Justice Hunter

by Harper Dimmerman

“It’s obvious. You haven’t stopped talking about her since you got here.” Maybe it was the guilt associated with his momentary temptation to stray, if one could even call it that, that prompted Hunter to call Sheila. There was also her wisdom, a valuable commodity when the Mafia was sending you death threats and trying to kill, or seriously maim at the very minimum, one’s dearest friends and colleagues.

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.”

  “It’s perfectly understandable if you are.”

  “Very funny.” Sheila ran her hand through her hair. “So is she attractive?”

  “See, you’re jealous. I knew it. This is priceless. The Honorable Sheila Primeau, Philadelphia Magazine’s Most Eligible Bachelorette of 2008, of all people.”

  “I told you to never bring that up again.” Sheila flushed with embarrassment.

  “Right.”

  “So answer the question, counselor. Is she attractive?”

  “What do you mean by attractive?”

  “As in you might just get the urge to screw her.”

  “She is,” conceded Hunter. After all, he had nothing to hide. “Not in an I’d-like-to-screw-her sort of way, of course. Really more of a collegial observation than anything else.”

  Sheila rolled her sparkling blue eyes, pretending to be annoyed with Hunter’s clumsy explanation. “Aha. That’s how it all starts, though. Spending countless hours together, pent up in the posh digs of the blue-chip firm, collaborating on mentally stimulating assignments, then craving stimulation of a completely different and more primal variety.”

  “What a fantasy.”

  “Seriously, though. When I used to work at Kruger, it was a known fact the partners hired attractive paralegals just to tempt the associates into staying there longer, billing more hours.”

  “I can believe it.” Hunter thought about his own paralegal, Debbie. She was attractive in a 1980s sort of way. “Look, I would tell you if I’m considering playing the field, and I’m not. I’m not interested in wasting each other’s time.” Sheila appeared to get the message. “After all, time is a lawyer’s stock in trade,” he said, reaching for a bit of levity. “Isn’t that how the old adage goes?”

  “Time and advice,” she corrected him. “But something tells me good old Honest Abe wasn’t referring to middle-aged divorcees like me.”

  “They had divorcees back then, too, didn’t they?”

  “Very funny. And actually, I don’t think they did. I’m a little rusty on my nineteenth-century law, but I think I would’ve been stoned or something if I tried to leave my philandering husband back then.”

  “Or sent off to the stocks.”

  “That’s true. Can’t forget about those barbaric little contraptions,” she replied with a pleasant smile. She quickly got serious, though. “Well, does she even know about us? I mean, has it ever come up?”

  “Highly doubt it. I sure as hell didn’t bring it up. I barely know her.”

  “Excellent. So this hard-bodied associate, assuredly very eager to please, still thinks you’re on the market.”

  “Sheila, don’t go there.” The repartee had been relatively harmless up until that point. But Hunter was losing his patience. “We discussed all this. We both agreed to keep things private. And it was primarily your idea, if you remember.”

  “Yeah, but…” Sheila checked herself. “No. You’re right,” she admitted. Sheila was unable to contain her vulnerability as it came into full relief for the very first time in their relationship. “I must sound so petty,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “What the hell’s wrong with me?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with you,” comforted Hunter, who stood and began to make his way past the formal desk. “Don’t be alarmed. Don’t be frightened,” he toyed. “What you’re experiencing is perfectly normal. This is merely a symptom experienced by all the women I seduce.”

  She swiveled in her leather desk chair and invited him closer with her eyes. “You must think I’m damaged goods, huh?”

  “Aren’t we all, in a way?” pondered Hunter philosophically.

  “Maybe.”

  Hunter leaned into her space even farther. The clean, sophisticated scent he associated with her Coco Chanel perfume grew more fragrant as the seductive vapors overpowered his senses. Her black skirt could no longer contain her bare, slender legs, which were now spread invitingly.

  “If you didn’t protect yourself, I’d lose all respect for you.” Hunter knew her ex-husband screwed her up. And he just discovered Mancini likely had a hand in it, too.

  She wrapped her toned arms around the back of his neck and brought him even closer. “You would?”

  “I would.” Almost nose-to-nose, their breathing grew faster, heavier. “Let go,” Hunter ordered, before the passion overtook them both and he did what she was craving so badly—overpower her.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “So what’ve you been up to, dude? Pulling any hot chicks these days?”

  Chris Gates, the total hacker type, was Whitman’s in-house IT guy. And as far as nerds went, he was of the cool persuasion as opposed to the socially inept, introverted types, the kind who drooled on themselves and inadvertently emitted that serial killer vibe. He had feathered blonde hair, a slightly ruddy complexion, and always wore the same pair of worn-down Sketchers. Gates still had a social awkwardness to him, though, which was clearly his way of overcompensating for a pornographically high IQ. He loved to talk about his recent hacker exploits, his proclivity for Guitar Hero, and heavy-metal musicians like Marilyn Manson and Rob Zombie. His favorite subject seemed to be Hunter’s love life, though. Gates was in his early twenties and seemed resigned to the fact that he couldn’t get a date. So instead he posed a litany of probing questions, which amounted to his version of vicarious dating.

  “Not really,” replied Hunter.

  Gates was seated in front of a wall of servers. He hammered away on a keyboard as he talked. Hunter noticed a half-eaten pack of Fun Dip sitting on a nearby laptop, well within striking distance. That might explain Gates’s especially high energy level for so early in the day.

  “Yeah, right, dude. Like I believe that. And I’m Trent Reznor.” Gates laughed at his own joke. His snicker bore an uncanny similarity to Beavis from the culturally refined classic Beavis and Butt-Head, yet invariably ended in a sort of question mark, when Gates realized he was the only one laughing. This time was no different.

  “So what did you find out?”

  “Nothing yet, man. Only be another minute or so. For some reason, the system is totally slow this morning. I keep telling Mr. Mancini we’re due for some upgrades, and he keeps blowing me off. If this shit crashes, there’s no way I’m taking the fall. Fuck that.” Although Gates came across as an apathetic slacker, he took his job seriously. He had put the system’s infrastructure in place, soup to nuts, when Whitman made the move to the new building. Killing time, he asked: “So how was the weekend? The hotties in the square were out in full force, huh?”

  “Is that all you think about, Gates? We need to find you a girlfriend. Get you laid.”

  “Hook me up, dog.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open. How about that?”

  “Cool. You’re the man.” Gates hit the enter key decisively and scanned the message that scrolled down the LCD. “Dude, are you ready for this?” he asked, as if he’d just unearthed the coordinates to the Holy Grail.

  Hunter leaned over his shoulder to look at the cascade of computer code gibberish. “All right. So what are we looking at?”

  “This is what an e-mail account on the server really looks like.”

  “Exciting. Really. It is, Gates. But what’s it all mean?”

  “What it means, my friend, is that Mr. Mancini wasn’t lying. He really did send you those e-mails.”

  “He did?”

  “Yup. Unless someone manipulated Mr. Mancini’s account, which is impossible considering that I’m the only one with access at this l
evel.”

  Hunter almost choked. “You didn’t say Mancini’s account, did you?”

  “I did. Why? What’s the big deal?”

  “Gates! I told you the least intrusive way possible.”

  “I know. And this was. At least if you wanted me to be sure.” Gates turned nervously. “Dude. Chill out. He’ll never know. Just to make you feel better, I’ll delete any trace of my even being here from the server. I’m fucking invisible.”

  “Please do,” ordered Hunter.

  “Anyway, are you sure you never got them? Because they definitely made it through to your account.”

  “I’m telling you, there’s no way.”

  “Yup,” said Gates under his breath, pointing to a couple lines of code. “Well, your office must be haunted or some shit, because they were accessed and deleted at your office desktop.”

  “Which means someone had to log in first, right?”

  “Yeah. Unless someone got to it within thirty seconds of your last keystroke. That’s the default security timer I’ve got the machines running on.”

  “I wasn’t in the office until yesterday. And it happened before then.”

  “That’s fucked up, man. Does anyone else have your password?”

  “No. No one. Except for my paralegal and you…”

  “Debbie? She is so hot, dude.”

  “Keep it in your pants, Gates.”

  “All right,” he replied dejectedly.

  “There’s no way Debbie would ever do something like that.” The wheels were turning inside Hunter’s mind. Who, and more importantly why, would anyone delete those messages? “And so that only leaves you,” added Hunter, a slightly menacing inflection to his voice.

  “Don’t look at me, man. I’m your boy. You know that.”

  “I do,” said Hunter, smiling and giving a fraternal nod.

  “You never know. If she’s like everybody else, she probably keeps it in Outlook or something under your name. You’d be amazed by how many people do stupid shit like that.” Gates paused and then had a thought. “Do you know who has access to her computer?”

  “I can try to find out.”

  “I hope everything’s all right,” said Gates sincerely.

  “Yeah. Me too.” Hunter started to walk out. “Hey, Gates. One last thing. Is there any way for you to check if someone installed one of those keystroke programs on my machine?”

  “A keylogger? No need, man. I would’ve been alerted if somebody had.”

  “Just do it anyway.”

  “All right. But only because it’s you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey? When can I call you about that hook-up?” asked Gates. But Hunter was already gone. “Hunter?”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Debbie still wasn’t at her cubicle, and that was a bit unusual for a Monday morning. The plain wall clock outside Hunter’s office read 8:25 a.m. Normally, by now Debbie would’ve already been at her desk for close to an hour or so, getting a jumpstart on the week ahead. Hunter’s first thought was a commuting delay, which happened every so often. Typically a car wreck or construction break, which pretty much counted as construction these days, down on the other side of the Ben Franklin Bridge, wreaked havoc on the rush-hour commuters. He scanned the other dozen or so desks, only to find a couple of the other New Jersey contingency pounding away on their keyboards, bracing for the torrent of work and stress about to be unleashed upon them by their respectively assigned attorneys.

  It was possible that Debbie had come down with something. But in the five years they’d been working together, she’d only been out sick once. In Hunter’s mind, that left just one other possibility: marital trouble. Debbie’s husband, Kevin, an immature biker type, worked as an auto mechanic at the Chrysler dealership along auto row in Turnersville, New Jersey. Hunter only knew the location because the dealership was on the Black Horse Pike, one of the most popular alternate routes down to the Jersey shore. That stretch of South Jersey highway was also responsible for 90 percent of the points on Dillon’s driver license. Once in a while the pair hit the Atlantic City casinos, which in Dillon’s eyes was just another excuse to break the speed barrier in his M3 BMW coupe. Dillon relished the opportunity to put on his black leather racing gloves, which looked ridiculous. Debbie and Kevin lived a few towns over from the dealership in Hammonton, one of those incestuous little South Jersey communities with a Main Street, a shit-kicking sheriff, and dilapidated American Gothic stylized homes. The semi-rural town’s claim to fame was the distinction of being the blueberry capital of the world.

  Kevin was a character, no doubt about that. And Debbie probably could’ve done much better for herself. Looks-wise, he was well built and had a face like Patrick Swayze’s—like being the operative word. With his rolled-up white tees and Levi 501s, he looked like he’d just stepped off the set of an off-Broadway production of Grease. He was a Harley guy, with a nasty boozing problem and a hot head to go with it. Debbie never came straight out and admitted it, but Hunter was pretty sure Kevin hit her when the world looked especially bleak—like when the Eagles lost Super Bowl XXXIX to New England.

  Hunter sipped on a piping hot cup of Starbucks coffee as he powered on his office desktop. Mindful of Murphy’s Law, he was anxious to get the Vito’s brief into a messenger’s hands before lunch. It was due today, and he still hadn’t laid eyes on the final product. He reminded himself they were in good shape, based in large part on what he had seen yesterday. Hunter quickly dialed Stephanie’s extension, but she didn’t answer. What time would someone like Stephanie get in? She could’ve been one of those overly confident associates who strolled in casually at nine on the knuckle. That has to be it. It makes sense.

  Hunter listened to his messages and rifled through the mostly unimportant e-mails that had accumulated in his inbox over the weekend. There was nothing else from Mancini. Apparently. Since the last time he checked, there had been a dozen or so firm-wide e-mails concerning Andy. Hunter regretted not making it back to the hospital last night. He did call that morning, though. Andy’s wife Pam had received promising news from the doctors, which was a huge relief for everybody. Apparently there was also a break in the investigation being led by Detective Risotto. Hunter scrolled down to the most recent e-mail from the office administrator, sent early that morning. The e-mail explained that Andy had improved even more throughout the night and listed the hospital’s visitor hours. The firm had arranged for a shuttle for anyone who wanted to head over to the hospital during lunch. The phone startled Hunter. The caller ID read: Stephanie Diaz. It’s about time!

  “Hunter Gray.”

  “Hi. It’s Stephanie.” Hunter immediately detected a sense of urgency in her voice.

  “Everything okay?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve already started fixing it. So please don’t panic.”

  “Fixing what? Stephanie, I need to see the final version of the brief stat.”

  “That’s actually…”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “I swear I don’t know how it happened. This has never happened to me before.” She paused before dropping the bomb. “The files were corrupted. The original and the backup. It’s impossible,” she added, seething with anger and frustration.

  “Don’t panic.” Hunter was getting ready to lose it.

  “Look, here’s the good news. This all happened late last night. That’s when I intended on proofing the final version and printing it out. Fortunately, I caught it then. So I’ve been up all night reconstructing it.”

  “Why didn’t you call me? What were you thinking?”

  “I didn’t want you to be pissed.”

  “Didn’t you realize I’d be pissed either way? This is nuts.”

  “I know. Look, give me another hour, tops. I think I can have something even better than yesterday’s draft by then.”

  “One hour. E-mail me the file as soon as you finish.”

&nbs
p; “Got it.”

  A hurried click was audible on the other end of the line. Hunter just sat there, feeling entirely powerless. He kicked himself for delegating out such a crucial task in the first place. Yet now, thanks to a fleeting interval of laziness, his chance of making partner, possibly even his career at Whitman, was in the hands of a bright yet unproven associate. The day had barely started, and he was already wishing it were over.

  A wave of panic started to swell. And Hunter needed a distraction—fast. So he diverted his attention to a few random news sites and tried to enjoy a leisurely sip of coffee. It was futile, though. The anxiety continued to smolder. As he sat there in escapist mode, the constant awareness of what he was trying to do, ignore the panic, only made it worse. He must have been stuck in that state of anxiety limbo for a half hour or so before a voice startled him out of his trance.

  “Dude, what’s going on?”

  Jumpy, Hunter turned his gaze toward the door. Dillon stood there, Red Bull in one hand, redwell file in the other, looking slightly disheveled. His creased, white dress shirt was partially untucked and his necktie loose. Hunter saw right away that Dillon’s eyes were as red as a bloodhound’s, not entirely atypical for a Monday morning or any morning these days, for that matter. Dillon was just one piss-drunk night away from AA.

  Hunter tried to play it cool, more for his sake than anything else. “Hey. I was just catching up on some news.” Hunter stared past Dillon to Debbie’s cubicle. She still wasn’t there.

  “I don’t know how you read that shit. Between Wall Street and the presidential campaigning, it’s unbearable. Same old crap over and over again. Sensationalized smut. And the Americans just eat it up, waiting to be spoon fed their very next thought.”

  “We didn’t wake up on the wrong side of the bed today, did we?”

  “Okay. So I’m a little bitter. Our best friend, Andy Smith. You might’ve heard of him. He was beaten to a pulp yesterday morning, and we’ve got to endure another week in this shithole.” Dillon slyly looked over his shoulder to check for partners in earshot. “Coffee break? The usual?” So long as they weren’t in court, Dillon, Andy, and Hunter typically headed down to Starbucks on Monday mornings. It had become a ritual of sorts. They swapped stories about their weekend as they eased into the inevitably brutal workweek that lay ahead.