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

by Jane Haddam

  “Carter, honestly, I couldn’t tell you. We were doing that thing again where I could only pick up one word out of three.”

  “She would go to jail herself,” Carter said. “If she thinks she wouldn’t, she’s insane. It’s a juvenile court she’s dealing with. The press will go insane.”

  “Probably.”

  “She didn’t tell you when she was going to do this? Today? Next week? At a press conference? What?”

  “She didn’t even tell me that she was going to do this. It’s like I told you. The reception was all crapped up. She refuses to talk anywhere but in her car.”

  “Well,” Carter said, “you’re going to have to call her. Or go to see her. You’re going to have to go do something. If she’s going to do this, it’s going to be bad no matter what, but I can tell you it’s going to be a lot worse if we’re not ready for it.”

  “Ready for it or not, Carter, I don’t think it’s going to make any difference. We paid a juvenile court judge a lot of money to make sure she sent kids to juvie for as long as possible to make sure the places were, uh, operating at full capacity.”

  There was a long, drawn-out silence at the other end of the phone. When Carter Bandwood’s voice came back, it was flat and metallic. It didn’t sound panicked at all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “And if you’re taping this, I’ll find a way to make you dead.”

  After that, there was nothing. Mark shut off his phone and then disassembled the recorder device he’d bought at the advice of a private detective he knew. The private detective was the only person Mark had ever known who was more cynical than he was himself.

  Somewhere upstairs, somebody flushed a toilet. Mark put the device into his inside jacket pocket and called up. “Bethany? Or is that Kaitlyn? Everybody’s late today.”

  Bethany came down the stairs with a towel around her head. “Kaitlyn’s not running late,” she said. “She’s not home.”

  “She left early?”

  “No,” Bethany said.

  Mark looked at his wife. She’d been a pretty girl at school, and she wasn’t bad now. But that wasn’t the point. Her sister was the point.

  “We’re going to have to do something about this,” he said.

  “We’ve got a judge and a lawyer,” Bethany said. “We are doing something about this. She just needs a little time to grow up.”

  “She may not have any more time,” Mark said, tapping his chest.

  But then it just seemed wrong, somehow, to bother Bethany with all this, especially when he wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. The only thing he had decided was that he wasn’t going to jail alone, and that didn’t begin to cover the situation.

  5

  When Russ Donahue first agreed to take a case in juvenile court, he had been more than half convinced that he would fail at it. Lose your temper, lose the argument, his father had always said. The very idea of a “juvenile justice” system made Russ lose his temper. Surely there was something wrong with a country that could think of nothing else to do with its troubled children but lock them up and parade them around in leg irons anytime they went outside.

  Russ had seen the leg irons once when he was late for a court session and went around the back way as a shortcut. The kids brought in from juvie had had a delay of their own, or the door they were supposed to use had had something wrong with it, or something. Russ didn’t really know. Still, there they were, lined up along one wall, their hands in cuffs behind their backs, their ankles in irons—as if every one of them were a precocious Jeffrey Dahmer, ready to commit murder and mayhem if given half the opportunity.

  That night he’d gone home to Donna and Tommy and the baby and stared at them all through dinner, as if the fact of them could make sense of the fact of what he had seen at court. Tommy was close to the age of many of the kids he had seen. Russ tried and tried to think of something Tommy could do that would make leg irons a necessity. He even tried to think of something Tommy could want to do. He’d come up blank. Eight-year-olds didn’t rob banks and gun down all the tellers. They didn’t carjack little old ladies in grocery store parking lots and shoot them in the woods to get their wallets full of one-dollar bills.

  Some of the kids against the wall had been older, teenagers at least. That had made a little more sense. Teenagers were at least capable of doing real harm. A seventeen-year-old was more or less an adult—in size and strength, if not in maturity.

  Then he found out that there were almost no seventeen-year-olds in that line against the wall, or sixteen-year-olds either. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds who had done truly bad things were almost always charged as adults.

  “That’s why you should do it,” Donna had told him when he was thinking about accepting that first case. “There aren’t enough people to take these cases, and not enough of them don’t think we should be putting children in jail.”

  “Wouldn’t there be less of the kind of thing you were talking about if lawyers who didn’t like it got involved with it?” Bennis Hannaford asked him.

  Russ was helpless enough when Donna went after him on her own. When Bennis joined the party, he had no idea how to get himself out of the mess he’d gotten himself into.

  That first case had been one of Father Tibor’s, a case like the one he was working on now—a kid newly in from Armenia, not a case of criminality as much as of culture shock.

  Well, there was more criminality in the case today but it was still something small. If Russ had left well enough alone after that first time, all the juvenile cases he handled would have been small, and he wouldn’t have ended up where he was now.

  Instead, he’d let the word get out that he was willing to take juvenile cases, and the excrement had hit the fan.

  The second case he’d taken involved a twelve-year-old boy who had first raped and then murdered a three-year-old in his neighborhood. The case was sensational, an international news circus of truly epic proportions. There were still Web sites devoted to vilifying the kid, three years after he’d been sent away. Hell, there were still Web sites devoted to vilifying Russ himself.

  The kid, of course, had been tried as an adult—sort of. He’d been tried in an adult court, but there was no possibility that someone that young could actually be incarcerated in an adult jail. The other inmates would eat him alive.

  The compromise had been to remand him to the juvenile justice system until he was eighteen, then to transfer him to an adult prison for the rest of his natural life. Russ had rehearsed all the arguments he had ever made against locking up juveniles forever: Their brains weren’t fully formed. They didn’t have the impulse control. They would mature out of violence if only you treated them right.

  The arguments all came to a crashing halt against the reality of John-Ray Croydon.

  The first time Russ met with him, the kid had sat tilted back in his hard wooden chair and said, “They told me in there you couldn’t tell anybody anything I said to you. Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” Russ had said.

  Even in those few seconds, Russ was able to feel something going wrong in the room. John-Ray’s eyes were hard little pits, all the more disconcerting because they were such a clear, bright blue. The kid looked like he’d been called up out of central casting to play the Carefree Barefoot Boy in some retro version of The Waltons.

  Except for the eyes. The eyes had been—absolutely literally—unbelievable.

  John-Ray broke out into a huge grin. “I did it before,” he said, almost hooting. “I did it twice before, and I can prove it.”

  I did it twice before, and I can prove it.

  They’d found the girl’s body in an abandoned building in North Philadelphia, torn up by the feral cats that roamed that part of the city the way coyotes once roamed the frontier towns of the Old West. She was only barely recognizable. To be absolutely sure, they had had to rely on DNA.

  Half the country was calling for Russ to be jailed along with the kid, just for agre
eing to defend him. The other half—well, he didn’t remember what the other half had been doing. Donna and Bennis had both insisted that even the worst criminals deserved a defense. He had told them so himself.

  And he still believed that. He really did. The system worked only if everybody got representation, if the government was required to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, if you dotted all the is and crossed all the ts.

  What he didn’t believe, anymore, was that there was no such thing as a bad boy, or that no one who was under the age of eighteen should be tried as an adult or put away for life. He knew now that there were “children” out there who weren’t really children. They were on a ramp up to becoming truly horrible, and the only way you could stop them was to lock them up early and lock them up irrevocably.

  A lot of people railed against Martha Handling’s sentencing practices, but Russ Donahue did not. He knew what she was up to. He even admired her for it. He thought she was a woman of principle.

  This morning, he thought even women of principle could run late, and he found it very annoying.

  The court was a big, bland room with the judge’s bench set up very high. There was the United States flag and the flag of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. There was Stefan Maldovanian sitting next to him at the defense table and Stefan’s aunt Sophie and brother, Petrak, in the seats just behind.

  Petrak Maldovanian leaned forward and said into Russ’s ear, “Where is Father Tibor? Father Tibor is supposed to be here.”

  This was true. And, Russ reminded himself, Stefan Maldovanian was not a John-Ray Croydon. He hadn’t raped or murdered anyone. He’d just gotten himself caught trying to shoplift DVDs out of a Good Times Movies store at the King of Prussia Mall.

  “I think maybe he’s had an accident,” Stefan said. “He promised he would be here. Father always does what he promises.”

  This was absolutely true. Russ thought it was too bad that Stefan Maldovanian didn’t always do what he promised, since the last thing he’d promised was to stay away from the Good Times Movies store at the King of Prussia Mall. That was after the first time he’d been caught shoplifting, when the store decided not to prosecute.

  “Let me go look,” Russ said, getting up. “Maybe he got lost in the maze.”

  “Where is the judge?” Petrak asked. “Isn’t she supposed to be here?”

  “She’s here somewhere,” Russ said. “Her first case ran. She must have heard it.”

  “It’s after eleven o’clock,” Petrak said.

  Russ gave no answer to that, and made his way out of the courtroom and into the hall.

  He felt enormously relieved, as if there had been rocks sitting on his chest, and now they were gone.

  6

  Dr. Janice Loftus was lost, and not only lost, but agitated. She was so agitated, she was finding it hard to think straight. If there was one thing Janice had always taken pride in, it was her ability to outthink anybody in any room anywhere, including men and the kind of university administrator who liked to rule by bullying.

  At the moment, she was in some back corridor somewhere, and the clock on the wall and the watch on her wrist both said it was after eleven o’clock. Somewhere in the building, the hearing on Petrak Maldovanian’s brother must have started. Janice wasn’t sure where. When she’d first decided to drive Petrak to the courthouse, she had a vague idea of serving as a Moral Witness. She’d thought of herself as sitting at the very back of the courtroom, looking up at Martha Handling, staring in a way that Martha could not ignore. Janice remembered Martha from Bryn Mawr. She’d been a fascist in those days, too.

  What bothered her most about finding out that the hearing was closed was that the possibility hadn’t occurred to her first. The Authorities were always closing hearings and meetings and everything else they had a hand in. They would close trials themselves if they thought they could get away with it. They usually couldn’t, because the right to a public trial was right there in the Constitution. Janice didn’t think much of the United States Constitution. She did think it sometimes had its uses.

  In this case, the hearing might have been closed because there was something peculiar about it, or because Martha Handling wanted her hearings closed so that nobody would know what she was doing, or because all juvenile hearings were closed. Janice didn’t know.

  She was very well versed on the ways of adult courts and hearings, but until now, she had never taken much interest in juveniles. There was something about juvenile law that always seemed to her to be squishy and unsatisfying, even when she knew it was a prime example of oppression. It was really incredible how many prime examples of oppression there were in the world.

  The corridor was empty. All the corridors leading into it or out of it also seemed to be empty. Janice could not hear anything she thought she should—like footsteps or talking. She had no idea how she had managed to get to where she was, or what she was supposed to do now that she was here.

  First she was at the little desk in the front. That’s where they had taken her cell phone and searched her bag and sent her through a metal detector. Then she had gone to the second desk right outside the hearing room. Then she was arguing with the guard about coming in. Then another guard was called, who was probably somebody of higher rank. Janice couldn’t tell. The other guard had been adamant. Janice had stalked off to pace.

  That was it. That was all Janice could remember.

  “Idiot,” she said out loud, just to hear noise in the corridor.

  She felt as if she were deep underground, although she didn’t think she was. There were no windows anywhere, and no doors to offices or closets. It was a strange place, made even stranger by the complete lack of sound.

  Superstition was a tool of oppression; she knew that. So was the belief in ghosts and goblins and God and all the rest of the supernatural universe. When people believed in those things, they also believed in their own powerlessness. They believed that their lives were controlled by a ghost in the sky and that they could do nothing to help themselves.

  That was why you had to be so careful all the time. Those ideas had been instilled into all of us as children. They could come back to haunt us even when we thought we had purged them completely.

  Up above her head there was a security camera, and there was something wrong with it. She couldn’t put her finger on what it was. The best she could come up with was that the thing looked flat. She was sure it wasn’t supposed to look flat.

  She kept moving along the corridor, looking from one side to the other so that she could spot all the cameras. There were millions of the things. They were everywhere. Welcome to the surveillance state.

  All of them looked just as flat as all the others. She kept squinting at them. They just sat where they were. They didn’t move. They didn’t tilt and follow her when she moved.

  She got to a bend in the corridor and began to wonder if this was the way the cameras were supposed to be. But just as she turned the corner, she saw something else.

  One of the camera lenses seemed to have something hanging from it.

  She stopped and stared. The camera was all the way up on the wall at the ceiling. There was nothing she could climb on. The corridor was completely, absolutely, and irrevocably empty.

  What was hanging from the camera lens was a little drop of something that looked like coagulated plastic, or maybe paint.

  There were a lot of reasons why someone might put black paint over a security camera’s lens. They could want to keep the camera from recording anything definite, without shutting it off completely, which might be noticed. But the act of painting might be noticed, because there were so many other cameras. Even if you were painting the lenses of every one, the others you hadn’t gotten to yet would record your progress.

  She made herself pick up speed. She was wearing tie shoes with soft soles, but she could still hear her own steps—slap slap slap, pound pound pound.

  She forced herself along, looking at the lens of each s
ecurity camera she found. They all had that flat look, but now Janice knew that somebody had deliberately put black paint over the lenses of every single camera.

  Janice reminded herself that most things that looked like they had been done by the deep forces of conspiracy hadn’t been. That was another way the oppressors kept the oppressed in line. All you had to do was to start thinking you were crazy. If you were crazy, then everything you saw was an illusion. It wouldn’t be just the paint on the camera lenses that was a delusion. It would be everything everywhere.

  This leg of the corridor was short. There was another turn, and Janice found herself right at the edge of a long row of doors. She couldn’t remember when she’d felt so relieved.

  She strode up to the closest one as quickly as she could. She knocked on the door. There was no answer. She tried the knob and found it turned without trouble. She looked at the nameplate by the door. It said MARILYN ALLEGETTI, but gave no other identification.

  Janice opened the door and looked inside. It was an ordinary office. There was a desk with a little L to the side, where the computer sat. There were some bookshelves. There were some chairs. It could have belonged to anybody, doing anything.

  Janice closed the door and stood very still. This corridor was not uninhabited. She could feel it. She could hear it.

  She could hear breathing.

  She went down the hall a little farther, stopping at each door and listening. Mostly what she heard was nothing. The names on the doors meant nothing.

  The name on the door in the middle of the line was finally one she recognized: JUDGE HANDLING, just like that. No first name. The other women in the corridor must be some kind of assistants. At any rate, they wouldn’t be judges.

  Janice stopped in front of Martha Handling’s door and listened some more. There was definitely breathing. It sounded labored and quick, unhealthy. Maybe Martha was in there having a heart attack. Maybe Martha was in there drinking.

  The breathing came on and on, heavy and shallow and rapid all at once. Janice rapped against the door as loudly as she could.