by Sadie King
“Well, you’re right about that, whoever designed this place was like the anti-you. Your nemesis.”
“Very funny. Speaking of my nemesis, what does the Judge want? Come on, that’s the whole reason we came here and I have to see you eat that nauseating hot dog.”
Zora was not a strict vegetarian, she ate chicken and fish aplenty, but her sympathies ran more in the herbivorous direction than the carnivorous one. It didn’t help that Jack chewed like a cave man. A gourmand he wasn’t, nor a master of etiquette in general.
“Ever heard of the Gatekeeper?”
“Yeah, who hasn’t, most famous female serial killer in American history, right? Over in Arizona.”
The Gatekeeper’s real name was Dorothy Krause. Like the Unabomber, she’d gotten an acronym in honor of her peculiar talents: gouge, amputate, keep. Aside from dozens of stab wounds in their pulped-up chests, her five victims had been found with their eyes gouged out.
And when the police found Dorothy, half a mile from the bodies in a ramshackle shelter on a small tract of undeveloped BLM land outside of Phoenix—she’d been homeless for years, schizophrenic since her teens—she had in her possession five sets of severed hands and five sets of severed feet. Trophies, mementos, toys. Dueling psychiatrists didn’t prevent her from being found competent to stand trial, and she was currently on death row in some hellhole.
“Know where she is now?”
“No, really didn’t follow her story that closely, too sick and twisted. Pray tell.”
“The Drome.”
“No shit!”
Zora put a little too much juice in her voice and surrounding eyes swept over at her. She fixed her face with the sheepishness of apology and then overcompensated by whispering to Jack.
“Wow, that close. Now I’m officially freaked out.”
The Drome was only a mile away from the city limits of Madison Springs. In more official parlance: United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility, Madison Springs, Texas. But pretty much everyone within eyeshot, or anywhere really, called it the Madison Springs Supermax, the Drome for short. MSSM. A palindrome.
The Drome was 100% supermax, on top of which it had its very own death row, a super-dupermax of sorts, the Gatekeeper’s new home. Zora couldn’t imagine that the Gatekeeper’s schizophrenia had improved very much in that infernal place. Dante’s paradise. If you weren’t already mentally ill when you arrived there, you’d unwind fast.
“She’s slated for execution about a month from now. Lethal injection. The Judge wants to meet you tomorrow during his office hours, wants you to help.”
“He wants me to help with her execution?! What the hell are you talking about?”
Zora was starting to feel the slightest desire to asphyxiate Jack, and not in a good way either.
“Zora, calm down, the Judge knows you’re part of the LORD Project. He read your resume, dummy.”
The Judge could read her like a Crim Law casebook. He knew of her religious convictions, knew she opposed the death penalty, knew she had joined the Life Over Death Project. To keep the needles out of felons’ arms, at least while they were in prison. What they did on their own time, injecting death into themselves from a spoon if they so desired, that didn’t concern Zora as much as what the government did to them.
She took another bite of salad. Chewed methodically, everything she did was methodical. The anti-Jack.
“That makes sense. What time are his office hours again, where? Never mind, I’ll check the syllabus back at Ford. Let’s just eat this food and get out of here. If I’m lucky I can still prep for Prop. And I have something I want to talk to the Judge about.”
“Really Zora. You’d better be careful. He doesn’t take kindly to upstarts. Asskissers maybe, bootlickers definitely, not upstarts. You definitely seem more the upstart type. And what is it you have in mind?”
Jack’s tone had flattened out, almost as if he didn’t relish talking about Zora and the Judge in the same sentence.
“If I told you I’d have to strangle you.”
Now she gave voice to her playful subliminal impulse.
“Way sooner than I would have to otherwise.”
“Just try it, I dare you.”
It seemed more of an invitation than a warning, a double entendre for the not-so-celibate.
“Eat your salad. If I don’t let you prep for Prop you probably will kill me.”
As they parted outside the Cave, standing in the bright shadow of a billowing sky:
“See you on Wednesday Zora, or maybe I’ll run into you before then. I live off campus, but I’m around here most of the day. I will get you to tell me your secret. Over dinner next time. An actual restaurant. With everything in a grid. Geometric.”
Before she could reply in the negative, one excuse after another, all reducing to celibacy, to the proverbial nunnery, he had turned on his heels and exited from the stage.
CHAPTER THREE
“Enter.”
Past the secretary’s desk, a look of sympathy from the harried woman, through the translucent inner glass door, gilt lettering, Hon. Victor Ras. Zora could see the hazy shape of her Socratic tormentor. A blur of fear passed through her as she swung the door.
The haze resolved into the Judge in a blue silk shirt, the tie a darker shade of blue, not as catching, cobalt-fiery as the eyes, seated at an arboreal work of art, the most gorgeous desk she’d ever seen, huge, varnished zebrawood with an enormous burl right in the middle. The ivory gavel was nowhere in sight.
“Ah, Ms. Bright, so glad you could come. Do sit down.”
Two matching zebrawood chairs. She chose the one on the right but first moved it to the left. A clouded look passed over the Judge’s face but he gave it no voice.
Carefully, sputtering almost perceptibly, conscious of the gulf that lay before her, between them:
“Jack Carson told me you wanted to see me. About the LORD Project.”
“Of course, of course. I have your resume right here in front of me.”
He gestured to a stapled set of three sheets on the zebrawood, Crane cotton paper, bright white, the one she’d mailed to the admissions office. Sure she’d submitted an electronic copy like everyone else, but her old-fashioned sensibilities had eclipsed her worry that the admissions people wouldn’t appreciate snail mail. She figured if Crane paper was good enough for the U.S. Treasury, it was good enough for the FLS Admissions Office. Her upstart attitude again. A paperwork rebel, a bureaucratic maverick.
“Vanderbilt alumna I see. Justice major. You from Tennessee?”
She got the uncanny impression he already knew all of this, had already memorized her resume, researched her life, knew her inside and out, her paper-thin self.
“No, born and raised in Appomattox, Virginia. Stone’s throw from the original courthouse. It burned down. Lots of history there.”
The Judge didn’t pursue any of that history, maybe didn’t care.
“Same with your husband?”
She found the question strangely out of place, cordial yet personal, and was more than a little tempted to change the subject altogether. Steer it toward the Gatekeeper, the woman whose life had 27 days left to run before 50 cc’s of potassium chloride stopped her heart. It was common knowledge around campus that the Judge had recently—and rather nastily—divorced his wife Sheila. Plenty of allegations of infidelity on both sides. Grist for the rumor mill—but his notoriety made the rumors richly deserved.
Zora was a nobody, her private life still sacred. She answered and then steered.
“I’m not married, Judge Ras. Never have been.”
That just popped out of her—a dig at his divorce, retaliation for the question. Upstart. A pair of judicial eyebrows furrowed.
“Right now I’m too dedicated to my studies, and”—suggestive cough—“trying to get the death penalty abolished.”
Which was, after all, the whole point of the LORD Project. If the LORD activists couldn’t halt the needles,
and the occasional 2500-volt jolt of electricity, they’d chip away at the edifice of official death one convict at a time. Mainly through exculpatory DNA evidence. Wouldn’t work for the Gatekeeper—her DNA had been all over the crime scene, smothering the body parts she hoarded. How the hell Zora was supposed to get her off the hook was anyone’s guess.
The Judge took the hint, steered back toward the condemned.
“I’d like you to prepare a clemency plea for Dorothy. I’ll send it directly to the White House. They know it’s coming, in fact I’ve spoken to President Heath about it. She went to Founders, you know.”
Rebecca Heath had gone to Founders? Zora had no inkling of that, but politics really weren’t her thing. She hadn’t even voted for President Heath, hadn’t voted at all in the last election. Not something she wanted to admit to Judge Ras. Where Heath had matriculated didn’t surprise Zora—it might not have been Harvard or Stanford Law, but FLS put Texas on the map for more than just steaks and sweet crude. Higher-ranked than UT-Austin, and that was saying a lot.
What did surprise her, really startled her, was how the Judge had referred to the Gatekeeper as Dorothy. As though they were old chums. For one of his law students, an upstanding citizen and upwardly-mobile woman, a future who’s who of American lawyers, he waxed formal. For a serial killer in the deepest hell-hole of the American penitentiary system, buddy-buddy. Strange. Perverse.
“I think I heard about that. But how am I going to prepare a clemency plea? I’m just a 1L and I really know very little about the Gate—about Dorothy’s case.”
The Judge became more animated, signs of growing passion in his demeanor. The zeal of the personal.
“That’s exactly the point, Ms. Bright, you’re an eager young mind, passionate about the law, you can bring an idealist’s point of view to the plea. I know Heath would respond well to that. And the media would eat it up.”
“Honestly I don’t think I could bring anything to the plea. Of course I’d like to help but . . .”
“You’re going to meet Dorothy, Ms. Bright. End of discussion. I’ve already arranged the date and time. Next Monday, 10 o’clock. Sharp. In lieu of coming to class. You’re going in the capacity of legal counsel. I explained the situation to Warden Arnold and he’s issued clearance. Everything is set.”
“Judge!”
Zora’s voice sharply chirped, crescendoed, indignant. She wanted to object, refuse, slam down her fist, hard like ivory, the gavel if she could get her hands on it, put a mark in the zebrawood, put a mark on the Judge. Merely a passing fancy, a fleeting rage, and in a heartbeat she had her bearings again, was right side up. Floating.
The Judge gripped the lingering anger, and suffused the room with the intimacy of self. He softened into a person, a soul, a vessel of weariness and care. A tactic of endearment, honed before a mock jury in a mock courtroom at Yale.
“My mother suffered from depression for a long time. Severe. Attempted suicide twice when I was a boy.”
“Judge, I’m so sorry, I never had any—”
“The system doesn’t work for people like Dorothy, Ms. Bright. Why does insanity, let’s call it that, it’s distasteful, why does insanity have to be an affirmative defense? Why should someone like Dorothy have to prove that she’s insane, instead of the prosecution having to prove that she’s not? Before Hinckley it was the other way around.”
Zora knew what he was talking about, she’d been a Justice major at UVA for one thing. Straight A’s there, one of the very few people at Founders on a full academic scholarship. She put the average super-achiever to shame. Strange, though, for the school to extend so much money to someone who had expressed no interest in becoming anything but a public defender—she wouldn’t exactly end up having any new buildings on campus graced with her name, no super-sized checks she’d be able to write to the school, no fame to garner as a luminary of her profession. No, if she went that route, the only thing she’d have to compensate for penury would be obscurity.
But her future was up in the air, and Lord knows—Satan even better—that for every ten idealists who start out in the law, 9 of them corner their idealism in a tight spot and kill it. Slaughter the fucker like a sacrificial beast.
In her taintless, as-yet-untainted frame of mind, Zora was starting to warm to Judge Ras. See him not as a cold authoritarian, a professor who victimized students like a wolf victimized lambs, a judge whose power in some ways could almost rival the President’s. As a kindred spirit. Her eagerness, her sympathy, got the better of her.
“The Insanity Defense Reform Act, I studied that my senior year, my Criminal Justice seminar, wrote a paper on it actually. I criticized the life out of it.”
The Judge nodded as though he already somehow knew that. Zora continued.
“Passed after Hinckley tried to kill Reagan, follows the M’Naghten test for the most part, shifts the burden to the defendant like you said, sets up clear and compelling as the standard. Too tough to go up against the government on something like that, criminalizes almost the whole spectrum of mental illness.”
“Very good, Ms. Bright, very good. That’s why you’re perfect for this. You know your stuff, and you care. You care.”
He gestured, reached out with warmth, the energy and electricity of contact, humanity, something more lurking there, to touch her shoulder, her hand, the desk was in the way. Better that way.
“The idea is, you get her clemency, treatment, out of prison, into a hospital. You give the White House an intimate look, a compassionate look, a truthful look, at Dorothy. You’re not a doctor, not a lawyer, yet anyway, but you’re an idealist. That matters almost as much as anything else, probably more. Idealism is something too easily pretended and—”
A rapid knock on the door, staccato.
“Victor! Victor, I need to talk to you.”
“Come in Vane.”
The door opened and a man stood on the threshold. His shadow covered Zora. He stepped inside the room. A commanding presence, brooding, urgent, his resemblance to Judge Ras far from faint, more youthful. Eyes green not blue, blank.
Zora began to rise off the zebrawood.
“No, Ms. Bright, sit down. This is my brother Vane. He teaches here too.”
As she descended, Zora reached up and shook the brother’s hand. An awkward posture, too lowly. Abject. Reminded her of Judge Ras’s comment about the weak and the strong.
“Very nice to meet you. I think I’ll be taking your Law and Economics seminar next semester.”
She knew, or could surmise pretty well, that Vane had depended on the patronage of his brother to get his position. A Lecturer who’d joined the faculty the previous year, no chance at tenure, the Judge, the elder brother, there for 16 years, a full professor almost from the beginning. But Founders was a bastion of Law and Economics, second only to Chicago, so it was no small coup for Vane to get the seminar plum.
Vane looked at her, through her, translucent like the door into the office. There, not there, indeterminate.
A single glassy word to her: “Fine.”
Then, solidly, opaquely, to his brother: “Victor, there’s a problem with one of the members. We need to get it resolved before tonight.”
“In that case Vane, let’s step into the outer office. I’ll ask Ms. Kim to come in here to give us some privacy.”
Why he didn’t simply ask her to step outside made no grain of sense to Zora. Was Judge Ras actually deferring to her on some level, trying to slight his own brother?
While the brothers conferred, Zora got to know Eunice Kim and weather trends on the Eastern seaboard. Eunice was quite an addict of the Weather Channel it turned out, secretly watching hours of live reports on her office computer. Hush hush. Two small powerless women in the inner sanctum of the Judge, two powerful men of stature in the outer. Then Vane left, and so did Eunice, trailing back to her desk something about a derecho in New Jersey.
Something happened when the Judge returned to his desk, a transformation in the ai
r. It reached into the murky deep of Zora’s life.
Barely a disturbance—upon returning to his desk, behind her in passing, the Judge brushed his fingers—felt like two, right index and middle—across the back of her neck. The soft junction between shoulders and head. Skin upon skin, silk upon silk.
No accident: passion or compassion? Her body sensed it was both, a sensual mingle of common understanding, of fellowship, and of the chemistry of attraction between the weak and the strong.
Yet she was not weak, he would have to know that, she would force him to know that. As strong as she was, she couldn’t avoid the catharsis of touch, the shiver that radiated outward as she inhaled a warm burst of air. She dug the fingernails of her right hand into her thigh.
She exhaled through her nose, slowly, not sharply, in control now, her catharsis, his skin, would go unspoken between them, would be a sign needless of voice. An emotion imprisoned, locked in silence. Her inhalation, the movement of her lungs, of her chest, a bodily tremor that could have come from anywhere, the only sign.
Another sign: her voice started as a whisper, grew quickly to full intensity:
“Judge, you were talking about the Juris Club with your brother, weren’t you?”
Sooner or later she would call him Victor, cast off her weakness once and for all, she knew that calmly, fervently.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Ms. Bright.”
For a lawyer, a judge no less, he was a terrible liar, as translucent to her as she had been to Vane. Transparent would be a better word. She saw him. His touch had activated something in her, an understanding of the man, of his personality, of his strengths and frailties. A single touch.
“Judge, I read the expose of the Juris Club in American Lawyer. Mentioned you by name.”
“Goes to show you you can’t believe everything you read. Especially in American Lawyer. Personally I prefer The National Law Journal, I can get you a discounted subscription if you’d like.”