A Darker Justice (5 page)

CHAPTER 6

“Good morning and Merry Christmas, Atlanta! We’re gonna start off this hour with a real blast from the past, Roy Orbison and ‘Sweet Dream Baby’!”

Mary smiled at the disk jockey’s choice of tunes. According to her mother, “Dream Baby” was the first song her father ever sang to her. “He just got out his guitar,” Martha had told her daughter one evening long ago. “And suddenly Roy was right there in the store. Singing ‘Dream Baby,’ just to me.”

“Could he really play the guitar?” Mary had asked, impressed that anyone related to her could play anything beyond the radio.

“Oh, yes.” Martha smiled. “He was wonderful. He could play the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix. Everybody.”

Mary listened until Roy finished, then she switched off the radio. On workdays, the oldies station helped her wake up as she inched along in her tedious, bumper-to-bumper commute. But today, this early on Christmas Eve, the streets were empty. Downtown Atlanta looked like a ghost town.

Impatiently, she drummed her fingers on the steering wheel as two joggers wearing red elf hats loped across the street in front of her.
Seven days.
Surely she could talk Irene into being guarded by the FBI for that long.
Irene.
Where would she be without Irene, the infinitely kind, wise woman who’d taken Mary home with her the afternoon they’d loaded her mother up in the back of an ambulance, a black body bag zipped over her head. She’d taken her to Upsy Daisy and fed her soup with crusty bread. Then Irene had made a pallet on the leather couch in front of the big kitchen fireplace and held her while she’d cried from a well of tears that seemingly had no end. Two years later, when every picture Mary had painted in her art classes gave her nightmares, Irene had driven down to Emory and taken her to lunch, suggesting that perhaps art was not the course of study she should follow.
Why not try the law?
she’d said that day, gently squeezing Mary’s arm.
Let the seeking of justice retool the workings of your heart.

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” Mary murmured, trying to shake away the image of Rosemary Klinefelter holding her own head.

She turned her car into the courthouse parking lot, coming to a stop in space number twenty-nine. The lot was empty, except for a black Dodge pickup with a camper top, around which paced Agent Daniel Safer. Though he’d changed from his sleek Italian suit into worn jeans and a red flannel shirt, she could tell by the urgency of his stride that Safer was a city boy; concrete probably did feel better under his feet. She waved at him as she parked her car. He glared back.

“Well, screw you,” Mary said as she shoved her car into park. Angrily she grabbed her backpack and walked toward the truck. If this Agent Safer was going to pout about being saddled with a “female civilian” all the way to Hartsville, North Carolina, she would just drive up there by herself.

“Morning,” she called, her footsteps brisk on the damp pavement.

“Morning.” Safer took her measure with his dark eyes, which were just as intense as they had been yesterday. “Glad to see you’re on time.”

“Actually, I’m fifteen minutes early.” Mary dropped her backpack an inch away from Safer’s toe.

He glanced at his watch. “So you are.” He looked at her single small bag. “What are you taking with you?”

“A sketch pad. A paperback. A Christmas present for Irene.”

“Didn’t forget your gun, did you?”

Glaring at him, Mary allowed her down jacket to flop open. His eyes made a brief appraisal of her breasts before they noted the Beretta nestled in her shoulder holster. “Good,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

He opened the back of the truck. Mary shoved her pack in beside Safer’s black briefcase, a battered camera bag, and two impressive-looking tripods.

“You a photographer?” She couldn’t imagine Safer needing a camera to snap anything. His eyes alone seemed to etch everything permanently on his brain.

“No.” He moved the tripods to one side. “These make a good cover up there.”

“So what’s the plan?” she asked, stepping back as he slammed the tailgate shut.

“I’ll drive you to Judge Hannah’s farm. If you can talk her into accepting our protection, I’ll work as a liaison between her and the rest of the team.”

“And if I can’t talk her into it?”

“Then we’ll do the best we can by ourselves. Either way, we’ll fly you back here.” He gave her a tight smile. “You’ll be home in time for Christmas.”

Mary buckled herself into the front seat. Safer kept a cell phone on the console, nestled beside a paperback
Guide to the Eastern Night Sky.
A glow-in-the-dark bookmark in the shape of an alien protruded from the pages of the book. Mary repressed a groan. Surely this guy wasn’t of the Mulder and Scully persuasion.

“You into spacemen?” Mary gave Safer a dubious eye as he jammed his key into the ignition.

“No.” He looked at her challengingly, not embarrassed to be caught with a luminous alien bookmark. “I like astronomy. My daughter gave me that bookmark.”

“Oh.” For some reason, Mary could peg Safer as an obsessed astronomer far more readily than a contented family man. “You have children?”

“Just one daughter.” He adjusted the rearview mirror. “Leah. She’s four. She lives with her mother in Montreal.”

“That’s pretty far away.”

“Yep.” He put the truck into gear. “My ex-wife made sure of that.”

Mary heard the acid in Safer’s voice. The rest of the story was so common, she knew it without asking—a woman marries a cop, then she grows tired of the hours and the brutality and the alcoholism or any of the other thousand things that eat cops alive. So she leaves, and puts as much distance between them as she can. It was sad, but it was a fact of life, and everybody who went into law enforcement ought to be forewarned
—abandon normalcy, all ye who enter here.
Quickly she changed the subject.

“Do you know the way to Hartsville?”

“Like the back of my hand,” Safer replied, his dark brows drawing together so sternly that he reminded her of a Byzantine icon she’d seen once at the High Museum. “I’ve put in some hours up here before.”

“Work the Eric Rudolph case?” The man who’d five years ago allegedly bombed a gay nightclub in Atlanta and a Planned Parenthood clinic in Birmingham had been spotted in the southern Appalachians. Battalions of federal agents had given furious chase, but ultimately came up empty-handed and humiliated.

Safer nodded.

“Too bad you couldn’t catch him. He would have landed on my docket.”

Safer shrugged as they pulled out of the parking lot. “A couple of times we were five minutes behind him. Then the mountains just swallowed him up.”

She thought of her own mother’s murder, years before. That killer had vanished into the mountains just like Rudolph. “Yeah,” she agreed quietly. “The mountains can do that.”

They drove north in silence. Even though traffic was light, Safer tailgated the cars ahead of them as if they were intentionally impeding his progress to North Carolina. Mary pulled her seat belt tighter, grateful that they weren’t driving in the everyday lethal, take-no-prisoners Atlanta traffic.

Before they crossed into North Carolina, they stopped at a service station to get the less expensive Georgia gas. As Safer filled up his tank, Mary went into the little convenience store and bought black coffee and two peach fried pies, hopeful that sugar and caffeine might turn him into a less dour traveling companion.

“Here.” She gave him a bright smile as she set the coffee and pastries on the hood of the truck. “Have some Appalachian cop food.”

He looked at her strangely, as if nobody had ever given him anything before. Opening one end of the fried pie wrapper, he scrutinized the small, oblong tart, then folded the wrapper back up and returned the pie to Mary. “Thanks. But I don’t normally eat dessert for breakfast.”

“Neither do I,” replied Mary. “But neither do I normally pack my gun to spend Christmas Eve twisting an old friend’s arm into being guarded by the FBI.”

Safer just shrugged, so she ate both fried pies while he paid for the gas. By the time he’d climbed back in the truck, she’d pulled out the sketch pad she’d packed and was drawing large circles with a pastel pencil.

“You an artist?” Safer glanced at her lap.

“I’m a hobbyist,” Mary replied. “My mother was an artist.”

“I understand she was quite gifted.”

Mary looked over at him. “How would you know?”

Amazingly, he blushed. Mary watched as his cheeks blossomed like crabapples above his dark beard. “They tell us these things when we enlist civilian aid,” he finally stammered.

“You’ve read my jacket,” Mary snapped, suddenly sorry that she’d bought him anything to eat. “What else do you know about me, Agent Safer?”

His look darkened. “That you’re half Cherokee. That you grew up here, in the Nantahala. That your artist mother was murdered when you were eighteen,” he said. “Then you went south, where your paternal grandmother enrolled you in Emory University. There you studied law and became a crackerjack DA. That you’re excellent in the woods and you’re like a daughter to Irene Hannah.”

Mary stared at him, realizing that he must also have read that the last time she was up here she succeeded in killing one man and tried very hard to kill another.
He knows all of that,
she thought, her anger shrinking into a cold little knot of discomfort.

“You got it.” At least he had the decency not to mention everything. “I’m a real whizbang in the forest.”

“That’s what I understand,” Safer said, for once his voice soft with apology. “And that’s why I’m glad you’re here.”

She turned back to her drawing. They rode in silence as the road curved up into foothills that were warm brown in the winter.

“So what about you?” She looked at him.

“What about me?”

“What’s your story? You know an awful lot about me. Seems hardly fair for me to be riding up here with a total stranger. How long have you been with the Bureau?”

“Not that long, actually. Seven years ago I was teaching Russian at the University of Memphis.” Safer smiled as if recalling a pleasant vacation.

“You speak Russian?”

He nodded. “I’m a Russian Jew. My great-grandfather emigrated from Kiev just after the First World War.”

Mary blinked. No wonder the guy had the air of a Cossack. “Okay,” she said. “So why did the Bureau drag you out of your classroom and give you a gun?”

“Actually, they dragged me out to transcribe some wiretaps. The Russian Mafia was infiltrating businesses along the Mississippi River, and using a dialect from the Ukraine.”

“The Russian Mafia?” Mary laughed, picturing Josef Stalin knocking back vodka on the
Robert E. Lee.

“They are dangerous men,” Safer replied without smiling. He spat out some word in Russian. “Beasts, all of them.”

“So did you help the FBI crack the case?”

“I did. And by the time we’d nailed them, I was hooked. Gave the university my resignation and applied to the Bureau.”

“Dr. Safer became Agent Safer. What did your family think?”

“They thought and still think I’m crazy.” He chuckled. “How about you? What does your family think of your being a prosecutor?”

She remembered her grandmother’s funeral, three months ago. “Actually, I don’t have enough family left to think much of anything.”

They rode on, passing through green pastureland grown gold, letting the Dodge’s heater warm the sudden coldness that filled the truck. After a time, Safer spoke again.

“So did you give any thought to these judges last night?”

Mary tried to sort through her jumbled memories of the day before. Everything seemed chaotic—first she’d been dancing to the Strutters, then she’d raced downtown in a police car, then she’d seen the picture of that poor woman with no head. When she’d finally gotten home, she’d pulled off her silky green gown and fixed her special martini—three fingers of frozen Sapphire gin, not shaken, not stirred, not altered at all except for being sloshed in a glass. After that she remembered packing, then dozing, then waking from a terrifying dream where Irene Hannah was being loaded into a cattle truck and driven away.

“Some,” she lied, quickly starting her prosecutorial wheels turning. “I wondered if there was any commonality between the victims.”

Safer raised one eyebrow. “Opinion-wise, they were all middle-of-the-road jurists. Five had been appointed by Democratic presidents, six by Republicans. Most had supported fourth amendment rights and ruled against hate crimes. Klinefelter had just signed an opinion involving interstate banking.”

“That’s not exactly a hot-button issue.” Mary frowned. “How about personal? Anybody divorced? Gay? Minority?”

“The Alabama judge was African-American. The guy in Wyoming was Latino. The rest were white. All were married to people of the opposite sex. Six were Protestant, two were Roman Catholic, the other three had no religious affiliation.”

“No religious axe-grinding there,” Mary said.

“How about Irene Hannah?” asked Safer.

“She’s a white Democrat, sixty-two, and widowed,” replied Mary. “I don’t know her judicial record chapter and verse, but politically she’s pro-choice, anti–hate crime, and thinks DUI ought to be a capital offense.”

“I read that she spent a lot of time in Japan,” said Safer.

Mary nodded. “After the war. Her father was in the diplomatic corps. She’s fluent in Japanese, speaks good Cherokee, and doesn’t suffer fools lightly.”

“Well.” Safer gave an ironic smile as he zoomed past a Greyhound bus. “Then I’m doubly glad you’re here.”

*  *  *

They drove on, considering the possible connections between the eleven dead judges. As the highway began to twist through the old familiar territory of the mountains, Mary started sketching again. In the winter, the fiery red and orange leaves of autumn were gone, replaced by skeletal maple and oak branches that waved thin fingers at a stark gray sky. The mountains themselves stood like sheep after a shearing. The great humps of iron-brown earth looked strangely humbled, shrouded with fog at the lower elevations, dusted with snow at their peaks.
How different it is this time,
she thought, abruptly remembering Jonathan’s hands and mouth and eyes so fiercely that the breath seemed to catch in her throat.
How very different from before.