Backfire

32

San Francisco General Hospital

Monday morning

Ramsey blamed himself, Eve saw it clearly on his freshly shaved face, just as she’d known he would.

“It’s obvious to me that by suspending the trial, I alerted the Cahills or whoever is working with them that I suspected something going on with Mickey’s prosecution. If only I’d held off that day, let the pretrial motions continue until I could talk to him privately, he might still be alive.”

Eve said, “It isn’t like you to sit back and watch a train wreck, is it, Ramsey? You did what was appropriate, what your experience and your training told you to do. Who could have known what would happen?”

Ramsey plowed right over her, shaking his head back and forth. “No, no, I should have thought it through better. I should have realized that with the death penalty on the table, whoever was controlling Mickey wouldn’t draw the line at anything. It’s my fault they killed him, no one else’s.”

Eve said patiently, “Ramsey, say Mickey had succeeded in manipulating you, and you had ruled to dismiss the federal case against the Cahills. Do you think they would have let Mickey live? I think you know as well as I do after what happened that Mickey was dead the minute they threatened his family. If he’d come to you, maybe it would have turned out differently, but he didn’t.”

Slowly, he shook his head. She hated it. He looked defeated. “I should have approached him differently, gotten him to confide in me-if he’d told me, I could have made sure he’d be safe. And his family.”

She lightly tapped her fist against his arm. “Stop this, Ramsey, you’re pissing me off. A monster hiding in a human skin did this. No more blaming yourself or I’ll have to punish you for it when you’re well again.”

He didn’t smile. “I’ve been thinking about why they shot me, of course. I’m a judge, and if a judge is doing his job, he’s providing an even playing field to give the jury the best chance of arriving at the truth, not to influence the jury in any one direction.

“So why me? Most of my pretrial rulings had been in the Cahills’ favor, in fact. And the bigger question-why did they try to kill me again after the trial was dead in the water, at least in my court? We were done with each other, so why?”

He looked at each of them. “The only answer I’ve come up with is that they think Mickey may have talked to me before they could grab him, told me something dangerous for them, either about the case itself or implicating whoever had threatened him. That would also explain why they tried to shoot me again on Saturday, while they could hope I was still too ill and drugged to have spoken to anyone.”

“That’s a reasonable scenario, Judge Hunt,” Harry said. “We’re certain someone was working with the Cahills, probably a professional. And the man-we’re calling him Sue for the moment-might have a great deal to lose if he’s exposed. As a matter of fact, Sue did try to find out if Mr. O’Rourke told you anything before he kidnapped him, but O’Rourke didn’t have any information to give him, and so he ended O’Rourke’s life.”

Ramsey said, “So whoever this Sue is, you can be sure the Cahills are up to their earlobes in this with him; there’s simply no other explanation.” He paused for a moment, his eyes narrowing. “Molly already knew Mickey was dead last night, didn’t she? She knew, and she kept quiet about it.”

Eve said, “No, I didn’t tell Molly.”

“The TV didn’t work, either. I wondered why not. What’d you do, Agent, unplug it?”

“I asked one of your guards to unplug the TV, Judge Hunt,” Harry said.

“I hate lying here feeling helpless, everyone guarding me, shielding me. I’m pretty sick of it.” He smacked his fist on the bed and swallowed.

Eve waited a moment until he had himself together again, then looked him straight in the face. “I had nothing to do with it. It was all Harry’s idea.”

What moxie. Harry had to work hard to keep the laugh in. She was a piece of work, fast on her feet. He couldn’t help but admire that. She’d succeeded in distracting Judge Hunt. Harry saw incredulity, disbelief, and then humor in his eyes.

Harry said, “Yes, sir, it’s true. I ordered Deputy Barbieri to keep her mouth shut, and I told everyone here in the hospital to keep this from you or I’d have them all fired.”

“But still-” Ramsey said, but Eve overrode him. “You want guilt? Give me a big share, okay? I allowed you to very nearly get killed in the elevator only two days ago.”

Ramsey frowned at her. “Get real, Eve.”

“I will if you will. Listen, we all do our feeble best, and sometimes things simply don’t go the way we planned or we prefer. Did your recovery take a hit from that fiasco Saturday?”

“No, the elevator business didn’t faze me, Eve. Dr. Kardak even told me I was such a superb physical specimen he felt comfortable taking out the chest tube this morning. They took away my morphine pump, too. I’m on oral pain medication now, and I’m thinking a lot more clearly.” He looked from Eve to Harry. “You two are quite a team, aren’t you?”

“We’re not a team,” Harry said. “That’s a vicious rumor.”

“That’s right,” Eve said. “If we were a team, Harry would be saluting me by now.”

“In your dreams,” Harry said.

Ramsey didn’t laugh. He knew how bad it would make him hurt. He said, “So you think Sue is a code name for a man? That simplifies things, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a start,” Harry said. “All we can do is keep digging.”

“If we were a team, Ramsey,” Eve said, “you could count on me telling the boy here where to dig.”

A laugh came out this time. Ramsey closed his eyes and took some light shallow breaths against the stabbing pain in his chest where the tube was removed. Slowly, too slowly, he eased. He said, “Emma’s performance is in a week and a half. I keep telling my body to get over it and stop whining at me. I really don’t want to miss it.” He managed a smile. “Do you know what a pain it is to have to lie here and let people come in and out and torture you? Amazing that the hospital makes you pay them for it.” He realized he had come full circle. “Sorry for the complaints. I’m a loser. Just belt me.”

“Nah,” Eve said, “not until you have a prayer of belting me back.” He was exhausted, Eve saw it, knew Harry saw it, too. Not only exhausted, he seemed flattened emotionally, like Molly. She knew he’d think about Mickey O’Rourke’s murder and blame himself for a very long time.

She watched Ramsey close his eyes. He said, barely above a whisper, “You’ve got to find the worthless son of a bitch who did this.”

She took his hand, squeezed it. “We will, Ramsey, I swear we will.”

There were two marshals and two SFPD officers nearby, two outside and two inside the room. Of course they’d been listening. She knew they’d all discuss the O’Rourke murder with Ramsey after she and Harry left. Perhaps they’d come up with something. She knew the deputy marshal who was stationed outside Ramsey’s room was smart and committed to keeping Ramsey safe. Not a single sign of trouble, he’d said when they’d arrived to see Ramsey. She hoped it stayed that way.

She said to the guards standing by the window, “Hey, has Judge Hunt talked you into playing poker with him yet?”

Ramsey groaned.

“What, you haven’t stripped them of their paychecks, Ramsey?”

“No, not our paychecks,” Officer Mancusso said. “We told him he’d have to fix parking tickets for our wives.”

Ramsey said, “I tried to tell them I couldn’t fix a thing since I’m a federal judge, not a state judge.”

Mancusso winked at her. “We don’t believe him. We figure a federal judge has got friends everywhere.”

“If you win, Ramsey, what will you get from them?”

Ramsey didn’t open his eyes. “I’m thinking maybe they can get one of their buddies in Contra Costa County to ticket my chief judge’s boat in Discovery Bay. He’s having way too much fun on Cyrano-his big bad cabin cruiser-and drives way too fast. Scares the crap out of the fish. He deserves a couple of tickets, and he needs to spend more time in here commiserating with me.”

Mancusso said, “I heard the chief judge has friends everywhere, too, sir.”