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  THE NOVELS OF

  STEVE MARTINI

  THE LIST

  “ABSOLUTELY IRRESISTIBLE . . . [A] wild and wooly tale.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “INTRIGUING ANTAGONISTS: the man of action versus the woman of thought. Their dueling turns The List into a fast, and often funny, offering.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “GREAT GOOD FUN . . . the final paragraph is worth the price of admission.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “THE PLOT BARRELS RIGHT ALONG. Abby is a strong and sympathetic character, and the climax is nicely twisty. Along the way, Martini gets in some sharp asides on the nature of fame.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “AN EXCITING, SURPRISING ENDING . . . Martini deftly conceals the killer until the last flaming finale.”

  —Booklist

  “SWIFT PACING AND MULTIPLE PLOT TWISTS.”

  —People

  THE JUDGE

  “RIVETING . . . a suspenseful tale, right up to the satisfying climax . . . legal thrillers don’t get much better than this.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A COMMANDING VOICE . . . the author answers just about every question you’ve ever had about the games lawyers play.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “MARTINI, a former trial attorney, is fascinating on legal strategy.”

  —People

  UNDUE INFLUENCE

  “THE COURTROOM NOVEL OF THE YEAR . . . virtually nonstop courtroom pyrotechnics . . . a dazzling climax.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A COMPLEX, RIVETING TALE and nitty-gritty courtroom drama.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “THE ACTION BUILDS TO A ROUSING CLIMAX through a brilliant series of trial scenes with several surprises.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “FILLED WITH SURPRISES AND TWISTS . . . supremely readable.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “FANS OF COURTROOM DRAMA will love Martini’s protagonist . . . and this complex tale of intrigue and murder.”

  —USA Today

  COMPELLING EVIDENCE

  “SUPERB . . . truly on a level with Presumed Innocent.”

  —F. Lee Bailey

  “PACKS A WALLOP!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “BY FAR THE BEST of the genre that I’ve ever seen . . . Absolutely thrilling.”

  —Clifford Irving

  “ALL THAT COURTROOM DRAMA SHOULD BE . . . seamless, suspenseful.”

  —New York Daily News

  “ENGROSSING!”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “ONE OF THE BEST COURTROOM DRAMAS this reviewer has seen in years.”

  —The Sacramento Bee

  PRIME WITNESS

  “RIVETING, YOU-ARE-THERE IMMEDIACY . . . ingenious . . . nail-biting . . . fascinating . . . first-rate . . . Prime is indeed the word for this involving read!”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “THE TRIAL BEGINS and Martini rolls up his sleeves to do what he does best . . . packs a satisfying punch.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THE SIMEON CHAMBER

  “CHILLING . . . PROVOCATIVE . . . STUNNING.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A FINE FOOT-TO-THE-FLOOR THRILLER!”

  —New York Daily News

  “INTRIGUING TWISTS AND TURNS.”

  —The Orlando Sentinel

  “THRILLING . . . a winner . . . Martini demonstrates a confident and deft control of literary suspense . . . excellent, top-quality adventure.”

  —The Sacramento Bee

  Titles by Steve Martini

  DOUBLE TAP

  THE ARRAIGNMENT

  THE JURY

  THE ATTORNEY

  CRITICAL MASS

  THE LIST

  THE JUDGE

  UNDUE INFLUENCE

  PRIME WITNESS

  COMPELLING EVIDENCE

  THE SIMEON CHAMBER

  PRIME WITNESS

  STEVE MARTINI

  JOVE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PRIME WITNESS

  A Jove Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons hardcover edition / July 1993

  Jove mass-market edition / February 1994

  Copyright © 1993 by SPM, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-55026-7

  Visit our website at www.penguin.com

  JOVE®

  Jove Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  JOVE® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “J” design is a trademark belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  To the mothers, Rita and Betty, for their interest, care and love

  Prologue

  They are the birds of darkness and noiseless flight, fierce and savage. On the dead fly the great horned owl can pick the eye from your head in the pitch black of a moonless night. On more than one occasion they are known to have attacked man.

  It will take only three more nights to finish the job for which he’s been paid nearly a year’s salary. Though the risks are high, it is the easiest money he’s ever made.

  As in the previous four nights he parks his car in the trees a half mile down the road. He takes Harvey from his cage, loosens the leather traces and removes the hood from the bird�
�s massive beaked head. He holds his arm straight, gloved fist elevated a bit, and sweeps it forward, the signal for the bird to take to the air. In a fluid motion a broad canopy of feathers opens overhead and the massive bird lifts skyward. It is a vision of flight, an analogy of animation perfect in its silence. He watches as Harvey disappears into the shadows of the trees and the half-moon-lit sky above.

  Named for the six-foot fictional rabbit in a vintage Jimmy Stewart movie, Harvey is sheer stealth, six pounds of streaking death on the wing.

  He listens, and after a few seconds, hears the telltale ruffle of folded wings, the only sound of flight Harvey ever makes. It is the sign that the bird has landed, ninety feet above, in the massive madrone on the makeshift perch. This place, high in the trees, will give the bird a better angle of attack.

  He locks the car and checks to ensure that it is far enough off the main road so as not to be seen by some passing pain-in-the-ass motorist, or worse a county sheriff on patrol. But it is nearly a mile to the county highway, and nobody ever comes down the old abandoned gravel road, at least at night. He picked this place from an old plat map of the property gotten from the county recorder’s office. It was best not to ask the owner for too much help. The less he knew the better, for both of them.

  He makes his way through the brush, across the shallow creek, to the base of the tree and begins his own ascent. This is made easier by the climbing gear erected on his first night, rappelling ropes and a harness called a leg-strap saddle. He sets the pin in the foot-cam that is fastened to his shoe and starts his climb.

  Moving effortlessly through the branches of the blood-red madrone, ten feet up, twenty, the rope coils on the ground beneath him like some interminable serpent. For this he avoided the taller pines and stouter oaks, and picked the madrone. It has smooth bark, and no sap to foul the ropes.

  In four minutes, hardly winded, he is up on the platform next to Harvey. The bird is perched on a limb a few feet away.

  He checks his watch. It is nearly midnight. Moving swiftly, he frees himself from the entangling ropes and prepares to begin. At most there are five hours of darkness left.

  Quickly he gives Harvey the scent, this from a small sack he carries on a tethered line from his belt, a little leather satchel marked by shiny metal studs. It contains blood, bits of flesh, pieces of vital organs from the previous night’s work. The body count now stands at four. With luck he will add to that tally tonight.

  With Harvey the pattern of ritual is firmly established, first the scent, then the flight, then the kill. If he is true to form the bird will return in minutes, with blood on its talons.

  With little ceremony he dispatches Harvey into the skies, then stands, stone silent and alert, facing the sheer basalt cliffs that rise a hundred feet from the valley floor to the west.

  He is always uneasy when Harvey is on the wing. It is an anxiety born of the freedom of flight, the knowledge that after all, this is a creature that in the fickle flicker of a thought can disappear over the horizon never to be seen again. Like good fortune to the lucky, and the affections of a beautiful mistress to her lover, this bird of prey returns to its owner for a single reason—because it approves of the company. It is a chastening relationship, one which is always open to the question, who is master, and who is servant.

  As his eyes strain for vision to the west in the dense night air, the bird issues from behind him an unearthly scream, high-pitched like a cornered cougar in agony. Though he knows this sound, it sends a chill down his spine.

  Struggling for balance on the platform, he turns, his gaze cast down through the canopy of leaves to a spot two hundred feet below, across the winding creek. And for a fleeting instant his vision is fixed, the figures fused in his mind like the flash of a strobe in the moonlit night. Then Harvey is upon him, unwieldy wings, blood dripping from his talons, and in one claw the object of his frenzied flight.

  With the bird balanced precariously on his gloved fist, he wrestles with the sharp talons of the closed claw. He coaxes the thing from Harvey’s grip, and it rolls upon his gloved and open palm. A bloodied remnant barely recognizable in form and shape, it sends a quick shiver of fear through him. And without thinking, he drops it ninety feet into the flowing waters of the creek below.

  Chapter One

  This place has the undiscerning smell of death about it. Horseflies and other buzzing things are thick in the noonday sun along the Putah Creek. I would have been here an hour sooner, but for the chaos out on the county highway, drivers rubbernecking, tourists getting a little extra on their trek from the Sonoma Valley.

  We are perhaps five miles below the dam where the river is choked to a trickling creek among boulders and gravel the size of golf balls. The budding heat of the day rises off the rocks.

  There are people here I recognize but cannot name, cops I have seen in the sheriff’s office in Davenport in the last few weeks. Some of these are tripping through weeds and brush up to their armpits, what police call the strip method for searching terrain, three cops walking at arm’s length combing an area in quadrants for anything unusual.

  Across the creek, in the distance I can see soaring cliffs carved in the black lava rock by the river before it was tamed at the dam. Running up to these bluffs is a tangle of trees, oaks and a few tall poplars, their branches nipping at the promontories.

  But the object of my interest is on this side of the creek, behind the yellow band of police tape wrapped around a group of small trees. Inside of this there is a single moving figure, hunched and low, scanning the ground. In a navy-blue police jumper with bright white lettering high on the back, the initials “DOJ.” It is a woman, short, a little stodgy, one of the criminologists from the State Department of Justice.

  I walk from my car and move toward the taped area, stepping on strands of a broken barbed wire fence, stretched to the ground from rickety and rotting split rail posts. A small trashed metal “No Trespassing” sign is on the ground, rusted nearly beyond recognition, like perhaps it has been in the dirt and mud for a dozen years.

  I circle, maintaining a good distance from the center of the search, until I have an opening, a clear line of sight through the trees and underbrush. There in a depression on the ground I see them lying on their backs, their arms stretched as if in crucifixion, faces to the blazing sun, two bleached and naked bodies, their midsections streaked in congealed blood, the color of rusted metal.

  The flies and insects are thicker here, and the stench of death strong in the midday air.

  The body closest to me, a male, has tightly clenched fists. Tied firmly with cord, these have turned the black-blue of death. The victim’s limbs are stretched to near dislocation at the joints, pulled taut by what appears to be a plastic-coated cord, similar to that used in the earlier murders. Metal tent stakes have been used for this purpose, driven deeply into the ground so that only a small portion of the L-shaped tip remains above the surface. There is some blood, not much, congealed on the lower abdomen. From this I assume that as in the earlier murders there is a fifth stake, driven hard, transfixing the victim to the ground. If true to form, this is the cause of death.

  I had read the reports of the earlier killings. This one, it seems, always takes his victims in tandem, a man and woman together, staked out in the same fashion. In each case, college students. The cops and their shrinks who study such things tell me there is ritual to this, a signature they have now linked to at least two other double murders, one in the southern part of the state, Orange County, and the other in Oregon.

  My gaze is fixed on the two victims stretched out before me on the ground, ten yards away. More than feeling the revulsion this causes, I am struck by the indisputable fact that this time the killer has departed from his pattern. The woman a bit overweight, what the coroner will in his medical euphemism call “well nourished.” There is an undeniable mane, disheveled and unkempt gra
y, atop the man’s head. This time the killer has not taken the young, the college students, that before have been his only quarry.

  My guess is the man is in his sixties. Considering the agony of death, it is difficult to tell. As for the woman, while her body reveals the wrinkles and sags of age, I can posit no guess. I cannot see her face. It seems this is another of the killer’s trademarks. As I survey this sorry scene, I marvel at the quirks of fate that have conspired to put me here.

  Even as a kid, Mario Feretti was a crazy son of a bitch, one of those people whose life was a candle burning from both ends. Increasingly, in the last week, I am wishing I had declined his request when he came asking. Now, with the third set of victims not yet cold on the ground, my regret is growing deeper with each passing moment.

  Mario came to me three weeks ago with his tale of woe. At forty-three, he was a candidate for a triple bypass. He was married with three kids in grade school. Two members of the County Board of Supervisors now wanted to ease him from his position as the elected district attorney of Davenport County. These were people for whom opportunity knew no bounds, no sense of propriety. For my part, saying no to Mario was not in the cards. When he came to my office, he was still the kid I remembered from sand-lot ball and summer raft trips on the river. Mario had deep-set wild eyes, two large olives floating on egg whites and a countenance that seemed, even with its impending medical problems, still filled with hell. When he asked me to take a temporary assignment as special county prosecutor—just to fill in, a few months, no more, until he was out of the hospital, back on his feet—I could not say no. I now live with the consequences.

  I turn away from the bodies on the ground.

  Thirty feet away there’s a man, a face like weathered leather, the most prominent features of which are a slender arching nose and forehead furrowed deep as crevasses. He is spry and slight of build. It is this man who has called me here.

  Soaking wet, Claude Dusalt weighs perhaps 140 pounds. Of Basque ancestry, the son of a migrant sheep herder, Claude chased wandering lambs through these hills for his father as a child. For the last thirty years he has trudged the same ground for the county of Davenport, the sheriff’s chief of detectives.