A Darker Justice (3 page)

CHAPTER 3

DECKARD COUNTY COURTHOUSE
December 23

“Sorry I took so long,” Mary gasped as she burst into the office. “Martel had to drive me all the way from the country club.” She paused to catch her breath. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry I had to interrupt the wedding, Mary. This is Daniel Safer, FBI.” Deckard County DA Jim Falkner, the lower half of a bright red Santa Claus suit barely visible above his desk, jerked his head toward a man sitting on the other side of his office. “I’ll let Dan here explain.”

Sitting in front of Jim’s desk was a man who looked more like a foreign diplomat than a federal agent. Around thirty-five, he had wiry dark hair that curled around his forehead and tumbled into a close-cropped beard the color of pitch. Though his blue silk tie accented an elegant Italian suit, his eyes were what caught Mary’s attention. Dark and deep-set, they seemed to open like the aperture of a camera, instantly taking in everything from the dark green pumps on her feet to the now slightly ridiculous flowers that she still wore in her hair.

“Hi.” She extended her hand. “I’m Mary Crow.”

“Daniel Safer.” He stood and shook her hand. He was tall, with a commanding demeanor that with his beard reminded her of a Russian Cossack. He would look perfect in heavy black boots and a sable hat.

Mary smiled, but chose the chair farthest away from Agent Safer. The man had a kind of dark gravitational field that made her want to keep her distance.

“You want to fill us in on this now?” Jim Falkner said gruffly.

Without a further word of explanation, Safer clicked open a black leather briefcase. “Anybody here squeamish?” he asked as he withdrew a large manila envelope.

“We’re prosecutors, Safer.” Jim rolled his eyes at Mary. “We got over being squeamish years ago.”

“Good.” Safer opened a smaller red evidence file on the desk, revealing a photograph of a white-haired man. “This is the Honorable Arthur Fitzgerald of New York, late of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. On September 18, Judge Fitzgerald was killed by a single knife wound to the kidney just outside his home in Greenwich Village. He was walking his dog about ten o’clock in the evening. No one saw anyone, the police have no suspects.”

“Okay.” Jim flipped through the file, then passed it to Mary. “What’s next?”

Safer opened a second red file. This time a chubby man lay sprawled out on an Oriental rug. “The Honorable Edward Hebert, late of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. On Halloween night, a cleaning crew found Judge Hebert on the fifth floor of his office building, hanging from a staircase banister. The coroner ruled it a suicide. His widow vehemently denies this, insisting that the judge was a happy, satisfied man with no history of depression and no reason at all for taking his own life.”

Jim grunted, passed the file to Mary, then Safer tossed out a third.

“Let me warn you, this one is not pleasant.”

“I thought we handled the first two pretty well,” snapped Jim, taking the third file from Safer’s hand.

“That’s the Honorable Rosemary Klinefelter, of the Sixth Circuit Court,” explained Safer. “She failed to come home the night before she and her husband were due to fly to the Caribbean for a Thanksgiving vacation. The husband drove down to her office and found her himself. The photo more or less says it all.”

Jim scowled at the picture. The body of a woman sat in a tall leather chair, clad in a judicial gown. On her lap rested her severed head, a baffled expression of astonishment frozen on her lifeless features. “I read about this in the paper.” Jim handed the picture to Mary. “Of course they didn’t say she’d been beheaded. Who do you guys think did it?”

“Someone strong enough to administer a single blow to the back of the neck, with an extremely sharp sword approximately six millimeters thick, perhaps four feet long.”

“But how did he get her to stand still long enough to chop off her head?” asked Jim.

“Poison,” replied Safer. “Judge Klinefelter had been injected with some kind of hemlock derivative, laced with something we haven’t identified yet. Depending on the dosage, hemlock’s either instant death or a slow, fully conscious paralysis that ends in death. Our boy had some fun with Rosemary Klinefelter.”

“Your
boy
?” Mary looked up from the last grisly file, hoping the wedding cake she’d consumed an hour ago would stay in her stomach. Judge Klinefelter’s was the most sickening crime photo she’d ever seen.

“He, almost certainly. The amount of upper body strength needed to sever a head in one blow is enormous—beyond that of most females, even if they were pumped up and on steroids. The good Dr. Guillotin used gravity and a heavy blade in his machine for that very reason.”

“Have you gotten any other physical evidence?” asked Jim.

“Just some partial prints off Klinefelter’s desk and one of these.” Safer tossed a plastic bag on the desk. Mary picked it up. Inside was a sleek ebony feather.

“Crow?” She lifted an eyebrow at Safer.

He shook his head. “A common starling. And the MO doesn’t match anything on anybody’s computer, either here or on Interpol.”

“How do you like that,” Jim muttered. “All those wonderful computers and they still can’t tell you a damn thing.” He sat back in his chair, studying Safer through narrow eyes. “Okay. Now tell me what all of this has to do with Deckard County, Georgia.”

Safer fumbled in his briefcase again, then pulled out a single sheet of yellow paper. “I work in the Cincinnati office, so the Klinefelter case was assigned to me. I happened to be in New York at the time of Judge Fitzgerald’s murder, so I remembered that case and did some digging on my own. I came up with this.”

Safer put the paper down on the desk between Jim and Mary. “Statistically, the federal court system loses about 2.3 judges a year to death. Since most federal judges are white males over forty, most succumb to heart attacks. In each of the past eleven months, a federal judge has died unexpectedly. Five have had fatal accidents, two have had heart attacks. One’s an apparent suicide. Three have been murdered quite obviously.”

“Mmmm.” Jim ran his finger down the list. “District Judge Bryan Woody thrown from his horse in Casper, Wyoming. District Judge Kendrick Eaton lost in a boating accident off the coast of California.” He frowned over his glasses at Safer. “Have you guys gone back and done toxin screens on these victims?”

“We’re in the process of doing that. Unfortunately, three were cremated and two drowning victims have not been recovered.”

Jim grunted. “I still don’t see what this has to do with us. We’re in the Eleventh District. According to your chart, our judge died in a wreck in Decatur, Alabama, back in March.”

“I don’t think it has anything to do with the Eleventh District, Jim,” said Mary. She looked at the agent. “It’s about the Fourth District, isn’t it?”

Safer nodded.

“You’re thinking the next one could be Irene Hannah, aren’t you?”

“You got it,” he replied.

“Wait a minute.” Jim sat up in his chair. “Who the hell’s Irene Hannah?”

“Appellate judge, Fourth Circuit, Richmond,” Mary explained. “I clerked for her in law school, when she sat on the Fourth District bench in Asheville. She’s an old family friend.” Mary thought how much more than an old friend Irene Hannah was. She had known her ever since she was eleven years old. It had been Irene who’d come roaring up in her brown Mercedes the afternoon her mother was murdered. She’d wrapped a blanket around Mary’s trembling shoulders and driven her back to Upsy Daisy farm, holding her tight in her arms while Mary had wept that long, hellish night away.

Safer said, “If this rather loose pattern holds, some judge in the Fourth District should be killed sometime within the next eight days.”

“And that judge will be injected with poison and have her head cut off?” Mary asked, her eyes on Safer’s.

He nodded. “Possibly. Or her heart could simply stop, or she could have an automobile accident or someone could fake her suicide. All are lousy ways to die.”

“But why?” asked Mary.

Safer shrugged. “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. The who and the why. Whether it’s just one psycho birdwatcher with a grudge, or a conspiracy of freaks who hate federal judges. Obviously, we need to keep our judiciary safe until we can nail down a suspect.”

“So why don’t you just put guards on them?” Jim demanded. “Jesus, you guys are the FBI!”

“We have, Mr. Falkner,” Safer replied, his tone sharpening for the first time. “We’ve alerted every federal judge in the country and put round-the-clock bodyguards on every Fourth District judge. All except Judge Hannah are extremely well taken care of.”

“Then why the hell don’t you guard her?” Jim groused.

Safer gave a bitter smile. “Because Judge Hannah refuses federal protection. She says that for a federal judge to require bodyguarding smacks of a regime rather than a republic, and she won’t have any part of it.”

Mary fought an urge to leap from her chair and have Martel speed her immediately to Hartsville, North Carolina, lights and sirens blaring. In the years since that long-ago April afternoon, Irene had stepped in and filled a void in Mary’s life that no one else could fill. Irene knew her better than her grandmother Bennefield, in some ways better than even Alex McCrimmon. Though they now lived miles apart, Mary could not conceive of her life without Irene Hannah in it.

Jim was frowning. “You still haven’t told me how you want my prosecutor to help you out, Agent Safer.”

“If we can keep everything quiet for the next week, we’ll have broken the pattern. We’d like Ms. Crow to go to Irene Hannah in person, and talk her into accepting FBI protection.” Safer turned to Mary. “Since you’re a friend of hers and an assistant DA, we thought you might have better luck convincing the judge that she could be in serious danger.”

“What makes you think she’ll listen to me?”

“She may not. She probably won’t. All we can do is take you up there and hope you can talk her into it.”

“Here.” Jim turned the phone on his desk around. “Call her, on my dime. Save yourself a lot of time and gas.”

Safer shook his head. “Judge Hannah disconnected her phone last week. At the moment she’s incommunicado with the outside world.”

“So where does she live?” asked Jim. “Timbuktu?”

Five miles away from Jonathan, Mary thought, her heart both leaping and aching at the same time. “She’s got a thirty-acre farm near Hartsville. She raises Appalachian Single Foot horses.”

Jim blinked. “The woman raises horses that only have one foot?”

“It’s a special breed of mountain horse,” Safer explained. “They have the normal number of feet.” He turned to Mary. “Would you be willing to help us out?”

Mary grabbed her purse. “If I leave now I can be up there by midnight.”

“Whoa,” protested Jim. “Mary, you could be stepping into a real situation up there.”

“My team has already formed a perimeter around Judge Hannah’s farm. We’ll keep Ms. Crow safe the entire time she’s there.” Safer looked at Mary. “Have you ever fired a gun?”

“I shoot a 9mm Beretta twice a week,” she replied promptly. “I’m no sharpshooter, but I do okay.”

“Then it might not be a bad idea if you brought the Beretta with you.”

“Just a minute!” cried Jim. He turned to her, his thick gray brows drawn with concern. “Look, Mary, I know how loyal you are to your old friends, but you’ve got no business in the middle of a federal operation like this.”

Mary thought of her mother’s death years ago, and her grandmother Bennefield’s death in September. Jonathan had left her, and as of two hours ago, Alex was a married woman. She looked at her boss with somber eyes.

“Jim, Irene Hannah is the last shred of a family I’ve got left,” she answered softly. “I would do anything to keep her alive.”

Jim shook his head, knowing further protest would be a waste of breath. He knew all too well what Mary Crow was like when she dug her heels in. However much he might say, she would go off and try to talk this judge into being guarded by these idiots, everyone else be damned. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, then he stabbed his finger at Daniel Safer.

“I can remember when the FBI would have been embarrassed to ask a female civilian to help with an investigation. . . .”

“This wasn’t my idea, Mr. Falkner,” Safer interrupted. “I have orders to follow, just like Ms. Crow.”

“I don’t give a damn what you’ve got,” Jim thundered. “If this girl comes back here with as much as a broken fingernail, I’ll personally hack off one of your most treasured parts. And I won’t do it in a single blow, either! I don’t care if you’re J. Edgar Hoover reincarnated.”

“That won’t be a problem, Mr. Falkner.” Safer snapped his briefcase shut, then turned his dark eyes on Mary. “Meet me here at the courthouse at seven tomorrow morning. Bring your weapon, Ms. Crow, and be ready to do some fast talking in North Carolina.”

CHAPTER 4

Two hundred miles north of Atlanta, two boys were exploring the third floor of Camp Unakawaya’s castle. The first two floors of the old place held little interest for these boys; they attended home school on the first floor and slept in a drafty dormitory on the second. But the third floor was something else. Long regarded as haunted, the third floor was an old, shadowy warren of hospital rooms that still held medical equipment from 1919. It was said that during thunderstorms you could still hear the screams of the mutilated ghost-soldiers as they revisited the trenches in their nightmares. It was, of course, here that the boys explored.

“Look!” Willett Pierson thrust one pudgy hand deep into an old chifforobe. “There’s some cool stuff back here!”

Tommy Cabe watched as Willett pulled out a small, suede-bound notebook and something that looked like a weird set of false teeth. Grinning, Willett handed the book to Cabe and immediately stuck the teeth in his mouth.

“Cheeldren
of ze
night,”
Willett moaned, imitating Bela Lugosi. “I
vant
to suck your
blood
!” Holding his hands out like claws, he began to creep toward Tommy. At just an inch over five feet, with hair the color of a carrot, Willett Pierson looked more like a North Pole elf than a Transylvanian vampire. Tommy Cabe laughed.

“Man, can you believe somebody actually wore these?” Willett spat the teeth from his mouth. They were the top front teeth only, constructed long ago, with thin, painful-looking wires to hold them in the wearer’s mouth.

“I guess.” Tommy Cabe examined the book Willett had handed him, squinting at the spidery old-fashioned script. “Somebody wrote this diary. Captain Nigel Dempsey of the Eleventh Fusiliers.”

“I bet he was one of the patients here,” cried Willett. “This must be all his old shit. I told you there’s tons of cool stuff in here!”

“Probably.” Tommy leaned over to peer into the old chifforobe. On the top shelf lay a round hat box; next to that an old photograph of a soldier in puttees with a young woman wearing a long dress. He’d just started to reach for the photograph when a bell rang. Both he and Willett jumped as if they’d been stuck with pins.

“Awww, fuck!” Willett looked at Tommy. “Anthropology class.”

“We can come back later.” Tommy stashed the diary back in the chifforobe and gathered his books from the cot. “Let’s go. I still don’t have any demerits this week.”

Willett hid the teeth behind the diary and closed the chifforobe. “Man, are you still having your phone-call fantasy?”

“David Forrester swore you get one phone call for every week you have no demerits. He’s my senior proctor.”

“He
was
your senior proctor,” Willett reminded him. “Nobody’s seen Forrester’s sorry ass in over a month.”

“Maybe he ran away,” Tommy suggested, always buoyed by the idea that somebody might have said to hell with Camp Unakawaya and taken off for parts unknown.

“You can’t get away from here, man. Wurth probably sent him on some kind of secret mission and got him killed.”

Tommy shook his head. “You’re crazy, Willett. Wurth can barely stand to put Forrester on guard detail, much less send him on a secret mission.”

“Maybe. But I still think when pigs have wings is when they’ll let
you
make a phone call.” Willett scooped up his books from the cot and pulled a Chicago Bulls baseball cap down backward on his head.

Tommy’s eyes grew large. “Are you gonna wear that cap?” Two days ago Sergeant Wurth told Willett that if he ever caught him wearing any more nigger sports gear he’d put him in Attitude Realignment for six months.

“I am.” Willett grinned at him, cocky as ever. “The operative word is ‘catch,’ Tommy-boy. Wurth ain’t gonna catch me. Wurth couldn’t catch cold, even if he tried.”

“Come on, Willett. Let’s just get down to class so I can finish this week without any demerits.”

“Suit yourself, sucker,” Willett shot back. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

They closed the door to the old bedroom and raced down the hall. Though nobody ever came up to the third floor, they still made their way cautiously to the stairs. Spies lurked everywhere in this old castle, and you never knew when they might be watching.

The staircase, however, was safe. With their legs pumping, they flew down the flights like firemen on their way to a three-alarm blaze. As Cabe watched Willett’s Chicago Bulls cap bounce down the stairs ahead of him, he kept thinking that in just eighteen more demerit-free hours he would get his phone call. How wonderful it would be to hear his grandfather’s voice. He could finally tell him where he was, let him know at least he was still alive.

With a final leap he reached the first floor and followed Willett down the hall. He wished he’d run this fast into the woods behind the shopping center that night when his mom didn’t show up. He’d told the sheriff that she’d probably just gotten drunk somewhere and passed out. It was okay, he assured the cop. He was used to it, no big deal. But the sheriff had slapped him in the back of that cruiser, and called some stupid social worker, and before Tommy knew it he was standing in front of Sergeant Wurth at this shithole they called Camp Unakawaya.
Pisgah County wants me to make a man out of you, boy,
Sergeant Wurth had said, grinning at him and standing so close that Tommy could count the hairs sprouting from his wide nostrils.
Someday you’ll make your mother sorry she was such a sot.
But Tommy didn’t want to make his mother feel that way, and he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to become the kind of man Wurth had in mind. Neither did Willett Pierson. Thank God they’d become friends. Tommy didn’t like to consider what Camp Unakawaya would be like without Willett.

“Take your cap off, Willett,” Cabe whispered as they neared their classroom. “They’ll bust both our asses.”

With a quick swoop of his hand, Willett tore the Bulls cap from his head and stuffed it under his T-shirt. Cabe skidded up behind him as he opened the classroom door. Although the other boys had taken their seats, Sergeant Wurth was not yet standing behind the podium. Keeping their eyes on the floor, Tommy and Willett scurried to their respective desks, fourth from the front in the second and third rows, plopping into their chairs a nanosecond before the bell sounded for the second time.
Just in time,
Tommy thought, his forehead damp with sweat.
Still no demerits for me.

“You were almost late, C-C-Cabe!” Wayne Tallent, one of Wurth’s Troopers, taunted from the seat behind him. Tommy knew that since the other three old faculty geezers had gone home for Christmas, Tallent would regard him as fair game until Wurth arrived to teach the class. He hunched his shoulders forward, hoping that Wurth would come before Tallent had time to get started.

“What have you and your girlfriend Wilma been d-d-doing?” Tallent gave Tommy’s ear a hard twist. “Spanking your little monkeys? Or popping those big old pimples on your chin?”

Tommy Cabe stared at the empty podium, his tweaked ear burning, while Tallent and his buddy Grice laughed. Willett turned around and poked up his middle finger.

Grice reached over from the fourth aisle and thumped Willett viciously between his shoulder blades. “Put that finger down, Pierson,” he growled. “Somebody’s gonna think it’s your dick.”

“Hey, Cabe.” Tallent thrust his long, black-booted feet around Tommy’s desk. “Upchurch told me you was smart. Is that true?”

Searching for the right response, Cabe stared at the flag that was draped above the blackboard. It looked like a regular American flag, except in place of the stars was an eagle lifting a cross in its talons. He always hoped that bird would give him the answers to Tallent’s questions, but all it seemed to do was make his stutter ten times worse. He was just beginning to formulate a reply when Tallent struck him between his shoulders, whooshing the air from his lungs with a loud slap.

“I asked if you was smart, boy. You answer me!”

Slowly Tommy Cabe turned sideways. He sighed, resigned to the inevitable wrongness of his reply. Blinking through thick glasses that had already been broken and mended twice, he was about to choke out an answer when Willett piped up.

“Cabe’s not nearly as smart as I am, Tallent. What do you want to know? What two plus two makes? Or maybe we should take it slow for you, and start out with one plus one.”

Instantly Grice’s fist shot out, slamming into Willett’s ear. “You shut up, you little ridge runner! Tallent was asking Cabe a question.”

“Hey, C-C-Cabe, since this is anthropology, answer me this. Who do you figure would be hardest to kill—a nigger, a woman, or a Jew?”

With his back still burning, Cabe stared at the floor, trying to figure out which answer would earn him the least grief. Finally he gave up, realizing there was no best answer; Tallent would beat him whatever he said. Reluctantly he raised his eyes and spoke. “A J-Jew, I think. They always put up a good fight.”

Tallent snorted. “Those little long-nosed nigger lovers? The ones who faked the Holocaust?”

“They d-d-didn’t fake it, Tallent,” Cabe said wearily, knowing he would regret it.

“Sure they did!” Tallent said, indignant. “They filmed the whole thing in Hollywood, at MGM. They got people from TB hospitals to play the parts!”

Willett started to laugh. “God, Tallent, you’d have to double your IQ to reach moron. In 1939 the Germans had a standing army of a hundred and six combat divisions. The Jews didn’t even have the right to vote.”

“Bullshit!” screeched Tallent, his face growing red. “That’s not what it says in our history book.”

“Tallent, our history book says the moon landing took place in Winslow, Arizona, and Jimmy Carter’s real mother was black.” Willett cackled. “Cabe’s right. You go one-on-one with a Jew, he’d give you a hell of a fight.”

“He wouldn’t give me a hell of a fight,” muttered Tallent.

Willett leaned across the aisle. “Tallent, my old stove-up grandma’d give
you
a hell of a fight.”

“Fuck you, you little nigger-lover!” Tallent lunged forward, ready to pummel Willett. Cabe reached out to grab him; just then the door opened. All twenty boys in the room shot to their feet and snapped to attention as Frank Upchurch, a senior Trooper from Texas, strode in. He wore Wurth’s full uniform, khaki trousers stuffed into black combat boots and a khaki blouse with red stripes on the sleeves. A red beret peeked from under his arm.

Upchurch gave the class a brisk salute as he walked over to the podium. As he watched the students sit back down, his gaze skittered along each row of upturned faces, then his badly hairlipped mouth spasmed in a grin.

“Sergeant Wurth just called and said he wouldn’t be here tonight,” Upchurch reported. “His orders are for everyone to get to the gym and load up the FaithAmerica Christmas boxes. We’ll start delivering them at oh eight hundred tomorrow morning.”

“So who’s in charge, Up-chuck?” called Tallent. “You?”

“That’s right, Tallent, me. You got a problem with it?” Upchurch’s eyes narrowed into beads of an indeterminate color.

“Naw, Up-chuck,” Tallent snickered. “I guess even a monkey can get a truck loaded.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go.” Upchurch scowled at the group, waiting to see if they would accept his authority. For a moment nobody moved; then, slowly, the Troopers began to rise from their seats. Upchurch looked relieved.

“I’m not forgetting about you, Wilma,” snarled Tallent, wrenching Willett’s ear brutally as he walked by. “Watch your back, boy. I’ll see
you
later tonight.”

Tommy Cabe kept his eyes lowered as Tallent and Grice strode past him. After they left the room, Willett again lifted his middle finger at them.

“They’re going to get you sent to AR,” said Cabe.

“They’re going to try,” Willett replied.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.” Willett tugged his cap from under his T-shirt and pulled it back on his head. “I’ll come up with something, though. AR is the last place I’m gonna spend Christmas.”

*  *  *

A few miles away from Tommy Cabe and Willett Pierson, in an old barn built before the doughboys sailed to France, a chestnut mare stood in a foaling stall. Although her belly was swollen and her front legs splayed, she ate her hay placidly, returning the gaze of her owner with kind brown eyes.

“Lady Jane ain’t ready yet, darlin’.”

“Are you sure? After supper she looked like she was going to go at any minute.”

Hugh Kavanagh leaned over the stall and rubbed the horse’s nose. He’d seen a hundred mares foal during his lifetime, first in County Wexford, Ireland, then in North Carolina, and not one birth had been exactly like another. Some mares went about their task serenely, as if it were just another hedge to jump, while others grew peevish weeks beforehand, whisking their tails around and snapping at their handlers. He smiled over at his silver-haired neighbor and shook his head. “She ain’t doing it tonight. I’d say Christmas Day, at the earliest.”

Irene Hannah looked at the horse and frowned. “Darn. I was so sure it would be this week, I canceled my dental appointment.”

Hugh chuckled. “Next time, get your choppers fixed. It’s great good luck to be born on Christmas Day, anyway. Means whatever it is will be fey.” He put an arm around Irene’s shoulders. “Have you decided on a name for this one?”

“Cushla McCree, if it’s a filly.”

“Cushla McCree?” He frowned. “For a horse?”

Nodding, Irene laughed at Hugh’s pronunciation of “horse,” which sounded to her American ears like “harse.”

“What if she throws a colt?” Hugh asked.

“Aloysius. Or Patrick.”

“As in Ireland’s famous saint?”

“Yep. Then he can drive all the snakes out of the upper pasture.”

Hugh Kavanagh shook his head. “Irene, you’re the only woman I know who can see an unborn colt clearin’ snakes from a pasture.”

“I’ve spent forty years in the courtroom,” Irene Hannah said. “I can imagine most anything.” She put an arm around Hugh’s waist. “Come on inside. I’ll fix us a drink and something to eat. I owe you one for dragging you out here on a false alarm.”

“Let me freshen Lady Jane’s straw a bit, then,” Hugh replied, wiping his hands on a towel. “She’ll sleep better on something soft.”