Nothing Lasts Forever

Prologue

San Francisco

Spring 1995

District Attorney Carl Andrew was in a fury.

"What the hell is going on here?" he demanded.

"We have three doctors living together and working at the same hospital. One of them almost gets an entire hopital closed down, the second one kills a patient for a million dollars, and the third one is murdered!"

Andrew stopped to take a deep breath, "And they're all women! Three g*#$%^& women doctors! The media is treating them like celebrities. I can't pick a newspaper without seeing their pictures. Hollywood is going to make a movie about them, and they'll turn the bitches into some kinda heroines!" He slammed a fist down against the photograph of a woman on the cover of Time magazine. The caption read: "Dr. Paige Taylor -- Angel of Mercy or the Devil's desciple?"

"Dr. Paige Taylor," the district attorney's voice was filled with disgust. He turned to Gus Venable, his chief prosecuting attorney. "I'm handing this trial over to you, Gus. I want a conviction. Murder one. The gas chamber."

"Don't worry," Gus said quietly, "I'll see to it."

Sitting in the courtroom watching Dr. Paige, Gus thought: She's jury-proof. Then he smiled to himself. No one is jury-proof. She was tall and slender, with eyes that were a startling dark brown in her pale face. A disinterested observer would have dismissed her as an attractive woman. A more observant one would noticed something else -- that all the different phases of her life coexisted in her, there was the happy excitement of the chhild, superimposed onto the shy uncertainty of the adolescent and the wisdom and the pain of the woman. There was a look of innocence about her. She's the kind of girl, Gus venable thought cynically, a man would be proud to take home to his mother. If his mother had a taste for cold-blooded killers.

There was an almost eerie sense of remoteness in her eyes, a look that said that Dr. paige Taylor had retreeted deep inside herself tto a different place, a different time, far from the cold, sterile courtroom where she was trapped.

The trial was taking place in the venerable old San Francisco Hall of Justice on Bryant Street. The building, which housed the Superior Court and County Jail, was a forbidding-looking edifice. Visitors arriving at the courthouse were funneled through electronic security checkpoints. Upstairs, on the third floor, was the Superior Court. In Courtroom 121, where murder trials were held ..... two tables separated by an aisle, one for prosecuting attorney, the other for the defense attorney.

the courtroom was packed with reporters and type of spectators attracted to fatal highway accidents and murder trials.

Gus Venable , the prosecuting attorney, was a show himself. he was a burly man, with a mane of gray hair, a goatee and the courtly mannerof a Southern plantation owner. He had never been to the South. He had an air of vague bewilderment and the brain of a computer. His trademark, an old fashioned stiff-collar shirt.

Alan Penn, Paige Taylor's attorney. Was Venable's opposite, a compact, energetic shark, who had a built reputation for racking up acquittals for his clients.

The two men had faced each other before and their relationship was one of grudging respect and total mistrust. In fact, Alan Penn had come to see him the week before the trial was to begin.

"I came here to do you a favor, Gus."

Beware of defense attoneys bearing gifts. "What did you have in mind, Alan?"

"Now understand--I haven't discussed this with my client yet, but suppose--just suppose--I could persuade her to plead guilty to a reduced charge and seva the State the cost of a trial?"