Fugitive

PROLOGUE. “Where’s Charlie?” 1997

Mr. Burdett, notify me when you’ve made up your mind,” the Honorable Dagmar Hansen said. “We’ll be in recess until I hear from you.”

Amanda Jaffe rose with the rest of the spectators in the courtroom when Judge Hansen left the bench, but her eyes weren’t on the judge. They were watching the intense conference between her father and his client. Frank Jaffe’s lips were inches from Sally Pope’s ear and he was speaking rapidly. Mrs. Pope’s hand rested on her father’s forearm and her brow knit as she concentrated on what he was saying. Amanda frowned, because she sensed more intimacy than was normal between a lawyer and his client.

Karl Burdett, the Washington County district attorney, looked furious as he stormed through the courtroom doors with his two assistants in tow. Frank Jaffe and Mrs. Pope followed a moment later. Just before the courtroom door closed behind him, Frank gave Amanda a quick thumbs-up. This morning, before leaving for court, Frank had hinted at a major development in the case. Amanda was dying to know what had happened in chambers, but she knew better than to bother her father when he was in the middle of a trial.

Amanda decided to take the stairs to the lobby. The walk would probably be the only exercise she would get today and she felt a twinge of guilt. Amanda had been training furiously this summer while she was home from college. As a junior, she had won the 200 freestyle for Berkeley at the PAC-10 championships and had placed sixth at Nationals. If she shaved a few seconds off her best time, she could place in the top three at Nationals as a senior and have an outside chance of making the 2000 Olympic team. Breakthroughs like that didn’t happen if you missed too many practices, but she couldn’t pass up a chance to watch her father try the nation’s most publicized murder case.

Frank Jaffe was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Oregon, and Amanda had wanted to follow in his footsteps since she was in elementary school. When other girls were reading fashion magazines, she was reading Perry Mason. While other girls dreamed of going to the prom, she dreamed of trying homicide cases, and there had been no Oregon case in recent history that had been as highly publicized as the trial of Sally Pope for the murder of her husband, United States Congressman Arnold Pope Jr. Adding to the buzz was the aura surrounding Sally Pope’s codefendant, Charlie Marsh, aka the Guru Gabriel Sun, whose rise from petty criminal to national hero and New Age guru had captured the country’s imagination.

Amanda was carrying a copy of The Light Within You, Marsh’s autobiography, in which he bared his soul about the abuse he’d suffered as a child and told how this psychic damage had led him to a life filled with violence. What made the book special was Marsh’s account of his amazing religious conversion, which occurred at the moment he risked his life to save a prison guard from the attack of an insane prisoner.

Amanda looked at the photo of Marsh on the back of the book. It was no mystery why women flocked to the guru’s seminars, where he taught his flock the way to find the inner light that had suffused him during his near-death experience. Marsh had the blond, blue-eyed good looks of a movie idol, but his violent past hinted at a devil within. Sally Pope was one of the most beautiful and self-possessed women Amanda had ever met, but even she had fallen under Marsh’s spell, if you believed the tabloids.

Sally Pope’s case had sex, celebrity, and violent death. Only one thing was missing-Charlie. “WHERE IS THE GURU?” screamed the headlines in the national press on the day the trial opened. The question led off every television news hour. Charlie Marsh had disappeared from the Westmont Country Club the instant Arnold Pope Jr. was shot. Like everyone else in America, Amanda wondered where he was now and what he was doing.