Naked Justice

by William Bernhardt

  There was no response. Well, that wasn’t a tremendous surprise.

  Martha wasn’t in the living room. Normally, absent Buck, she would be watching one of those tabloid TV shows this time of the evening. But the living room was silent.

  I suppose she’s holed up in her room, Deanna thought, protecting herself from undesirable contact with me. Well, enough’s enough. I didn’t change her diapers for three years so she could treat me like an untouchable.

  She banged on Martha’s bedroom door. There was no answer. No noise, no stereo, no radio.

  The short hairs on the back of Deanna’s neck stood on end. That was very odd. She tried the door.

  It wasn’t locked. And Martha wasn’t inside. Damn!

  She ran back to the kitchen to check the refrigerator for messages.

  Nothing there. Not a word.

  Maybe the note fell off, she told herself, trying to stave off the incipient panic. Maybe Martha didn’t fasten it securely …

  She bent down on her hands and knees and examined the floor. There was no note. But on the other side of the kitchen, under the table, she did notice something. A small flat colorful something.

  She crawled under the table. There were two playing cards that evidently had fallen off the table and gotten lost. One was Sewers of Estaark. The other was the Vesuvian Doppelganger. Magic cards.

  He’d been here.

  And now Martha was gone.

  Omigod, omigod, omigod. She pressed her hands against her chest, trying to calm herself. Don’t make too much of this, she thought. Don’t jump to any stupid conclusions. Wait for the facts.

  What facts, you fool? Martha’s gone.

  She threatened to run away, and she did.

  What a stupid ignorant sorry excuse for a mother she was. How could she be so blind? She had practically pushed her daughter into that arrogant, abusive creep’s arms. She had been too protective, too smothering. And what did she have now? Nothing.

  She laid her head down on the table. What a loser I am. My life is over. Just let me die now, before I do any more harm.

  It was just about then that she heard the back screen door open.

  Her head snapped up. She blew out of her chair, stumbling on a table leg, limping into the living room. “Martha!”

  Martha was coming in from the backyard. Her face was flushed and glowing. She lifted her chin and made a wide arc around her mother.

  “Oh no.” Deanna grabbed her arm. “What have you been doing?”

  Martha slowly lowered her eyes and focused daggerlike on a point in the middle of Deanna’s face. “I was trying to get a tan. Is that all right with you? Or did I need your permission first?”

  Deanna held out the two Magic cards. “I found these on the kitchen floor.”

  Martha snatched them away. “Thanks.”

  “Where did they come from?”

  Martha looked at her as if she had lost her mind. “For your information, I was playing a solitaire game before I went outside.”

  “Solitaire?”

  “Right. As in, by myself. That should make you happy.” Martha jerked her arm free, then sulked away to her bedroom.

  Deanna didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. A good argument could be made for either. She returned to the kitchen table, laid her head down again, and let the tears flow. God, she had been so scared. So afraid. Why didn’t anyone ever tell you how hard it was to raise children?

  Because it would be the end of the human race, she realized.

  A laugh broke out, involuntarily. She began to regain her composure. She had been so scared.

  She laughed again, not really knowing why, and unfolded the evening paper. Perhaps the agonies of the world would take her mind off the agonies of the home.

  She scanned the front page. The whole office had been abuzz about the mayor’s being arrested. She couldn’t get through the first paragraph without wincing. Those poor little girls. They would have been utterly lost, confused, and terrified. What they must have thought. Especially if their killer really was their own father.

  She scanned the article to see if the police were pursuing any other suspects. There were some quotes from a press conference given by a Lieutenant Morelli in which he made it rather clear the police thought the mayor did it. A reporter had spoken to a neighbor who had seen the mayor dash out of his house around the time of the murder.

  But the neighbor had more than that to say to the reporter. Deanna read the passage twice, just to make sure she got it right. The neighbor complained that he had seen suspicious persons in the neighborhood for several days—one male, one female. She read the descriptions.

  Tall, lanky. Goatee. Fatigues. High-top sneakers.

  She couldn’t have described Buck better herself.

  And the girl?

  Short, dark. Tank top. Blue headband.

  She folded up the paper and slid it into her briefcase, as if hoping to hide the evidence. Could it be a coincidence? The descriptions were very general.

  But both of them? Together?

  She knew Martha and Buck had gone out together sometimes in the afternoons, even though they weren’t supposed to. But what on earth would they be doing in the mayor’s neighborhood?

  A shiver trickled down her spine. Where the hell did Buck get all that money, anyway? He didn’t exactly look as if he were descended from royalty.

  Deanna felt a cold, icy sensation oozing through the marrow of her bones and chilling the blood in her veins. What was happening here? What was happening to their lives?

  She couldn’t sort this out. She couldn’t think clearly. All she could think about was the one central question that kept racing through her mind.

  Her eyes darted involuntarily toward her daughter’s bedroom door. Martha—!

  Was it really you?

  Chapter 18

  CHRISTINA MET BEN AT the door. “I found the sister,” she announced, beaming.

  “That was quick.”

  She fluttered her eyelashes. “Am I not your faithful aide-de-camp? Am I not resourceful beyond measure?”

  “Uh-huh,” Ben answered. “But seriously, how did you find her?”

  “You know what they say. Cherchez la femme.”

  “Christina!”

  “She was listed in the phone book.”

  Ben smiled. “Amazing.”

  “Now this is odd,” Jones muttered from behind his computer.

  Ben and Christina crossed the office to his desk. A steady ping, every second or so, was coming from the computer. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve been doing some research online,” Jones explained. “Follow-ups on the city council, like you wanted. I sent out a lot of feelers on the Web and to some of the big databases and search engines on the Net.”

  Ben leaned toward the computer screen. “Did you get a response?”

  “Oh, yeah. According to my e-mail folder”—he clicked his mouse twice—“I received exactly four thousand eight hundred sixty-six responses.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “And they’re still coming in.”

  Christina crowded between them. “I can’t believe there are that many computer hackers with titillating stories about city councilmen.”

  “I don’t know what these messages are about. Look for yourself. They’re not addressed to me. They’re addressed to the Boss.”

  Ben saw his name headlining a tall, staggered stack of cyber-envelopes:

  BENJAMIN KINCAID, ESQ.

  “To me? That doesn’t make any sense,” Ben whispered. “I don’t know any of these computer hackers.”

  “You may not know them,” Jones replied. “But they sure know you.”

  “Four thousand of them?”

  “And counting. They’re still coming in.”

  The computer suddenly erupted with a series of beeps and bells. Screens flashed. The stack of cyber-envelopes expanded to infinity. “What’s going on?”

  Jones was frantically pushing keyboard buttons a
nd clicking the mouse. “I don’t know. The computer seems to have lost its mind. It’s showing hundreds of messages coming in at once. No, make that thousands. The computer’s jamming up.”

  “Get rid of them,” Ben said.

  Jones continued banging the keyboard. “I can’t. That’s just it. Whoever is sending these messages is tying up the modem connection. I can’t get rid of them and I can’t get past them to do anything else. I can’t even exit.” He turned suddenly. “Boss, this is computer warfare.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sabotage. Someone doesn’t want me to be able to do my work. Correction: doesn’t want you to be able to do your work.”

  “How could anyone send so many messages all at once?”

  “Our friend must have a program or subroutine that generates them spontaneously. Spamming, we call it. This is pretty sophisticated stuff. Someone is trying to screw you up but good.”

  Ben got an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Let’s look at one of them,” he suggested. “Can we do that?”

  “I think so.” Jones clicked on the top envelope in the computer window. A short message was revealed: SICK HEART.

  “That’s it?”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  “Let’s look at the next one.”

  They looked at the next message, and the next and the next, but they were all the same: SICK HEART.

  “This is really weird,” Jones said.

  “Second the motion,” Ben murmured.

  “Look,” Christina said, “we need to know where these messages are coming from. Can you trace them?”

  “That’s way beyond my capabilities,” Jones answered. “There aren’t many skid marks on the superhighway.”

  “Well, can you tell who’s sending it?”

  “I can get his online name and e-mail address, but almost no one uses their real name.” He punched a few buttons on the keyboard. “The sender has direct access to the Net. He’s not using CompuServe or Delphi or any third-party carrier.”

  “Sick Heart?” Christina said aloud. “What does that mean?”

  “It’s what Wallace Barrett said the other day in court,” Ben replied. “He said he was sick at heart about the killings.”

  “Apparently someone else is, too,” Jones said. “Someone who isn’t too happy that you took Barrett’s case.”

  “Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” Christina said. “It’s not like this is the first time Ben ever represented an unpopular defendant. Ben’s made a lot of enemies these past few years.”

  “Oh, thank you very much,” Ben said. “Now I feel much better.”

  “Look, it’s probably just a prank. I mean, it’s not as if it threatened you.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “I think the best thing is to just ignore it.”

  “I can’t ignore it,” Jones said, throwing his hands into the air. “My keyboard is totally locked up.”

  “Can’t you block messages from this source?”

  “Not without access to the keyboard. I can’t do anything right now.”

  “Then pull the plug.”

  Jones looked horrified. “Boss! Do you know what you’re saying?”

  “It’s not a living being, Jones. It’s a machine.”

  “Says you.”

  “I don’t think you have any choice. It’s no good to you like this.”

  Jones sighed. “True. But unplugging it won’t make the interference go away. The messages will just stack up in my mailbox until they can be delivered.”

  “We’ll get a new phone line put in and get a new e-mail address. Will that take care of the problem?”

  Jones shrugged. “I guess. Till Sick Heart gets the new number, anyway.”

  “Let’s hope he doesn’t.”

  “In the meantime, how will I get my work done?”

  “I’ve still got my old college typewriter in my office.”

  Jones looked aghast. “Are you joking? Me? A typewriter? As in typing paper? Return bars? Liquid Paper?”

  “I don’t see that we have any alternative.”

  “Well, this is just beyond the pale.”

  Ben didn’t hear Jones’s dismayed protestations. He was still staring at the flickering computer screen.

  Sick Heart. Sick Heart. Sick Heart.

  Chapter 19

  MIKE MORELLI RACED TO finish his paperwork. He had reports to complete pertaining to the still-unsolved murder of the homeless man, plus he needed to get the Barrett murder report finished while it was still reasonably fresh on his mind. He knew that his report would be closely scrutinized by judges and reporters, and worst of all, by lawyers, and it would probably end up as Prosecution Exhibit One, so it had better be done right.

  The city council had finally allocated funds for the purchase of computers for the Tulsa police department, and Mike now had one on his desk. He had never used one before and probably wouldn’t have started if Chief Blackwell hadn’t complained about the time Mike wasted battering out reports on typewriters. So Mike had agreed to give the computer a try. So far, his work was taking about four times as long to complete. Last night, he had inadvertently deleted an entire day’s work. Why didn’t they tell you up front that you had to save before you could turn off the computer? With a typewriter, when you were done, you were done.

  Mike had resorted to reading the manual, the last refuge of the desperate. He found it far from illuminating; indeed, he began to wonder if it was perhaps written in some foreign language, Urdu maybe, and was not intended to be understood by outsiders.

  Finally he slammed the manual shut. This was simply not going to work. He’d finish the reports in crayon if he had to.

  A flutter of activity in the doorway caught his eye. “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  Detective Prescott smiled a smarmy smile. “Just wanted to see how your report is coming along.”

  “Get out of my face before—”

  Jack Bullock strolled into the office a step behind Prescott. “Good afternoon, Lieutenant Morelli.”

  “Are you two traveling together now?”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “I would’ve thought you had better things to do at the moment.”

  Not waiting for an invitation that would not have been forthcoming, Bullock flopped down into one of Mike’s chairs. “Doing what?”

  “Well, for starters, taking care of the Barrett prosecution.”

  “Ah, but that’s exactly why I’m here.” He steepled his fingers in front of his face and peered through them. “To make sure you don’t screw it up.”

  “If you have a complaint about my work, take it to Chief Blackwell.”

  “Oh, believe me, I already have. But even he can’t influence what you write in your report.”

  An unhappy smile thinned Mike’s lips. “Is that why you’re here?”

  “In part.”

  “You’ll get a copy of my report at the same time as everyone else.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  Mike felt the steam inside rising. He gritted his teeth. “In case you’ve forgotten, Mr. Prosecutor, I don’t work for you.”

  “Cut the macho cop crap,” Prescott said, intervening between the two of them. “Bullock’s trying to help you.”

  Mike fixed Prescott with his glare. “You put him up to this, didn’t you, Prescott? You’re trying to cover your ass.”

  “We’re trying to cover everyone’s ass,” Bullock said, “because everyone’s ass is going to be on the line if this Barrett prosecution goes sour. Including yours.”

  “Being a bit melodramatic, aren’t you?”

  “Not at all. The eyes of the world are on us, Morelli. Did you realize this story is being tracked on CNN? Fact. Did you know Court TV has been granted gavel-to-gavel coverage rights? Fact. If we live to be a hundred, we’ll never see another case with this high a profile. So naturally, the city council is very concerned that everything goes right.”

  �
�Meaning?”

  “Meaning that the great city of Tulsa, and its government employees, not come off looking bad.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning we’ve got to get a conviction, you stupid son of a bitch,” Prescott interrupted. “Meaning we’ve got to lock this sorry bastard up and throw away the fucking key.”

  Mike calmly placed a toothpick in his mouth. “That’s what I thought it meant.”

  “So you can see where we might be concerned about your report,” Bullock continued. “We don’t want anything in it to impede the prosecution.”

  “I am not going to lie in my report,” Mike said firmly.

  “I’m not asking you to lie,” Bullock replied. “I am an officer of the court, after all. At the same time, there’s no reason to include unnecessary details that might impair our case.”

  “Like the fact that Prescott totally screwed up the crime scene?”

  Prescott’s fists clenched. “That’s not true, you—”

  “It is true!” Mike snapped back. “You did the most half-assed job of controlling a crime scene I’ve seen in my entire career. You went in assuming you already had the culprit, so it didn’t matter whether you preserved the evidence. That was a stupid, stupid mistake.”

  “Gentlemen, please.” Bullock raised his hands. “Everyone in this room knows that mistakes were made. Why on earth do we need to parade that fact before the media and the defense?”

  “I am a member of this police force, Bullock. My job is putting bad guys behind bars. It’s what I do. What makes you think I would do anything that would hurt the prosecution?”

  Bullock paused. “Detective Prescott saw Ben Kincaid coming out of your office earlier today.”

  Mike glared at Prescott. “Are you spying on me now, you sorry excuse for a—”

  “It was purely a coincidence, I’m sure,” Bullock cut in. “Just in the right place at the right time. But it does raise some disturbing questions. Why on earth would our investigating homicide detective be chatting with the lawyer for the defense?”

  So that was it, Mike thought. Now this whole charade was starting to make sense to him. “He came to me because you’ve been so damn uncooperative.”

  “I consider that part of my job.”