The fourth book in the Amanda Jaffe series, 2009

Mr. Burdett, notify me when you’ve made up your mind,” the Honorable Dagmar Hansen said. “We’ll be in recess until I hear from you.”

Amanda Jaffe rose with the rest of the spectators in the courtroom when Judge Hansen left the bench, but her eyes weren’t on the judge. They were watching the intense conference between her father and his client. Frank Jaffe’s lips were inches from Sally Pope’s ear and he was speaking rapidly. Mrs. Pope’s hand rested on her father’s forearm and her brow knit as she concentrated on what he was saying. Amanda frowned, because she sensed more intimacy than was normal between a lawyer and his client.

Karl Burdett, the Washington County district attorney, looked furious as he stormed through the courtroom doors with his two assistants in tow. Frank Jaffe and Mrs. Pope followed a moment later. Just before the courtroom door closed behind him, Frank gave Amanda a quick thumbs-up. This morning, before leaving for court, Frank had hinted at a major development in the case. Amanda was dying to know what had happened in chambers, but she knew better than to bother her father when he was in the middle of a trial.

Amanda decided to take the stairs to the lobby. The walk would probably be the only exercise she would get today and she felt a twinge of guilt. Amanda had been training furiously this summer while she was home from college. As a junior, she had won the 200 freestyle for Berkeley at the PAC-10 championships and had placed sixth at Nationals. If she shaved a few seconds off her best time, she could place in the top three at Nationals as a senior and have an outside chance of making the 2000 Olympic team. Breakthroughs like that didn’t happen if you missed too many practices, but she couldn’t pass up a chance to watch her father try the nation’s most publicized murder case.

Frank Jaffe was one of the best criminal defense attorneys in Oregon, and Amanda had wanted to follow in his footsteps since she was in elementary school. When other girls were reading fashion magazines, she was reading Perry Mason. While other girls dreamed of going to the prom, she dreamed of trying homicide cases, and there had been no Oregon case in recent history that had been as highly publicized as the trial of Sally Pope for the murder of her husband, United States Congressman Arnold Pope Jr. Adding to the buzz was the aura surrounding Sally Pope’s codefendant, Charlie Marsh, aka the Guru Gabriel Sun, whose rise from petty criminal to national hero and New Age guru had captured the country’s imagination.

Amanda was carrying a copy of The Light Within You, Marsh’s autobiography, in which he bared his soul about the abuse he’d suffered as a child and told how this psychic damage had led him to a life filled with violence. What made the book special was Marsh’s account of his amazing religious conversion, which occurred at the moment he risked his life to save a prison guard from the attack of an insane prisoner.

Amanda looked at the photo of Marsh on the back of the book. It was no mystery why women flocked to the guru’s seminars, where he taught his flock the way to find the inner light that had suffused him during his near-death experience. Marsh had the blond, blue-eyed good looks of a movie idol, but his violent past hinted at a devil within. Sally Pope was one of the most beautiful and self-possessed women Amanda had ever met, but even she had fallen under Marsh’s spell, if you believed the tabloids.

Sally Pope’s case had sex, celebrity, and violent death. Only one thing was missing-Charlie. “WHERE IS THE GURU?” screamed the headlines in the national press on the day the trial opened. The question led off every television news hour. Charlie Marsh had disappeared from the Westmont Country Club the instant Arnold Pope Jr. was shot. Like everyone else in America, Amanda wondered where he was now and what he was doing.

It is coming soon, it is coming soon!” Jean-Claude Baptiste, President for Life of the People’s Republic of Batanga, told Charlie Marsh in the singsong English spoken by Africans who had been raised speaking a tribal dialect. Like most of the other men at the state banquet, Charlie was wearing a tuxedo. President Baptiste, who had never held a rank higher than sergeant, was commander in chief of the Batangan army and dressed in the uniform of a five-star general.

“Watch closely!” the president said with gleeful anticipation as he jabbed a finger at one of the many huge flat-screen televisions that were mounted along the walls of the banquet hall in the executive mansion. The massive chamber was longer than a football field and was modeled after the Las Vegas casino where Baptiste had won his most important fight. Using flat-screen TVs as wall hangings would have been out of place at Versailles, but they looked perfectly natural amid the mirrored walls, bright lights, and velvet paintings that gave the banquet hall the ambience of a sports bar.

“Now, look,” the president said excitedly. On all of the screens mounted along the walls, a younger Baptiste was laughing as he drove Vladimir Topalov, the number two-ranked heavyweight in the world, into a corner of the ring. This Baptiste stood six foot six and weighed two hundred and sixty pounds. His skin was as black as ink and the lights in the arena reflected off his smooth, shaved skull. The present-day version of Jean-Claude looked vaguely like the boxer on the screen, but weighed more than three hundred pounds and gave the impression of being two large men who had been glued together.

“Look Charlie, it comes now,” Baptiste told the blue-eyed man with blond hair and tanned, weathered skin who sat to his left at the end of a teak banquet table that easily sat fifty. Charlie feigned exuberant interest, as did the thirty other guests. Anyone giving the impression that he was not completely enthralled with Baptiste’s fistic skills risked an attitude adjustment session in the basement of the mansion, from which few emerged alive.

On the screen, Baptiste’s opponent staggered back a few steps. Blood from a deep cut over his right eye was blinding him. The future president of Batanga feinted with a jab before landing a crushing hook to his victim’s temple. As Topalov sank to the canvas, both the boxing and presidential Baptistes threw back their heads and laughed uproariously. Though the sound was off, everyone at the banquet knew that Baptiste’s many fans were chanting “ho, ho, ho,” as they always did when “The Happy Warrior” knocked down an opponent. Baptiste had earned his nickname by laughing delightedly whenever he subjected a foe to a particularly awful beating.

Topalov had been hospitalized after the bout. The man who had ruled Batanga before Baptiste had not been so lucky. After his knockout of the Russian, Baptiste returned to Batanga for a victory parade followed by a dinner in his honor given by the previous president of the republic. During dinner, a squad of army officers, bribed with money from Baptiste’s fight purse, stormed the banquet hall and engineered a coup. Rumor had it that Baptiste had made several excellent jokes while eating the heart of the ex-president in a Juju ceremony that was supposed to infuse him with the deceased’s spiritual essence.