Limitations (3 page)

“The Bureau techies say that what we’ve got is a variation on something called a bounce-back attack, where somebody ‘spoofs’ ”-she draws quotation marks in the air-“your e-mail address by placing it in the ‘From’ settings. Apparently, you could figure out how to do this with fifteen minutes of research. It’s simple, as this kind of stuff goes, but it works.

“When the FBI examined the headers, it looked like all the messages come through an open mail server in the Philippines.”

“ ‘Open mail server’?”

She lifts a square hand. “An open mail relay server. Spammers set up most of them. Sometimes somebody muffs the security settings on their Web site, and everybody uses it until the owner catches on. But if the server is open, anyone can connect. It sends out any message given to it without checking who it’s from. And open proxies don’t usually keep logs of who routes through them either. The Bureau guys say this one may be related to a Web site hosted in China and owned by a company in London. I mean,” says Marina, “good luck.”

Disappointed, George looks around the room to think things over. One of the compensations of life on the appellate court is office space by the acre. His private chambers are nearly thirty feet by thirty, large enough to house all the knickknacks and mementos of his three decades in practice. The decorating, however, is strictly government-issue, an oceanic expanse of robin’s egg carpeting and a lot of sturdy mahogany furniture manufactured by Prison Industries.

“Marina, this doesn’t help your theory about Corazon, does it?” This name is why he closed the doors, and even so, he’s dropped his voice. Mention of Corazon would intensify the alarm among his staff.

“Beg to differ, Judge. Gang Crimes is telling me some of these Latin gangs are pretty with it. Lots of Internet identity theft. I’m not ruling Corazon out at all. Boys and girls at the Bureau like him too.”

Based on the evidence so far, #1 could be anybody in the world with a computer and the judge’s e-mail address. With little else to go on, Marina compiled a run of the cases George has sat on in the last three years. One name leapt out: Jaime Colon, known to everyone as ‘El Corazon.’ Corazon was the infamous Inca, or head, of Los Latinos Reyes, a street gang of several hundred members and a ‘set’ in the Almighty Latin Nation, the fastest growing of the Tri-Cities’ three overarching gang organizations.

Decades ago, when George regularly visited the state penitentiary at Rudyard as a State Defender, he was routinely impressed that some inmates were regarded as so savage they frightened even the murderers and ruffians he was there to represent. That is Corazon-so evil, they say, that clocks stop and babies cry when he passes.

Little more than a year ago, the judge had written the opinion affirming Corazon’s conviction for aggravated assault and obstruction of justice and, more to the point, his enhanced sentence of sixty years. Corazon had personally taken a tire iron to the girlfriend and two children, ages five and seven, of a jailed gang rival who was scheduled to testify against him in a drug case. Nor did Corazon’s efforts at intimidation end there. When he was convicted, on the basis of a DNA match from fingernail scrapings taken at the hospital from the victims, who were prudent enough to flee to Mexico before the trial, Corazon promised to wreak revenge on the trial judge, the prosecutors, the cops, and anybody else who had a hand in sending him away.

As a result, Corazon is now held in the state’s lone supermax facility, his cell an eight-by-eight concrete block where he enjoys extemporaneous communications with no one except the guards and his mother, with whom he gets a single monitored visit each month. Nonetheless, Corazon’s sheer badness has made him the prime suspect. The intrigue of organizing the intimidation of a judge while being held incommunicado is a challenge he’d welcome, especially since he could take it on with little fear of the consequences. A longer sentence is meaningless to a man of forty-two. If he’s caught, his principal punishment will be a period of receiving a tasteless hash called meal loaf instead of real food.

“Bureau agents paid him a visit last week,” Marina says. “Corazon loves to get out and shoot the breeze, doesn’t even bother with his lawyer. The Feebies were asking him about a couple kids in his outfit doing dirt time,” she says, meaning that the gang members were murdered, “but they worked your name in.”

“And?”

“He didn’t twitch. Still, they wanted him to know they had his scent.”

When it comes to solving crimes, the obvious answer is usually the right one-the jealous husband is the murderer of his ex, the fired employee is the one who sabotaged the pipes at the factory- but the judge remains skeptical that a man who used a tire iron to silence witnesses would bother with something this cagey.

“I’m not sold on Corazon, Marina. Frankly, I still think whoever’s doing this is just talking dirty.” The paranoid crackpots are the correspondents George has learned to fear-they attack thinking they’re protecting themselves. But a rational person intent on mayhem does not send warnings, simply because they’d make reprisals harder to carry out. George is convinced that #1’s only aim is to roil his peace of mind, a goal far too civilized for Corazon.

“I take this creep seriously, Judge.”

Inclined to debate, George chooses not to answer. He’s long understood that people in law enforcement yearn to see themselves as knight protectors-you could bet a goodly sum, for example, that Marina Giornale had grown up reading everything she could about St. Joan. The more gravely Marina takes these messages, the more important they make her.

“And the Bureau and my people agree on one thing,” she says.

“Which is?”

“It’s time for a detail.”

“No,” says George, as he has said before to the idea of a security detail. A bodyguard would be an infernal nuisance-and far worse, something that couldn’t be hidden from Patrice. He has said nothing to his wife about these threats, and he does not intend to. Her own condition provides enough worry at the moment. “I can’t handle that at home, Marina.”

Aware of Patrice’s illness, Marina offers a lingering sympathetic look before massaging her jaw to contemplate.

“Look, Judge, how about this? Your house is your house. I can’t tell you what to do there. You’re not listed, right?”

An unlisted phone has been required since George’s days as a defense lawyer, the better to avoid the 3:00 A.M. call from the white-collar client who’d just awoken from a nightmare of prison.

“But when you get to County property, Judge, you’re on my turf. So all due respect and genuflecting several times, and doing the dance of the seven veils”-she smiles in her apple-cheeked way, a winning child-“I still gotta have somebody with you. When I run through the God-forbids in my head, Your Honor, I can’t even imagine how I’d explain leaving you uncovered.”

She is saying that he can’t require her to engage in the law enforcement equivalent of malpractice. He slaps his thighs in resignation, and Marina quickly offers her hand.

George sees her out. As he opens the door, Banion is there, a draft opinion in hand that has just arrived from another judge’s chambers. On the threshold, Marina turns back to both of them.

“Say, you drew quite a crowd this morning.” She’s referring to the horde trying to gain admission to the oral argument in Warnovits, which her staff was required to handle.

Recalled, the case immediately nags at the judge. It’s like a bad meal, a fight with your spouse, something carried with you that douses your mood all day.

“I hate that case,” he responds. This is no news to Banion. The judge assigned John to review the portions of the videotape that Sapperstein said should not have been shown to the jury after George reached the point where he could not stand watching any more. Ever impassive, John shows little more than a mild frown. But Marina draws back.

“Why’s that? I thought deciding the big ones is what you guys live for.”

She’s right about that. In fact, it’s part of the larger riddle about his reactions to the case. George wanted to be a judge because the job matters, because you are trusted to be the conscience of your community and to apply the time-ennobled traditions of the law. He often feels the weight of those responsibilities, yet seldom regrets them. But now he gives his head a decorous shake, pretending that propriety rather than utter mystification prevents him from trying to explain.

George races down the judges’ private corridor toward the conference chambers adjacent to the appellate courtroom. He is actually a few minutes ahead of schedule for his meeting with Purfoyle and Koll, but he wants to phone Patrice, and he stops by a long window where cell reception is better. It is a goofy rectitude, he knows, uncomfortably reminiscent of his father, to avoid personal calls from the County line in his chambers, but as a judge he never shakes the expectation that he must lead by example in matters large and small. He wears a suit and tie each day and requires similar apparel of his staff, notwithstanding the more casual attire favored by his colleagues when they do not have to appear in the courtroom. He is determined that, if nothing else, he will always look the part: tall, trim, gray-haired, and handsome in a conventional middle-aged way. Standard-issue white guy.

“Fine. Tired. Not a bad day at all,” Patrice says when he reaches her at the hospital. He has tried her several times this morning, but the line has been constantly engaged. At the moment, Patrice’s interaction with the human race is confined to the telephone. “They think my Geiger levels may be down enough tonight to let you in the room. Most women want a man’s heart, Georgie. I bet you were never counting on risking your thyroid.”

“Gladly, mate,” he answers, a term of mutual endearment. “Any organ you like.” The Masons have always relished each other’s company and the way they generally ride along on a current of low-voltage humor. But at the moment, his druthers are to be more sincere. To many men George knows, marriage is a war against their longings. Yet he is among the happy few. For more than thirty years now, he has been able to say that he has wanted no one more than Patrice.

These sentiments swamp him frequently these days. The nodule on Patrice’s thyroid was discovered on February 10, and when he stood in a store a day later reading the humid poetry on several valentines, he actually wept. But at the moment he feels obliged to keep this torrent of affection to himself. For Patrice right now the only acceptable behavior is what she deems ‘normal’-no dramatics and certainly no proclamations of a kind that Patrice, being Patrice, would deride as ‘soft and runny.’

“How about if I bring dinner?” George asks. “We can eat together. Any cravings?”

“No more limp green beans. Something with spice.”

“Mexican?”

“Perfect. After eight. That’ll be thirty-six hours. But they won’t let you stay long, mate.”

Yesterday at 6:00 A.M., he’d brought Patrice to West Bank Lutheran-Sinai. There she’d swallowed a large white pill full of iodine-131. Now she may not have any physical contact with other human beings. The radiation broiling through her and eradicating every thyroid cell, especially the wayward ones that have wandered dangerously into other portions of her body, might also kill the healthy gland in someone else. The treatment has a long record of success, but it is disquieting to experience. At the moment, Patrice would be less isolated on a lepers’ island, where at least she would have company. At West Bank, she is housed alone in a small, white room of cinder block laid over a lining of lead. The decorating aims to avoid the sterile appearance of a hospital room, with the result that the space instead has the dismal look of a cheap motel, with scarred furniture and a thin chenille spread on the bed. Any item that will exit the area must be destroyed by special staff or quarantined- the books and magazines Patrice has been reading, her undergarments, and the leavings in the bedpan she must use. Her pulse and temperature are monitored electronically, and the orderlies serve her meals through a lead flap in the door.

Yesterday, even George was not permitted in her room. Instead, his wife and he spoke through telephone handsets on either side of a large window cut into the wall adjoining her bed, on which Patrice can raise the shade. For George, the comparison with his professional life was unavoidable. How many clients in how many institutions had he conversed with this way? And how many of their fellow inmates had he surreptitiously eyed with the usual mix of empathy and judgment, as the prisoners pawed the glass or wept, with a child or lover on the other side, feeling only now the sharpest tooth of confinement, and thus of crime? With his own wife isolated this way, George could not shake a miserable, low conviction that he had failed. Their conversation was listless and unsettled. The glass between them might well have been her illness. After thirty-three years, it has turned out that their life together is a matter of grace rather than mutual will. Patrice is sick and he is not. ‘There is really no such thing,’ one social worker warned a support group for spouses, ‘as having cancer together.’

“Didn’t you have arguments this morning?” Patrice asks. “How were they?”

“Lackluster in most cases. But we just heard Warnovits. The high school rape case?”

“The one on the news? Were the attorneys good?”

“Not especially, but I was sitting with Nathan Koll, who planted a roadside bomb for the lawyers. Now I’ve got to go to conference and watch him wrap his arms around himself so he can pat his own back. I’m due now.”

“Then go ahead, George. I’ll call if I fail the Geiger counter.”

Clicking off, he peers from the window into the canyon of U.S. 843 that separates the Central Branch Courthouse from the Center City, and beyond that to the downtown towers, stolid monuments to capital. Summer is coming, a season of ripeness and promise, but the feeling in his own soul remains autumnal. George is off his stride and knows it. Revered as calm and poised, he is lately more likely to become unsettled, as he has been by Warnovits. He has occasionally turned snappish with his staff and has grown uncharacteristically absentminded. About ten days ago, he lost his cell phone-who knows where? He noticed it was gone on his way back from a Bar Association luncheon he’d attended with several of his colleagues. He had Dineesha ransack his chambers while his clerks called all over the Center City. For the moment, he is using Patrice’s spare.