The Judge

by Randy Singer

  But if they were after Finney, why would McCormack have warned Dr. Kline not to make the finals? Maybe McCormack knew only part of the story. Maybe he overheard some plans about something bad happening to a finalist but didn’t realize they were talking about Finney. It was the only thing that made sense from a motive perspective.

  But then again, things hadn’t been making sense on Paradise Island from day one. Why should Finney assume they would start doing so now?

  Later that morning, as Javitts spelled out the contestants’ assignments for the next few days, Finney passed on a critical message to Kareem Hasaan. Finney assumed that Dr. Kline was doing the same for both Hadji and Ando.

  “Tomorrow,” Javitts said, “each of you will be conducting a cross-examination by satellite uplink of an esteemed scientist whose name will not be revealed until he or she takes the stand. You will each be allowed ten minutes of cross-examination to see how well your faith coincides with the best-known scientific evidence. Dr. Kline, since you advocate a scientific worldview that is devoid of any particular religious belief, we’ll let you go first.”

  Finney looked over as Victoria nodded. He watched her write a few notes, which Hadji appeared to be studying.

  “Since tomorrow’s theme is Faith and Science, we will also be conducting a series of medical tests on each of the faith advocates,” Javitts announced. “This will allow a few days for any necessary biopsy results to be returned prior to next Thursday.”

  Kareem Hasaan stiffened but held his tongue. Finney made a few more marks on his notes.

  They were communicating using the pinprick cipher that Finney had explained to Dr. Kline while sailing. It was a centuries-old trick and one they could use even though their papers were being searched every day.

  The key was to place a tiny dot under each letter that formed part of the message. The uninitiated eye would not even notice. If it did, the dots would look like stray pen marks scattered around the page. But to somebody who knew the secret, the pinprick cipher could create an effective trail of breadcrumbs for most any message.

  “In addition to the upcoming faith-and-science emphasis, we will also be trying to determine how well your faith holds up under pressure. Does it allow you to endure things that life throws at you without stressing out?”

  Javitts glanced down at some notes and then back to the contestants. “As we all know, we tend to stress out more when pushing our bodies to the limit—when we’re tired and hungry. Yet all of your religions seem to suggest that self-denial, though it may be tough on the body, is good for the soul. Jesus fasted forty days and forty nights. Muslims are called to fast during Ramadan. Buddha almost starved himself over the course of six years, claiming that the skin of his belly came to be cleaving to his backbone. And the Hindu religion teaches an ascetic lifestyle, which, for many adherents, translates to extended periods of fasting.”

  Finney casually placed some more dots and waited until Kareem nodded. Then he turned to a new page of notes and placed dots there as well.

  meet us in the ocean after prayer tomorrow morning all contestants are going snorkeling so we can ditch our microphones and talk

  “Therefore,” Javitts said, “during our second week on Paradise Island, each of you will be asked to engage in a fluids-only fast. Food will no longer be provided, only beverages. You are not necessarily required to fast. But if you want to eat, you will be responsible for catching and preparing your own food. Are there any questions about that?”

  “Is this Faith on Trial or a POW survival camp?” Kareem asked.

  Javitts hesitated before responding. Finney could sense that Javitts didn’t want a widespread revolt. “You knew up front that this show was going to push you to your physical limits, Mr. Hasaan. You signed a release that stated as much.”

  Kareem just stared back.

  “I’m assuming this doesn’t include me, since I don’t have any religious beliefs that require fasting,” Kline said.

  “No, that’s not correct,” Javitts replied. “The whole purpose is to see if religious faith somehow allows individuals to handle these kinds of things better. You’re our control group, so to speak.”

  “Maybe we ought to broaden the control group,” Finney suggested. “Include the judge and the set director.”

  “Very funny, Judge Finney. Are there any other serious questions?”

  Kareem frowned, then started placing a few stray dots on his page of notes. Finney shifted in his seat so he could see without being conspicuous.

  “Tuesday should be a very interesting day in court,” Javitts said, thankful to be changing subjects. “Each of you will be conducting an examination by satellite uplink with an expert member of your own faith group. Dr. Kline, of course, will not participate in this exercise.”

  Finney pieced together Kareem’s message thus far: I do not . . .

  “The only catch is that this expert from your own faith is somebody who sees things differently than you. It may be somebody from a different sect or different denomination or someone who doesn’t believe that your holy books should be taken literally . . .”

  I do not swim, Hasaan’s message said. Finney had to smile. His big, strapping, tough adversary couldn’t swim. Finney now knew why he had never seen Kareem in the water.

  “You will not know who it is until you begin your examination on Tuesday,” Javitts continued. “And just so you’ll know exactly where they’re coming from, we’ve given them ten minutes to share their views before you begin your cross-examination.”

  Wonderful, Finney thought. I’ll probably get some liberal scholar from the Jesus Seminar.

  But he wasn’t too worried about that right now. He was having too much fun dotting out his next message to Kareem.

  Don’t worry if you start drowning I’ll save you

  It didn’t take Kareem long to reply.

  Will not be necessary I am only going in waist deep

  38

  “Nikki, this is Preston Randolph.” Apparently the man made his own calls on Saturdays. “I talked to a few executives at the network who put me in touch with the producer of Faith on Trial. I had concerns before, but I’ve got serious issues now.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told this guy Murphy that I didn’t like the way they were portraying my client. Even the show’s director thinks that Dr. Kline’s got serious potential for television, but they’re killing her with this May-December romance thing.”

  Nikki stiffened. She had an urge to defend her judge—it wasn’t like he was a total loser for Kline to be hanging out with. But Nikki also had plans. It would be hard to use Preston if she didn’t keep it civil.

  “Plus, the way they set my client up for that ethical temptation at work, even before she got to the island—it was totally underhanded. She passed their little test, but still . . . I told him I wouldn’t hesitate to file a lawsuit even while the show was running in order to get Dr. Kline’s story out there. That’s when he dropped the bombshell.”

  Preston waited, apparently to let Nikki prompt the next response. Trial lawyers like Preston did that instinctively—everything is drama. “What bombshell?”

  “He said he had some confessions on camera from Dr. Kline that could be career threatening if they came out. I challenged him, and he gave me the specifics. He mentioned that he had the same types of career-ending stuff on other contestants. You know anything like that with regard to Judge Finney?”

  Twenty-four hours ago the answer would have been no. But Nikki had asked around at the courthouse yesterday after getting Finney’s message about the speedy-trial cases. She had read the old newspaper articles that blamed it on the prosecutors, but she also had a confidential talk with the clerk who worked for Finney at the time.

  “Judge Finney?” Nikki asked, as if it were the most preposterous question she had ever heard. “It’s hard to imagine anybody having dirt on him.”

  “Yeah. Well, I thought the same thing about Dr. Kline.”


  There was silence for a moment as Preston apparently tried to figure out the next step. “Did you say you’d be in Washington next week?”

  Nikki had almost forgotten. “Uh . . . yes. Monday.”

  “Can you stop by the office? I’ve talked to a few family members of the other contestants—Hadji’s parents and Hasaan’s wife. We might be able to hook them up by videoconference and get a plan together.”

  They settled on a time, and Nikki saw her opening. “Have you got any private investigators working for you?” She already knew the answer.

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think they could do background checks on Cameron Murphy, Bryce McCormack, and Howard Javitts by Monday?”

  “I think so. Maybe we can get some dirt on them to use as bargaining chips—is that what you’re thinking?”

  “More or less. And I’ve got a few names for your investigators to keep an eye on—see if there’s any connection between these guys and the men they’re investigating or their families.” Nikki spelled out a list of defendants who had been freed in the speedy-trial cases, including Antonio Demarco. “I’ll tell you on Monday why I’m asking about these men.”

  “Okay,” Preston said.

  Nikki tried to keep the conversation going for the next minute or so—“Got any big plans for the weekend?”—but it became obvious that Preston was ready to get off the phone. She let him go without much of a fight and with no resentment. The Moreno charm always worked best in person. That way, the legs could do part of the talking.

  Kicking back in a comfortable pedestal chair in her television room, Nikki continued her Internet research on Javitts, McCormack, and Murphy. The men were hard on wives. Combined, they had gone through seven, and Javitts was the only one still married. Nikki was putting together family trees, complete with alimony and support obligations, as well as criminal records for the men. To do this right, she would have to interview all the living ex-wives—always a ready source of dirt. Complicating matters was a name change by Murphy, formerly a small-time actor named Jason Martin. She hadn’t yet pulled up any dirt on Murphy under his prior name, but you don’t go through a name change for no reason.

  But now that Nikki had scammed some help from Randolph’s top-notch investigators, she found it hard to garner much enthusiasm for her own research. The pros would have a report prepared for her on Monday. She would use their work as a springboard for any further investigation. Obviously Finney thought one of these men was out to get him because of something associated with the speedy-trial cases. But Nikki had found no obvious links, and she had been working on it for hours.

  She needed a break. She took another glance at the small book that had arrived that morning. Her brand-new copy of Finney’s Cross Examination. She didn’t doubt that another message would be arriving from Finney soon and that Nikki would have to know the cipher system used in chapter 2 of the book to understand it. Sure, Wellington would be able to solve it. He probably already had. But still, if Nikki could solve it as well, then she would be firmly back in the driver’s seat. She wouldn’t even have to tell Wellington about the message.

  She glanced at her watch. Not quite noon. She would take no more than two hours to work on the cipher before she got back to her research. Time might be of the essence for Finney, but everyone needed a break.

  She started by making a chart of the code letters contained at the beginning of chapter 2, just as she had seen Wellington do. She would need to find a pencil with a good-size eraser for her guesses at what the code letters stood for.

  The next step would be tedious, but there was no way around it. She would have to count up the total number of times each letter was used in the code message and compare the result to the average frequencies of letters in the English language. Cruising around the Internet for a chart showing letter frequencies, she struck gold.

  Nikki landed on a site that hailed itself as the Black Chamber and included a substitution cipher–cracking tool that was, in her opinion, about the coolest site ever invented by humankind. It looked to Nikki like it had computerized the work of cracking codes. She wondered why Wellington hadn’t already seen this site . . . or maybe he had. She remembered how he stepped outside the noisy sports bar to call his mom that first night, allegedly to get information about letter frequencies. Either way, she couldn’t wait to see the look on Wellington’s face when he found out she had cracked this cipher all by herself. Well, sort of.

  For starters, all she had to do was plug her ciphertext into a blank box on the site. She carefully transcribed every letter. Now there were several buttons that would kick out an analysis of the ciphertext. The button that looked like it had the most promise was Show Solution. She almost cheered as she clicked it. But her spirits soon plummeted when the solution came back “undefined.” Did that mean she had to be smarter than the computer to solve this code?

  Not yet. There were still a few more tricks the Black Chamber had up its sleeve.

  The next button she clicked was called Frequency of Individual Letters. It automatically, in less than a second, produced the following chart—a thing of absolute beauty in Nikki’s opinion, saving her a half hour of counting.

  Nikki jotted a few notes. She assumed that either the letter E or the letter S in the ciphertext, the two most popular letters, represented the letter E in the English language. The other probably represented the letter T. And since it didn’t make sense for a letter in the ciphertext to be the same letter in the regular text, she assumed that E in the ciphertext stood for T and that S in the ciphertext stood for E.

  But she wasn’t done with her shortcuts yet. The Internet site had another useful tool. This one was called Vowel Trowel. The description explained, just as Wellington had a few days ago, that vowels were more “sociable” than consonants and tended to border lots of different letters. Consonants, the site said, were “snobs,” bordering only certain other letters. I’m liking consonants better all the time, Nikki thought. When she clicked on the button, it showed her how many different letters each letter in the ciphertext was adjacent to. From this, she learned that both E and S were probably vowels.

  If they were both vowels, then the ciphertext E probably stood for A and the ciphertext S probably stood for E. She started filling out her graph. She placed E in for the plaintext everywhere the ciphertext showed S. Then she put an A for the plaintext where the ciphertext showed E.

  The next button she clicked was something called Common Digraphs. It showed how often certain pairs of letters were together in the ciphertext and the most common letters found together in pairs in the English language. Things were starting to get confusing. Another tool, called Frequency of Pairs of Letters, didn’t help much either. She tried looking for a repeating pattern of three letters together, like Wellington had done, but this was a dead end too.

  Nikki looked at her data, substituted some letters in her chart, then frowned at the nonsensical message being generated. It all seemed so logical and easy when Wellington explained it. But after nearly two hours, all Nikki had was a lot of scribbling and erasure marks on her chart.

  She set down her pencil. The eraser was black around the edges and well-worn. Who cared? She could probably solve it if she really wanted to. But why waste more time? The important thing was investigating the backgrounds of Javitts, McCormack, and Murphy. She would leave the menial task of deciphering to a specialist like Wellington Farnsworth.

  Maybe he was smarter than the computer.

  39

  Finney was no scientist. Math he loved. The law he had mastered. But science? People who understand science go to med school, not law school. The only thing lawyers needed to know about science was that doctors carry big insurance policies. And if something goes wrong, then somebody must have been negligent.

  But tomorrow Finney would be expected to cross-examine some scientific expert in front of a national television audience, exposing Finney’s scientific ignorance for all the world to see. He didn�
�t even know what kind of scientist might take the stand.

  He assumed it would have something to do with the showdown between science and religion on matters of origin. The scientist would probably be a distinguished molecular biologist or biochemist or another expert in some other specialty that Finney didn’t know a thing about.

  Finney started by reviewing the basics of Darwinian evolution. He cruised the Internet until he located a synopsis of The Origin of Species. He took some notes and jotted down a few questions that immediately sprang to mind. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. Like a good lawyer, he traced Darwin’s research back to the original source and read a few sections of Darwin’s journal—The Voyage of the Beagle. The entire book was reproduced on the Internet. Intrigued, Finney turned to the chapter on the Galápagos Islands:

  Considering that these islands are placed directly under the equator, the climate is far from being excessively hot; this seems chiefly caused by the singularly low temperature of the surrounding water, brought here by the great southern Polar current. Excepting during one short season, very little rain falls, and even then it is irregular; but the clouds generally hang low.

  Finney read with interest Darwin’s description of the volcanic geology of the islands, the lava streams, the black sand, and the zoology. Darwin described the unique habitat and incredible variety of wildlife with zeal, reveling in his interaction with the indigenous creatures.

  In Darwin’s concluding thoughts on the Galápagos, he speculated as to why each island had such distinct wildlife. The paragraph triggered a number of additional questions for Finney, and he scribbled more notes.