Degree of Guilt Read Free

had died in a hit-and-run ‘accident,’ leaving behind one ambiguous memo and the suspicion in Paget that someone within the ECC was betraying his inquiry.
    Slowly, Paget had begun to uncover corruption within the ECC, which, he came to suspect, reached all the way to the White House. Then a second witness was kidnapped. When Paget persisted, someone had tried to kill him, just before he pieced together the meaning of Lasko’s transactions.
    The transactions, it turned out, were meant to funnel one and one-half million dollars to the President’s campaign. And the man who had been leaking information about the investigation to Lasko was the chairman of Paget’s agency. A man named Jack Woods.
    It was never clear, Terri had found, whether Paget had entirely uncovered the corruption within the ECC itself. But he had taken the story to the Washington Post and then to Congress. A second witness had come forward – a young woman lawyer who was Woods’s chief assistant. The results were prison sentences for Woods and Lasko, and political ruin for the President.
    Christopher Paget was the first twenty-nine-year-old, a columnist wrote sourly, to bring down a President without using sex. The columnist seemed slightly nettled; Paget refused all requests for interviews.
    As far as Terri could tell, he had never spoken of the Lasko case again.
    The strain must have been enormous; everyone wanted a piece of him. The young woman witness, Terri knew, had become a television journalist. But Paget seemed to want no part of it. And, much more than the woman, he had earned the undying enmity of partisans of the President, who felt that he had tampered with the scales of history. He had left Washington and returned to California for good.
    He had started his own firm, turned down requests to enter politics, made a specialty of white-collar crime. Within the office, Paget’s time in Washington was treated like some private trauma, which people were too tactful to mention. In six months, she learned almost nothing about him except that he was very good at his job.
    ‘Mr Gepfer?’ he asked politely.
    Across the table, the witness was staring at several pages of handwritten figures, seemingly unable to move or speak. He looked like a mouse, Terri decided: thin, sharp face, sandy hair combed to cover a bald spot, small eyes that shifted between avarice and fear. Had he not been so dishonest, and the moment so sublime, she would have felt sorry for him.
    ‘I don’t recall this document,’ opposing counsel broke in. ‘I’d like to know what this is and where you got it.’
    It was with Starr that Terri’s conceit of cats and mice broke down. He had a basilisk face, slicked-back gray hair, and an air of deliberate shrewdness; it had not surprised her to learn from the skinny associate who sat next to Starr that he treated his staff like serfs.
    Ignoring him, Paget turned to the court reporter, a young woman who sat watching from the end of the table, fingers poised over her machine. ‘In Mr Starr’s excitement,’ he said, ‘the witness may have forgotten the question. Perhaps you should read it back.’
    Starr leaned across the table. Terri scrutinized him, trying to figure out how much he understood. Not quite enough, she concluded; he looked like a man who was prepared for a setback but not for a disaster.
    ‘Oh, go ahead.’
    ‘Thank you.’ Paget’s tone held the barest trace of irony. He nodded to the reporter.
    ‘Can you identify Defendant’s Exhibit 13?’ the reporter read out.
    Almost inaudibly, Gepfer answered, ‘Yes.’
    Paget took up the questioning. ‘And is that document in your handwriting?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Could you read the heading at the top center, please.’
    Gepfer’s eyes shut. ‘Liberal Accounting Adjustments,’ he said in a monotone.
    ‘How did you come to call it that?’
    ‘David Frank suggested it.’
    ‘When he was still chairman of Lyon Industries?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did you also get the