“M-My name’s not Henry.”
The black guy spoke down to him. “You’re all named Henry.”
They dropped him abruptly inside the railing. The landing hurt and produced a gray puff of air that smelled like concrete dust. The shorter guy was wiping his hands on the back of his jeans, making a face as though he had touched something filthy.
“What’s the matter, Henry? Can’t take a joke?”
A shadow fell across his face, and he saw the black cop on one knee looking down at him. The others were standing in the background, hands on their hips.
A blue light was bouncing off the side of the building. In the pale flashes, the faces appeared and vanished, like devils out of some nightmare. He could see they were all still hoping to kill him. What was going to happen? He couldn’t stop making little squeaks. Was it him or someone else? The cuffs, mashed between the concrete and the middle of his spine, cut into him.
The deep voice slid into his ear again. “My name is Mike Patterson. I’m a special agent with the FBI. You have certain rights, and I want to be sure you understand them. You have a right to remain silent. Anything you say …”
Out of the corner of his eye, in the six inches under the bottom rung of the railing, he could just make out a pickup truck down in the parking lot, rounding the corner of the building. It was Buddy, with his right-front headlight still out. For once in his godforsaken life, the fact that Buddy could never get anywhere on time was working out for him. One of the plainclothes guys was leaning over the balcony, keeping an eye on the lot. Buddy never hesitated, just drove slowly right past the squad cars and the milling cops and on around the far corner, as though he didn’t have a thing in the world to worry about.
A glimmer of last-laugh satisfaction flickered across his mind. Buddy was not the brightest bulb on the tree, but he had a fuck-you-all vicious streak that ran deep. He wouldn’t appreciate being cheated out of his little fun. Some of these bastards must have kids, and somebody besides him was going to rue this day.
PART THREE
DIRECT AND CROSS
31
You mean, you just let Patterson come in your living room and start asking questions?” Elizabeth couldn’t believe it. “And you waited all this time to tell me?”
Elizabeth and Ryan were heading to class, squeezed under a dented umbrella, which protected them hardly at all from the stinging rain. The air was sharp and carried a tang of distant charcoal. The Thanksgiving break was a week away.
When Ryan didn’t say anything, she continued, a notch louder.
“And your dad’s supposedly a big-shot lawyer? Good grief, Ry, my dad made Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and I know better than that.”
“He was only there for, like, two minutes.”
“Yeah, but you answered his questions, right?” When Ryan didn’t say anything, she went on, increasingly angry. “I gave him the polite kiss-off, Ryan, to protect you. I didn’t tell him you’d been at Professor Cranmer’s house. I didn’t tell him that you saw the flyer, okay? Because I just didn’t talk to him.”
“I know, and I love you for that, Lib. I really do.” Ryan’s eyes brimmed with sincerity.
It was true that Ryan did love her, in his way. Elizabeth’s birthday had been a good example. He’d arranged a catered dinner at his condo, complete with candelabra, lobster, and two bottles of sparkling wine in an ice bucket. At the end of the meal, he’d blindfolded her, and when he’d slipped off the blindfold, there was her birthday cake, candles ablaze, with a Tiffany-blue box sitting next to it. Inside the box was the most beautiful piece of jewelry Elizabeth had ever seen, a diamond-and-emerald pendant on a delicate silver rope. The pendant was in the shape of a sycamore leaf—the Jaworski tree.
So it was true, yes, that Ryan did love her, sort of. But his version of love hadn’t stopped him from showing Ridge the video or snuggling up with his little friend Jackie when he had the chance or lying about the flyer. He’d do anything for her, except be honest.
They walked along in silence under the rain. Most of the trees were bare now, and the sidewalks across campus were a sodden mat of brown and yellow leaves. Elizabeth had been right to grab Sid’s pictures. Ryan had obviously ratted the professor out. It was such a shithead thing to do she could hardly believe it.
Ryan stopped, keeping the umbrella over Elizabeth. “Wait a sec, okay?” He looked at the ground, getting himself ready to give one of his speeches. “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.” He stared at her, letting the rain trickle down his face. “You’re right. I shouldn’t have spoken to the FBI guy. I’m just not as smart as you are, Lib. I don’t know how to do that thing you do.” He scraped a wad of leaves off the walkway with the side of his shoe. “I get freaked out, and I worry about my dad and everything. You saved my ass by not talking to Patterson.”
“I did.”
“But let’s not fight, okay? We fight too much these days. I just …” Ryan wiped a hand over his face. “I just want to be like we were.”
“Let me think about that.” They continued on their way to class, saying hello to an occasional friend. By good luck, no one was going their way. The rain was beginning to let up as they parted for separate classes.
“You keep the umbrella,” Ryan said, offering it to her.
“I was planning to, since it’s mine.” Elizabeth smiled and let her face soften as she gave Ryan a quick kiss.
“Okay, no fighting.” She held a finger up under his nose. “But behave yourself, buddy boy. Remember you’ve got a birthday coming up. We have big plans for you if you’re good.”
Ryan’s face eased into a lopsided smile. “What do you mean ‘we’?”
“Just be good, Ry, and you’ll find out.”
“You know I’m always good, Lib. Really good.” His smile broadened, deepening the dimple in his right cheek.
Ryan’s birthday, February 12, was still almost three months way, which was fortunate, because Elizabeth needed the time to operationalize her plan to settle up with him. Her scheme might teach Ryan a useful lesson; if it didn’t, it would at least get her justice.
The plan had three parts: chemical, logistical, and psychological. She could manage the first two, no problem. The third was tricky, and potentially dangerous, since that portion of the program required Ryan’s cooperation, and he had to be kept totally in the dark right up to the big moment.
For the chemical part, Elizabeth would have her lab partner, Chase Bergstrom. Chase was a fellow midwesterner, a brilliant chemist, and a complete nerd. He regularly experimented with various drugs to help with his social awkwardness, and he was the go-to guy for party meds, which he either concocted himself or ordered over the Internet. Chase’s transparent crush on Elizabeth made it natural to ask him for help, and she could be sure he’d keep quiet afterward.
To carry out her plan, Elizabeth needed three chemicals. The first, Chase simply “borrowed” from the lab: sixty milliliters of pure alcohol. She might not need it all. Ryan’s tolerance for booze was so low that two large glasses of red wine typically had him slurring his speech and making loud, stupid jokes. A flavorless boost, slipped into his merlot while he wasn’t looking, would give him three or four glasses in one.
The other two intoxicants, roofies and liquid X, would take more work. Roofies were sold by prescription as Rohypnol, but Elizabeth and Chase referred to them by their chemical name, flunitrazepam, a class of benzodiazepine and the primary ingredient in notorious “rape cocktails.” Chase ordered the roofies from Thailand, where they were still available in two-milligram, tasteless, easily dissolvable white tablets, which were illegal in the United States and Europe. Their effect, Chase said, was to induce a kind of pliant automatism and what he called “anterograde amnesia”—meaning that if you popped a couple roofies, you would have trouble, the next day, remembering exactly what had happened.
“Liquid X”
was a party drug, sometimes known as “GHB,” for gamma hydroxybutyrate, very effective in generating a lust-crazed, anything-goes state of mind. Elizabeth and Ryan had tried a dose once, and the resulting marathon sex had given Elizabeth a urinary tract infection that took two rounds of antibiotics to snuff out.
If the chemical aspect of Elizabeth’s plan went right, the overall effect on Ryan would be to reduce him to an extremely horny zombie.
Part two, the logistical element, involved finding a large, high-ceilinged trysting spot, very private, where no one would hear Ryan if he made noise. With some poking around, Elizabeth located an auxiliary garage on the edge of campus, fifty yards down a twisting dirt and gravel road. The Amherst College snowplows were parked on the ground floor, but the second floor was empty except for some equipment covered by a tarp in one corner. The upstairs room had no ceiling, only bare beams exposing the underside of the roof. Best of all, by plan or fluke, the college kept the garage heated, and the rising air made the empty room on the second floor nice and toasty, which was important to Elizabeth’s plan.
That left only the challenge of getting her boyfriend’s unknowing cooperation. At first, Elizabeth was concerned that she would have only Ryan’s impaired judgment and her own resourcefulness to count on. Then, with a lift from whatever gods watch over abused girlfriends, Ryan’s handling of her birthday celebration, including the blindfold and the necklace, provided the perfect setup. Now Elizabeth had her own version of Ryan’s scenario in mind. With any luck, his twenty-first birthday would be something he would remember for the rest of his pathetic life.
32
As Judge Norcross looked down from the bench at the cast of United States v. Cranmer, he became aware of a sensation of relief that he didn’t like. In the wake of two continuances requested by the defendant, and a postponement necessitated by a paralyzing sleet storm, Professor Cranmer was finally making it to court to offer his guilty plea.
This feeling of something approaching pleasure was not good. Judges often experienced satisfaction when some contentious piece of litigation resolved, but this case was different. Norcross knew that Professor Cranmer’s admission that he had, in fact, ordered the contraband DVD would be gratifying to him personally, and this fact was making him distinctly uncomfortable.
A big part of the judge’s ambivalence had to do with how things were going at home. Moving Lindsay and Jordan to Amherst had been a pistol. He didn’t know what Ray had said during his “talk” with them, but all through the flight from Washington, Jordan hardly spoke more than three sentences, just stared out the window with her mouth open. And Lindsay didn’t utter a single syllable, barely even looked at him. It was as though they were being taken off to be executed. In the coming weeks, Norcross would need to give more of his attention to his nieces, and the removal of the Cranmer distraction, he had to admit, would be a big help in that department.
Then there was Claire. She’d responded to the girls’ arrival by being incredibly generous and helpful. She’d located an Amherst College freshman to act as an after-school nanny for Jordan, and she’d joined the three of them for several of their awkward dinners. Once, when he and Claire were alone for a few minutes, he’d briefly broken their ban on discussions about Cranmer and asked her how on earth she happened to be at the defendant’s house during the second search. She’d told him, a little breezily, that it was just a fluke, just one of her occasional visits—Sid was still her friend, after all, and he deserved support—but Norcross had a terrible inkling that something more might be going on. Getting Cranmer’s case closed was the only way out of this briar patch.
The judge opened his plea folder and exhaled to allow this tangle of emotions to slide past. In the microgap before his mind shifted entirely to the courtroom, his memory of Claire changed shape and warmed him like a passing burst of sun. She’d stayed at his house over Thanksgiving when Lindsay and Jordan had a trial visit to Washington. This visit hadn’t gone well—Ray was rehospitalized shortly after they departed—but it had been a heavenly interlude for Claire and him. They had a lot to be thankful for.
Judge Norcross took a sip of water and moved into his standard plea colloquy.
“Professor Cranmer, we are here this afternoon, as I understand it, to take your plea of guilty to the charge of possessing child pornography. There are some questions I need to ask you and some things I need to be sure you understand.”
As he focused more carefully on the professor, Norcross noticed that Cranmer was looking odd, even for him. He’d lost a lot of weight, which was not unusual for a criminal defendant, and his shirt collar was drooping sadly, but what struck Norcross most was the man’s posture. Cranmer was sitting, frozen, on the front three inches of his chair, his short body stiffly upright and angled forward. The fingers of his right hand were resting on his upper lip, as though he’d just heard something upsetting or was trying to conceal a burp. His only moving parts were his two eyes, enlarged by his glasses, which kept flickering up to the bench and then dropping down into the well of the court. His unkempt hair hung over his collar. He looked distinctly creepy and possibly on the verge of a meltdown.
Norcross checked defense counsel for a hint about what might be up with her client, but Linda Ames, her arms comfortably folded, looked unconcerned. From time to time, she glanced without expression over at Cranmer. As Norcross watched, Ames’s lips moved, and Cranmer’s hand dropped from his mouth into his lap.
To the right, Assistant U.S. Attorney Campanella seemed irritated, or anxious, or both. He was drumming faintly on the table and stroking his goatee. Next to him, Special Agent Patterson exuded boredom, as though he hoped the proceeding would be over quickly so he could go do something more important.
Norcross shoved forward, bringing himself an inch or two closer to the defendant. He tugged his robe back over his knees, so the hem would not snag in the casters of his big leather chair.
“I want you to know that as we go through this process, Professor, you should feel free to speak up if you’re not following me. I’ll be happy to repeat or explain myself at any time, okay?”
A murmur from Linda Ames prompted a jerky nod from Cranmer. “Okay.”
The Republican reporter had moved from her usual perch at the right-hand side of the back row of the gallery to the front, directly behind Cranmer. The defendant tended to mumble, and she clearly didn’t want to miss anything. A sketch artist sat next to her, working quickly. Once in a while, these drawings would include a depressing likeness of Judge Norcross in the background, making him look older than he felt and grimly pompous. The coverage of Cranmer’s plea would definitely be above the fold in tomorrow’s paper.
“Same goes if you need to talk to your lawyer. You can confer with Ms. Ames at any time. Just let me know, okay?”
“Okay.” Cranmer’s voice was a little croaky. Had he been crying? Yelling?
“Now, let me tell you how I go about taking a plea. In a couple minutes, I’m going to ask you to step up into the witness box, over there.” Norcross pointed to his left. “Ms. Johnson will place you under oath, and I will have a series of questions for you. A guilty plea generally takes me about half an hour, but we’ll take as long as you need, to be sure you know exactly what you’re doing. Do you have any questions before we get started?”
“No.” Cranmer cleared his throat into his fist. “Nothing so far.”
The inflection of Cranmer’s answer—the suggestion that he might have questions later—prompted a smothered stiffening in Ames and a twitch from Campanella.
Was Cranmer going to have trouble getting through this? Norcross knew from reading the plea agreement that the government was giving this guy a very, very sweet deal. Was there really any chance that Cranmer would throw a gift like this away, in return for a hopeless trial?
The temptation Norcross sometimes felt in these situations was to hustle the defendant through the guilty pl
ea as quickly as possible to rescue him from his own disastrous reluctance. He generally resisted this urge, and he certainly wasn’t going to give in to it today. His written plea script, an outline of reminders he always used in taking guilty pleas, sat squarely in front of him, and he intended to follow it, question by question. Cranmer was going to have to cough everything up, or go to trial, with no special help from him.
“All right, sir, at this stage, I’ll ask you to step up into the witness box, please. Raise your right hand. Ms. Johnson will place you under oath.”
Cranmer stood mechanically and made his way around the counsel table toward the witness box. Norcross used the time to top off his water, setting the small paper cup to the right of the pretrial services report. It pleased him that the report confirmed Cranmer’s good behavior during his home confinement. For all of Campanella’s dire predictions at the initial appearance, the decision not to lock him up had been correct.
Ruby Johnson stood and raised her right hand, pronouncing the oath in her elegantly tinted Jamaican accent.
“Raise your right hand, please. Do you solemnly swear that the testimony you will give to this court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”
“I do.”
As Cranmer took his seat and Ruby returned to her desk in front of the bench, the door to the courtroom swung open, and a gaggle of teenagers blundered in, supervised by a stocky, dark-haired woman. Presumably a teacher, she gave an apologetic grimace toward Norcross’s end of the courtroom and began shooing the kids onto the pews. Everyone turned to look.
Norcross leaned down and whispered to Ruby. “What do we have here?”
Ruby swiveled in her chair. “Students from Amherst Regional High. Forgot to tell you. Sorry.”
“Ah.” Then he spoke louder, nodding in the direction of the students. “Welcome.” He paused to give them a chance to get settled.
The One-Eyed Judge Page 25
