He decides in the end to do that. It wouldn’t be safe to get on a bus with a grocery bag full of brains, with blood and beer spilled all over them. They would probably smell.
He hadn’t thought of that.
In an hour, he is at his aunt’s building. The basement is open. The furnace is going. He takes the bag and pushes it in, with the overalls, through the square door that he holds with one of the gloves. For a while the bag just sits there, as if impervious to fire, as if it has become magical, something that will never disappear. He imagines that the furnace will go out and they would come down to see what was wrong and find the bloody clothes, or maybe they would burn up and then reappear again, like a curse in a horror movie.
He needs to stop thinking.
Then all at once the bag explodes into flames.
It burns white. His forehead is searing. He watches the bag become engulfed. The heat of the furnace is so intense the clothes are gone in a minute.
“Bye, bye, Calvin,” he whispers so softly he can barely hear himself.
Seventeen
Saturday, April 18, 9:51 A.M.
Woodside, California
“This guy the Unabomber?”
Brooks looks out the passenger window of their rented Buick and scowls at the redwood trees rushing past. The country makes her uneasy.
Roland Madison must love it. He lives in a town south of San Francisco on the top of a mountain. To get there, Brooks and Rena have to navigate a steep, curving two-lane country road.
Brooks feels carsick.
“These hills remind me of Tuscany,” Rena says, grinning. Her partner knows the drive is making her nuts and he’s rubbing it in. “But the forests here are thicker.”
Rena was born in Tuscany and spent summers there with his grandmother.
Brooks takes another pull of her double venti Americano for support and frowns.
“Give me buildings. And concrete. And streetlights imposing order on the traffic,” she says. “We build cities for a reason. They’re civilized.”
They enjoy teasing each other about how different they are, maybe because so many people can’t believe they are partners. Nearly everything about them seems mismatched. Their politics is just one of the more obvious items. She is loud and opinionated and works out her ideas through arguing. He is cool and quiet and puzzles things out by listening. He still looks like he could play midfielder for West Point’s soccer team. Her? Jesus, she thinks, what could she say? She is only four years older than her partner but has already begun to thicken into middle age. Somewhere around forty, it’s like she started shapeshifting.
She sees their differences as complementary, their secret weapon, the combination that makes them so good. She is linear and lawyerly. She can build a documentary record of someone’s life and make out patterns even the subjects of the investigation don’t recognize about themselves. Rena adds something she cannot. He can read people. He can interview them, sense things that were never in the record, things that have to do with character and motivation, and somehow get the person to reveal them. If she is the documentarian, she often thinks, he is the ethnographer.
But in one respect she thinks they are utterly alike. They are both retrievers. They can’t help it. Once given something to probe, they share an almost pathological need to know the whole of it.
She also senses in her partner a lingering doubt. He never meant to have a career like this, part politics, part rich companies, fixing problems for powerful people, some of whom would be better punished than rescued. Her partner, the soldier, she knows, would prefer his lines of demarcation to be bolder and thicker—country and enemies, duty and patriotism. He isn’t sure he belongs doing this. But she is sure he belongs. He wouldn’t be so freakishly, instinctively good at it, she thinks—especially the political stuff—if he didn’t.
“I’m telling you, Peter, if this guy is some kind of mountain loon . . .” she grouses. “It’s bad enough he’s from California.” She’s just feeling irritable. “Why can’t Nash pick a southerner? At least that might be worth a couple of votes.” Maybe Rena’s doubt about Madison being a pound of flesh for the right wing isn’t entirely far-fetched. Well, she needs to meet the man.
At the top of the mountain, they come to a crossroads with a gas station, a restaurant called Alice’s, a general store, and a realty office. The place is crowded with an odd mix of luxury cars, pickup trucks, Harleys, and expensive road bicycles.
Brooks and Rena look out of place, like easterners who made a wrong turn, she in a suit, he in gray slacks, tie, and blazer. Rena is apparently thinking the same thing, she notices. He is pulling off his tie.
A left turn and five minutes later they are in front of a nondescript sign hanging on a wooden fence: Portola Heights. But there’s a locked wooden gate. For all the funky, rustic woodsiness, she thinks, the place is a gated community. Rena punches in a code on a security system that opens the gate and they head down a gravel road, the passing houses hidden behind redwoods and unpaved private drives, until they come to Madison’s, signified by a wooden address sign nailed to a tree. Two hundred feet down a gravel driveway they come upon the house, Frank Lloyd Wright–inspired, all glass and redwood and horizontal lines, jutting out over the mountain’s edge.
It all irritates her, the woods, the queasy drive, the dirt, the hidden affluence. There is no doorbell.
She bangs on the door like a bounty hunter.
“Really, Randi?” says Rena.
“They can’t afford a ringer?”
A woman dressed in tan hiking shorts and a Princeton T-shirt opens the door.
It’s Roland Madison’s daughter, Victoria. A lawyer, age thirty-six, they knew from the file, who lives in nearby Palo Alto. She is more striking than her photos, slender and athletic, dirty-blond hair streaked from the sun cut short in a bob, with eyes the color of smoke flecked with yellow at the irises. She looks like a girl in a Beach Boys song grown up and gotten more poised.
Rena is staring. Do men have any idea how obvious they are? Brooks thinks. She gives her partner a stare to prevent him from embarrassing himself but then thinks it’s already too late.
“Morning,” the woman says as if they were already friends. Confident, strong voice.
“I’m Randi Brooks, and this is Peter Rena. We’re from Washington. You must be Victoria.”
“It’s Vic.” She smiles. Rena smiles back in a way that Brooks thinks stupid.
The signs of outdoor life are everywhere. By the door sits a basket filled with trail-running shoes and hiking boots. On the wall, hooks with field glasses, walking sticks, and various hats.
The house inside, Brooks has to admit, is dramatic—a large open space with dark wood, varied elevations, and large windows surrounded by a huge deck. Everywhere you look you see the outdoors. The forest in one direction. Green and gold hills dropping toward the sea in another. In the distance hangs a thick layer of fog over the Pacific.
“Well, no doubt you want to meet Rollie,” Vic says, and she leads them to a small den on the other side of the open living room.
“Dad?”
They hear a chair squeak, then footsteps, and a lean, angular man appears in the doorway. He is tall, perhaps six four, and long legs make him appear even taller. He has the same sandy hair as his daughter, a thin patrician face, a high forehead, strong cheekbones, and a long chin—the face of an English vicar. He is wearing a cardigan sweater, blue jeans, and hiking sandals with padded hiking socks.
Too goddamn crunchy granola, Brooks thinks. They will have to get rid of the sandals and socks.
“Dad, this is Randi Brooks and Peter Rena from Washington.”
“Welcome, welcome, come in,” Edmund Roland Madison says, extending a bony, enormous hand. The voice is disappointing, thin and brittle—not good for television.
The room is Roland’s personal study. Brooks notices Rena scanning it, drinking in details. Rena believes you learn the most from a room used primarily by one person,
and he is much better at learning from such spaces than she.
A few things stand out to her. The range of topics of the three walls of books for one—logic, theories of math, physics, music composition, biography, sailing, running, birds, parenting. No ego wall with photos of famous people, plaques, or awards is another. The only photos—and they are on a desk pointed so he can see them rather than at visitors—are photos of Vic at different ages on trips in various places in the world. The room’s also packed with stuff. And tidy. She’d like to ask Rena what he has seen, what’s she’s missing.
She and Rena have a routine for interviews they conduct jointly. She begins. He watches. He might say nothing. He might add a few questions. He might become aggressive and take over. It depends on what he thinks will loosen whatever the subject is holding back.
“Your honor, we talked on the phone,” Brooks begins.
“Yup, yup,” he says. “Please sit.”
With a glance that suggests his patience for even this amount of small talk is nearing exhaustion, he adds, “So, what do you need?”
“We’d like to ask you some questions about your record, your judicial philosophy, and your background,” Brooks begins.
“What is it you can’t get from my judicial record and my academic writings?”
It’s a bad start, Brooks thinks. If Madison has to make rounds of Senate offices and charm people who disagree with him, lack of patience for empty talk with people he considers dull will not do.
“We need to get to know you a little better,” she says.
“Why?”
She glances at Rena, whose expression tells her they’re wondering the same thing: Is Madison ill at ease or trying to provoke them?
“Well,” Brooks says, “we need to know, sir, how you’ll answers questions you might be asked if nominated. We want to go a little deeper on some matters in your background. And, frankly, we need to observe you over a number of hours.”
“Ah, to see how I will withstand the withering glare of the national media and penetrating scrutiny of Senate questioning,” Madison says to Brooks.
“Dad, play nice,” Vic says from her chair on the other side of the room. Madison holds up his hands in mock surrender.
“Yes, Judge, we need to size you up.”
“You are the direct one,” Madison says to Brooks.
“Actually he’s the direct one,” Brooks says, looking at Rena. “I’m the nice one.”
Madison can’t suppress a small laugh.
Eighteen
About a quarter mile away, on the opposite ridge, a man raises large field glasses to his face and focuses at a house in the distance. He can see into it easily through the big picture windows.
He’d discovered months ago that this was the house, found it on Google satellite maps. That’s the key—advance planning—right, Bird? Plan it all ahead of time, down to the last thing. Then, when you start, they all go in rapid succession, different people, different places, different ways. And you’re gone before anyone realizes any connection.
He hasn’t been here in weeks. But after doing Calvin yesterday, no rest for the righteous. Or is it the wicked. Or just the weary?
He needs to be careful. The judge is hard. No freaking way you can do crap at a courthouse. Up here in the freaking woods seems great, at first. It’s so remote. But it’s also hard to get out here. You can get into the woods from public land, but you have to hike on private property to get this close. He has done it a dozen times, a day here, a day there, over the months of planning, but it’s been a while. Who knows, maybe he’ll just do it today.
Rapid succession. Before anyone knows there’s a connection. That’s the plan, right?
He puts the field glasses back to his eyes.
Nineteen
“You know that the hearing process is a sham, don’t you?” Madison says. “The senators ask questions to curry favor with interest groups. The nominees score points by not actually answering them. No one learns anything. It’s become a disappointing, meaningless ritual. Surviving it says nothing about whether someone would be a thoughtful constitutional jurist.”
Not exactly a revelation, Brooks thinks, but not what you expect a job applicant to say to butter you up.
“Does that mean you would turn down the nomination if the president offered it to you?” Rena asks, jumping in for the first time.
Madison gives Rena the kind of flinty look a professor might give a student who has asked an impudent but intriguing question.
“If you want to size me up, shouldn’t you know how I feel about the process? Or should I lie to you to be polite?”
“If you lied to us, we would learn what kind of liar you are,” Rena says.
“Is that useful to know?”
“If you are going to lie,” Rena says.
A full smile this time from Madison and then it’s gone.
“What do you mean by the process is meaningless?” Brooks asks, trying to take the testosterone level down a notch.
“It’s theater, not inquiry. You know this idea that everyone should testify didn’t even begin until 1955, which, of course, coincides with the birth of TV. Southern senators were worried John Harlan would spread integration in the South.”
“So it’s all for show?”
“Before John Harlan, only two nominees had ever testified in a hundred and seventy years,” Madison says. “Harlan Stone in the 1920s and Felix Frankfurter in the 1930s, in both cases, to answer doubts by southern senators about desegregation.”
“Isn’t testifying still a way to settle doubts?” Brooks asks. “And if you cannot do it competently, you don’t pass muster.”
“If there are real doubts about a nominee they don’t ever get to hearings. The last nominee to be done in by them was Robert Bork in the 1980s. And his mistake was he answered the questions honestly.”
“In that case, Judge, we need to know if you will insult the senators by telling them how you feel about their process,” Rena says.
“Why don’t you ask some more questions, and you can tell me how I do?”
“Why don’t you stop sparring with us,” Rena says. “Are you so afraid of this that you want to scuttle it? Do you really think it is too much for you to handle?”
Vic begins to chuckle. She is looking at her father, trying to suppress breaking into laughter.
“Dad isn’t sparring,” she says. “He’s being dense. But I have to say I enjoy watching him being challenged by you.”
Madison turns and stares at his daughter.
“Am I?”
“Well, I doubt that there is anything Randi or Peter can do about the nomination process, Dad. They’re here to assess how well you will survive it. Arguing with them isn’t going to help.”
“Yes, of course,” Madison says. “I apologize.”
Rena smiles, but Brooks thinks it’s a hunter’s smile, the one that means Madison’s not off the hook yet.
“Judge, now that you’ve revealed you can be evasive, we need to know whether you can be charming or you know only how to be offensive while you do it,” Rena says.
Madison’s eyes dance with interest. “Ah,” he says, “then we can begin.”
After questions about Madison’s resume for fifteen minutes or so, Brooks asks, “Do you believe the Constitution guarantees a right of privacy?”
“Certainly there is a right to privacy in the Constitution. But—though I wouldn’t bring this up in a hearing—I wouldn’t say guarantee.”
“Why not?”
“The word guarantee is political babble.”
“Yeah, don’t bring that up,” Brooks says. “If you think there is a right to privacy, why did the Founders not include it among the Bill of Rights?”
“Because it went without saying. Privacy was simply a fact of life in the eighteenth century—beyond anything we can imagine now. Time moved slowly and people spent a good part of it in private thought, and in nature. In many ways the whole purpose of the Bill of R
ights was to protect privacy. Privacy was integrally linked to the terms happiness, liberty, and opportunity in a way we don’t think of today, that didn’t require separate enumeration.”
“So do you see a right to abortion?”
“Ah, so here we are now.”
“Yes, here we are,” Brooks says.
“I thought the White House didn’t ask nominees whether they believed in a right to abortion or supported Roe v. Wade anymore,” Madison says. “That’s how they finesse that it isn’t a litmus test. Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
“We’re not the White House,” Brooks says.
“A semantic difference, don’t you think?”
“She asked you an honest question,” Rena interrupts. “If you care so much about candor, why are you afraid to answer it?”
A flinch in the eyes. Madison’s voice slows, a sign of irritation under control.
“Legally the Constitution offers a right to privacy and to life, both. The question is how do you balance them? And that is the problem. Our modern political discourse doesn’t accommodate balance.”
Madison uncrosses his legs.
“One party is attached to life, the other to choice, as if there is nothing in between. But real life exists in the middle. Modern politics does not.”
“How about modern jurisprudence,” Brooks asks. “Where does it live?”
Madison nods at the distinction between politics and law.
“That is one of the fallacies of the conservative idea that judges simply read the Constitution, understand its intent, and then see if the facts fit that intent. The Constitution articulates sometimes conflicting values. A critical part of being an appellate judge is balancing those conflicts.”
“Would you say that in a hearing?” Rena asks.
“What you mean, Peter, is would I offer the same evasion as everyone else who testifies,” Madison answers. “Would I say I don’t think it is wise to engage in hypotheticals and I believe in precedent? Or would I try to turn my hearing into a national teaching moment on the law?”
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