Power Blind Read Free Page A

going to be pretty lonely. Charlie didn’t have any real friends, and his parents aren’t well enough to travel from Florida.”
    â€œWe can even come back to the house afterward, if you think it would help.”
    Viz nodded, then lowered his head, his unfocused eyes oblivious to his rotating hat.
    â€œMakes you think, doesn’t it?”
    â€œAbout what?”
    â€œAbout dying too soon—” Viz caught himself, flustered, eyes pained. His own words reminding him of the death of Gage’s father three months earlier. “Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
    Gage’s mind pushed past the final memory of his father at the moment of his death to their last conversation a day earlier. Sitting by his bedside at the family’s southern Arizona ranch, holding his hand as they gazed out the adobe-framed windows at the desert. His father, a family physician, had laughed about being paid in Yaqui corn, Apache chickens, and Mexican tamales in the years after World War II, cried about friends he’d lost in combat when he was young and to disease as he got older, and wondered aloud about the changes the world would see after he was gone.
    â€œMy dad told me his only regret was that he wouldn’t live long enough to see how everything turned out,” Gage said.
    Viz pulled away and looked over at him. “But nobody ever . . .”
    Gage nodded. “I think that’s why he had a little smile on his face when he said it.”
    â€œBut there’s a difference between your father and Charlie.” Viz’s voice rose, more in frustration than in argument. “A big difference.” He set down his hat on the step next to him, as if preparing to plead Palmer’s case. “Your dad’s life had a kind of completeness. Charlie’s was unfinished, and he didn’t have a chance to make things right.”
    â€œHe had lots of chances,” Gage said, “he just never took them.”
    They both knew it was worse than that, for the lens through which Palmer had chosen to view others’ lives had filtered those chances out.
    Even more, Palmer’s kind of life made his the kind of death that brought all his acts and deceits into the present, and into the space between the two of them sitting on these steps.
    Palmer had spent his career as part of an underworld of lawyers and private investigators—as clandestine as a secret society and as public as a Hollywood celebrity trial—that exploited victims’ shames and terrors and forced them to choose silence over justice.
    In the years after he’d left the San Francisco Police Department, Palmer had been the surreptitious hand that had tipped the scales in countless child custody hearings and divorce battles, in sexual harassment complaints, even in disputes over movie rights and royalties. He’d been an expert in the art of leverage, in discovering the embarrassing lapse, the plagiarized high school term paper, the drunken confession on a defunct social networking site, the juvenile petty theft from Victoria’s Secret, the videotaped ménage à cinq in a college dorm, the used condom in a Las Vegas hotel room, or the empty bottle of Prozac in an aging star’s garbage.
    He’d also been an expert at avoiding exposure; for those furious enough to expose him also had the most to lose.
    And sitting there next to Viz, with him so desperate to redeem the unredeemable, it was unimaginable to Gage that Palmer had found the courage in his final moments to crawl out of the darkness and into a light that would transform his entombed past into a living legacy.
    â€œIt’s just hard to live with mixed feelings about dead people,” Viz said. “He did a lot of bad stuff as a cop and an investigator, but he was also a brother-in-law who tried to do good for his kids.” He sighed. “The truth is I’m not sure they have a clue about who he really