“Great,” George says.
“How much do you know about tracing e-mails, Your Honor?”
“Not a thing.”
“Me neither,” she says. “But I take good notes.” With another hacking laugh, Marina fishes a small notebook from her jacket pocket. Marina is a cousin of the legendary and long dead Kindle County boss, Augustine Bolcarro. Nepotism being what it is, George had once assumed she was overmatched by her job. He was wrong. A former Kindle County police detective and the daughter of another dick, Marina has the crafty intuitions of somebody tutored over a lifetime. She has responded personally whenever he calls and, even more admirably, realized that her own staff, stretched thin by constant County budget cuts, will require assistance. She’s involved the FBI, who are willing to help out since use of the interstate wires makes the threats to George a federal matter. Two silent technicians were in here for a day last week, imaging the judge’s hard drive.
“The Bureau techies say that what we’ve got is a variation on something called a bounce-back attack, where somebody ‘spoofs’ ”-she draws quotation marks in the air-“your e-mail address by placing it in the ‘From’ settings. Apparently, you could figure out how to do this with fifteen minutes of research. It’s simple, as this kind of stuff goes, but it works.
“When the FBI examined the headers, it looked like all the messages come through an open mail server in the Philippines.”
“ ‘Open mail server’?”
She lifts a square hand. “An open mail relay server. Spammers set up most of them. Sometimes somebody muffs the security settings on their Web site, and everybody uses it until the owner catches on. But if the server is open, anyone can connect. It sends out any message given to it without checking who it’s from. And open proxies don’t usually keep logs of who routes through them either. The Bureau guys say this one may be related to a Web site hosted in China and owned by a company in London. I mean,” says Marina, “good luck.”
Disappointed, George looks around the room to think things over. One of the compensations of life on the appellate court is office space by the acre. His private chambers are nearly thirty feet by thirty, large enough to house all the knickknacks and mementos of his three decades in practice. The decorating, however, is strictly government-issue, an oceanic expanse of robin’s egg carpeting and a lot of sturdy mahogany furniture manufactured by Prison Industries.
“Marina, this doesn’t help your theory about Corazon, does it?” This name is why he closed the doors, and even so, he’s dropped his voice. Mention of Corazon would intensify the alarm among his staff.
“Beg to differ, Judge. Gang Crimes is telling me some of these Latin gangs are pretty with it. Lots of Internet identity theft. I’m not ruling Corazon out at all. Boys and girls at the Bureau like him too.”
Based on the evidence so far, #1 could be anybody in the world with a computer and the judge’s e-mail address. With little else to go on, Marina compiled a run of the cases George has sat on in the last three years. One name leapt out: Jaime Colon, known to everyone as ‘El Corazon.’ Corazon was the infamous Inca, or head, of Los Latinos Reyes, a street gang of several hundred members and a ‘set’ in the Almighty Latin Nation, the fastest growing of the Tri-Cities’ three overarching gang organizations.
Decades ago, when George regularly visited the state penitentiary at Rudyard as a State Defender, he was routinely impressed that some inmates were regarded as so savage they frightened even the murderers and ruffians he was there to represent. That is Corazon-so evil, they say, that clocks stop and babies cry when he passes.
Little more than a year ago, the judge had written the opinion affirming Corazon’s conviction for aggravated assault and obstruction of justice and, more to the point, his enhanced sentence of sixty years. Corazon had personally taken a tire iron to the girlfriend and two children, ages five and seven, of a jailed gang rival who was scheduled to testify against him in a drug case. Nor did Corazon’s efforts at intimidation end there. When he was convicted, on the basis of a DNA match from fingernail scrapings taken at the hospital from the victims, who were prudent enough to flee to Mexico before the trial, Corazon promised to wreak revenge on the trial judge, the prosecutors, the cops, and anybody else who had a hand in sending him away.
As a result, Corazon is now held in the state’s lone supermax facility, his cell an eight-by-eight concrete block where he enjoys extemporaneous communications with no one except the guards and his mother, with whom he gets a single monitored visit each month. Nonetheless, Corazon’s sheer badness has made him the prime suspect. The intrigue of organizing the intimidation of a judge while being held incommunicado is a challenge he’d welcome, especially since he could take it on with little fear of the consequences. A longer sentence is meaningless to a man of forty-two. If he’s caught, his principal punishment will be a period of receiving a tasteless hash called meal loaf instead of real food.
“Bureau agents paid him a visit last week,” Marina says. “Corazon loves to get out and shoot the breeze, doesn’t even bother with his lawyer. The Feebies were asking him about a couple kids in his outfit doing dirt time,” she says, meaning that the gang members were murdered, “but they worked your name in.”
“And?”
“He didn’t twitch. Still, they wanted him to know they had his scent.”
When it comes to solving crimes, the obvious answer is usually the right one-the jealous husband is the murderer of his ex, the fired employee is the one who sabotaged the pipes at the factory- but the judge remains skeptical that a man who used a tire iron to silence witnesses would bother with something this cagey.
“I’m not sold on Corazon, Marina. Frankly, I still think whoever’s doing this is just talking dirty.” The paranoid crackpots are the correspondents George has learned to fear-they attack thinking they’re protecting themselves. But a rational person intent on mayhem does not send warnings, simply because they’d make reprisals harder to carry out. George is convinced that #1’s only aim is to roil his peace of mind, a goal far too civilized for Corazon.
“I take this creep seriously, Judge.”
Inclined to debate, George chooses not to answer. He’s long understood that people in law enforcement yearn to see themselves as knight protectors-you could bet a goodly sum, for example, that Marina Giornale had grown up reading everything she could about St. Joan. The more gravely Marina takes these messages, the more important they make her.
“And the Bureau and my people agree on one thing,” she says.
“Which is?”
“It’s time for a detail.”
“No,” says George, as he has said before to the idea of a security detail. A bodyguard would be an infernal nuisance-and far worse, something that couldn’t be hidden from Patrice. He has said nothing to his wife about these threats, and he does not intend to. Her own condition provides enough worry at the moment. “I can’t handle that at home, Marina.”
Aware of Patrice’s illness, Marina offers a lingering sympathetic look before massaging her jaw to contemplate.
“Look, Judge, how about this? Your house is your house. I can’t tell you what to do there. You’re not listed, right?”
An unlisted phone has been required since George’s days as a defense lawyer, the better to avoid the 3:00 A.M. call from the white-collar client who’d just awoken from a nightmare of prison.
“But when you get to County property, Judge, you’re on my turf. So all due respect and genuflecting several times, and doing the dance of the seven veils”-she smiles in her apple-cheeked way, a winning child-“I still gotta have somebody with you. When I run through the God-forbids in my head, Your Honor, I can’t even imagine how I’d explain leaving you uncovered.”
She is saying that he can’t require her to engage in the law enforcement equivalent of malpractice. He slaps his thighs in resignation, and Marina quickly offers her hand.
George sees her out. As he opens the door, Banion is there, a draft opinion in hand that has just arrived from another judge’s chambers. On the threshold, Marina turns back to both of them.
“Say, you drew quite a crowd this morning.” She’s referring to the horde trying to gain admission to the oral argument in Warnovits, which her staff was required to handle.
Recalled, the case immediately nags at the judge. It’s like a bad meal, a fight with your spouse, something carried with you that douses your mood all day.
“I hate that case,” he responds. This is no news to Banion. The judge assigned John to review the portions of the videotape that Sapperstein said should not have been shown to the jury after George reached the point where
