“I didn’t know anything about this, Mike.”
“Yeah, and you still don’t. If we track him down and get an indictment, they’ll probably bring in someone from Boston or DC to handle the case. No offense.”
Campanella’s face got hard. “They may be underestimating me.” He reached toward Patterson’s pile and took a handful of pistachios. “How do you know this guy is around here?”
“First, the IT people tell me that unless Henry has a very high-tech computer, he must be somewhere in western or southern New England.”
“Who’s Henry?”
“I always call these guys Henry. I don’t know why.” He shrugged. “It’s easy to read the incoming messages off the girls’ computers, but hard to trace the sender. Anyone with any smarts can use programs that bounce encrypted transmissions through different servers. The most they can tell me is that Henry is probably within driving distance, three or four hours of where we’re sitting now.”
“Okay.”
“Second, the missing girls all come from this area: one from down in Enfield, Connecticut; one from South Hadley, just up the road; and one from over in the Albany area. It seems likely that Henry is not too far away if he’s driving to meet them. Finally, I have my own theory, which is probably why I got sent up here.”
“No good deed goes unpunished.”
“Right. Henry used the same phrase to groom all three of the victims: ‘Refuse to Lose.’ He tells them that they should be tough, be themselves, and refuse to lose. That ring a bell?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not a basketball fan?”
“Once in a while, I catch a Celtics game. That’s it.”
“‘Refuse to Lose’ was the motto of the 1996 University of Massachusetts basketball team, the last UMass team to make the Final Four. I’m betting this guy has, or had, some connection to the University of Massachusetts up in Amherst.” Patterson swept his pile of nutshells into the metal wastebasket. They made a faint clatter. “That’s why I’m here. I’m going to find Henry. And when I do, I’m going to tear his balls off.”
“Save one for me.” Campanella stood up. “I better go. I need to check on a couple things before we head back in.”
“Good luck. Let’s see if you can convince Norcross to stick Professor Snape in Azkaban.”
7
You don’t have children, Chitra. Just wait.”
“Erik, I’m a raging feminist. If it were up to me, I’d ban adult pornography and child pornography both. It’s all disgusting. But you can’t dictate what some loser pulls up onto his computer. It’s like trying to ban what a person can read.”
Chitralehka Vaidyanathan’s mom and dad came from Chennai, India, but she was born in Palo Alto where her father taught at Stanford. She was leaning in through the doorway to Erik’s small office. Her dark hair was, as usual, piled high on her head in an effort to compensate for her small stature. A yellow pencil stuck out of the side of her coiffure. She’d been Judge Norcross’s law clerk, her dream job, for the better part of a year.
Her co-clerk, Erik Blanchard, was sitting at his desk, his chair tilted back against the wall as though pinned there by Chitra’s vehemence. His family came from Provo, Utah, where Erik had been an All-American rugby player. His hands were the size of snow shovels, and everywhere was too small for him. Even his desk looked undersize. He’d married right after college and now had three kids, with a fourth on the way. In contrast to Chitra, who liked to gab, he hardly ever talked, unless provoked.
Erik liked Chitra very much—he secretly hoped that he’d overhear some guy, preferably some large guy, being rude to her so he could flatten him—but it was fair to say that Chitra did provoke him, sometimes almost to loquacity. The two clerks were very smart, and they disagreed strongly about child pornography.
During the court recess, Judge Norcross had disappeared into his private office at his end of the chambers and closed his door to take the phone call. The two clerks had been battling ever since, with Chitra pursuing Erik like a fox terrier nipping at the tail of a rhinoceros.
“Chitra,” Erik began, but his co-clerk broke in.
“It’s just as futile as banning adult pornography was back in the sixties.” She waved her fingers behind her. “Except worse, because now we have the Internet.”
“It’s not the same. This is …” Erik flushed and tapped his desk with the point of his pencil. He’d been underlining passages in Cranmer’s pretrial services report, reviewing the pros and cons of detaining the professor in case Norcross wanted to confer.
Chitra pressed over him. “Until the early 1970s, if I remember, a person could go to prison for possessing any material, including sexually explicit adult material—let’s see if I can do this—‘whose dominant theme …’”
“‘Taken as a whole …’” Erik inserted.
“‘Appealed to prurient’—boy, that’s an odd word, hard to pronounce too—‘prurient interest in the mind of the average person …’”
“‘Applying contemporary community standards.’” Erik completed the formulation.
“And this test allowed the police to arrest Lenny Bruce for using the word cunnilingus during a comedy routine.”
“Right.” Erik’s face squirmed with distaste. “But the Supreme Court put an end to that in Stanley v. Georgia.” He tried to return to underlining the pretrial services report but instantly broke the point of his pencil. “Dammit.”
“They had to. The justices had been stuck applying the wacky Roth test, film by film, magazine by magazine. Justice Stewart’s version of the standard—that he couldn’t define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it—meant that they were forever watching dirty movies. You remember poor Justice Harlan?”
“It’s an old story, but child porn is totally different. The Supreme Court said so in Osbourne.”
“The poor man was losing his eyesight, and he had to have a law clerk sit next to him and describe who was inserting what into where so he could decide if it was prurient. Here, take this one.” She pulled the pencil out of her hair and handed it to him. “Nowadays, they keep porn in doctors’ offices to hand out to sperm donors. It’s in the best hotels. It’s on HBO, more or less. Fifth-graders look at it when their parents aren’t around.”
“Are you saying it should be the same with videos of five-year-olds, Chitra? Raping a toddler as a form of entertainment? Give me a break.”
“It’s revolting, I agree. But the Internet is like the river Ganges, divine and swollen with garbage.” She nodded at Erik’s computer. “Four or five clicks on that, and you can watch some poor journalist having his head removed. You can watch suicides and murders in real time. You can watch the dead bodies of American soldiers being mutilated and dragged through the street. And, yes, you can watch little children being raped. The people who do it, the people who film it, and the people who distribute it as a business should be chucked into a giant food processor. I have no problem with that. But some curious teenager? Some depressive with Asperger’s or whatever who just looks at this muck? Five years in prison for looking? We punish people for what they do, Erik, not what they look at.”
Erik shook his head. “It’s the only way to suppress the industry. And some of these guys are not just losers. They sit at their computers …”
“Okay, sleazebags.”
“Lots of them aren’t just that.”
“Dirtballs.”
“Whatever. Lots of them sit at their computers, like I’m trying to say, Chitra, and they crow about their collections, trolling for swaps, buying it, and trading information on the best sites. These creeps keep the whole horror show going. Children are tortured, and these pictures get made, because guys like Cranmer enjoy looking at them.” Erik dropped his head, exhausted by all the talking, and muttered, “Some things just have to be off-limits.” He nodded up at Chitra.
“Like I said, wait until you …”
“Excuse me. Could I break in?”
Both of them jumped. Judge Norcross rarely came down to their end of chambers, and the carpeting had muffled his approach.
When Chitra turned to face him, she knew immediately that something awful had happened. Judge Norcross was looking down, with his mouth open as though he were still trying to catch his breath.
“I’ve just had a pretty rough phone call.”
Erik untangled himself from his desk chair and stood up. “Who was it?” He broke off, perhaps realizing he was too pushy. “I’m sorry, I mean if …”
“My brother Ray’s chief of staff.” Norcross inhaled, steadying himself. “It will be in the newspapers tomorrow.” He paused. “Probably online this afternoon. There’s …” He cleared his throat. “There’s been a plane crash.”
“Oh no.” Chitra’s eyes instantly welled up. She started to touch the judge’s arm and pulled her hand back.
“Ray was on a fact-finding mission to Croatia, and they were approaching, uh, the Dubrovnik airport in fog. Two hours ago. About forty people on the plane.” Norcross looked to the side and swallowed. “They overshot the runway, and the plane …” He paused to swallow a second time and clear his throat. “Sorry. The plane went into a stand of trees and caught fire. Half the passengers were killed immediately, including Ray’s wife, Sheila.” He reached around to the back of his neck and rubbed hard. “She was traveling with him, I guess.”
The judge’s secretary, Lucille, came up and joined the group, her face grave. Back at her desk, the phone began ringing. When Chitra said, “Let me get it,” and turned to go take a message, Lucille put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Let the machine do it.”
The judge leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. He looked devastated. Chitra wondered how she would handle news like this if it were one of her brothers. The Vaidyanathan family was very close.
“Ray was alive when they pulled him out, but in bad shape.” Judge Norcross closed his eyes, waited a few seconds, and opened them again. “Unconscious. They’re trying to get him on a plane to Germany.” He looked at Lucille, then Erik, and then Chitra. “Ray’s my only brother.” He wiped his hands over his face. “I just called my dad. He’s pretty cut up.”
“Did they have—” Erik began and broke off, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. Never mind, I …”
“It’s okay. What is it?”
“Did they have any kids?”
“Two. Two girls. A teenager and a … a …” The judge lowered his hand, palm down, to indicate kindergarten height. “A littler one. Jordan. Right after we finish up in court here, I’m headed to Bradley. The Secret Service has a plane waiting. Ray’s staff asked me to come and break the news to the girls. Just to …” He hesitated. “They’re not sure what to do with them.”
“Judge, we can postpone this hearing.” Erik twisted his large hands into a tangle at his waist, pulling on his thumb. “Really.”
Chitra said. “Or you can send it to Boston to the emergency judge. We can draft the order. It wouldn’t take—”
“No, I’m …” The judge pulled on his nose and sniffed. “I just have to flip the ‘off’ toggle here. Just for an hour. We’ll do this, and then I’ll have it done. Tell the truth, it might help.” He looked at Lucille. “Call Ruby, please. Ask her to round up counsel. We’re going back in.”
8
He didn’t think much of people, but he loved birds. The field down below his house was full of song sparrows and at least two eastern meadowlark pairs. In the evenings, he’d sit on his porch just riding the music, listening to the males marking their territory. His favorite was the hermit thrush. You could never find him, but his call was sad and sweet, like a voice from a better world. A couple nights back, he thought he heard a bobolink.
He’d been out that morning running errands, picking up bags of seed from the Garden Center for the chickadees, nuthatches, and finches that mobbed his feeders. As he drove, he kept turning over in his mind ways to move things along with Li’l Sis. He hadn’t pushed to get her address—he’d once frightened off a perfect sweetheart who might have been his best catch ever by yanking too hard. One minute, you had them eating out of your hand, ready to do anything, and the next minute, they’d slip off the hook and disappear, and you’d never know why.
But with some patient play on the line, he’d learned that Li’l Sis was in the eighth grade and lived somewhere in Massachusetts. When the name of her horribly unfair, stupid social studies teacher slipped out—McCauley—it took him less than an hour on the Internet to discover that Li’l Sis had to be living somewhere in the Amherst-Pelham school district. It was only three hours’ drive down there, and he had a nephew in the area, Buddy, who enjoyed Playtime and would be happy to help out.
He bounced his Jeep up into the garage, pulled the brake, and popped the hatch. After the car died, there was only the sound of the birds and the wind in the trees, which was how he liked it. To the west, a grassy field, spotted with wildflowers, sloped down toward a pine copse. Two ruts ran through it, leading to a narrow dirt road through the trees and eventually to a small pier he kept on the water with a motorboat tied up. The Lake Champlain frontage had been his grandfather’s, and he’d inherited it years ago along with a little bit of money. That was when he decided that six semesters chasing a UMass degree was enough. He had everything he needed anyway. The place was completely private. No neighbors for a quarter mile on either side and so shut in by trees it was practically invisible both from the road and the water.
Apart from the money and the land, he’d inherited a love of Lake Champlain itself. The lake was vast enough that it even had its own monster, now nicknamed Champy, with legends trailing back to before the time of the white man. He’d never seen Champy, but he could feel her down there in the dark water. The middle of the lake was very deep. When something went into it, properly weighted, Champy never gave it back.
A squad of blue jays in the sugar maple alongside the garage was bombarding him with indignant squawks. Their insults made him smile. At the back of the car, he began pulling out bags of sunflower seed, cracked corn, and suet blocks. Over to the side, next to the jack, he kept his traveling kit: a small green duffel with a teddy bear sporting an i love you! T-shirt with a large red heart, some petite-size gauzy pajamas, a blindfold, a gag, two tubes of lubricant, and duct tape.
9
As he scrutinized the defendant, Judge Norcross found himself beginning to worry.
“The government, Mr. Cranmer … Professor Cranmer, are you with us?”
Cranmer was slumped, motionless, staring blankly into his lap like a crash-test dummy after the collision. Norcross tilted his head to one side to try for a better look at the guy. Defendants in child pornography cases were a high risk for suicide. Should he order a psychiatric evaluation? The defense wasn’t seeking one. He’d have Erik swat up a memo on the circumstances that would justify having someone like Cranmer examined on the court’s own initiative. Two of his defendants had died while charges were pending against them, one of AIDS and one in a carjacking. He didn’t want another fatality, certainly not one where the defendant took his own life.
Death, indeed, seemed to be everywhere. He hadn’t known Ray’s wife, Sheila, very well. She and Ray had met in Madison after he’d left the Midwest for his Peace Corps stint in Kenya and then law school. Little bits of things about her stuck in his mind. She was a late only child whose parents had passed away years ago. She liked flowers in the house. She and Norcross’s wife, Faye, had never clicked. Sheila had a routine, each time he met her, of putting a hand on his shoulder and kissing him quickly on the cheek, then backing up, looking him in the eye, and smiling. The gesture felt practiced, the act of a politician’s wife, but it might have just meant she was shy. He and Sheila had been related by marriage for almost twenty years, but he cou
ldn’t recall even one phrase of any conversation they’d shared. What on earth was he going to say to her children?
These thoughts flickered through Norcross’s mind in less than a second while Cranmer finally woke up to the fact that the judge had spoken to him. The professor twitched and cranked himself upright. “Yes, Your Honor. I’m with you. Sorry.”
“Good. The government takes the position that you should be detained pending your trial, which may be some months from now. Ms. Ames, have you gone over this with your client?”
“Yes, Judge.” She stood and shook her head wearily. “And it’s cuckoo. My client’s, you know, an English teacher. He’s lived in western Massachusetts for more than thirty years. He’s no threat to anyone, and he’s not going anywhere. We’re happy to post his house, which has no liens, if you feel it’s necessary. Brother counsel over there has lost his marbles.”
But Campanella was already on the move, shifting from counsel table to the podium in the well of the court, buttoning his suit jacket and quickly adjusting his tie. He didn’t twitch at the “marbles” dig or even deign to glance at Attorney Ames.
“Your Honor, if I might be heard?”
“Proceed. Ms. Ames, have a seat, please. My time is limited this morning, Mr. Campanella. I can give this matter about twenty minutes.”
Campanella positioned his yellow pad in front him. The top of his bald head caught the ceiling lights. “Okay. First, let’s look at the weight of the evidence, okay? It’s overwhelming. The case is not triable, and sister counsel knows it. Getting a conviction in this case will be child’s play. The defendant has been participating for at least the past month, probably longer, in a disgusting . . .”
Judge Norcross interrupted. “You’re talking about child’s play? In a pornography case?” Campanella stopped abruptly. His car was already in the ditch. He glanced back at Patterson.
The top of his head turned pink. “I’m sorry, Your Honor. That was unintentional.”
The One-Eyed Judge Page 6