Judgment

75

She parked in the underground parking garage across the street from the courthouse. Finding a space there was no problem at this time of night.

The courthouse was closed, but her ID allowed her to enter after hours. She greeted the security guard, Rodrigo, by name.

“Very late for you, Judge,” Rodrigo said.

“No rest for the wicked,” she said.

“No, ma’am.”

She took the elevator to the ninth floor. It was dark, and her footsteps echoed.

A security guard walked by. She tensed. Not someone she knew. She kept going down the hall to her lobby. She unlocked the door and switched on the light.

She remembered Hersh’s words, when he first came to her office: I could pick that lock inside of a minute and a half.

Might he have left his file for her here, in her office?

Maybe, maybe not. He’d said he might bring it by. But at the same time, he was less than impressed by the security in the courthouse. Her office was easy to get into, too easy.

She looked around, looked at her desk, the side table heaped with paper, all the usual places. But nothing that looked like it could be Hersh’s file.

As she scanned the room, she was hyperaware of the noises around her, of passing footsteps, someone coughing as he or she walked by. Her nerves were taut.

Then a thought occurred to her. You a big Trollope fan?

He’d been showing off when he picked her book safe right off the shelf. But neither one of them had said anything aloud about it being a hiding place. So perhaps...

She looked at the bookcase where Barchester Towers was shelved.

It was gone.

What the hell? She winced as she thought of her favorite pearl earrings and the pile of cash, almost five hundred dollars. Well, she had bigger things to worry about.

Then she found the book safe on the shelf below. Someone had moved it.

Maybe a signal?

She pulled the book off the shelf and opened it. Inside the compartment, in addition to the cash and the earrings, were a couple of folded pages and a small USB stick.

Hersh’s file.

Juliana unfolded the papers and realized quickly she was looking at a bank transaction. Multiple transactions. Wire transfers. Between the Russian Commercial Bank of Cyprus, a subsidiary of the VTB bank of Russia, and Mayfair Paragon.

Proof that Yuri Protasov was a Kremlin puppet.

She wondered where Hersh could possibly have found it. She slotted the USB drive into her laptop. That opened a PDF document containing the same information. She downloaded it and e-mailed it to herself.

She wondered how many statutes Hersh had broken in order to secure this damaging information. How many laws he’d broken. All her life, she’d been a rule-follower, she realized. She loved the certainty, the absoluteness of abiding by a set of rules. But the rules were no longer helping. If she was going to survive, and protect her family, she’d have to make up her own rules.

She refolded the pages and put them, along with the USB stick, in her purse. Then she turned off the lights and locked the door, but before she did, she glanced into the hallway to make sure no one was coming.

She left the courthouse the same way, said goodnight to Rodrigo, and walked out into the plaza, into the adjoining Center Plaza building, to the elevator bank. And down into the parking garage. Everything was quiet. The elevator stopped on the floor below and someone got in, a man wearing a hoodie and orange sunglasses and Beats headphones, his head bopping. He pressed his floor button; then he pulled back his hoodie, and she saw the shaved head and the jutting jaw, and her stomach did a flip. The ropy muscles, the powerful build.

The fake janitor. Greaves.

He inserted a small key in the elevator panel, and the elevator shuddered to a stop between floors.

“The good news for you,” he said, “is that this is the last you’ll be seeing of me.”

She froze in place. There was nowhere to run. Her pulse raced. “What do you want?”

“Seems you weren’t a good candidate for blackmail,” Greaves said. “You got pushed, and you just started digging. Trying to get the goods on us, and maybe getting a little close. So that changes the whole calculation, see. You’re clearly not someone who can be intimidated into silence. Not someone who can be humiliated onto the sidelines.”

“I’m glad you figured that out.”

“Which means there’s no point making threats any longer.”

“Then what do you call this?”

“Oh, I’m not here to threaten you. I’m here to terminate you.” He said it matter-of-factly, as if he were ordering a pizza. In that moment she noticed he was wearing blue nitrile gloves, like a surgeon’s.

He lunged at her, shoved her hard into the elevator wall. Her head bounced against the cladding. He was on her now, his big arms around her, his hands clutching her throat, squeezing hard.

She tried to struggle, to kick and swing her arms, but she could barely move them; he was too close, and he was so much bigger. She could smell his meaty breath.

He made unwavering eye contact with her. She could see every capillary in his eyes. What was that thing they say, that if a mammal makes prolonged eye contact with another, it’s an assertion of dominance — to be followed by fighting or screwing?

Greaves was going to kill her.

But he was not doing it quickly. If he wanted to, he could surely dispatch her easily and quickly, snapping her neck in an instant. Instead, he seemed to be protracting the process. This was not just a professional task to him. He was enjoying it.

His hands squeezed her throat, and she gagged.

She tried to say “Please,” but it came out blez.

Finally she wrested a hand loose from his grip. She felt around for her purse, found it on her left side, over her shoulder, just out of reach. She was seeing stars. She could smell the man’s aftershave, the gloves, a rancid odor of sweat.

Her fingers scrabbled inside the purse, felt stuff, objects her fingers didn’t recognize. Her head was swimming.

Greaves began to talk, in a calm voice. “Somebody with a grudge followed you out of the courthouse,” he said. “An aggrieved felon you once sentenced, perhaps.”

She screamed soundlessly.

“A criminal you put away when you were an assistant US Attorney, let’s say. There will be theories. I see a big front-page story in The Boston Globe. A story about how vulnerable judges are. The governor will say it’s shocking.”

He squeezed harder now, and her head felt like it was exploding. Her body had gone into panic mode. Her lungs were burning: it felt like they were on fire, like her chest would explode.

“Lots — of people — will show up — at your funeral.” He throttled her harder, and her eyes felt like they were going to pop out.

It can’t end this way. Her thoughts were like a rusted hinge, shrieking again and again, Can’t end this way can’t end this way.

Can’t end this way.

The strength was seeping out of her body, ebbing away, like rice paper dissolving in water.

Then she touched the cold metal of the knife, felt around for the button she’d pressed once before and thumbed it open. The blade jumped in her hand.

She remembered Hersh’s instructions: Upward toward the heart. It’s a steeply upward arc through the belly into the pericardial sac.

She summoned the strength, willed the muscles in her arms to contract, and with a great upward thrust she sliced into the man’s body. Not aiming, just driving upward. The blade pulsed and tugged in her hands, like a fishing pole with a hooked fish. Greaves’s eyes opened wide. Then wider still. His mouth gaped. His face was contorted. The hands on her throat went slack.

With a sudden surge of strength, he threw her to the floor of the elevator, her arms pinned, grasping her shoulders with talon claws, a big cat pouncing on its prey. She screamed, swung her feet wildly, kicking at him. The man’s weight was heavy on her. But then his grip on her let up, and he collapsed, canting to one side, and she was able to wrench herself free. She gasped, deep and hard, choking for air. Her head was swimming.

When she looked at Greaves she saw that something had changed in her attacker’s eyes. The fury of his gaze had given way to something more like disbelief. His mouth had gone slack. He looked dazed. At first she wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive.

He was still. His blood pooled on the floor.

Maybe he was dead.

She struggled to her feet, and catching sight of the key in the elevator panel, she turned it. The elevator started moving.

It opened on the first garage level. The elevator doors opened. She stumbled out into the darkness, the cool air, the smell of gasoline.

She looked back at Greaves’s sprawled body, his staring eyes.

She pressed the elevator’s lock button to keep the car from moving.

Then she looked for help. She raced through the garage, low-ceilinged and dark, but saw no one. She saw an exit sign, flung open the door, ran up an echoey stairway, up two flights, came out into a Center Plaza building, dark and deserted, a dingy fluorescent cast.

She ran to the revolving door, then out onto the street. It was drizzling now, the sidewalk gray. No cops in sight. During the day you’d see plenty of police cruisers out here on Cambridge Street, in the vicinity of the courthouses and City Hall.

She crossed the street, no cars coming in either direction, onto City Hall Plaza, a great desolate campo paved in brick.

She descended the steps toward City Hall, a hulking concrete monstrosity, looking for a cop.

She had killed a human being.

It was only just sinking in.

She had killed a man. An attacker, yes. But she’d done this.

She was half out of her head. She’d just been almost strangled.

I killed a man.

She wondered what she looked like to other people, her hair matted and damp, her blood-spattered clothes astray. Panic in her eyes. She didn’t look like a judge, like an upstanding citizen. She probably looked like a crazy person out here in the middle of the night.

In the lobby of City Hall she found a guard, a black man of around fifty. “I need some help,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“A man is dead,” she said.

Before he could even get a word out, she continued, “In the Government Center parking garage.” She gestured behind her.

“Let me radio for an officer,” he said.

She waited for the response, crackling over his radio. She didn’t fully understand it, but it sounded like cops were coming.

About ten minutes later, a weary young cop arrived, presumably a beat cop. A handsome but haggard-looking guy with blue eyes and black hair.

She told him she’d just found a body.

The cop walked with her across the plaza and into the Center Plaza building. In the moonlight, the cool evening, everything had the smeary feeling of a dream sequence.

“He attacked me,” she said. “Did I already tell you that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” the cop said. His radio was crackling on his hip.

The leftmost elevator’s doors were closed. She pressed the button, and it binged and its doors came open.

The elevator was empty.

Empty.

No blood. No body.

Empty.

She stared in disbelief.

“He was — there,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.” She noticed a real change in his expression. Almost an eye roll. “Looks like he left.”

“He was dead! I’m quite sure of it.”

“Uh-huh.”

She was certain it was the leftmost elevator, but what if — being so panicked, so near-hysterical — she was remembering wrong? She tried the other elevator, punching the button. It opened, empty.

“Can I ask — have you been drinking, ma’am?” the cop said.

“No!”

“Or are you on any substances, maybe?”

“That’s impossible!” she said. “He was here. If he was moved—”

“Okay, ma’am.”

What the hell was going on? She didn’t understand it: Greaves was dead. Why was his body gone? Could somebody have moved it? There was no way he’d gotten up and walked away.

There must have been a backup team or something that had come and retrieved Greaves, cleaned up the scene. What else could it have been?

“The man was dead,” she said. “This is where he attacked me, in this elevator. I killed him in self-defense. This is the crime scene.”

“Okay,” the policeman said. “If you want to file a police report—”

“No, he was right here,” she said. “Someone moved his body.”

“Okay then,” the cop said. “I’m at the end of my shift, so let’s keep things simple. If you want to file a police report, I’ll be glad to pass you on to one of my colleagues.”

Something clenched and unclenched in her gut. Because she finally understood. She understood the logic of the loose end. Greaves had failed.

That had turned him into a loose end.

The elevator doors closed, and Juliana steadied herself against a pillar. She shook her head. She was finally beginning to think clearly. She had no time to waste. She had to get out of there. She flashed on the prospect of spending hours to no avail in a police station, filing reports and answering questions.

“I’m— I’m sorry to waste your time,” she said. Her eyes were out of focus. She saw a trash receptacle and stepped over to it, and her head jerked down and she threw up. Hot acids scalded her throat. It was as if her body were determined to purge itself of some poison. She thought it would bring a sense of relief.

It didn’t.