The Nomination Read online

  Books by William G. Tapply

  Brady Coyne mystery novels

  Death at Charity’s Point * The Dutch Blue Error

  Follow the Sharks * The Marine Corpse * Dead Meat

  The Vulgar Boatman * A Void in Hearts

  Dead Winter * Client Privilege

  The Spotted Cats * Tight Lines * The Snake Eater

  The Seventh Enemy * Close to the Bone

  Cutter’s Run * Muscle Memory * Scar Tissue

  Past Tense * A Fine Line * Shadow of Death

  Nervous Water * Out Cold * One Way Ticket

  Hell Bent * Outwitting Trolls

  Other novels

  Thicker than Water (with Linda Barlow)

  First Light (with Philip R. Craig)

  Second Sight (with Philip R. Craig)

  Third Strike (with Philip R. Craig)

  Bitch Creek * Gray Ghost * Dark Tiger

  Books on the outdoors

  Those Hours Spent Outdoors

  Opening Day and Other Neuroses * Home Water Near and Far

  Sportsman’s Legacy * A Fly Fishing Life * Bass Bug Fishing

  Upland Days * Pocket Water

  The Orvis Guide to Fly Fishing for Bass * Gone Fishin’

  Trout Eyes * Upland Autumn * Every Day Was Special

  Other non-fiction

  The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit

  The Nomination

  A Novel of Suspense

  William G. Tapply

  Copyright © 2011 by Vicki Stiefel Tapply

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

  Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018 or [email protected].

  www.skyhorsepublishing.com

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Tapply, William G.

  The nomination : a novel of suspense / by William G. Tapply. p. cm.

  9781602399907

  1. Police--Massachusetts--Boston--Fiction. 2. Boston (Mass.)--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3570.A568N66 2011

  813’.54--dc22

  2010012390

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Books by William G. Tapply

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  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

  EPILOGUE

  To my five kids with love,

  Mike, Melissa, Sarah, Blake, and Ben

  PROLOGUE

  He’d expected to be one of the first ones there, but even at seven in the morning, with rain spitting from gray clouds and a chilly March breeze coming off the Bay, they’d already begun to gather. They stood in scattered clusters around the parking lot and on the sidewalk with placards on their shoulders and naïve enthusiasm on their faces.

  The place had opened one year after that monstrous Supreme Court decision, one of the first of its kind, and they’d been killing babies here ever since. Today marked the thirty-fifth anniversary of the day it destroyed its first innocent life. The television cameras would be here today, they were saying.

  He’d overheard their excited, disorganized planning—if you could call it that. They’d form a human barricade. They’d lie down across the entrance to the parking lot. They’d wave their placards and chant their slogans, and they’d try to get themselves arrested and dragged, bodies gone limp, heels digging in, to the police wagons.

  And nothing would change. The babies would continue to be murdered.

  He recognized a couple of preachers working the crowd, patting shoulders, whispering their canned words of wisdom and encouragement into eager ears. He’d heard them at meetings, their pious, high-pitched passion invoking God and Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and the Bill of Rights. Humility and passive resistance. The meek shall inherit the earth. Turn the other cheek.

  It was all bullshit.

  Despite thirty-five years of slogans and placards and demonstrations, Dr. Devil was still violating God’s laws, as bold and self-confident as ever. Nothing had changed.

  And again today, after the placards had been waved and the slogans had been chanted and the human barricades had been dragged away and the television cameras had shot their footage and the reporters had gotten their stories, Dr. Devil would once again march on into the building and continue committing murder, as he did every day.

  He allowed himself a silent chuckle. Today these lemmings would see how things should be done.

  He pressed his elbow against his side and felt the solid, comforting, deadly weight in the pocket of his windbreaker.

  Today Dr. Devil would die.

  “Wouldn’t you like to hold a sign?”

  He turned his head. A white-haired man with a red face and a clerical collar showing under his jacket was standing beside him. He was carrying an armload of cardboard signs tacked to rough wooden stakes.

  “Sure,” he said. “Thanks. God bless.”

  The preacher smiled, handed him a placard, and moved away.

  He propped the placard against the wall without bothering to glance at its slogan.

  The crowd was swelling. He guessed that close to a hundred people were here now, and the leaders were trying to organize them, moving from person to person, waving their arms, shouting instructions.

  A woman approached him. “He’ll be here soon,” she said, her eyes shining. “Let our voices be heard.”

  “Amen, sister,” he said.

  Around quarter of eight, four police cruisers and two vans arrived. The officers left them parked at the curb and took up stations around the parking lot and along the pathway to the clinic. They folded their arms and assumed their practiced bored expressions.

  Five minutes later excited murmurs passed through the crowd.

  Somebody said, “Channel Eight’s here!”

  The crowd was milling around, and the police moved among them, pushing and prodding them to open an aisle from the parking area to the front door of the building.

  There was some excitement out by the entrance to the parking lot. He craned his neck and saw two officers dragging a middle-aged white man and an overweight black woman toward a police van that waited with its back doors open.

  “Here he comes!”

  He wedged his way toward the front of the crowd and saw a black Volvo station wagon nose its way into the parking lot. He stood on tiptoes. He wanted to see Dr. Devil’s face.

  “Baby killer!”

  “Murderer!”

  Placards bobbed in the air, and the chants filled his ears. Camera flashes sparked in the gray, sunless morning
air.

  A minute later he saw the familiar white hair and sun-crinkled face looming over the crowd. The face of the Devil, and the Devil was smiling. Dr. Richard Bryant, all six feet five inches of him, director of the San Francisco Woman’s Reproductive Center.

  Reproductive. These abortionists did have a fine sense of irony.

  A woman had been riding in the Volvo with Dr. Devil, and now she was walking beside him, headed for the clinic. A patient, he supposed. Another rich suburban woman, come here to have her “procedure,” their favorite euphemism, performed by the best baby-killer in the business.

  She looked a little Chinese or Japanese or something. Around the eyes, mainly. But her hair wasn’t right. Brown, not black, and curly, almost kinky, parted in the middle and pulled back in a loose ponytail. She was taller than most Asian women he’d seen. She was beautiful, in an offbeat, exotic way, and she moved with the self-confident grace of a celebrity, someone who’d been coddled and admired all her life. He wondered if he had, in fact, seen her on TV. A lot of showbiz people lived in the Bay area.

  She wore tight black pants and a black jersey over a thin black jacket. All black. The color of death.

  Her dark eyes darted from side to side as the protesters waved their signs and yelled their pitiful slogans at her. She didn’t look nervous or scared, though. She looked like she hated everybody as much as they hated her, and she didn’t mind looking them straight in the eye.

  He understood how these entitled suburban women thought. Babies wrecked their bodies, smudged their beauty, crushed their egos.

  He hated them all, these selfish, narcissistic women who valued their looks and the shape of their bodies and their self-indulgent freedom more than human life. He hated them almost as much as he hated Dr. Devil himself.

  “Excuse me,” he muttered, shouldering his way toward the front of the crowd. A cop was standing there facing them, holding his nightstick across his chest to keep the aisle from the parking lot to the clinic door open. He edged away from the cop, murmuring “excuse me” and using his elbows to wedge himself into position.

  He eased into the second row of protesters. Now he had a clear view of the open pathway where the baby-killing Dr. Devil and his patient would pass, shielded from full view by the short bald man and the elderly woman standing in front of him. He reached into his coat pocket, gripped his weapon by its cold handle, and slid it out. He held it flat against his thigh. Its weight felt serious in his hand.

  Now Dr. Devil and the tall woman were approaching, and the voices around him became deafening. Dr. Devil ignored them all, as he had been doing all these years. He gazed straight ahead, intent on the sanctuary inside the clinic, smiling that bemused holier-thanthou smile of his. The woman beside him with those searching black eyes looked more alert than frightened.

  He slid the revolver up to his chest and held it inside his open jacket.

  Dr. Devil was about fifteen feet away now, moving slowly in his direction, working hard to appear casual and relaxed, ho hum, another day at the office. He was speaking out of the corner of his mouth to the woman beside him. Only his eyes, still grimly focused on the clinic doorway, betrayed his fear.

  You better be afraid, Dr. Baby-Killer.

  The woman’s eyes kept darting around. If she was afraid, she hid it well.

  He’d get her, too.

  He eased the weapon out from his jacket, shifted his position.

  Another two steps and they would be directly in front of him.

  His thumb found the hammer, cocked it. He held the revolver in his right hand, bracing it against his hip and aiming it through the space between the man and woman standing in front of him, using them for a blind. From this distance, he couldn’t miss. He looked at the baby-killer and the woman with the Asian eyes. In about fifteen seconds he would pull the trigger and keep pulling, and he visualized the cries and the spurts of blood, the two of them falling, big black puddles on the wet pavement . . . one more step, come on, his finger caressing the trigger, and then Dr. Devil’s torso, with the Asian woman right at his side, filled the space between the two people, and as he braced his elbow against his hip and tensed his muscles to pull the trigger, he was aware of the woman moving between him and Dr. Devil, her head turning, her eyes stopping, suddenly staring at him—

  Then everything happened too fast for his brain to keep up. A flashing movement, a sudden sharp pain in his wrist, balance gone, reflexively yanking the trigger, hearing the explosion of the gunshot, falling backward, his finger snapping with a hideous crack like a pencil breaking, and the sudden exploding pain shooting up to his armpit, the gun gone from his hand, his back smashing onto the pavement. A claw, an iron vise, grabbing, squeezing his scrotum, the weight on his chest crushing him, driving the breath from his lungs, the pain searing his finger and the unspeakable fire burning in his groin, his stomach convulsing, the gray sky above him swirling . . .

  It went black and fuzzy, and when he was able to focus again, he was looking into a pair of big dark almond-shaped eyes. She had one knee on his chest. Her face was close to his and her forearm was pressing against his throat so that he could barely breathe. Her other hand was squeezing his testicles. It hurt like hell, but he knew it could hurt more. She was doing it just hard enough to keep him under control. She’d done this before. She was some kind of professional.

  She narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth as if she was going to speak to him. Then suddenly her head jerked up. Her forearm left his throat, and she looked up, her eyes wide and her arm out straight with her palm raised like a traffic cop at the man who was aiming the camera at her, and she was yelling, “No! No! Please don’t!”

  CHAPTER 1

  Patrick Francis Brody sat on the wooden bench facing the Boston Inner Harbor with his scuffed old leather briefcase on his lap. He’d swear it was still the dead of winter. The knife-sharp east wind blew off the water at him and sliced through his topcoat, through his suit jacket and his shirt and his undershirt, through his muscles and skin, and penetrated to the marrow of his bones. The April sun that ricocheted off the water was pale and empty of warmth.

  He’d only been there ten minutes, and already he was freezing his ass off. He hunched his shoulders inside his spring-weight topcoat and shivered. Bad decision, that thin, unlined topcoat. He’d been wearing it for a couple weeks now back in D.C., where the cherry blossoms were ablaze and the endless acres of lawns had turned that amazing lime green that made your eyes hurt. It was spring back in Washington. Two hours ago, a couple hundred miles ago, it had been spring.

  Behind him rose the sweeping glass facade of the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse. The building had won several awards, and Pat Brody, who had spent a lot of time in courthouses all over the country, had to admit that it was impressive, architecturally, not that he really gave a shit. It was what the people inside the courthouses did that impressed him, although not always favorably.

  Brody glanced at his watch. Twelve noon on the dot. He turned and looked back toward the courthouse, and sure enough, punctual as hell, there was Judge Larrigan, strolling down the wide path, looking around.

  Brody lifted his hand. Larrigan spotted him, waved, smiled that million-dollar one-eyed smile of his, and started toward him.

  As cynical as he was—and Pat Brody didn’t get to be a special assistant to the president of the United States by being naïve—he had to admit that Judge Thomas R. Larrigan was a pretty impressive specimen. Well over six lanky feet tall, with a thick shock of black hair sprinkled with dignified gray, a wide, lopsided, fun-loving grin, and, of course, that black eye patch. He moved like an athlete, oozed self-confidence. Fifty-nine years old, Brody knew, but he looked about ten years younger. Mature, but not old. Experienced, but not over the hill.

  The right look didn’t hurt. It didn’t hurt at all. Larrigan had it.

  The son of a bitch had his suit jacket hooked on his finger and slung over his shoulder. His tie was loosened at his throat, and h
is cuffs were rolled halfway up his forearms, as if it was the middle of July. Shirtsleeves on a day like this. Jesus.

  Brody couldn’t stop shivering.

  Then Larrigan was standing in front of him. “Mr. Brody?” he said.

  Brody looked up and nodded.

  “Hope I didn’t keep you waiting,” Larrigan said. “Lawyers, you know?”

  “You’re right on time. I just got here.”

  Larrigan sat beside him on the bench and folded his jacket on his lap. “Nice day, huh?”

  “I’m freezing my balls off, you want the truth.”

  Larrigan grinned. “You get used to it.” He shifted so that he was half turned and looked at Brody out of that one sharp blue eye. “I got your message. Pretty mysterious. Don’t know why you wouldn’t want to get together in my chambers where it’s warm. So what brings you to Boston?”

  “Do you know who I am?” said Brody.

  Larrigan nodded. “Of course I do.”

  “Then I thought you might’ve figured out why I’m here, Judge.”

  “Maybe I did,” Larrigan said. “But maybe I’d rather hear you say it, just the same. I’ve been trained to withhold judgment until I’ve heard all the evidence, you know?”

  “Okay,” said Brody. “Here it is, then. Supreme Court Justice Lawrence Crenshaw has informed the president of his intention to retire at the end of the term. You’ve heard the rumors.” He made it a statement and looked up at Larrigan with his eyebrows arched.

  “Rumors,” said Larrigan. “Sure, I’ve heard talk. It’s true?”

  “It’s true,” said Brody. “And you, Judge, are on the president’s personal list.”

  “Personal list,” said Larrigan. “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said Brody, “that the president’s staffers are studying and evaluating dozens of men and women. Eminent attorneys and jurists from all over the country. A dozen or more of them will be invited to the White House for interviews. Those candidates are on what we call the staff list. You are bypassing all of this, Judge. The president wants you to know that. That’s why I’m here. It’s why you weren’t asked to make the journey to Washington. You’re on the president’s personal list. His is a very short list.”