Limitations Read online

  So he had continued, not quite of this place yet surely not of the one he’d left. Popular with colleagues, he was elected President of the Kindle County Bar Association in the late 1980s. He remained successful and respected, but never the ultimate lawyer of choice in this town, where his friend Sandy Stern would forever be called first in a complicated criminal case. As George had wearied of practice, he found himself idly attracted to the ambition that had eluded his father: to be a judge. It was a wan hope, given the open disdain he’d always shown for the oily dealings of the party leaders who controlled such matters. He assumed he had damned himself forever when he agreed late in 1992 to represent a lawyer turned federal witness whose secret tape recordings led to the conviction of six judges and nine attorneys in a bribery scandal that burned through the Kindle County Superior Court. Instead, in one of those demonstrations of life’s perpetual defiance of expectations, George found himself regarded as the very emblem of lawyerly independence, begged to run by the party powers, who were desperate to meet the outcry for reform. He led the judicial ballot in 1994, a success that leapfrogged him over dozens of more experienced candidates when a seat opened on the appellate court for the 1996 election.

  Assuming George wants to keep his job, a yes-no question will appear this November on the County ballot: “Should George Thomson Mason be retained for another ten-year term as a justice of the appellate court?” Now and then, reading the record of a trial, he yearns to pick apart a weaseling witness again on cross-examination, and he frequently regrets the restrictions of a public salary. Occasionally, there are moments—when he longs to curse out the umps at Trappers Park or must respond stone-faced to certain jokes—that he feels caged by the proprieties of the role he’s taken on. Yet until Patrice’s illness, he had no doubt that he would stand for retention, which he is nearly certain to win. His candidacy papers are due in a matter of weeks, but he has been waiting to file, just in case life deals out more surprises.

  Now, with his robe across his arm, George sweeps into his chambers, a baronial space of high ceilings and dark crown moldings. The oral argument in Warnovits came to an unsettling conclusion, with Nathan Koll engaged in more grandstanding. The judge is just as happy to escape for half an hour before confronting his colleagues in conference.

  In the outer office, Dineesha, the judge’s assistant, is at work at her large desk. She hands him several phone message slips—most requests that George add a ceremonial presence to various public events—but there is only one communication of interest to him at the moment.

  “So what did my favorite correspondent have to say for himself this morning?” he asks.

  Since this business with #1 started about three weeks ago, Dineesha has taken to screening his e-mail, so that Court Security can be alerted as quickly as possible about new developments. Calm and dignified, Dineesha has been attending to George in his professional life for close to twenty years, selflessly following him to the public sector from the plummier confines of private practice. Now she wobbles her stiff jet hairdo, a daily monument to the tensile strength of the polymers in her hair spray.

  “Judge, you don’t need to bother with this. With #1,” says Dineesha quietly, “it’s all number two.” Humor, especially anything remotely off-color, is uncharacteristic, and he takes her contained smile as a sign of outrage on his behalf.

  Nobody in chambers has known how to refer to whoever is trying to unsettle the judge. ‘The stalker’ was George’s initial term, but that gave too much credit to someone who really has no physical manifestation. Avenger. Nemesis. The Crank or The Crackpot. Irony became the default position. The message writer was referred to as the judge’s #1 fan, and soon after that simply as #1.

  George does not know if he is exhibiting strength of character by examining these messages or just irresistible curiosity. His excuse to himself is that sooner or later something will clue him to the sender’s identity. Dineesha makes a face but opens today’s e-mail while George leans over her shoulder.

  Like all the communications before, this one appears to be George’s own message that has been returned. The sender shows up as “System Administrator,” while “Undeliverable Message” appears in the subject line. Embedded, after the nondelivery notice and a few lines of code, is the communication George supposedly sent, consisting of a few words and a Web link. At the judge’s instruction, Dineesha clicks on the blue words. The site name, “Death Watch,” in heavy black characters, springs onto the screen, accompanied by a line drawing of a wreath-covered coffin and a pointed inquiry: “Have you ever asked yourself when you’ll die? Or how?” A lengthy questionnaire follows, seeking age, health history, and occupational information, but George pages back to the message #1 somehow had directed to the judge’s computer. It says, “I know the answer.”

  Beginning with his time as a State Defender after law school, George Mason has received his share of hate mail, which he has duly ignored. Criminal defendants, despite six eyewitnesses and security photos of them committing the stickup, have a notorious ability, after several months in the penitentiary, to explain to themselves that they would be free if they’d had a “real” lawyer, instead of one receiving a paycheck from the same government that employed the prosecutor. The better-heeled crooks George represented in private practice also grew cantankerous sometimes, especially when they found that all the money they’d paid had merely paved the way to prison. In his current position, unhappy litigants occasionally vent too. None of these vitriolic communications has ever culminated in anything worse than a couple of manacled ex-clients, glowering at him across a courtroom, where they were appearing after a new arrest.

  But the cool intelligence of #1’s messages makes them more difficult to discount. They are unsigned, unlike most of the threatening correspondence George has received over the years, its erratic authors always eager for him to recall exactly whom he wronged. And, of course, recent events in Cincinnati, where a state court trial judge and his family were found murdered, have left everyone wearing a robe feeling more at risk.

  The first returned message had simply said: ‘You’ll pay.’ George had taken it as a mistake and apparently deleted it. But there was a second and a third with the same words within hours. George imagined they were spam. You’ll pay—less. For car insurance. Mortgage payments. Viagra. Two days later, another followed: ‘I said you’ll pay. You will.’ Since then there have been several more, each adding a new phrase making their meaning unambiguous. ‘You’ll pay. With blood.’ And then: ‘Your blood.’ Then, ‘You’ll bleed.’ At last, ‘You’ll die.’ His permanent law clerk, John Banion, had just entered the judge’s chambers when the message mentioning death popped up on George’s screen, and he’d asked John to take a look. Banion appeared far more shaken than his boss and insisted on calling Court Security.

  Court Security has arrived again now, in the person of its good-natured chief, Marina Giornale, who barrels into the reception area while George is still behind Dineesha. Less than five one, Marina makes up for size in energy. She issues greetings to the accompaniment of her raucous, rattling smoker’s laugh and applies her usual robust handshake. She sports a black mullet, and no cosmetics. With the long khaki jacket that’s part of her uniform and a wide black belt circumscribing her middle, she has the hefty look of a freezer in a packing crate.

  “Is ‘Death Watch’ a real Web site?” the judge asks, as he shows her into his large private chambers. George closes both doors, one leading to the reception area, the other to the small adjoining office shared by his two law clerks.

  “Oh, yeah. I was on the phone with the webmaster all morning. He keeps telling me it’s a free country.” George Mason IV was one of the driving forces behind the Bill of Rights, and the judge often amuses himself by wondering how many hours it would take in today’s America before his famous forebearer gave up on the First Amendment. There is no liberty that is not also the pathway to vice. The Internet has bred defiant communities of lunatics who once hud
dled in shamed isolation with their unsettling obsessions.

  “So what did the Bureau say?” George asks when he’s behind his large desk. Marina has taken a wooden armchair in front of him.

  “They’re going to run forensic software on your drive,” she says, “when they get a chance, but they figure they have ninety-nine percent of what they’ll find from capturing the e-mail headers.”

  “Which is?”

  “Long short, there’s no way to tell who’s doing this.”

  “Great,” George says.

  “How much do you know about tracing e-mails, Your Honor?”

  “Not a thing.”

  “Me neither,” she says. “But I take good notes.” With another hacking laugh, Marina fishes a small notebook from her jacket pocket. Marina is a cousin of the legendary and long dead Kindle County boss, Augustine Bolcarro. Nepotism being what it is, George had once assumed she was overmatched by her job. He was wrong. A former Kindle County police detective and the daughter of another dick, Marina has the crafty intuitions of somebody tutored over a lifetime. She has responded personally whenever he calls and, even more admirably, realized that her own staff, stretched thin by constant County budget cuts, will require assistance. She’s involved the FBI, who are willing to help out since use of the interstate wires makes the threats to George a federal matter. Two silent technicians were in here for a day last week, imaging the judge’s hard drive.

  “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 Corazón, does it?” This name is why he closed the doors, and even so, he’s dropped his voice. Mention of Corazón 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 Corazón 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 Corazón.’ Corazón 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 Corazón—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 Corazón’s conviction for aggravated assault and obstruction of justice and, more to the point, his enhanced sentence of sixty years. Corazón 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 Corazón’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, Corazón 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, Corazón 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, Corazón’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. “Corazón 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 Corazón, 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 Corazón.

  “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.