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the large dining room with its gleaming paneling, the officer said, “All four of Justice Reinbeck’s clerks have arrived. Do you want to interview them in a certain order, or should I just show one in?”
    The three looked at each other, and Shepherd shrugged. “Any order will do.”
    Jaid sat between the two men and placed her briefcase on the long polished table. Popped it open.
    “Okay if we rotate taking the lead in the interviews?”
    She looked at Tom Shepherd, a little surprised at the diffidence in his voice. Jaid didn’t know the man well, but his self-confidence used to border on cocky. Originally coming out of cyber crimes, his rise in the agency had earned him the nickname Midas. Every case he touched came out golden. Until his team had failed to resolve a kidnapping of a multimillionaire’s daughter. It was Adam who’d eventually cracked the child-swapping ring a couple years later, when one of his agency’s cases intersected. He’d been credited for the safe return of that girl and dozens of other children. From what she’d heard, Hedgelin had banished Shepherd to the field office in North Dakota, likely because of the resulting embarrassment to the division. She wasn’t sure how he’d landed back in DC, but apparently his tenure in the frozen north had taught him a little humility. “Fine with me.”
    Adam only nodded.
    A few minutes later there was a knock at the door. “Lawrence Dempsey,” the officer announced.
    A tall, exceedingly thin man with a headful of strawcolored hair entered. “This is horrendous. Absolutely horrendous.” His blue eyes, below brows so light they were nearly invisible, were troubled. “Justice Reinbeck was a brilliant jurist. A scholar. He was doing great things for our country. That something like this could happen is a staggering commentary on second amendment rights run amuck in our nation today.”
    “Please sit down, Mr. Dempsey.” When the man took a chair across the table from them, Shepherd made introductions and began leading the man through his educational background and employment history. They already had that information in a dossier on each of the people they would interview today, but the man visibly relaxed during the recounting of the familiar. It wasn’t until Shepherd got to the questions regarding his work relationship with Reinbeck that he showed any signs of discomfort.
    “What was Justice Reinbeck like to work with?” Shepherd asked.
    “Awe-inspiring,” was Dempsey’s prompt answer. “His mind . . .” He shook his head, as though words failed him. “He needed only a couple paragraphs of a memo to get the grasp of a petition. He could summarize the most complicated brief in just a few incisive, articulate sentences.”
    “I knew Byron for a long time,” Adam put in. His blackon-black pin-striped suit was almost a twin to the one Dempsey was wearing. But where the younger man’s looked like an effort to appear more polished, Raiker’s gave him a deceptive sheen of civility that all but the unwary would immediately mistrust. “His brilliance is undeniable. But he was unwavering in his convictions. And I’m told he could be something of a task master.”
    “He had an admirable work ethic,” Dempsey said stiffly, picking a barely visible speck of lint from his lapel. “Of course all of us who clerk for him wanted to support him in any way we could.”
    “So you worked late last night, too?” Shepherd rolled the pen he held between his thumb and index finger.
    The other man bobbed his head. “Of course. Justice Reinbeck was selected to write the dissenting opinion of one of the recent votes. Some of the justices have a clerk write the first draft for them, and then they make changes, put their own stamp on the opinion. But not Reinbeck. He likes . . . liked”—he seemed to stumble on the selfcorrection—“to do the writing himself. So even though we knew he had an engagement in the evening, we figured on staying until he