Fighting Chance: A Gregor Demarkian Novel (Gregor Demarkian series Book 29) (16 page)

“But this is different,” Janice insisted. “She’s a big noise in the news now. Everything about her will come out and be in the papers. Things we couldn’t get any traction on before will be news. And the news will make all the difference.”

“No,” Kasey said. “It really won’t.”

That was when Janice realized what was going on. It was a disease, power was. Kasey had it. Kasey was used to getting all the publicity and attention for herself. She was used to making all the waves and seeing herself on the six o’clock news. She obviously hated the idea of anybody else getting a little attention.

Really, Janice had thought when she finally got off by herself and was able to think. She should have known it all along. She really should have. Kasey had been showing all the signs for years. All that talk about “collegiality” and “leading by consensus.” It was just a lot of words to mask the grab for power. And the power was a soft power because only with soft power could you go on pretending as if you really believed in equality.

It happened to all of them. It really did. Janice had never belonged to any organization anywhere that was any different.

By the next morning, she’d managed to calm herself down. She’d gone in to school and taught her first class. She’d answered a few questions from fellow faculty members and one from a student. Most of her students never watched the news, so they knew nothing about the fact that Janice had become the pivotal element in the country’s most famous murder case.

Most famous at the moment, Janice reminded herself when she went into her office for office hours.

She didn’t know what she’d expected when she turned on her computer. She did know that the arraignment was supposed to be today. That had been on the news last night, even though cameras were not being allowed in the courtroom. Cameras in the courtroom were something Pennsylvania Justice strongly supported. The more a record existed of every phase of a case, the more likely it was that they could get innocent people out of jail once the injustice had been done.

At least, that was the theory. Janice was now fairly sure that Pennsylvania Justice supported cameras in the courtroom because Kasey liked to see herself on television. Some people just couldn’t get enough of being made a fuss of. You saw that with Kasey all the time. She had to be the queen bee at every party. She had to be the person who stood up at the microphone and announced policy at press conferences, and announced the results of investigations, too.

Somebody else might have given the spotlight to one of the people who did the really important work, but not Kasey. No matter how many hours the volunteer lawyers spent working on cases, no matter how many mountains of material the volunteer researchers looked through to find the kink in the armor of conviction, no matter how much work
other
people did, it was always Kasey up there, being the Public Face of the Organization.

Well, Janice thought, that kind of thing always ended badly. That kind of thing ruined organizations. It put an end to all the good work. Janice knew that for certain, because she’d seen half a dozen organizations come apart.

The first of the Web sites Janice managed to get to load was WTFX, which was, of course, Fox. Janice never watched the Fox News cable channel, because it was nothing but lies and propaganda, but she watched all the local channels in turn, because no single one of them ever seemed to have what she needed for weather.

She made a face at the Fox local anchor and tried again. This time, the Web site for WPVI actually managed to load.

And although ABC was nothing more than the usual patriarchal imperialism, it had a few things going on.

What was on WPVI was the arraignment, which was what Janice was looking for, but it wasn’t the arraignment she had been expecting.

She hated to admit it, but Kasey had made one relevant point. If that priest pleaded guilty, there would be no trial. And if there were no trial, that would be the end of any publicity Janice could get on the subject of the betrayal of juvenile justice.

Kasey Holbrook might be willing to use up all the leverage she had just to get a bit of publicity for herself, but Janice was not. The world was full of injustice, and it was going to stay that way if people didn’t get out and do something about it.

Janice had always had a picture of herself getting out and doing something about it.

She settled in to read the news story on the arraignment—it was the lead story; of course it was—certain that she was going to find a recap of the whole case. Instead, she found a long, rambling piece that made no sense to her at all, all about pleas and what you couldn’t plead to and how the judge had been very angry with Father Tibor Kasparian.

Of course the judge had been angry with Father Tibor Kasparian. Judges were always angry with priests when priests ended up in court. That was because priests and judges were icons of the patriarchy, and when one of them got arrested, it threatened the entire power structure.

Janice read through the piece all the way to the end. Then she read through it again. Then she rechecked the home page. There were no other stories about the case.

By then, she could feel the steam coming out of her ears, but she held it back. She needed to be calm. She needed to be clearheaded. She brought up CNN. It had a story about the case, too, and right on the home page, but like the one on WPVI, it said nothing about the background and nothing about Martha Handling.

Janice closed her eyes and tried to think. It seemed impossible, but there it was. They were missing the entire point. They were wandering around talking about trivialities, and the real story was right under their noses. They were doing that even though Janice herself had tried to tell them, just yesterday, what it was really all about.

The least she had the right to expect was a whole slew of stories that exposed Martha Handling for what she had really been. Janice had counted on those stories. Without those stories, there was no point at all to anything that had happened.

The steam was rising and rising. Janice thought her head was going to explode—literally, right there in the office, sending blood and bone and brains all over the office walls.

She hadn’t bothered to unpack her tote bag when she came into the office. It was sitting on the floor at her feet. She picked it up and got to her feet. She was supposed to log off the computer when she was finished with it, but she didn’t have time. She held down the Start button until the machine kicked off. Then she held down the Start button again until it started to reboot.

She’d wanted to rush right out of the room without paying attention to any of it, but she knew what the result of that would be.

Men were always trying to undercut women in positions of power and responsibility, and that was especially true of the men in the IT department.

2

Petrak Maldovanian had known, from the moment he first saw Martha Handling lying there dead, that he was going to have to find a way to talk to Stefan alone. Talking to him was not so difficult as Petrak had expected it to be when Stefan was first taken into custody. Since no “disposition” had been made in Stefan’s case, there were generous visiting hours available at the Juvenile Detention Facility, and the lawyers could come and go almost as they wanted.

At least, the hours were generous from Petrak’s point of view. Back in Armenia, if they locked you up, they locked you up. If you happened to be of the wrong race or religion, they locked you up for a good long time before they got around to doing anything about you. When the old Soviet Union fell—Petrak didn’t know this from experience, he wasn’t born yet, but he’d heard all about it often enough so that he felt as if he’d been there—

When the old Soviet Union fell, everybody thought the disappearances and show trials would be over, but it hadn’t turned out like that. In some ways, thing were better. In some ways, they were actually worse.

Things were certainly better in America. Petrak could testify to that, because in just ten minutes, he would be allowed to talk to Stefan in a secure little room at the back of the building. He had rushed down here as soon as his College Algebra class was over. He had been almost rude to Professor Loftus when he passed her in a corridor. She looked all worked up and flustered, which was not usual for her, but he did not stop and ask her why.

The real issue here, Petrak knew, was not getting in to see Stefan, but getting to talk to him alone. Aunt Sophie was very conscientious. She went to see Stefan at every opportunity. She even used her lunch hour to do it. Her lunch hour, though, was more restrictive than the visiting hours. That meant that Petrak had a chance. If he got to the JDF early enough, he would have some time alone with Stefan before Aunt Sophie came along and insisted that everybody start speaking English.

Petrak knew that everything was better in America, but he was not naïve. They said that the visiting rooms were secure and that nobody listened in on private conversations, but he didn’t believe it.

Most of the people who worked at the JDF were women. The woman on the intake desk when he arrived was very small and frail.

Petrak tried to look humble. It was very important to look humble in front of Authority.

“Please to ask,” he said, thickening up his accent and trying to be as awkward as possible. “My brother, he is doing well?”

“He isn’t giving
me
any trouble,” the little woman said. Then she spoke into her phone, waited for a reply, and hung up. “They’re bringing him over. You can follow me. Where’s your mother this morning?”

Petrak was momentarily stumped. His mother had been dead for seven years.

“Ah,” he said finally. “This is my aunt, the woman I usually come with.”

“I’m sorry,” the little woman said. “It’s mothers we get, usually. Fathers, not so much. Grandmothers, a lot of the time. You know the drill, right? You have to let the guard check you over.”

Petrak knew the drill. He waited at the cage gate while the guard patted him down and then went up one side of his body and down the other with a wand. This guard was male, and looked menacing.

The little room for visiting was all the way at the back and did not have the bulletproof glass partitions that Petrak had seen on television shows set in adult prisons. Stefan was already waiting for him, sitting on a bench on one side of a wooden table. He was wearing the bright orange sweat clothes that were the juvenile system’s answer to the bright orange jumpsuits for adults.

“Barev dzez,”
Petrak said, sitting down across from him.

“Barev dzez,”
Stefan answered, looking surprised. But he did what Petrak wanted him to do. He went on in Armenian. “Why are we being so formal?”

Petrak went on in Armenian, too. “I wanted you to speak in Armenian, this is all. For once I would like to have a private conversation.”

“Where is Aunt Sophie?” Stefan said. “Aren’t you early?”

“I came before Aunt Sophie could be away from work,” Petrak said. “Like I said. I wanted us to have a private conversation.”

“Can we have a private conversation here? Maybe it’s like in that movie. Maybe the walls have ears.”

“Maybe the walls have ears, but I don’t think the walls speak Armenian. Almost nobody speaks Armenian.”

“What is going to happen next?” Stefan said. “I have asked about another hearing, but they won’t say anything. They say my lawyer will tell me.”

“Aunt Sophie said she would talk to Mr. Donahue today,” Petrak said. “Maybe she will have the news when she gets here.”

“She is coming?”

“She always comes,” Petrak said. “She will come and think I am not here, because I will not be waiting for her in the lobby. Then she will be surprised to see me when she comes in. Or they will tell her at the desk. I don’t know.”

“It is good to see you, in any case,” Stefan said. “It is good to have a visitor without the yelling.”

“I could be yelling,” Petrak pointed out. “I’ve got every right to yell. It’s your own fault you are sitting where you are sitting. What were you thinking about? First cutting school and then shoplifting CDs and video games? And no attention to the security cameras at all.
Tcha.
If you have to turn yourself into a thief, do you have to turn yourself into a stupid thief?”

“I told you, I have not turned myself into a thief. It was an initiation.”

“An initiation into what? The worldwide stupid society?”

“I have told you before, it is a club for the best—”

“Stop,” Petrak said. “You have told me before. You have told Aunt Sophie. You have told Mr. Donahue. It is still completely senseless.”

Stefan looked away. “There are people here who say that the priest killed the judge because of me. That Father Kasparian killed her because he thought she was going to have me sent away to prison for a long time.”

“They are saying the same thing outside, but I do not think it is true. It does not sound like something somebody would do.”

“Maybe the priest is what they say he is,” Stefan said. “Maybe he is some kind of saint. They said that at home. That he was some kind of saint.”

“Even saints don’t have to be idiots,” Petrak said. “What sense would such a thing make? This judge is now gone, and that means some other judge won’t give you so much prison time? Even if that is true—
tcha.
It is a story for children.”

“You want to talk to me alone,” Stefan said. “This is what you want to talk to me about?”

Petrak shook his head. “In a way. In a way not. I need to know for certain. You did not leave the courtroom yesterday before they took you away officially?”

“I could not leave the courtroom,” Stefan said. “There were guards at both the doors. And guards outside. And I was wearing this.”

“And you will be on the security cameras?” Petrak asked. “There was something wrong with the security cameras. Some of them were not working. I didn’t understand it when I heard it on the news. So maybe you will not be on the security cameras.”

“Aunt Sophie was there,” Stefan said. “She never left the seat next to me.”