Writ of Execution Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Preview

  PROLOGUE

  MOTION TO SUPPRESS - THE SUSPECT CONFESSED. NOW HER ONLY HOPE IS A LAWYER WHO BELIEVES SHE LIED.

  INVASION OF PRIVACY - LIGHTS, CAMERA, MURDER

  OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE - LIGHTNING STRIKES

  BREACH OF PROMISE - BROKEN HEARTS. BROKEN PROMISES. DEADLY CONSEQUENCES.

  ACTS OF MALICE

  MOVE TO STRIKE

  About the Author

  Also by Perri O’Shaughnessy

  Copyright Page

  DEDICATION

  To Our Teachers:

  Lucille Garrard, HJH; Miss Balsam, CES; Paul Ruud, Bertha Sheets, Mr. Ney, and Mr. Aranguren, CHS; Mr. R. Debernite, LSHS; Alan Dershowitz, Diane Lund, and Lawrence Tribe, HLS.

  Maureen Linder and Edna Rappaport, RUHS; Helen Chuvarsky, Carolyn Copenhaver, Gerhard Koehn, Ray Pharr, Mr. Locke and Mr. Shook, VHS; Kenneth Rexroth, UCSB.

  A special tip o’ the hat to our CSULB professors, Mrs. Dora Polk, and Mr. Josef Ctvrtlik, who taught us Creative Writing, and Russian.

  And to the other teachers along the way: thank you.

  PRAISE FOR PERRI O’SHAUGHNESSY’S BESTSELLING NOVELS

  WRIT OF EXECUTION

  “O’Shaughnessy deals readers a winning hand— the seventh in the series of Reilly adventures is another jackpot.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “[Perri O’Shaughnessy has] crafted yet another crackling courtroom drama featuring a strong yet believably human female lead. Move over, John Grisham.”

  —BookPage

  “Satisfyingly complex . . . a twisty legal thriller that cuts to the edge.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Captivates with its scenes of wily courtroom negotiation.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The O’Shaughnessy sisters deliver on every front . . . a tense and fast-paced legal thriller.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  MOVE TO STRIKE

  “A fast-paced page-turner . . . plenty of plot twists and turns . . . Courtroom drama and deft legal maneuvering are still at the heart of this thriller, and the tough-minded Reilly is its soul.”

  —New York Post

  “Suspenseful, entertaining reading.”

  —BookPage

  “Compulsively readable . . . very possibly her best . . a page-turner that will keep you up at night.”

  —The Drood Review of Mystery

  “Slick and accessible . . . [a] labyrinthine plot . . . The characters are well-portrayed.”

  —The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

  “Perri O’Shaughnessy weaves multiple strands of plot together in this sixth book in the popular series. . . . Courtroom sparring . . . adds still more luster to this fast-moving story.”

  —Philadelphia Daily News

  ACTS OF MALICE

  “Will keep you turning the pages into the night.”

  —USA Today

  “[O’Shaughnessy’s] best courtroom thriller to date.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  BREACH OF PROMISE

  “A legal mystery for thoughtful readers . . . the dialogue is clean and smart and the surprise twists wonderfully effective.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Lots of unexpected twists and turns . . . a savvy legal thriller.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

  “Nina Reilly is one of the most interesting heroines in legal thrillers today.”

  —San Jose Mercury News

  “Captivating . . . a beautifully plotted novel.”

  —Monterey County Herald

  INVASION OF PRIVACY

  “Suspenseful and complex.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “[A] . . . deft, multileveled tale of legal and criminal treachery.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  MOTION TO SUPPRESS

  “A real puzzler, with twists diabolical enough to take to court.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Fascinating . . . compelling.”

  —The Hartford Courant

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  WE GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE the no-nonsense, very capable editing of Danielle Perez, Senior Editor at Bantam Dell. Irwyn Applebaum, our hardworking publisher at Bantam Dell, has given us much-appreciated encouragement as well as strong support. We also very much appreciate the support and assistance of Nita Taublib, Deputy Publisher of Bantam Dell. We have benefited greatly from our association with these fine people.

  Also at Bantam Dell, we appreciate the support and help of the talented people in the Design, Publicity, and Marketing Departments. We especially thank Glen Edelstein of Bantam Dell and Fred Haynes of Hadel Studio Incorporated, who helped design the Tahoe map in this book.

  Grateful thanks as always to Nancy Yost, our agent at Lowenstein Associates, Inc., for her vision, conscientiousness, intelligence, and sense of humor.

  Thanks to our brother Patrick O’Shaughnessy, Esq., of Rucka O’Boyle Lombardo and McKenna in Salinas, California, for help with the plot and characters.

  We would like to acknowledge the Washoe tribe of Nevada and California and the fine people of Tahoe for providing ongoing inspiration for our books.

  We thank Auston Stewart for his help with arcane computer lore, and Ann Walker for help with research.

  For help with one of the characters, we read The Psychology of Gambling by Edmund Bergler, M.D., International Universities Press, copyright 1958, 1970. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler also had a thing or two to teach us.

  For Tahoe news we read the Nevada Appeal, Tahoe Daily Tribune, The Record-Courier, and North Lake Tahoe Bonanza online. We especially thank Geoff Dornan, a reporter for the Nevada Appeal, for his reporting on the gaming industry. For medical research we went online to various articles in the New England Journal of Medicine.

  We appreciate so much the love and support of Brad, Andy, June, Connor, and Corianna. And thanks to Peter, for sending the first e-mail.

  It’s a strange thing, I haven’t won yet, but I feel and think like a rich man and can’t imagine being anything else.

  Dostoyevsky, The Gambler

  Yet the ear distinctly tells,

  In the jangling,

  And the wrangling,

  How the danger sinks and swells,

  By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells—

  Of the bells—

  Of the bells, bells, bells, bells,

  Bells, bells, bells—

  In the clamor and the clanging of the bells!

  Edgar Allan Poe, “The Bells”

  1

  KENNY DUMPED THE leased black Lexus in the parking lot at Prize’s Lake Tahoe casino at precisely ten P
.M. on July fifteenth. Sunday night, Milky Way spilling over the black mountain ridge in a sixty-degree arc, no sleep for thirty hours.

  He had driven into the Sierra from Silicon Valley, festering in hundred-degree heat, without stopping. At an altitude of over six thousand feet, South Lake Tahoe had a different microclimate, much cooler and drier. He could see the ghostly reflections of old snow pockets on the mountains looming over the casino district. As he climbed out of the car, stuffing his pockets with the few things he intended to take with him, he began to shiver.

  Pulling nonessentials from his wallet and leaving them on the seat, he slid the worthless credit cards and the two thousand in cash into the pocket of his black silk sport coat.

  He opened the glove compartment. The Glock looked huge, matte black, and ready.

  He pushed his specs up on his nose and stashed the gun in the inner pocket of his jacket. Money and a gun. So all-American.

  Prize’s would be his last stop. This had not been his original intention, but a decision had hardened in his mind as he drove up to the mountains. That morning, before his courage fled, he thought, I will tell them, and then I will spend the rest of my life making it up to them. I will be a kitchen boy. I will hire myself out for road construction. Anything. Somehow I will save them from what I did.

  But as he drove alongside the surging American River, the idea of going to his parents with the news of his colossal failure began to seem pointless. He couldn’t save them, and he didn’t have the guts to face them.

  They would find out soon enough.

  The Five Happinesses restaurant would be sold first. He had worked at his family’s Tahoe restaurant from the time he was eight years old, chopping vegetables and packing rice into small porcelain bowls, doing his home-work in the back room with the Taiwanese news on the TV.

  Then the frame house where his mother swept the porch each morning before going to the restaurant to cook, where he and his brother and sister had grown up, would have to go. He had ruined them all with his—his overconfidence! his cockiness! The big visionary with the big ideas! If only he had died at birth and saved his parents the misery of his life. His brother, Tan-Mo, stoic, solid, and destined for all the traditional successes, was in his second year at Stanford Med. Now Kenny had destroyed his life, too.

  “I saved for thirty years, Tan-Kwo,” Kenny’s father had told him, using his Chinese name. “All consolidated. Savings, pension money, a loan against the restaurant fixtures.” He had waved the check at Kenny while his mother watched, eyes watery, face perspiring above a boiling pot at the restaurant. Colleen, younger than her brothers by several years, had clicked away on her Nikon. “One, two, three, smile,” she said. It was his parents’ twenty-ninth anniversary.

  Mr. Know-It-All, Mr. Brilliant Future, a shit-eating grin on his face, held out one hand for the check, shaking his father’s hand with the other, a moment immortalized on Kodak paper in a steamy haze of bright colors that would never fade.

  Four hundred fifty-seven thousand dollars. Years of hot summer days spent sweltering in the kitchen at the Five Happinesses, years of holidays skipped, luxuries scrimped, and birthdays ignored. He had taken away their past and their future. He had squandered it all.

  “Your father believes in you, Tan-Kwo. I know how much that means to you. But . . . what is this thing? This cityofgolddotcom?” his mother had asked him later that night.

  “Just the City of Gold, Mom. The dotcom is only an address.” In a fever of excitement about the check, his mind darting like a cursor around a thousand new possibilities now open to him, he had tried to explain.

  “Sounds like dreams,” she said when he finished.

  She was so right.

  But he had been convinced the money would roll in. The City of Gold was the next step for the Net—the step into beauty and poetry, like putting modern art up in a concrete bunker to make it livable and gladden the spirit. He should have known. The techies who ran the Net were too used to the industrial, minimalist look. The City of Gold was too lush a paradigm, too lyrical . . . too beautiful. . . .

  Yesterday, for the first time since that day in the restaurant kitchen with his family, he had awakened from his dream. There was no more money. The venture capitalists he approached on Sand Hill Road talked to their experts, who said he was overreaching. Eyes fixated on his Palm Pilot, Jerry Casper of Wildt Ventures had said, “It’s not like it was, where all you had to do was stumble over a sprinkler in this neighborhood to get your funding. We need to see a definite path, a rapid advance toward profitability.”

  The City of Gold would attract lawsuits, Casper claimed. And besides, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had the basic platforms sewed up for the next century. They were sexing up Windows and OS X, but the files and the drop downs would stay. And the rebel companies using Linux weren’t going to risk good money for a radical paradigm shift that would have to be marketed intensely because it was so novel.

  Kenny leaned his head back and looked up at the brightly lit twenty-story hotel and casino. He could smell the tang of the deep mysterious lake somewhere out there in the darkness.

  Like a man under water who finally gives in and floods his lungs, he took a deep, ragged breath and pushed open the glass door to the casino.

  Inside, flashing lights, gleaming metal, a low roar of voices punctuated by short blasts of ringing, and a feeling of entering a different universe where there are no clocks and no one ever sleeps. Slot machines squatted in long rows, and tourists cruised up and down the aisles or sat on stools pushing buttons. He joined the flow of people, looking for a dollar slot machine. It was important to him to pick the right one. Three reels only, a classic. Dollars, because he knew that by putting three in at a time he would be broke within two hours and in the right frame of mind to use his credit card one last time to check into a room.

  And then—finis!

  He had a mathematical vision of bracketed sets folding inward from infinity down to a single point. Himself, no longer quantifiable.

  The casino would clean up after him. Hotel rooms were popular places to die. Broke tourists did it up here on a regular basis. Even though the windows in the rooms probably didn’t open wide enough to allow impetuous jumps, there were options everywhere—the terry cloth bathrobe belts, the glass from a broken coffeemaker. . . .

  The Glock would be easy and fast. He would think of a way to minimize the splatter of the brains which were the cause of this entire intolerable situation.

  Kenny passed a group of blackjack tables and the craps table, where a crowd had gathered around and the stick-man was hooking the dice. He could lose it faster there, but he wanted two more hours to acclimate himself to the notion of death and to prepare himself for his ignoble end. Let a slot machine decide how close his estimate came.

  Ah. He spotted a bank of dollar slots called the Greed Machines. He walked closer, observing their rhythms. The Greed Machines spoke to him. Win, lose, die—very simple.

  The logos on the reels of the Greed Machine were gold bars and dollar signs and little brown banks. He found an empty seat between a girl in a wheelchair on the left end of the aisle and a white-haired man wearing a denim shirt whose skinny rear was planted firmly on his stool on the right. Kenny pulled out the stool and crowded in with them. He liked being wedged between two human beings. Utter strangers, they still comforted him with their bodies, their single-minded joint pursuit. Piglets and puppies rooting together at the mother’s teats must feel that same primitive comfort. Udder strangers! It reminded him of nights long ago when he and his brother slept together in the same bed.

  He cast sidelong glances at his neighbors, fixing them in his mind—her asthmatic breathing, the sour odor of house drinks he emitted. They were important people, among the last he would ever see.

  He inserted a hundred-dollar bill into the slot and the credit window blinked back “100 credits.” He jabbed the Play Max Credits button and the reels began to fly.

  In two minutes he ble
w the first hundred without registering a single gold bar, much less a bank.

  Another hundred-dollar bill. He pressed, watched the reels blur, and saw that he had lost. He pressed again. He fell into a rhythm of steady losing, broken now and again by a cherry which gave him back six credits or a set of mismatched bars which gave him fifteen. The trend was rapidly downward, about one hit per twelve to fourteen plays. He’d expected that. Prize’s was reputed to have the tightest slots at Tahoe.

  His company had lost money in a similarly jerky but inexorable fashion over the past nine months. Heady days, when he and his temps sent out prospectuses and brochures and labored over the GUI, morphed into jittery all-nighters, when he fed himself on the illusion that all he had to do was work his hardest and success would come. He lived and breathed in the City of Gold those nights until, incoherent with exhaustion, he slept, a cool blue screen saver his night-light.

  He was losing fast. He put in another hundred while he stepped up the self-flagellation. He was stalling. If he wasn’t such a coward he’d go upstairs right now and . . .

  He didn’t. The Glock pressed against his chest under the jacket. The stifling casino air smelled as rank as his freezer back at the condo in Mountain View, and the place was hot, but he couldn’t take off his jacket, so he sweated.

  The girl next to him talked to her machine, coaxing it. She lost faster than he did, but never lost the hopeful upward curve of her lips. Three small silver rings looped through each ear. Her dark hair was pulled sternly back from a wide, pale forehead. Every few minutes a biker-type Kenny took to be her boyfriend arrived to pass her a few twenties. She paid him with bright eyes and a big smile, like, Isn’t this grand? And he’d pat her hand and wander off again to wherever he had chosen to unload his share.

  She seemed to be fine above the waist, nothing wrong with her arms or her neck, but the legs beneath a long cotton print skirt never moved. She couldn’t ski or hike, but she could gamble and be part of something, until the money was gone, anyway.

  She would have loved the City of Gold. Kenny’s software had been made for her. She couldn’t walk, but she could have flown.

  At this thought, which reminded him of how much he loved the City of Gold, Kenny’s throat closed up and his eyes got so watery he had to take off the gold-rimmed specs and rub them on his sleeve.