by Brad Parks
I chased away the unpleasant thoughts and settled on something happier. It was the image of the morning routine Sam and Emma had worked out for themselves over the past year or so. Sam was the earlier riser of the two, but he never went downstairs without his sister. He just played in his room, waiting for her to call for him.
That was Sammy’s signal to enter Emma’s room. He usually cuddled with her a little bit—we used to keep the twins in the same crib, and they’ve become accustomed to the closeness—until she declared herself ready to go downstairs. Then Sam, who was bigger by two inches and maybe ten pounds, gave his sister a piggyback ride down the stairs to the family room.
The whole thing was so adorable Alison and I didn’t want to call attention to how much we loved it. But sometimes we would lie in bed a few minutes longer just so we could listen to their banter, or we’d sneak out of bed, stand near the door to our bedroom, and watch.
I was treating myself to that memory when I felt my cell phone buzzing. I pulled out the phone and read the screen: ALISON.
“Hey,” I said.
“Justina has a wig,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Justina has a blond wig,” she said again, emphasizing the last two words, as if the meaning of this should have been self-evident. “I found it in the cottage. In her closet.”
“I’m sorry, I’m not following you. Justina has a wig in her closet. So what?”
“Why does she need a blond wig?”
Justina was a brunette, though I made it a point not to notice much more about her appearance than that. When you’re a middle-aged man with a college-aged woman living on your property, it’s in the best interests of your marriage to pay as little attention as possible.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Wait, are you thinking—”
“That she put on the wig so she could pretend to be me when she picked up the kids? Yes.”
I considered the possibility of that fooling someone. There was no doubt Justina bore some resemblance to my wife from the neck down. They are roughly the same height and have the same thin build. And while Justina is from a country that straddles two continents, her looks were more European than Asian. Would a wig, a hat, and dark glasses be sufficient to make Miss Pam think Justina was Alison? Just for the few seconds the door to the Honda was open on the pickup line?
“Wait, why would she need to pretend to be you?” I asked. “She’s on the list. She picks up the kids more often than you and I combined.”
“Yeah, but she knew about the sign-out sheet and she knew if she was listed as having made the pickup we’d ask questions.”
“Okay. So talk out the rest for me . . . Why would Justina want to help free a drug dealer she has almost certainly never met?”
“Well, we don’t know that for sure. We don’t really know what she does or who she associates with when she’s not with our kids.”
“Fair point.”
“I’ve thought about two scenarios,” Alison said. “One, she has a drug problem she’s been hiding from us and it’s brought her into contact with this . . . criminal element.”
I quickly flashed through a mental file of my interactions with Justina. Nothing stuck out as being suspicious, but I had certainly seen ample evidence in my courtroom of how cunning addicts could be.
“The other scenario—and this seems more likely—is that someone forced her to cooperate by, I don’t know, threatening her or her parents or something. I haven’t worked out all the details. But think about it: Who else has keys to the Honda?”
I stood up and walked over to the window. Justina’s parents were in Turkey, but it wasn’t unimaginable that an international drug cartel could reach that far. If Skavron mattered enough.
“Okay,” I said. “What do you want to do about this?”
“Well, I already texted her and told her she didn’t need to pick up the twins this afternoon. I was thinking we could just deal with it once we got the kids back. In the meantime, I’m going to keep looking through her stuff, see if I find anything else. Like, I don’t know, cash or drugs or . . .”
“Okay. Good. Let me know.”
We ended the call. I returned to my desk and thought about Justina, who for two years had been a loving presence in my children’s lives. I can’t say I was ready to convict her of kidnapping and conspiracy on the basis of one blond wig.
But I also wasn’t ready to rule anything out.
TEN
The building was old and brick and perfectly suited to the brothers’ needs.
It was not, as far as the City of Norfolk was concerned, abandoned. But it was unoccupied. And it offered an unobstructed view of the Walter E. Hoffman United States Courthouse. These were the things that mattered most.
The younger brother had scouted it a week earlier. Its street-side windows and front entrance were sealed off from vagrants and would-be squatters by steel cages. But the back entrance, which could be accessed from an alleyway, was protected only by a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. During that earlier visit, he had snapped the padlock and replaced it with his own.
So now gaining entry to the building was a simple matter of using his own key.
He carried a briefcase and a canvas bag with him up to the sixth floor, which he had previously determined to be just the right height. From the canvas bag, he unfolded a tripod.
After setting it up, he snapped open the briefcase and removed a telescope. Setting it atop the tripod, he aimed it into the fourth-floor courtroom of the Honorable Scott Sampson. The resolution on the device was remarkable, and the younger brother had practiced adjusting the focus until he had become expert at it. He could actually see the strained faces of the defendant’s family as they entered the courtroom.
He smiled. They were not part of the plan. They had no idea what was coming.
Pulling out his phone, he called the older brother. “I’m in place,” he said.
“Good,” he heard in response. “The first text goes out in fifteen minutes.”
“Excellent. I’ll be watching.”
ELEVEN
For the rest of the morning, I watched the big hand of the clock on the far wall of my office drag through molasses on its way to eleven.
I kept my cell phone on top of my desk, not wanting to take any chance I’d miss my instructions. I was operating under the assumption that I would be told to set Skavron free, which in this case meant sentencing him to time served—two months and three days, about fifteen years less than he would have gotten under the sentencing guidelines.
There are, of course, exceptions to the mandatory minimums that I and other judges find so wearisome. But they are narrow: The defendant must be a first-time, nonviolent offender who neither used a gun nor played a larger role in a criminal syndicate.
In other words, not Skavron.
I could still rule in whatever manner I wanted, of course—Little Caesar had his throne. My ruling would then be appealed by the US Attorneys Office and reversed by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. A new warrant for Skavron’s arrest would be issued. By that point, I could only assume he would be long gone, secreted off by whoever was coordinating all of this.
Naturally, it went against everything I believed in and stood for as a judge. And, just as naturally, I would do it without blinking if it meant saving my children.
By 10:55 no instructions had come. It was time to move out. I slipped my phone into my pocket. Then I donned my robe and went into my private bathroom to perform a quick mirror check, always the last thing I do before heading into the courtroom.
So that’s what I was doing—specifically, looking at the bags under my eyes—when I felt a buzz on my thigh.
I whipped out the phone. There was a text message from a 900 number I had never seen before. It had to be the kidnappers. My breathing was short as I click
ed on it.
I had to read it three times to make sure I understood it:
Let Skavron rot. Give him two life sentences. Subsequent, not concurrent.
That was what this was about? Not about getting Skavron out of prison but about keeping him in there until he died? Who benefited from that?
Obviously, it was someone who bore the man significant ill. But I was only beginning to contemplate those possibilities when another text came in:
To signal that you’ve received our message and intend to comply, appear on the bench with your hair parted on the other side.
I felt ice in my spine. The preposterousness of that command struck me less than what it signified: They had someone keeping an eye on me. Someone near enough to be able to spot the subtle difference of my hair going in the opposite direction.
Another text:
Keep your phone with you to receive further instructions.
I waited to see if there was more, but that seemed to be it. I texted back:
I’ll do it, of course. But why? Why two life sentences?
Within seconds, my phone buzzed again, telling me I had texted a landline, but for thirty-nine cents I could have my text converted into a message that—
I put the phone back in my pocket. There was no time to make sense of this Gatling-gun burst of dictates. My staff, to say nothing of a courtroom full of people, were waiting for me to make my appearance.
And I had to do it with my hair going in the opposite direction. I had been parting my hair on the left side for as long as I could remember. Did they know that? Were they just trying to shove me as far out of my comfort zone as they could?
If that was their intent, it was working. I wet my hair, took several dozen desperate swipes at it with a comb, then studied the result.
It was me. But not me. I looked like my own doppelgänger.
“Good God,” I said to myself.
With one final shake of my still-damp head, I left the bathroom and strode into the reception area, where my staff was waiting for me.
“Everyone ready?” I asked, trying to seem unflustered.
“Jean Ann just called,” Joan Smith confirmed.
Jean Ann Sanford was my deputy clerk, a former beauty queen who sometimes acted as though my courtroom were a pageant she needed to keep on schedule. It was her job to make sure all was in place and then phone us to say the show could go on.
Jeremy Freeland was giving me the up and down. We had worked together long enough that he knew something was off, even if he couldn’t immediately place it.
“You okay, Judge?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I insisted.
Finally, his eyes settled on my head. “What’s with your—”
He stopped himself before he said the word “hair.” He knew it wasn’t the career clerk’s place to comment on the judge’s coiffure.
“I’m fine,” I said again, a little more firmly.
“Are you sure? Because we can—”
“Let’s do this,” I said.
The court security officer escorted me down the hallway. He held the door for me as one of my law clerks began the time-honored cry: “All rise! Oyez, oyez—”
What I saw as I passed through the doorway was, in some ways, exactly the same scene that usually greeted me.
Unlike some of the grander spaces on the first floor, with their towering ceilings and magisterial air, my courtroom was more intimate. It had six rows of benches for spectators. They were filled with but a smattering of people. One row was solidly African American, likely Rayshaun Skavron’s friends and family. On the other side of the aisle was a middle-aged white couple, nicely dressed but world-weary.
In front of them were the attorneys: the prosecutor to my left, the defense attorney to my right.
To the right of him was Rayshaun Skavron. He was a short, round black man with a blunt head and a forgettable face. He was dressed in a faded orange jumpsuit, standard issue from the Western Tidewater Regional Jail. His forearms and neck were festooned with tattoos.
He looked like so many of the defendants who appeared in my courtroom: righteously beaten, his pride gone, ready to accept his fate.
Near Skavron were two men in US Marshals Service Windbreakers, who had escorted the prisoner into the courtroom. Jean Ann and the court reporter were in front of me. The law clerk, who had just finished the cry, took her usual spot to my right.
That was it. Was one of these people watching me and, somehow, reporting back? A member of my staff, perhaps? Or was some stranger spying on me through the tiny glass slits in the doors in back? Or had they found a way to look into my courtroom through the fourth-floor windows?
All I knew was that somewhere, very close by, there was a person who was part of an effort to kidnap my children, an enterprise crucial to the larger conspiracy of ensuring Rayshaun Skavron never again left prison.
And I was still baffled as to why he was worth the trouble.
* * *
Wanting to move things ahead as quickly as possible, I raced through the things that needed to be put on the record at a sentencing, all of which I had memorized after four years of repeating them. I was still conscious of my phone, which I ordinarily would have never taken to the bench with me.
Further instructions. What further instructions?
As I continued speaking, I surreptitiously lifted my robe and eased my cell phone out of my pants pocket. Keeping it under my desk, I cupped it against my thigh so I wouldn’t miss its vibration.
Then I turned to Will Hubbard, the assistant US attorney. Hubbard had been in my courtroom many times before. He appeared to be just on the appropriate side of bored.
“Thank you, Your Honor,” he said, standing as he spoke. “I know you’ve read the presentencing report, and there’s no need to repeat the details. I’d like to note that when Mr. Skavron was first arrested he denied any connection to the drug stash in question. But to his credit, he changed his tune after about twenty minutes and since that time he has been consistent about admitting his guilt. He has cooperated with authorities in this case, and even though that cooperation has not led to any arrests, it ought to be considered all the same. He has also expressed an interest in completing a GED program, which suggests he is at least contemplating a more law-abiding life someday.
“Those are some of the mitigating factors. There are two main aggravating factors. One is that he stored his drug stash and a firearm in an apartment belonging to his cousin. She has three children under the age of ten and was obviously very upset to discover that Mr. Skavron had brought this kind of element into her household. There were originally some child endangerment charges, which the government agreed to nol-pros when Mr. Skavron pled guilty.”
Then he turned toward the gallery and gestured toward the middle-aged white man I had seen earlier. He was dark-haired, with a narrow nose and a long head. The woman he was sitting next to, presumably his wife, had an expensive-looking blond dye job.
As the man rose to his feet, Hubbard continued speaking.
“The other factor that the court should consider is that, Your Honor, this was a pretty bad batch of heroin. It came to the attention of law enforcement because it caused several overdoses at Norfolk Academy, including one tragic fatality. The Drug Enforcement Administration ran a sample and found it had been cut with fentanyl, which makes it a lot more harmful because of the reaction of the two drugs.”
The white man was now at the waist-high divider that separated the gallery from the rest of the courtroom. He was wearing a light gray suit. Gold cuff links peeked out from beneath his jacket.
“Your Honor, there were a number of families who were affected by this, but one in particular has been truly devastated,” Hubbard said. “And I think it’s important you hear from them before imposing your sentence. I’d like to invite Thomas Byrd to addr
ess the court.”
With his right hand thrust toward the sky, Thomas Byrd swore to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, so help him God.
He sat in the witness box and pulled out some reading glasses, which he perched at the end of his nose. His shaking hand held a piece of paper.
“Your Honor, my name is Thomas Byrd. I was born and raised in Norfolk. My family owns a chain of appliance stores as well as several restaurant franchises. My son’s name was Dylan.”
Was Dylan. I could think of nothing more wrenching than hearing a parent refer to his child in the past tense.
He reached into his jacket and produced a photograph, which he held up so I could see it. It was a school portrait of a young man with his father’s long head and thin nose.
“Dylan was a fine young man. When I say that, I know I sound like a naive father. But he never gave his mother or I any trouble. Norfolk Academy is very rigorous academically, as I’m sure you know, and his report card was all As and B pluses. He was part of the National Honor Society and also played on the baseball team. This past summer he got his own job, painting houses. He could have worked for one of my family’s stores or restaurants and they probably would have taken it easy on him. But he wanted to be on his own, which I respected. He worked hard all summer and was able to buy a used truck at the end of it. He was very proud of it. We were all proud of it. If you can imagine a seventeen-year-old boy with a truck paid for with his own money, maybe you know what I’m talking about.”
Thomas Byrd took a large swallow. He looked down at his notes again.
“Your Honor, I don’t honestly know what my son was thinking when he took those drugs. He wasn’t the kind of kid who smoked weed or snuck booze or anything like that. We had talked to him about drugs from the time he was in elementary school. He knew full well how dangerous they were. He was . . . Maybe he was trying to impress a girl or maybe he was curious or, I don’t know. And I don’t want to make any excuses for . . . for what he did to himself. I can’t tell you how many times over the last three months I wished I stopped him from going out the door that night.”