a friendly crying shoulder for the youthful staff Vail has assembled. If Vail was the chief of staff, Naomi Chance was the commanding general of this army.
Parver was the youngest and newest member of what Vail called the Special Incident Staff - better known around town as the Wild Bunch - all of whom were in their late twenties and early thirties, all of whom had been 'discovered' by Naomi, whose vast authority included acting as a legal talent scout for the man they all called boss.
Shana Parver was the perfect compliment to Naomi Chance. She was not quite five-two but had a breathtaking figure, jet-black hair that hung well below her shoulders, and skin the colour of sand. Her brown eyes seemed misty under hooded lids that gave her an almost oriental look. She wore little makeup - she didn't need it - and she had perfect legs, having been brought up near the beaches of Rhode Island and Connecticut, where she had been a championship swimmer and basketball player in high school. She was wearing a black suit with a skirt just above the knee, a white blouse, and a string of matched pink pearls. Her hair was pulled back and tied with a white bow. Dressed as conservatively as she could get, she was still a distracting presence in any gathering, a real traffic stopper, which had almost prevented Vail from hiring her until Naomi pointed out that he was practising a kind of reverse discrimination. She had graduated
A rebellious kid who had made straight A's without cracking a book, Parver had raised almighty hell and flunked out of the upscale New England prep school her parents sent her to. Accepted in a tough, strict institution for problem kids, she had made straight A's and from then on had been an honour student all the way through college and law school.
