Absolute Power by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online

was hoping with luck to quit altogether.
    She felt guilty about the abuse her body was taking with the endless hours and stress of moving from one horrific case to another, but what was she supposed to do? Quit because she didn’t look like the women on the cover of Cosmopolitan ? She consoled herself with the fact that their job twenty-four hours a day was to make themselves look good. Hers was to ensure that people who broke the law, who hurt others, were punished. Under any criteria she reasoned she was doing far more productive things with her life.
    She swiped at her own mane; it needed to be cut, but where was the time to do that? The face was still relatively unmarked by the burden she found increasingly difficult to carry. Her twenty-nine-year-old face, after four years of nineteen-hour days and countless trials, had held its own. She sighed as she realized that probably would not last. In college she had been the gracious recipient of turned heads, the cause of raised heartbeats and cold sweats. But as she got ready to enter her thirties, she realized that what she had taken for granted for so many years, that what she had, in fact, derided on so many occasions, would not be with her that much longer. And like so many things you took for granted or dismissed as unimportant, being able to quiet a room by your mere entrance was one she knew she was going to miss.
    That her looks had remained strong over the last few years was remarkable considering she had done relatively little to preserve them. Good genes, that must be it; she was fortunate. But then she thought of her father and decided that she wasn’t very lucky at all in the genes department. A man who stole from others and then pretended to live a normal life. A man who deceived everyone, including his wife and daughter. A man you could not depend on to be there.
    She sat at her desk, took a quick sip of the hot coffee, poured in more sugar and looked at Mr. Simmons while she stirred the black depths of her nighttime stimulus.
    She picked up the phone, called home to check messages. There were five, two from other lawyers, one from the policeman she would put on the stand against Mr. Simmons and one from a staff investigator who liked to call her at odd hours with mostly useless information. She should change her telephone number. The last message was a hang-up. But she could hear very low breathing on the end, she could almost make out a word or two. Something in the sound was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. People with nothing better to do.
    The coffee flowed through her veins, the file came back into focus. She glanced up at her little bookshelf. On top was an old photo of her deceased mother and ten-year-old Kate. Cut out from the picture was Luther Whitney. A big gap next to mother and daughter. A big nothing.
    *   *   *
    “J ESUS F UCKING C HRIST !” T HE P RESIDENT OF THE U NITED States sat up, one hand covering his limp and damaged privates, the other holding the letter opener that a moment before was to have been the instrument of his death. It had more than just his blood on it now. “Jesus Fucking Christ, Bill, you fucking killed her!” The target of his barrage stooped to help him up while his companion checked the woman’s condition: a perfunctory examination, considering two heavy-caliber bullets had blown through her brain.
    “I’m sorry, sir, there wasn’t time. I’m sorry, sir.”
    Bill Burton had been a Secret Service agent for twelve years, and a Maryland state trooper for eight years before that, and one of his rounds had just blown apart a beautiful young woman’s head. Despite all his intense training, he was shaking like a preschooler just awakened from a nightmare.
    He had killed before in the line of duty: a routine traffic stop gone wrong. But the deceased had been a four-time loser with a serious vendetta against uniformed officers and wielding a Glock semiautomatic pistol in a sincere attempt to lift Burton’s