An Engineered Injustice

by William L. Myers Jr.

Badgett nods.

  “Answer out loud, please,” says the judge.

  “Yeah, that’s what he said.”

  Vaughn drags Badgett through Reggie Frye’s role in getting the cell phone to Eddy and moving the TracVac onto Track 2, and Bunting’s role in getting Frye to do so. Royce testifies that he first fired a weapon in the army, where they told him he was a natural and made him into a sniper.

  “Eighty-seven confirmed kills,” Royce says proudly. “Maybe not Chris Kyle numbers, but almost all of mine were head shots.”

  On a hunch, Vaughn asks Badgett about the break-ins in Eddy’s neighborhood, and Royce confirms that Balzac thought up the idea, and he—Royce—made it happen. “Not me personally, but some guys I hired.”

  “What was the purpose of the drone?”

  “Oh, Benny—Mr. Balzac—was so pissed about that. He said that other one, Day, was a friggin’ idiot to film the crash. He didn’t use the word friggin’, though.”

  Geoffrey Day is on his feet as soon as his name is mentioned. He hisses at Badgett, firing off the words outrageous, slander, libel, infamy, and scurrilous. Balzac finally has enough and pulls Day into his seat.

  Vaughn waits while the judge cautions Day and Balzac. Then he asks, “Why not just park the TracVac in the middle of the curve itself? There’d be no chance for the engineer to see it in time to stop before hitting it.”

  “Blame,” Badgett answers. “The whole point was to set up the engineer. Make it look like he could have stopped the train in time but wasn’t paying attention. The boss said that would be recklessness, and there’d be punitive damages, which are a lot more than regular damages.”

  Vaughn glances up at Regina Johnson, who looks like she’s about ready to have a stroke. As a judge in Philadelphia’s criminal-justice system, she’s certainly seen her share of villains. But he doubts she’s ever witnessed evil as matter-of-fact, even cavalier, as what she’s witnessing now.

  “Mr. Badgett, do you know where Reggie Frye is?”

  Another glance at Jimmy Nutzo and Johnny G. “He’s in my basement.”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Not much.”

  Vaughn pauses. “What’s his condition?”

  “Dead.”

  “I see. And how did he get that way?”

  “I may have helped.”

  “Nothing further.”

  Regina Johnson looks at Christina. “Cross?”

  The young prosecutor stares at Royce Badgett like someone watching aliens walk out of a spaceship. If she’s heard the judge, she’s showing no sign of it.

  “Ms. Wesley, do you have questions for this witness?”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, Your Honor.” Christina stands and walks to the podium. “Mr. Badgett, there were no bullets found inside the locomotive. How could that be?”

  “Frangible bullets.”

  “Frangible?”

  “They disintegrate on impact. Most are made of powdered copper and tin, or copper and nylon, and have no jacket. They only disintegrate on impact with metal, normally. I had to make my own special recipe to get them hard enough to fire out of my rifle but soft enough to disintegrate when they hit the locomotive’s glass windshield. That was a lot of work. I’d say I earned my fifty-five hundred.”

  “Fifty-five hundred?”

  “Dollars. That’s how much the boss paid me.”

  Christina is, momentarily, speechless. Everyone watching is stunned and silently asking the same question: This little monster killed and injured all those people for five grand?

  “Five thousand, five hundred dollars?”

  “That’s more than I normally ask from the boss.”

  “Normally? You mean you’ve done this kind of thing before for Mr. Balzac?”

  Badgett’s shoulders slump, and everyone in the courtroom can read what he’s thinking: Oh shit.

  “Yes.”

  “Give me an example.”

  Badgett doesn’t answer.

  The judge leans across to him. “An example, Mr. Badgett. Now. Or plead the Fifth.”

  Badgett sighs. “You remember that big crash a few years back, on the Schuylkill Expressway, when that tractor-trailer hit that bus? I helped set that up. But the driver started pressing Benny for more money than they agreed to, and I had to put him in the basement. He’s in the vault next to Reggie Frye.”

  “Vault?”

  “I built it myself,” Badgett says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever had to bury someone in a field, but let me tell you, it’s a pain in the ass.”

  “Just how many bodies are buried in your basement, Mr. Badgett?”

  “Four.” Badgett turns to the judge. “It’s a small cellar.”

  Christina Wesley blinks and stands perfectly still. She stares at the man on the stand, seemingly reaching for more words, but none will come. Behind her, on the other side of the security glass, everyone else is reacting the same way. No one is talking. No one is moving. The shuffling on the uncomfortable wooden benches has ceased. The reporters have stopped typing on their iPads and tablets. Everyone is simply staring at Royce Badgett.

  Everyone, Vaughn realizes, except Benny Balzac and the man that Benny must sense looking at him from the other side of the aisle. When Balzac turns his head to the left and sees James Nunzio’s dead, black eyes boring a hole through him, the lawyer clearly no longer cares about the press, or the crash victims, or the sheriff’s deputies, or even the judge. All that matters to him is . . .

  “I didn’t know!” Balzac shouts. “I didn’t know your son was on that train, I swear!”

  Vaughn learned in science class about black holes in space. Spheres so dense they emit no light whatsoever. He sees two of them now, occupying the spaces where Jimmy Nutzo’s eyes used to be.

  “You can’t blame me for that!” Balzac, now half standing, continues his plea. “Jimmy, please. I . . .”

  Suddenly, Balzac turns to his right, where Geoffrey Day is sitting, leaning away, trying to distance himself. Balzac lunges at Day, puts a hand around his throat. “You idiot! You had to have a drone!”

  Balzac is a thick man, and strong, and it takes some time for the sheriff’s deputies to pry him off Geoffrey Day. When they do, Day collapses in a heap on the floor, massaging his throat and gasping.

  Judge Johnson pounds her gavel, orders the deputies, “Take those two men into custody. And that tall one behind them.”

  As the deputies cuff Day and Balzac and Corey King, another man, very large, approaches them.

  “Who are you, sir?” The judge addresses him through the security glass.

  “Your Honor, my name is Ed Iwicki. I’m the chief of police for Amtrak. And I sure would be happy if you’d let me assist in taking these motherfuckers into custody.”

  Regina Johnson’s neck snaps back, and her eyes widen. Then she leans forward and smiles. “Deputies, please let Captain Iwicki help you with the motherfuckers.”

  The pronouncement causes the room to erupt. People cheer and clap and shout, “Hear, hear!” Half a dozen reporters run from the gallery into the hallway. Crash victims and their families surround the Coburn clan, hugging them, shaking their hands, crying with them.

  The judge watches from the bench and shakes her head. “What is this crazy world coming to?” she mutters under her breath.

  “That’s a fact,” says Royce Badgett, who looks pale and spent.

  Regina Johnson turns to the small man in the witness stand. “I forgot all about you.” Then she has more deputies take hold of Badgett and tells them to walk him to the holding cells. “Just don’t put him in with Mr. Balzac,” she says. “I don’t think he’d last a minute.”

  Once he’s removed from the courtroom, Judge Johnson addresses everyone else. “I’m going to take a short break. Then I’ll come back and announce my ruling.”

  Vaughn wishes the judge would just announce her decision now. It can only be one thing, can’t it? He feels sure of it, but he’s felt sure so many times through this ordeal an
d been wrong about almost everything. But the judge’s ruling can wait. Right now, there’s something more important. He turns to embrace Eddy.

  But Eddy isn’t in his seat. He’s standing behind counsel table, his forehead and both palms pressed against the security glass, on the other side of which is Kate—holding Emma—her own forehead pressed against the glass.

  A dagger pierces Vaughn’s heart. Please, God . . . He doesn’t complete the sentence; God already knows what he’s praying for.

  Twenty minutes later, Regina Johnson retakes the bench. She doesn’t waste time, and she doesn’t mince words. “This case—the whole thing—the train crash, the pain and death suffered by so many people, these proceedings—what happened and what almost happened here—is the biggest disaster I’ve ever had the misfortune to be a part of. Mr. Coburn,” she says, looking directly at Eddy, “this court finds insufficient evidence to bind you over for trial. Go back and join your family, and get out of here. That goes for the rest of you, too. Get out. I want this courtroom cleared in ten minutes.”

  Now Vaughn gets his hug. Eddy embraces him with such force that Vaughn thinks he can feel his ribs crack.

  Eddy kisses Vaughn on his cheek as he holds him. “I knew you’d do it! I knew it!”

  Vaughn laughs as his eyes tears up. “That makes one of us.” He hugs his cousin and slaps his back. Then he steps away and turns toward the prosecution table. Christina Wesley is gone, and he doesn’t blame her. He’ll have to thank her later for taking an enormous risk.

  Eddy brushes past Vaughn and races to the security door. The whole family surrounds him the minute he enters the gallery. Vaughn waits a few minutes, then joins them. His uncle Frank takes Vaughn’s face in his meaty paws and looks him in the eye. Frank tries to push the words out, but he chokes up, and Vaughn jumps in to save him.

  “Uncle Frank, don’t. It’s okay. I get it.” Before he can say more, Aunt Claire and Eddy’s sisters are all over him with hugs and kisses of their own. Vaughn sees his parents nearby, watching and smiling. He joins them as soon as Eddy’s mom and sisters release him.

  In the back of the courtroom, Tommy, Erin, and Laurie stand together, waiting to catch Vaughn’s eye. As soon as they do, they motion that they’re leaving and will talk to him later. He shoots them the “okay” sign. He smiles at Mick and Susan, and they smile back, Mick like a proud mentor, Susan in gratitude.

  Vaughn spends a few minutes accepting thanks from a dozen or so crash victims, then rounds up his family and leads them past the press stalking the hallways, to the elevators, then the building lobby and the pavement outside. Once his parents, aunt, uncle, and cousins are all safely in the underground parking garage, Vaughn hails a cab.

  Ten minutes later, he walks through the open door into Erin Doyle’s apartment, and into her arms.

  39

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 29

  It’s 8:30 a.m., one month exactly since the preliminary hearing. The weeks since Vaughn’s victory have been good ones, and busy. Mick and Susan gave him his job back before he even had the chance to ask. He’s been interviewed on local and national news shows, and potential clients are lining up to hire him. His relationship with Erin feels stronger every day.

  Eddy, Kate, and baby Emma moved back to the farm, which is being rented for them by Eddy and Vaughn’s family, with McFarland and Klein chipping in a little as well. Eddy’s promised Kate that once he gets a job, he’ll find a nicer farmhouse to rent. They both know he’ll never be an engineer again, which hurts because he came to love the railroad. Still, someone will hire him—though who, and when, is anyone’s guess.

  As for the perpetrators, whose plan almost landed Eddy in prison for the rest of his life, things turned out much worse. Royce Badgett never made it out of the Criminal Justice Center. An hour after the preliminary hearing wrapped up, the sheriff’s deputies escorted Badgett to the elevators for the trip to the basement and then, via bus, to county lockup. Badgett and his honor guard stood by a pair of closed elevator doors next to an open pair of elevator doors protected only by a plastic yellow Out of Service sign and yellow caution tape—a familiar site at the CJC. Terrified that Jimmy Nutzo would not honor his agreement to kill him quickly, Royce Badgett saw his opening and took it. He broke free of the deputies—though, to be fair, they probably weren’t really holding him that tightly—and threw himself down the open shaft. Sadly for Royce, it wasn’t the three-story fall that killed him, but the elevator that’d been parked just above, on the fourth floor. At the exact moment the Badger dived into the open shaft, a repairman signaled the elevator to descend to the basement. The deputies stood helplessly as Royce’s screams were replaced by the sounds of crunching bone.

  Badgett’s death was good for Jimmy Nunzio, of course. It’s not wise to keep someone around who could tip the cops off to the kill room on your jet. The DA didn’t miss Badgett, either, because everything he said on the stand was corroborated. The police found the bodies in his basement, which included two former truck drivers and an eyewitness to a small plane crash. Also found were Badgett’s own hand-drawn diagrams of his sniping assignment—Honey Badger, it turned out, was a meticulous planner. His cell phone had pictures of him, Balzac, and Jack Bunting on fishing trips and sitting at a tiki bar in the Caribbean—unidentified but no doubt high-priced escorts on their laps at both locations. There were also pictures from a hunting lodge sans female companions, though the men weren’t smiling quite as broadly in those.

  In Geoffrey Day’s office, the authorities found the original “bang, bang note,” a copy of which they also found in Corey King’s office. Directions for flying the drone were found in the office of another associate as close to Day as King was.

  Two days into his stay at the Curran-Fromhold correctional facility, Geoffrey Day was approached in the shower by two men. One of them held a plastic bottle containing some sort of accelerant, the other a silver, metallic Zippo lighter. Twenty minutes later, the rising sun of the plaintiff’s P.I. bar was medevaced to Crozer Burn Center, where he died in screaming pain late the following week. Geoffrey’s nurses were convinced he would have passed much sooner were it not for the constant ministrations of his brilliant burn-treatment specialist, Stephen F. X. Nunzio, MD, brother of reputed mobster James F. X. Nunzio.

  Benjamin Balzac remains alive and in custody, though Vaughn has heard via the criminal-defense-attorney grapevine that Benny Balls is in poor spirits and worse health. According to a lawyer representing an inmate in Balzac’s part of the prison, the once-proud attorney spends all day and night curled in a fetal position next to his stainless-steel toilet and refuses to leave the cell for any reason, including nourishment or hygiene. As a result, he’s lost twenty-five pounds and is subjected to force-feeding.

  For a long while, Vaughn harbored fears of retaliation by Jimmy Nutzo. He called the mobster at his office the day after the preliminary hearing. The underboss kept him on hold for five minutes. Vaughn didn’t dare hang up.

  “I called to thank you,” Vaughn said when Nunzio finally got on the line. “Your man saved my whole team at that motel. And you saved my cousin at the preliminary hearing.” Vaughn paused and waited for a response. When none came, he got to the real point of his call. “So you saved us, and I got you justice for your son.”

  Vaughn waited again, and counted silently. When he reached ten, Jimmy Nunzio, his voice flat, matter-of-fact, said, “You think that makes us even?”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t call me again. And do not come to my office.”

  The line went dead, and Vaughn sat at his desk with a racing heart.

  And then . . . nothing. Weeks went by, and Vaughn heard nothing from the mobster. Finally, this week, he began to breathe easier. Obviously, the mobster had come to accept that Eddy was not the cause of his son’s death and to realize that, to the contrary, he was as much a victim as Alexander Nunzio.

  Vaughn sits now on the front stoop of his apartment building, waiting for the tow truck to car
ry away his Jeep. He was going to drive Erin to Stone Harbor that morning for a long weekend leading into Labor Day; Erin had a lot of free time on her hands now that Day and Lockwood is closed and being wound down by a court-appointed receiver. But Vaughn’s Jeep wouldn’t start. So Erin is going to pick him up in her own car as soon as the Jeep is hauled off to get fixed. At least that was the plan an hour ago. He’s called her twice since then and keeps getting kicked to voice mail.

  Vaughn pulls his cell phone from his pocket to call Erin again when a black limousine with gangster-tinted windows stops on the street just to his left. The rear door opens, and Johnny Giacobetti rises out of it like Jack’s beanstalk, uncoiling until he reaches his full height. He walks up to Vaughn, his face a study in seriousness.

  “Mr. Nunzio wants a word.”

  Vaughn looks up and down the street, then follows Giacobetti to the limo. He reaches the rear passenger door and, before he has the chance to see inside, is pushed hard from behind. He flies into the back seat, and Johnny G., getting in behind him, shoves Vaughn the whole way across to the driver’s side. Vaughn tries to open the door, to escape, but it’s locked.

  Vaughn turns to Giacobetti. “What the hell?”

  “I told you,” Johnny answers. “Mr. Nunzio wants a meeting.”

  “A meeting. Where?”

  “On a little farm in Lancaster County.”

  Vaughn’s mind flashes to his cousin, to Kate, and the baby.

  “But . . . there’s no reason . . . Eddy wasn’t to blame for that crash. You know that. And so does your boss.”

  “Not what the new lawyers are saying. He let himself get played. Lost his ‘situational awareness.’” Giacobetti skips a beat, then says, “I was there when the boss explained his business model to you. Rewards and punishments. I don’t know how he could have been any clearer.”

  “And Kate and the baby? Where do they fit into your boss’s business plan?”

  “You know anyone who served overseas? Friends of mine did. Came back with all sorts of interesting terms. Fog of war. Collateral damage.”

  Vaughn balls his fists. The car’s racing now, making light after light. He can’t open his door, but maybe if he gets into it with Johnny G., the driver will stop the car and he can jump over the front seat.