The Victim of the System

by Steve Hadden

  Maria pulled back and rolled her eyes a bit. “I just got worried about you.”

  Ike remembered the nine-year-old who had knocked over his WPIAL MVP trophy, breaking the figure from the top. On the rare occasions when she lied, she didn’t do it well. “Tell me what happened, Maria.”

  Maria started crying and yelled, “I just don’t want anything to happen to you, you dumb jock.” She threw her mug into the sink and it shattered. Then she ran for the stairs. “Don’t follow me. Just leave me alone. I’ll be fine.”

  A few seconds later he heard the upstairs door slam. She was hiding something. She’d responded like a trapped animal. Ike had seen it in other reluctant witnesses. Usually in those cases, the truth might harm someone close to the witness. In this case, the someone close must be him.

  CHAPTER 39

  Ike had to time this perfectly. While the conversation with Maria was troubling, being discovered here, by Lauren or Jenna, would be painful. He’d driven downtown and parked in the garage just up Fifth Avenue. The cold wind cut at his cheeks and he pulled his black Penguins hat low over his eyes. It would provide some concealment until he reached Judge Kelly’s courtroom. Many judges didn’t allow hats to be worn in their courtroom, but he’d arrived late and the hearing would be well underway. The room would be packed, with all attention on Lauren and the Falzones, and Ike planned to slip in undetected.

  As he turned the corner at Fifth and Ross, he couldn’t help but look up. The Family Law Court was housed in the old prison and connected to the county courthouse by the Bridge of Sighs, which spanned Ross Street. Designed after the famous Bridge of Sighs in Venice, the structure, built in 1888 and made of rough-cut granite, looked weathered and stained. The brownish hue of the stone, with only one small window centered on the span, made it look as heavy and draconian as its history. In the old days, prisoners would be dragged from their cells and across the bridge to hear their fate, then dragged back to the prison.

  But Ike would learn one piece of Jack’s fate in the old prison this morning: he’d stay either with Lauren or with his grandparents, or something in between. Based on the experience of some of his friends at Rossi’s, the family court’s rulings never completely satisfied either party. So Ike expected the worst. Despite some rough patches, he was thankful his parents had never split.

  Looming in the back of his mind was Monday, when the venue would move across the Bridge of Sighs to the county courthouse. He imagined Jack being convicted and dragged across the span to the holding cell still located there, and he had to look away.

  Ike entered the building, cleared security and made his way to Judge Kelly’s fifth-floor courtroom. As he’d imagined, the room was packed. Looking through the window of the thick wooden courtroom door, Ike spotted Lauren on the stand. She appeared to be holding her own as Jenna read questions from a yellow tablet she held in her hand. Jenna’s father watched calmly from the table. Ike cracked the door open and slipped inside. Each row of the gallery was full all the way to the wooden railing that separated the spectators from the court. Ike quickly eyed the wall on either side of the door and wedged into a space between two reporters, feverishly typing notes onto their small tablets. The gallery was quiet and Ike could hear Lauren and Jenna clearly.

  Ike had read Judge Kelly’s courtroom rules published next to his name on the Allegheny County Family Court website. He ran a tight ship and expected punctuality and decorum from all parties, and silence and proper attire from the gallery. Still, a sadness hung in the air as if everyone in the room mourned Jack’s loss of a supportive and loving family.

  Jenna described the glowing report of the court-appointed psychologist and ran Lauren through a series of questions outlining her daily routine with Jack and her son. When she finished, Ike thought there was no one in the courtroom who wouldn’t vote Lauren mother of the year. Jenna returned to her seat and Lauren stiffened in the witness chair and braced for the assault she seemed to already dread.

  At the table on the right, Ike spotted the white hair of Brooks Latham, who sat next to Joseph and Erin Falzone on one side and a slickly dressed fortyish attorney who Ike assumed was Mayer on the other. After conversing with Latham briefly, Mayer rose and began his questioning.

  “Mrs. Bottaro, you have quite a detailed account of your day with your son and Jack. Do you agree that their safety is one of the most important roles of a parent?”

  “Of course.”

  “A ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer will be sufficient.”

  “Yes.”

  “And would you say you are personally responsible for Jack Cole’s safety?”

  Lauren and everyone in the courtroom could see where this was going. Her eyes narrowed on Mayer. “Yes.”

  “So if safety is one of the primary roles of a parent, can you explain how you allowed a ten-year-old boy in your care and under your daily supervision to get his dead father’s rifle and kill a man?”

  “Jack had hidden the rifle the day his father died. Tom had several guns he used for hunting. I don’t know how Jack got access to them. They were always locked in a gun safe.”

  “You’re saying Jack had a rifle and you didn’t know it?”

  “Objection, your honor. Asked and answered,” Jenna said as she stood.

  “Overruled. Mrs. Bottaro, answer the question.”

  Ike could see that Lauren was cutting her eyes to Jenna, begging her for help. But it wasn’t coming.

  “Jack’s a good boy,” Lauren said.

  “Yes or no, Mrs. Bottaro.” Judge Kelly’s attention cut to Latham and back in a millisecond. The judge’s look went undetected by the gallery as far as Ike could tell, but from where he stood, it sought Latham’s approval.

  Lauren paused and looked directly at Ike. She’d spotted him. She seemed to gain strength, holding her gaze on Ike. But Ike could see that the answer she had to give would break her. He wanted to rush to the stand and protect her from Mayer’s humiliating questions. Finally, Lauren’s voice broke as she looked at Mayer and answered, “Yes.” Then she began to cry.

  Mayer stepped to the side of the table, closer to Lauren but not crossing into the no-man’s-land that would trigger the ire of the judge. “I’m wondering, Mrs. Bottaro, if you think that such a parent should be trying to keep one of the pillars of this community from his grandson?”

  Jenna rocketed up. “Objection, you—”

  “Withdrawn. No further questions, your honor.” Mayer took his seat and Latham patted him on the back.

  The judge excused Lauren and she made her way back to the table with Jenna. She leaned in and whispered to Jenna. Jenna’s head snapped around and she eyed Ike.

  “Ms. Price, anything else?”

  Jenna turned back to the judge. “No, your honor.”

  “Okay,” Judge Kelly said. “Normally, I’d adjourn and we’d reconvene, but nothing about this proceeding is normal.” He picked up a small stack of papers. “I’ve heard both sides, read the psychologist’s report and considered all the information provided in the previous hearing. It is, in my judgment, in the best interest of the boy that the grandparents be granted unsupervised visitation. That visitation will be every other weekend. However, considering the upcoming trial, the child will be with the grandparents this weekend, Saturday at nine a.m. until Sunday at noon, unless otherwise agreed by the parties.”

  Ike dropped his head. Jack would be in the Falzones’ hands. He’d be in danger.

  The judge adjourned the proceeding and disappeared into his chambers. Ike got caught up in the rush to get out the door. As he was shoved toward the door, he pushed back against the crowd and looked over their heads to Lauren’s table. She stood there, tears running down her face, staring at Ike. Jenna shamed him with one wag of her head and she gathered Lauren in her arms. Ike surrendered to the pressure of the crowd and moved out the door.

  But the pressure he felt the most came from inside. Jack would spend time with the very people who had killed his father, and Ike was on t
he outside looking in. He reminded himself that if he solved the clues and found the evidence that would exonerate Jack, they’d still use it. For a moment, a flicker of hope sparked in his heart. Then the shared look between Judge Kelly and Latham reemerged in Ike’s mind, and he remembered this was Friday.

  And Friday was poker night.

  CHAPTER 40

  Ike felt the minutes slipping through his hands like water. He’d spent what was left of the morning at the courthouse reviewing family court records, then sending the data to Mac, who was holed up back at Ike’s office. Ike had driven to Rossi’s and entered through the alleyway again. It was nearing noon and the Friday lunch crowd had been trimmed by the nasty cold front ripping through the city.

  He’d spotted Maria behind the bar and she’d conveyed a look that said nothing had changed between them. While he wanted to convince her he’d be fine, he couldn’t take the time. Jack was in danger, and Ike had put him there. Like an anchor dragging behind a speedboat, that burden attached itself to every thought Ike had. But this was no time to get bogged down. Ike knew finding concrete evidence that proved Jack’s story was the only thing that could save him, and as he entered his office, he was happy to see Mac hard at work.

  Mac sat in one of the wooden side chairs with his eyes glued to the only windowless wall. He’d taken a page from the flip chart and tacked it to the corkboard that Ike had hung when he moved in. On the page, he’d written all the expressions Ike had received from Tom Cole’s mystery account with their operators missing, just as Ike had asked on the phone.

  3 53 8 2 19

  4 3 53 8 74

  9 13 30 7 8 7 99

  53 25 7 47 10 7

  Mac looked up at Ike. “Tough morning?”

  Ike shrugged off his jacket and tossed it onto the other side chair. “He’s going to be sent to the Falzones. There’s nothing good about that.” Ike pointed to the sheet of paper on the wall. “I’m now convinced this means something. I think it’s the key to the whole thing.”

  Mac looked at Ike like his father had when Ike was caught drag racing across the Fortieth Street bridge. “You know anything about a car chase through Southpointe yesterday?”

  Ike remained silent for a moment. He never lied to Mac and wasn’t about to start now. “I had a little problem.”

  “Well, that little problem could have killed you, from what I heard.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I know you’re fine. But I spent half an hour this morning calming your sister down.”

  “You told her about that?”

  “No. That’s the problem. I didn’t say a word. But she’s convinced this case will be the end of you.”

  “Look. I talked to her early this morning. She wanted me to quit. Just fold it up and go home. She was the one who pushed for me to get involved. Now that I am, she wants me to quit.”

  “You were fired.”

  “I don’t care about that. I was doing this for Jack.”

  Mac walked over to Ike and put his hand on Ike’s shoulder. “Be careful. She can’t go through losing you, too.”

  Ike returned the gesture, his hand on Mac’s shoulder. “I will. You know this means I’m on the right track.”

  “I do. Just be careful.”

  Both men paused, silently connecting like father and son, and then Mac broke away. He returned his attention to the flip chart and dropped into the side chair.

  “I’ve been looking at it since I put them up there,” he said. “Why remove the pluses, minuses, and multiplication symbols?”

  Ike circled around next to Mac and leaned on the chair back. “The expressions were taking us nowhere. Even your cryptologist said so. I thought that if we only focused on the numbers we might get another perspective.”

  Mac wagged his head. “All I get is that two of the four expressions have five numbers. One had six and the other had seven.”

  Ike thought about that. If the two oddballs were thrown out, it would look like a matrix. But tossing some the clues didn’t make sense. If Tom Cole was anything, he was logical. “The recurring numbers tell me each of these numbers means something. The recurrence could be repeated symbols from a key. That key has to convey a message.”

  “He could have made up his own key. A special decoder,” Mac said.

  “If that’s the case, there are more e-mails coming. But they’re not coming fast enough. And why wait until the end to provide a key? If he suspected his life was in danger, he should have suspected that Jack’s life was at risk, too. I think he’d get to the point quickly.”

  “Then we’re back to a known key.”

  Ike stood and took a deep cleansing breath. He absorbed the numbers with no preconceived idea of what they were. He’d done this with evidence in other cases that appeared to be dead ends. The inductive thinking that followed was usually quite productive.

  His mind drifted to a trivia question he’d once heard on the number of languages in the world. The answer was more than 6,900, but Tom would most likely favor the major European languages first. That meant Spanish, French, German and Italian, and Ike threw in Greek and Latin for good measure.

  “Hey. Earth to Ike. What are you thinking?” Mac’s words shook Ike from his trance.

  “Sorry. I’m thinking about other languages.”

  “I’d think the cryptologist would have run that to ground.”

  “Maybe not,” Ike said, pulling his iPhone from his pocket. He searched for the letter count for each of the languages.

  Greek had twenty-four characters, Latin had twenty-three, and the others ranged from twenty-three to twenty-seven. He then shifted his thinking to the other major languages in the Eastern Hemisphere. Chinese had three thousand, India’s Devanagari had forty-seven, Russian had thirty-three, and Japanese Kanji symbols could go as high as fifty thousand. But none of the languages matched the range of the numbers in the expressions, two to ninety-nine. If the clues were simply meant to distract him, they were doing their job.

  Ike quickly decided to prioritize his time. “Can you send this over to a linguistics expert?”

  “Sure. We used one before I left the force. She’s at Pitt, too.”

  “Great. This could be a waste of time, and there are two areas I’ve got to run to the ground. The first is Tanner and his past. If Jack’s right, there’ll be a trail of some sort. Did you get the files I sent you?”

  “Sure did. Printed them all out, just as you asked.” Mac stood and walked to the printer stuffed in the office closet. He pulled out a thick stack of papers.

  “I had the clerk help me pull all the family court documents for the past year. But the last pages I sent you were all the cases Tanner had before the court.”

  “Saw that. Looks like he really liked Judge Kelly.” Mac pulled the first sheets from the stack and spread them across Ike’s desk. “And it looks like he usually faced off with the same six opposing attorneys.”

  “Exactly,” Ike said. “I think that’s the poker-night club.”

  Mac snapped his attention to Ike. “Poker club?”

  “Yeah. I found out that there’s a group of lawyers and judges that get together every Friday night for poker.”

  “Poker?”

  “That’s what they call it. But apparently they script their cases to create as much conflict as possible between clients to increase their billings.”

  Mac dropped the stack of papers. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Afraid not.”

  “The judges are in on it?”

  “Some of them.”

  “Let’s just shut that down now. I still know the editors at the Post-Gazette.”

  “No go. My source said it may go farther than the Family Law Court. And before we blow this up, I need to get the evidence that will free Jack.”

  Mac picked the papers up again and raised them in his hand. “You think this bunch had something to do with his dad’s death?”

  “It makes sense. Build up the case so the pressure appears t
o be nearly unbearable for Tom Cole.”

  “Was Cole’s attorney on this list?”

  “Sure was.”

  “And Kelly?”

  “I bet he was there, too.”

  Mac paused and Ike could see him grinding on the information. “You’ll need more than just this conspiracy. With Cassidy’s holes in the suicide report, you might have enough for reasonable doubt.”

  “Not enough,” Ike said. He wasn’t about to risk leaving it up to a jury to find Jack not guilty. “I need to show self-defense.”

  “You’ll need to show the premeditated plan to kill Tom Cole and his son.”

  “That’s right. I’ll need the Falzones and their motive, their connection to this group, and Tanner’s complicity.”

  “You’re not going back for that seismic again?”

  Ike felt a grin come across his face. The same one he’d show the defense when he knew he’d called the perfect play. “Not yet. But you and I are going to poker night.”

  CHAPTER 41

  Ike knew he’d only have one chance to do this. He kept his eyes on Brooks Latham’s Caddy, maintaining a cushion of at least three cars between them. The veil of dusk was dropping and helped conceal Mac’s old Buick. The wind had died down at sunset and the leaves on the trees lining Washington Boulevard were still. Behind the trees were Highland Park and eventually the Pittsburgh Zoo. Memories of warm summer days with his mother and father flooded his mind, back when they’d introduced him to the much larger world beyond his backyard.

  Traffic slowed as he neared the intersection at Allegheny River Boulevard, and Ike forced the thoughts from his mind. This was no time for a trip down memory lane.

  Mac sat in the passenger’s seat and watched for any sign of another tail. He’d spotted one earlier, following them when they’d left Rossi’s in Ike’s Shelby. Ike had pulled to the curb across from the hospital on Liberty Avenue, and the tail, just four cars back, did the same. It was an amateur move, but nonetheless one that had warranted action. After a series of quick turns and then a sprint at ninety down Bigelow Boulevard, they’d lost the tail. From there, they’d parked the Shelby in Mac’s garage and taken his ten-year-old Buick to stake out Latham’s house. Now, Ike was sure Latham was leading them to poker night.