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maybe it was stupid to wake up ten times a night imagining somebody was creeping around in her bedroom. Maybe it was neurotic to mistrust every guy she passed on the sidewalk or saw standing in a checkout line or heard on the other end of the telephone. Maybe she was paranoid. Probably she was. Nothing stupid about it, though. Paranoia kept you alive.
    Bodyguarding Sharon Stone was the last thing she needed.
    What she needed was witness protection, except they didn’t do that for undercover cops after they testified at the trials of men who kidnapped runaway children in American cities and sold them to rich Middle Eastern pedophiles.
    What they did for undercover cops after they testified was take them off the street and assign them to a desk.
    Jessie had lasted two months on the desk in Baltimore. She probably could’ve tolerated the dreary walls and the mindless paperwork and the lousy coffee and the sexist jokes for several more months. She was adaptable and patient. She had a high tolerance for boredom.
    What she couldn’t tolerate was the powerful apprehension that she was being watched, followed, stalked, and that sooner or later, at his whim, Howie Cohen would reach out through his prison bars to wreak his revenge.
    When she’d stepped down from the witness stand and glanced at Cohen, sitting there beside his lawyers, a paunchy sixty-year-old guy with a bald head and big ears and horn-rimmed glasses, he’d smiled at her, pressed his two fingers to his lips, then wiggled them at her.
    Kissing her off. Telling her she was dead.
    That awful smile still haunted her dreams.
    So she quit the cops, packed her stuff, which wasn’t much, into her Civic, and headed west. She left no forwarding address. Couldn’t, since she didn’t know where she was going.
    She ended up in San Francisco and presented herself to Del Robbins, the president of Bay Security and Investigations in Oakland. Del talked with her for about ten minutes, made one phone call, and hired her on the spot.
    Perfect, Jessie had thought at the time. For an ex-cop there was no more anonymous, behind-the-scenes job than private investigating. The whole job was about not being noticed or recognized.
    Unless you save a public figure from being assassinated in front of a mob of people and reporters, that is. And unless some lucky cameraman is there to shoot you kneeling beside the creep with one hand squeezing his balls and the other arm raised and a look of triumph on your face, and the photo is so good that it gets reprinted in newspapers across the country and makes the rounds on the Internet.
    So now Jessie Church was looking over her shoulder again. Some Cohen friend or relative or business associate or customer was bound to spot that newspaper photo and recognize her, phony name notwithstanding. Sooner or later, inevitably, Howie Cohen would send somebody to track her down and kill her.
    So far, it hadn’t happened. Not yet. Nobody could tail Jessie Church without her knowing it.
    But it would happen soon.
    She guessed it was about time to think about loading up her Civic again. Time to change her name again, change her habits, change her look. Get a job in an office somewhere. Couldn’t be worse than sitting in a car waiting for Anthony Moreno to make a mistake.

    JUDGE THOMAS LARRIGAN hung up his robe, slumped into his desk chair, and sighed. Another long, tense day on the bench. He rubbed his good eye, stretched his arms, then quickly jotted some notes on a yellow legal pad. He had to hand down an admissibility ruling when court convened the next morning. It raised a couple of tricky questions, and Larrigan didn’t want to blow it. Not now. Not with a Supreme Court nomination on the horizon. It wouldn’t look good if an appeal was granted because Judge Larrigan had misapplied the law.
    But if he erred, he knew enough to err on the side of the victim; in this case, a two-year-old girl whose skull had been fractured