Supreme Justice

Chapter Fifteen

Felicia Moss had lived alone for most of her life. There had been a brief marriage to a civil rights lawyer when she was in her late thirties, but that had only lasted two years, through no fault of her spouse. After the divorce, there’d been an occasional lover, but her work had been her real significant other. Felicia didn’t regret the lack of companionship. She had decided long ago that she preferred to live alone, so the only tics and foibles she had to put up with were her own.

With the exception of her stint on Wall Street, the judge had never had an income comparable to those of men like Millard Price, but she had been a wise investor, and the returns from her portfolio allowed her to afford a pleasant apartment in an old and elegant high-rise in the Kalorama Triangle near Connecticut Avenue. Three policemen accompanied her home from the Court. One watched her door while the other two searched her apartment to make sure no one was waiting for her inside. When the search was complete, two of the officers left, leaving the third on guard in the hall outside her apartment.

Felicia could tell that Brad had been shaken by the attack in the garage, but she had always possessed the ability to shuck off the violent emotions that crippled others when they faced danger. She experienced no trembling of the hand or shortness of breath when the officers left her alone. However, she was overwhelmed by fatigue, and she dropped into an armchair and closed her eyes as soon as the door closed. She had always possessed an inordinate amount of energy, but she was in her midseventies, and age was catching up to her more rapidly than she would have wished.

After she’d been sitting for a while, Felicia became aware of a second sensation, hunger. With all the excitement, she had forgotten about eating. Her apartment building had been built in the early 1940s. An antique clock graced the mantel of the marble fireplace that was the centerpiece of the high-ceilinged living room. Felicia was shocked to see that it was after nine. She pushed herself to her feet and walked to the kitchen. Felicia was a talented chef, but she had only enough energy to slap together a sandwich made from odds and ends she found in her refrigerator. After pouring a glass of milk, she sat at the kitchen table. She barely tasted her sandwich because she was preoccupied by the events in the garage. She was too old to fear death, but she was as curious in her seventies as she’d been in her teens. What was the motive for the attack? The assassin could just be a fanatic, but she didn’t think so. There was nothing going on in her personal life that could have engendered such hate. She examined a number of possible reasons for the assault and kept coming back to the same one. The only odd things that had happened recently were Millard Price’s overreaction during the discussion of the Woodruff case and the attempts by two of Price’s law clerks to pump Brad Miller for inside information on her vote, but Felicia couldn’t believe that someone would kill her to prevent cert from being granted in a case.

On the other hand, she really didn’t know much about Woodruff’s case other than the fact that the petitioner was facing execution in Oregon and that the most interesting legal issue concerned the state-secrets privilege, something she knew little about. Was it possible that Millard Price had some connection to the case? Felicia shook her head. Even if he did, it was absurd to think that her friend and colleague would try to kill her because of it. But as absurd as her theory was, Felicia couldn’t shake the idea that she might be on to something. What to do, though? There was no way she could conduct an investigation personally. A Supreme Court justice was not allowed to go outside the record in a case that was before the Court. Even if she was permitted to play private eye, she didn’t have the time or energy. Felicia smiled as a thought occurred to her. She couldn’t play at being Sam Spade, but she knew someone who knew a real-life private eye.