The One-Eyed Judge

by Ponsor, Michael;

  Sid Cranmer, alone in his house, was still recovering from his talk with Ames. Some years back, he’d read an article in the New York Times Magazine about a woman with Alzheimer’s who’d decided to take her own life before the disease cored out her mind entirely. The article described how she’d gotten what she needed from a source in Mexico. After that, it was just a matter of saying good-bye to her family and moving painlessly on. With a little effort, Sid dug up the article, found an address in Mexico on the Internet, and sent off for the things he might need.

  He was aware, of course, that he could make his quietus any time he wanted with the help of the .45 upstairs. Apart from taking the clip out, the search team had left the gun alone, which surprised him. When he’d asked, Patterson had just shrugged. “You’ve got a permit. The warrant doesn’t authorize seizure of firearms. But I’d start making arrangements to get rid of it soon.” Once Sid was convicted—something Patterson obviously considered inevitable—further possession of the gun would be a felony.

  At first, Sid was comfortable reserving the gun as his escape hatch if there was no hope. This exit strategy had occupied his mind a lot in the early days after his arrest—he’d even picked up an extra .45 clip online—sometimes calming him and offering relief, sometimes lowering him into a blank despair. Who, really, would give a shit if he blew his brains out? The world would just be relieved.

  The problem was that he hated the mess the gun would make. He knew very well what a high-caliber bullet did to a person’s skull. He kept thinking of his beige carpeting—the blood, bone, and globs of flesh spattered all over it—not to mention the shock in store for whoever found him, which would probably be poor Jonathan or, God forbid, Elizabeth.

  The tidier medical alternative attracted him. Ironically, though, when the supplies from Mexico promptly arrived, Sid was mildly outraged. Bending over the box, he whispered to himself: “Order a fucking out-of-print book, and you wait for weeks, but if you want to knock yourself off …” The key ingredient was something called pentobarbital, and he now had two hundred-milliliter vials of it. Enough to kill himself twice.

  As Darren was making his way to his office, he unzipped his leather jacket most of the way down. The sun was beginning to sift through the mist, and the prospect of the concert with Claire, and perhaps drinks somewhere afterward, was lifting him off the sidewalk. He was smitten, that was for sure, and it was time for him to settle down. He and Claire had similar interests and values, they were both at the college, and she was beautiful, in every way. They could take sabbaticals together. Travel. Make love often. Have kids.

  Darren knew he would be better for Claire than that shovelful of sod, Norcross. The guy might be decent and hardworking, but really. He looked like a man with a broom handle up his butt who figured, if he just maintained a thoughtful expression, no one would notice.

  A puff of breeze inflated the sides of his jacket, making it bubble out, an apt metaphor for how he was feeling. Then he heard someone calling his name, and the sight of Ryan Jaworski hurrying toward him punctured his cheerful mood. The kid was clearly agitated about something. He was trotting along with his hands in fists.

  Ryan quickly drew up and got right to the point. “Libby knows I saw the flyer.”

  Darren kept walking. “So?”

  Ryan put his hand on Darren’s arm, stopping him. “So? What do you mean, so? She could tell somebody—Lindemann or one of her friends, and I’d be—”

  Darren broke in, using his classroom voice. “I’m curious to know, Ryan, how she happened to learn about this.” Darren looked around. It didn’t seem as though anyone was within earshot, but it wasn’t impossible. One of the college patrol cars was parked at the side of Converse Hall.

  “It just sort of came out.” Ryan grabbed at Darren’s arm harder to stop him from walking off. “Listen, I can’t get in trouble, okay? My dad would cut my balls off.”

  “This is a fix you put yourself in, Ryan.”

  “Bullshit! You put me in it! You told me you thought it would be funny.”

  “That’s not true, Ryan. I said it would be funny, yes, but I never told you to do anything. I never put you anywhere.” He resumed walking, with Ryan in pursuit.

  “You did. I never would’ve—”

  “Hey!” Darren put his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Just calm down, okay?”

  They walked together for a few tense steps, Ryan muttering and shaking his head. Darren zipped up his jacket. Finally, he stopped and turned to Ryan, keeping his voice steady. “We’re just going to have to agree to disagree about what I said or didn’t say. All right?” He looked at Ryan, drawing out one of his well-practiced icy stares. Ryan glared back at him; he was not quailed. After a few more steps, Darren continued, in a more relaxed tone. “This does not have to be a problem, you know.”

  Ryan burst out. “Jesus Christ on a crutch, if I’d ever thought the FBI would get involved …” Ryan breathed in, pressing a hand against his chest. “But you had this cute idea.” The boy was more upset than Darren had realized. “Jesus, my dad! I can’t even think about it.”

  “Hey, listen to me,” Darren repeated. “This really does not have to be a problem, okay?” He pointed a finger at Ryan. “All you have to do is make sure your lady friend keeps her lip buttoned. You can do that, can’t you? Contain yourself, and contain the situation. As long as she is as silent as a tomb, neither of us will have a thing to worry about.”

  21

  Paul Campanella was anxious about his meeting with Linda Ames, so he put in a call to Mike Patterson and asked if he would sit in.

  “You need a bad cop?”

  Campanella could hear traffic in the background. Patterson must be out in the field.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m happy to sit in, Paul. Hold on a minute.” There was a sound of distant voices and a tractor-trailer accelerating. “Have to pay a toll.” A minute or two of grunting and rustling followed before Patterson’s voice resumed. “Okay. You be the good cop. I’ll be the bad cop. We can have some fun with la-la-lovely Linda.”

  A few days later, Campanella was waiting in his office on the second floor of the courthouse. Both Ames and Patterson were late. After checking his watch, Campanella hurried down the hall into the bathroom, hoping that one of them might arrive while he was gone and find his office empty. It wouldn’t hurt to make them wait for once.

  Linda Ames showed up accompanied by his secretary, Bonnie, just as he was returning. Ames apologized for being late, and Bonnie told him that Patterson had been held up.

  “I can wait if you want,” Ames said. She was wearing black jeans, running shoes, and a gray silk blouse. In court, she’d worn makeup and earrings, which she hadn’t troubled with today. Female charm apparently wasn’t her forte, which was a relief to Campanella. On the other hand, Ames’s offer to wait for Mike Patterson might imply that she didn’t think he had the chops to handle this situation on his own.

  “We can start.” Campanella pulled some papers from a file on his desk. “I can lay out what we’ve got here.”

  “Got your power tie on, I see.” Ames nodded at him slyly. This was true. He was wearing the lucky red paisley number Denise had gotten him for Valentine’s Day.

  “It’s just because you scare the hell out of me, Linda.” This happened to be true, sort of, but it worked as a fake joke and got a smile from Ames.

  “I don’t bite.”

  Campanella placed a pile of photocopies in the center of his desk. Boston had decided that this would be an “open file” case, meaning the U.S. attorney’s office was basically giving Ames every piece of paper the investigation had generated. Except in rare, particularly sensitive cases, this was a common practice. It had several advantages.

  First, criminal defendants often held back information from their attorneys or just plain lied. The prosecution file very often provided a better pictu
re of the crime than the half truths or flat-out malarkey the lawyer was getting from his or her client. Lots of times, the defense lawyer would end up using the documents received from the U.S. attorney’s office—photographs, witness statements, wire intercepts, and so forth—to persuade a reluctant defendant that his situation was hopeless if he went to trial. Since a guilty plea would usually get the client a lower sentence, nine times out of ten, the result would be no trial and a lot of effort saved for everybody. Campanella didn’t have any problem with this. Guilty people ought to plead guilty.

  Another advantage to the “open file” policy was that it protected a prosecutor from accusations that he or she had withheld evidence improperly. The law gave defendants the right to examine any evidence the government had that might be exculpatory, meaning evidence that tended to show that the defendant was innocent or that the case against him had holes. The consequences for a prosecutor who negligently or deliberately concealed this sort of material could be horrendous. Revelations of improperly hidden evidence could lead to mistrials and even outright dismissals. Worst of all, a touchy judge could go ballistic at a prosecutor and report him to the Board of Bar Overseers, get him fired, and destroy his career. With a guilty client shoveling out money, an aggressive defense lawyer would be on the lookout for some way to attack the AUSA and get a dismissal for prosecutorial misconduct where he could never get an acquittal before a jury.

  Campanella was determined to avoid this trap. He cleared his throat and launched into his summary for Ames.

  “The case originally came out of a child-exploitation task force in the Chicago division of the FBI. They received a tip from the NCMEC that—”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sorry. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.” Campanella handed Ames a copy of the FBI form opening the case eight months earlier. “The tip related to the posting of child pornography images on something called ‘Yahoo Groups.’ It’s a free service for people—”

  “I know what a Yahoo group is. For people with the same hobby, right? Like stamp collectors.”

  “Maybe, but not in this case. A task force officer using an undercover ID got access to a Yahoo Group called ‘Candyman’ and discovered that forty-three individuals were using it to discuss their mutual interest in child sexual abuse and to swap images of underage pornography. One of the individuals, who used the ID ‘Luv2look,’ shared child pornographic images with his chat buddies, including this one.”

  Campanella passed a black-and-white photocopy to Ames. It showed a naked girl, who looked about five years old, with her arms tied over her head and her vagina exposed. Something that looked like a clamp device was fixed on one of her nipples.

  “Ugh,” Ames said. She turned the photograph over, closed her eyes, and shook her head.

  “It wasn’t hard to trace ‘Luv2look’ back to your client.”

  “Well,” Ames said. “We’ll see.”

  “Sure.” Campanella pushed another document toward her. “On April 23, the U.S. Customs Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Virginia, issued this administrative subpoena to Yahoo, Inc. requesting subscriber information for ‘Luv2look.’”

  “I never heard of any Cyber Crimes Center.”

  “They’re pretty new, a division of Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE. The return on the subpoena disclosed the IP address used by Luv2look.” Campanella pointed at a line at the top of a new document. “You can see it listed there: 67.31.142.44, okay? They could tell, for example, that this IP address was online on April 18 at 23:46:22 EST, a little before midnight. You’ll see it in the log when you go through it.”

  Campanella pulled another sheet out of his file. “ICE served a subpoena on Comcast on May 4. The return identified the user of this particular IP address as belonging to your client Sidney Cranmer, with a particular Amherst street number.” He slid the sheet of paper over to Ames, who leaned back in her chair without looking at it.

  “The images your client posted were forwarded to an FBI intelligence analyst named Brittany Gomez, who compared them to known victims contained in the CVIP—”

  “Got to translate for me again, Paul.”

  “Child Victim Identification Program. Gomez looked for matches to known child victims. Her analysis disclosed positive hits, including six from one particularly notorious group called the Bauchwalder series, where the father was the abuser. Here’s Gomez’s report.”

  “I saw some of the Bauchwalder stuff in a case last year before you came to Springfield.” Ames sighed. “Not pretty.”

  “Right, it’s been floating around for more than ten years now. Thanks to the Internet, it will never disappear. Somebody’s probably looking at it right now.” Campanella glanced up at Ames and hazarded a dart. “Very popular with people like your client.”

  “Ease up, Paul. You don’t have him convicted yet.”

  The Bauchwalder series was heartbreaking and especially infuriating to Campanella. Typical images of child pornography showed the child victim frozen and terrified, usually in severe physical pain, which was unforgettably appalling in itself. Occasionally, though, the child had been coached, or physically coerced, into pretending she was enjoying the things being done to him or her. This fake eagerness, the glimpses of the degraded child looking up anxiously at the videographer in hope of approval—Was she being a good girl? Would he get another beating?—were somehow even worse than the images of pure torture.

  The notion of an adult doing this to a child was the moral bottom, in Campanella’s opinion, the lowest a member of the human species could go. The popularity of this kind of child pornography derived from the perceived absolution it gave the viewer. “See,” the video seemed to say, “she isn’t being injured—she’s having fun. She likes it!” But the frightened glances and frozen smiles of the Bauchwalder girl made the truth obvious. A child’s life was being destroyed. Elise Bauchwalder had died of a heroin overdose at age seventeen, and the fact that the girl’s father was serving a seventy-year sentence in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, was slim consolation.

  At this point, the door opened, and Patterson stepped in.

  “Sorry I’m late. I-91 was bad.” He hauled a chair from the corner of the room and positioned it across the desk from Campanella, next to Ames. His large body seemed to take up a lot of space.

  “Show and tell?” He gestured down at the pile of papers, then turned to Ames, holding out a hand. The two shook, both with their game faces on, expressionless. Campanella sensed immediately that Ames might think of Patterson as her real adversary. He’d have to watch that.

  “Just wrapping up,” Campanella said to Patterson, then turned to Ames. “Based on your client’s street address, the investigation was transferred to the postal inspector here in Massachusetts, which coordinated with our local FBI office. Postal Inspector Tom Levine sent a flyer to Professor Cranmer, inviting him to become a customer of Tiger Entertainment, a company purporting to specialize, as the flyer said, in ‘taboo, hard-to-find, forbidden material.’ The flyer had a list of DVDs with titles and short descriptions that left no room for doubt about their contents. Three days later, your client mailed back the flyer, with his credit card information, ordering the DVD called ‘Playing Doctor.’ The description says that it involves a prepubescent girl supposedly being examined by a doctor. According to the flyer, she is quote ‘spread-eagled on a table while the doctor’—”

  “I read the flyer, Paul.”

  “Hot stuff,” Patterson said, with a disgusted look.

  “You’ve got no confirmed handwriting,” Ames said. “You can’t even …”

  “Block capitals.” Patterson’s face turned impatient. “Probably using his nondominant hand. A typical dodge. Shows your professor knew he had to be—”

  “If it was my professor,” Ames broke in.

  A short, pregnant silence followed, until Campanella cont
inued. “Fine, Linda. As you know, we got an anticipatory search warrant from Judge Norcross, authorizing Mike’s team to enter your client’s house as soon as the DVD was delivered. Professor Cranmer admitted to the agent posing as the UPS driver that he was expecting the DVD, and he told Agent Patterson that he recognized it as something he ordered.”

  “More or less,” Patterson interjected.

  “My client denies ever saying or implying any such thing.” Ames’s voice had an edge.

  Campanella made a mental note of this. Was Ames actually thinking of putting Cranmer on the stand? He prayed she would. He would roast the guy alive on cross-examination.

  After another pause, Campanella continued. “Well, that may be up to the jury to decide, Linda. It will be his word against two federal agents.”

  “Three actually,” Patterson held up his fingers. “Maybe more, if I ask around. But who’s counting?”

  “And then there’s all this junk.” Campanella shoved a fat subfile across the desk to Ames, who eyed it suspiciously. “A search of your client’s computer disclosed three separate files, all with code names to disguise their contents, containing nearly one hundred still images of child pornography and three videos he’d downloaded.”

  Patterson looked over at Ames. “Our cyber guys also pulled up the contents of Luv2look’s chat-room conversations. One of Cranmer’s chat buddies used the ID ‘loves_infant_pussy.’ Real hard to figure that one out. LIP and Sid got up close and personal, talking about yanking diapers off and so forth.” Patterson leaned back and folded his arms. “My bet is, one or two of the jurors will actually throw up. I’ve seen that happen twice now.”

  “So that’s it. These are all copies of originals.” Campanella gestured at the pile of papers. “You can take them with you, Linda. Just let me know if anything’s missing, and I’ll get it to you.”