Personal injuries kc-5

by Scott Turow

  The chain-link fence between the country club and the forest broke at this point for a bridge that crossed the neck of Galler's Pond. The spring waters spread with indifference between rich and poor, over both public and private land. The bridge was divided along its length by a fourfoot stockade fence. The rear side, with the cross-braces running between the posts, faced Robbie. He was supposed to dump his clubs over and then use the ties to vault onto the club property. He had just boosted the bag across when, on the screen, he cranked a concerned look over his shoulder.

  The agent operating the nearby camera was taken unawares. He'd kept a tight shot on Feaver for fear that he'd lose him among the leaves. Now, as the cameraman attempted to locate what had distracted Robbie, he panned far too quickly and couldn't regain focus as he retreated to a wider shot. By the time he'd readjusted and found Feaver, Robbie was back at the bottom of the bridge talking to a Kindle County police officer. We'd heard Robbie tromping down the span, dispensing a sunny greeting, but it was a shock to see it was a cop who'd accosted him.

  "Playing golf, are you, sir?"

  "Right. I'm meeting some friends."

  The cop was huge, a former jock of some kind, a physical presence in the tight blue uniform. He sized up Feaver.

  "The club isn't open now."

  "Right, but these guys are members."

  "Uh-huh," said the cop. "They've had a problem here recently. People sneaking on and messing things up. It's private property, you know."

  Robbie said once again that his friends belonged to the club. When the cop asked who they were, Robbie, with some hesitation, gave Brendan's name. The officer pointed through the fence, noting that nobody was on the fifth tee. Tuohey, Robbie said, would be right along.

  "Can I see some i.d.?" the cop asked.

  From the overhead view, we could see Robbie nodding agreeably and gesturing in the wide way he employed when he was attempting self-conscious charm. He appeared such a picture of confidence that it was hard not to believe he'd get by. It was another mini-coronary, but we'd survived many by now. Tuohey would be arriving any second to bail Robbie out. We all hunched behind Alf, leaning toward the monitor. Amari was issuing orders over his radio. The second camera could not pick up Robbie, but had found the cruiser parked around a bend in the road. It was a Police Force vehicle, not from the Public Forest Division.

  The cop took Robbie's wallet and without returning it asked him to come away from the fence. He traded places with Feaver and with one hand hoisted the golf bag back to their side,' then remained behind Robbie as he walked him the thirty or forty feet up to the road. When they reached the black-and-white, the cop said, "Put your hands on the vehicle, sir, and lean against it, with your legs spread."

  "God bless you, Alfie," Stan whispered. Kiecker, busy with the dials, tossed off a salute. Detected, the FoxBIte, which bore the recorded preamble, would have given away everything, once someone figured out how to play it.

  The cop went down Robbie's sides quickly. For one hopeful second it looked certain Robbie had cleared. Then the cop straightened up.

  "Now slowly lift your hands to your head," he said "and remove your hat."

  "Hey," Robbie answered good-naturedly, "don't you think this has gone far enough?"

  "Remove your hat, please."

  "Think my brains are gonna fall out? I couldn't have a gun in my hat."

  The cop withdrew his baton and told Robbie he was asking him for the last time to take off his hat. "How about I call my lawyer?"

  With that, the copper lifted the baton to shoulder height

  "Oh, Lord!" That was Evon. But the cop didn't hit him Instead he flicked the hat off with the end of the nightstick. The hat plummeted to the asphalt with suspicious speed. The FoxBIte emitted a resounding ping and, with that, the frequency hopper went dead. Klecker sprung even closer to the equipment, switching dials and plugs to no avail, barking at Clevenger. It now became a silent movie.

  Robbie, with a show of tremendous irritation, grabbed the hat off the asphalt before the cop could reach it. The policeman shook his stick at Robbie twice and Robbie waved his hands around indignantly. He finally put the hat back on his head, looking grumpy and clearly making ready to depart. The cop took another step back, remonstrating further. Finally, he removed his service revolver from his holster.

  The sight of the gun coming up had a Zen-like intensity, prefigured as it was by our worries. I was still uncertain about the cop and his intentions, but Sennett had arrived at a far clearer interpretation of events.

  "God, no!" he screamed. "No, no. Move!"

  McManis already had the handset at his lips. "We're up!" McManis yelled. "All agents in at once. Go! Go!" he shouted.

  Before he had finished, Evon was out the door of the van, sprinting down the yellow center line in the narrow forest road. McManis in his blue seersucker suit seemed to have been drafted out behind her and took off in her wake at full canter. He said later he did not think about the fact he was unarmed. Until then, Evon's sporting background had been little more than a curiosity to me, but the speed with which she disappeared into the distance, putting more and more space between McManis and herself, looked almost like a cartoon.

  Inside the van, Amari was screaming instructions into two different walkie-talkies. When I looked back, Sennett was crouching, gripping the monitor by its sides, his face close enough to be colored by the gray glow.

  Robbie was still alive. He had both hands in the air and he was nodding vigorously to the cop, who had hold of the hat. The policeman shook it several times, while Bobbie yammered what, given his nature, was all but certain to be a ludicrous explanation. As it turned out, he had told the officer that the hat was equipped with a biorhythm meter to help promote an even golf swing. The copper appeared to be considering that, but all the same, he put the hat under the arm in which he was holding the gun, and ripped out the lining. He stared for some time into the crown, where the complex electrical equipment was wound tight within a cocoon of colored wires. Then he lifted the weapon straight at Robbie. For the first time the copper looked seriously angry.

  "No!" wailed Sennett again. "God no!"

  The officer claimed later he'd thought it was a bomb. BEFORE SHE REACHED THE BEND where the police cruiser was parked, Evon hopped the guardrail and began breaking through the woods, swinging her arms to clear the thorny undergrowth. By the time she reapproached the road, she saw the cop with his arm fully extended and his service revolver two feet from Feaver's head. Her own handgun was over her belly in something called a Gunny Sack, an enlarged fanny pack that could be pulled open, exposing the firearm. She extracted the 5904 that way and assumed position, yelling as loudly as she could.

  "FBI! FBI! Drop the gun or I'll shoot."

  The cop's head swung a quarter turn. She was about fifty yards from him in the trees and he was obviously uncertain where the voice had come from.

  "I am Instructor-Qualified at Quantico. I can put a bullet inside your eardrum fifty times out of fifty from where I am. Drop the gun."

  The cop crooked his arm instead, keeping the revolver directed at Robbie, but from a foot farther away. He tucked the FoxBIte under his armpit, and with his left hand squeezed the transmission button on the radio fixed to his shoulder and spoke into it.

  She repeated her instruction, but the cop's posture had slackened and she realized for the first time she would not have to fire. She could hear the cavalry rampaging through the leaves and the brush, and an entire posse of agents suddenly poured out of the woods, five or six of them, all screaming "FBI!" Three wore blue plastic parkas with the Bureau initials in huge yellow letters. They surrounded the cop and Robbie, crouching in a semicircle directly behind the policeman. Evon ran up to join them, and McManis arrived right behind her, badly out of breath. He put his hands on his thighs to recover his wind, then came around to where the coo could see him.

  "I want to ask everyone to lower their weapons on the count of three," he said.

 
At three, the cop cheated a look back to make sure the agents had complied, but then directed his gun toward the ground. The FoxBlte remained in his other hand.

  McManis told the cop he'd gotten himself in the middle of a Bureau operation.

  "So you're saying this guy is yours?" the cop asked about Robbie. Robbie's hands had sunk when the cop lowered his gun, but they were still held at a small distance from his sides as a gesture of compliance. His eyes remained grimly fixed on the officer. At one point, he caught sight of Evon to the rear and winked, but under the circumstances, he'd been unable to manage a smile.

  McManis avoided the cop's question. What he wanted was the FoxBIte. Drawing on the military heritage of many of its agents, the Bureau lived by a code which said that the next worst thing to losing a body to the bad guys was losing your equipment. Even if they couldn't salvage Bobbie's cover, they needed the FoxBIte back to maintain the security of future operations. Besides, the unit was cuttingedge, borrowed by Klecker from the Bureau's black-world spooks who worked foreign counterintelligence. Evon knew it was in capital letters this time: Don't Embarrass The Bureau.

  The standoff was still ongoing when Sennett jogged up. I was about one hundred yards behind, Stan having outrun me as usual. He had just approached the cop when I got there.

  "I'm the U.S. Attorney." From his blue suit coat, Stan withdrew his own federal credentials. "I'll take that, please." He reached out for the FoxBIte.

  The cop pulled the unit farther away, but he looked down to what he held and for the first time put his revolver back in the holster. He watched TV like everyone else and recognized Sennett from the news. He was finally convinced these were really the feds.

  Sennett took a step closer and asked for the equipment again. He was almost a foot smaller than the cop, but he gave no quarter and appeared hard enough to seem threatening.

  "You want it, call my C.O.," said the cop. "Which is who?"

  "Brenner, Area 6."

  "Six?" said one of the agents standing in the narrow semicircle to the rear. "What the hell are you doing out here? You're fifteen miles from the North End."

  "I live out here. He told me to look into this on my way in for roll call."

  From the distance, I could hear sirens keening. In less than a minute, another black-and-white made a squealing halt at the roadside. Two other Force cars shortly appeared from the other direction. The six cops trooped down together and stood beside the officer who'd been surrounded.

  Everyone held their places for some time. The sun had broken through an early morning haze and shone pleasantly. Eventually, several cops, including the first one, removed their caps. There was not much joviality, even though a couple of the local agents who'd been working for Amari were vaguely acquainted with a few of the policemen. It was the usual thing, Evon figured, the Bureau and the locals. The agents frequently viewed cops-less educated, more intuitive, and lower paid-as slugs, often embittered ones, because many had failed the Bureau's qualifying tests. The cops tended to see the Bureau types as pansies who knew more about filling out paperwork than dealing with real crime.

  Amari suddenly came trotting up the road, waving. He had one of the large walkie-talkies in his hand and two other agents were behind him. McManis met them on the shoulder. After he heard them out, he gathered a number of us, including Stan and Evon and me, about fifteen yards farther up the pavement.

  The unit tailing Tuohey had reported that about fifteen minutes ago he had abruptly changed course. Brendan had just arrived at St. Mary's, an hour late for his usual Mass. Amari had sent an agent into the clubhouse. The locker room attendant, who'd just come in, said Tuohey hadn't been out here for two weeks because of bursitis. Jim looked at us, his graying forelocks lifted from his brow on a breeze.

  "We have a city cop sitting out here just waiting for him? And no Brendan? And Robbie ends up completely blown? We just fell through Tuohey's trapdoor." He looked away, trying to cope with the bitterness of getting beaten this way.

  "Christ, this guy is smart," Stan said. He screwed up his face to absorb his own distress, then said something I'd never heard in the more than twenty-five years of our acquaintance. "This guy," he said, "is smarter than me."

  CHAPTER 39

  At the door to Barnett Skolnick's modest house in suburban Chelsea, Sennett and his party, which included Evon, were greeted by a stout older woman. She wore an inexpensive housecoat, her nightdress trailing below with an uneven hem. Her old face, spotted and wrinkled, glistened with Vaseline or moisturizer. In her free hand she held a half-eaten chocolate bar.

  Sennett introduced himself as the U.S. Attorney and pointed to the people behind him-Evon, Robbie, McManis, and Clevenger.

  "We'd like to speak to Judge Skolnick."

  "This is something to do with court?" she asked.

  "Exactly," said Sennett. "It's official business."

  She shrugged as she opened the screen.

  "Bar-nett!" she yelled. "Barney. You got friends here!" She was, apparently, not unacquainted with nighttime visits by lawyers. Skolnick was the kind to leave the bench promptly at five. If lawyers wanted more of his time, they could come to him, and lawyers, being who they were, occasionally did on emergency matters. No doubt there were also visits for less savory purposes now and then.

  Skolnick's voice rose from a distance with the same phlegmy cheerfulness heard in his courtroom. He asked his wife to send them down. Behind Sennett, Evon and the others descended a narrow stairwell. A few steps from the bottom, Sennett waggled a finger at Robbie to stay put. Feaver would be a surprise, Sennett's own jack-in-the-box.

  It was well past 10 p.m. by now and they had been scrambling all day. With the assistance of a late-arriving sergeant from Community Relations, the impasse at the roadside in the Public Forest had been resolved with a deal to deliver the FoxBIte to Linden Seilor, Chief Deputy P.A., who was a former trial partner of Stan's. Sennett recovered the recorder personally. Linden had heard Tuohey's name in the subsequent accounts and was determined to ask no questions. However, he vouched for the cop, who was named Beasley. Beasley's lieutenant had directed him to stake out the bridge by 5:45 and to stop whoever went over. The lieutenant warned that the groundskeeper had chased somebody away last week, ceasing pursuit when the fellow actually turned on him with a gun. A thorough pat-down was therefore in order. If the cop found anything, he'd been instructed to give a shout over the police radio. Seilor had already had a word with the lieutenant about where his information and instructions came from, but it trailed off to smoke up the chain in McGrath Hall, police headquarters. As usual, there were several layers between Tuohey and whomever it was on the Force he'd reached out to for this favor.

  Yet it was certain that the cop's story of seven FBI agents drawing on him would soon be departmental legend, along with the inevitable deduction that Robbie Feaver was a Bureau informant. Tuohey had almost certainly learned that this morning, but his people would spread the word slowly for fear that anybody they spoke to might be wired. Nonetheless, given the panic that would grip everyone Robbie had dealt with, the Presiding Judge and his circle would need to make stealthy efforts to hold them in line. Despite the dwindling odds, Stan maintained one last hope that in the fraught atmosphere, Tuohey might blunder. If Sennett could quickly turn someone whom Brendan was unlikely to suspect, or whom he had no choice about talking to, there might yet be an opportunity tonight, or early tomorrow.

  For this effort, the FBI had put the entire Kindle County Field Office at the Project's disposal. Sennett had fielded a full squad of Assistant U.S. Attorneys who were grinding out subpoenas to banks and currency exchanges and the courthouse, which would be served tomorrow to prevent records from going astray. In the meantime, several `flip teams' had been organized. Klecker and Stan's First Assistant, Moses Appleby, were sent after Judith and Milacki. Another group would go to the homes of various clerks-Walter; Pincus Lebovic; Crowthers' clerk, Joey Kwan. Sennett reserved the top targets for himself.

&
nbsp; Amari's people had staked out Kosic all day. The idea was to catch Rollo alone so that Sennett could confront him with the array of incriminating evidence the government had developed and offer Kosic the deal of a lifetime to turn on Tuohey. But Rollo never left Brendan's side, although this, more likely, was for protection and counsel in a moment of crisis, rather than to foil Stan's plans. Once surveillance put the two back inside Tuohey's house in Latterly, Sennett decided to go after the others, leaving Rollo for the next morning.

  At the bottom of the stairs, they found Skolnick huddled on a new tartan sofa-a colonial piece with dark maple arms-watching the Trappers game on TV. He was dressed in green pajamas with black piping, and a velvet bathrobe, adorned at the pocket with the crest of a family to which he surely did not belong. The room was clad in lacquered knotty pine and newly carpeted. The astringent factory odor of the rug did not quite obscure a lingering smell of mold. Along the paneled walls, built-in pine shelves were filled with family memorabilia, snapshots of children and grandchildren, trophies earned by Skolnick's kids in long-forgotten athletic triumphs, and a few photos from Skolnick's official life, including one 8 x 10 from his induction as a judge more than a quarter of a century ago. In it, he stood flanked by a large group, including Tuohey and the dear departed Mayor Bolcarro, as well as Knuckles, Skolnick's connected brother. By now Evon recognized all the faces, which appeared so much more appealing in youth that she had to suppress an impulse to laugh. Looking around, she realized the basement had been refinished recently. She made a note to get the IRS guys Sennett had in the background to go through Skolnick's financials for evidence of how he'd paid for the renovation. Nine would get you ten there'd be no credit card records or checks. Barney, almost certainly, had been a cash customer.