“Are you going to tell me what you’re involved in?” Ginny asked when they were alone.

“I really can’t. It does involve Court business, and I promised I wouldn’t tell anyone but Dana.”

“So you can tell her, but you can’t tell the woman you’re going to spend your life with?”

“It’s not like that. Dana is being paid to investigate a… a problem. This was a business conversation between a client and her employer.”

“You’re paying her?”

“I can’t answer that, and please drop this, OK? How would you feel if I asked you to reveal confidential communications between you and a client or demanded that you tell me what you and a partner discussed in a business meeting?”

Ginny could see that Brad was upset, and she knew he was right. She took his hands in hers and looked into his eyes.

“I’m worried because I love you so much, and I’d die if anything happened to you.”

Brad took her in his arms. If he had to choose between a billion dollars and hugging Ginny, he knew where his heart would lead him.

In his dream, Brad was on the deck of the China Sea, and the ship had been converted into a strip club. Brad was sitting at a table covered with a white tablecloth and lit by a candle, watching naked, busty women with large derrieres cavort on a raised stage. Millard Price was sitting next to him, and he was wearing a sombrero and a serape. A near-naked woman perched on Price’s lap. The judge was drunk, and he laughed as he stuffed hundred-dollar bills into her G-string. Then the woman turned toward Brad and thrust her breasts in his face.

“Do you want a private dance?” she asked, seconds before Brad shot up in bed and stared into the darkness.

“What’s wrong?” Ginny mumbled.

“Nothing,” he said, but the tension in his voice told her otherwise. “I’ve got to make a call.”

“It’s three in the morning,” Ginny said, fully awake now.

“I know.”

Brad grabbed his cell phone and left the bedroom. Ginny was pissed off by the secrecy. She debated staying in bed but decided that she needed to know what Brad was involved in, so she crept to the bedroom door and opened it a crack.

“I know it’s late, Dana, but this can’t wait,” Brad whispered in the mistaken belief that Ginny could not hear him. “The shell corporation that was used to purchase the China Sea was named TA Enterprises. Remember Mary Garrett told you that Sarah Woodruff asked John Finley what TA meant and he joked that it meant tits and ass? Well, that’s not it. You read Price’s bio, right? He went to Dartmouth with Masterson, and they were the stars of the championship football team. Do you remember their nickname? They were the Two Amigos! TA.

“When the incident on the China Sea took place, Dennis Masterson was the head of the CIA, and Millard Price was a senior partner at Rankin Lusk and one of Masterson’s closest friends. Smuggling hashish was an illegal operation that the CIA wouldn’t be able to get the Congress to sanction, so Masterson hired Finley, an independent contractor, to be the front man, and he also went outside the Agency and asked his best friend, Millard Price, to set up the shell company that was used to buy the ship and fund the operation. The company was called TA Enterprises because one ‘amigo’ asked the other ‘amigo’ to set it up. Proving that won’t be easy, but it does give us something to look into.”

Dana said something.

“OK, it gives Keith Evans something to look into, but if he can show Price set up the company, he’ll have a connection between Price and the China Sea, and we’ll know for certain why Price wants to kill the cert petition in Woodruff.”

Ginny listened until it was clear that the phone call was over. She crept back into bed and pulled the covers over her head. Now she knew why Brad and Dana were being secretive. They suspected that a sitting Supreme Court justice was involved in drug smuggling. It wasn’t much of a stretch for Ginny to conclude that Brad and Dana also suspected that Millard Price had something to do with the attack on Justice Moss.

Ginny decided that something must have happened recently that made Dana believe that Brad should back off. People who would try to kill a Supreme Court justice would think nothing of killing a lowly clerk, so Dana’s advice was sound. But Brad seemed convinced that they could show Price was involved with the murder attempt if they could prove he set up this TA Enterprises company. Ginny had an idea how that could be accomplished, and she didn’t think there would be any risk to her or Brad.

Chapter Forty-eight

At seven thirty the next morning, Ginny booted up her computer and typed “Sarah Woodruff” into Google. She was worried that her search would be traced back to her, so she entered a password she’d seen one of the junior partners use. It didn’t take her long to find the case that was before the Supreme Court and newspaper articles about Woodruff’s two trials for killing the same man.

When she was finished, Ginny could see why digging into the case was very dangerous. Once the China Sea disappeared, Masterson must have thought he was home free. Then Max Dietz charged Woodruff with murder, and Mary Garrett started poking her nose into the China Sea affair. Masterson must have taken another deep breath when the first case was dismissed and no one had any reason to look into what happened in Shelby anymore. But the specter of the China Sea rose again when John Finley turned up dead for real and the only way Mary Garrett could defend her client was by proving that Finley was involved with CIA assassins and drug dealers.

Masterson must have thought he was safe when the trial judge blocked Garrett after the government asserted the state-secrets privilege, but Sarah Woodruff was sentenced to death, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the defendant’s right to exculpatory evidence in a death case doesn’t trump the state-secrets privilege, and the issue in the case became one of national importance. If cert wasn’t granted, the case would die. If cert was granted, the case would get national scrutiny. While Masterson was with the CIA, he had a million ways to keep the lid on it, but he was on his own now, and he had to get rid of Justice Moss because she stood in the way of the Court denying cert.

As soon as Ginny felt she knew enough about the facts of the case, she ran an internal search in the firm’s files for TA Enterprises. She was disappointed when the computer could not make a match, but she wasn’t surprised. Anyone clever enough to run a major drug-smuggling operation under the nose of the federal government was going to cover his tracks.

If Price had created the papers used to incorporate the company and they weren’t stored on a hard drive, there was another place they might be stored. During her first week on the job, Ginny had needed a file from a closed case that had been handled for a major client in 1970, before the firm had computers. When she couldn’t find the file online, she had asked the secretary for the partner who’d assigned her the project where she could find it. The secretary had taken a distinctive key from a drawer in her desk and sent Ginny to the subbasement where the paper files were stored.

Ginny’s secretary wasn’t in yet, but her desk wasn’t locked. Ginny found the key and took the elevator to the subbasement. When the doors opened onto the reception area of Rankin Lusk, they revealed a world of sparkling glass, shiny chrome, and polished wood. The subbasement was the dark side of the force. When Ginny got out of the elevator, she walked into an unpainted concrete corridor dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs. The air was clammy, and the odor of decay hung in the stagnant air. Both sides of the corridor were divided into storage bays. The file cabinets in the bays were vague shadows protected by chicken wire attached to a wood frame. The strands of a cobweb brushed across her face and she started before wiping it away. A flashlight would have come in handy, and she cursed her lack of forethought.