Judgment

by Joseph Finder

  “I do,” Juliana said.

  “Okay, then,” Martie said quietly.

  “You told me Philip Hersh saved your life. You didn’t tell me how.”

  “You remember who Frank Krupinak is?”

  “God, yeah.”

  Krupinak was a serial killer who’d raped and murdered four girls in Massachusetts, in a particularly grisly manner. “When I sentenced him to one hundred and fifty years in prison,” Martha said, “he shouted at me as he was led away. That he was going to kill me. And then his conviction was reversed on appeal.”

  “Ineffective assistance of counsel?”

  “That’s right. Plus there was some issue with the lab that did the DNA testing.”

  “They let him out, right?”

  “Right. Awaiting trial. So this rapist-murderer who promised he was going to kill me is out there. At large. And I was terrified—but what could I do? I had to be in court every day. And then a couple of days later I opened my mailbox and found the, uh—this is still not easy to talk about.” She paused a long time. Then in a smaller voice she continued, “I found the severed head of my cat.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “This was when I was living in Lincoln, in that isolated old house? And the thing is, Sheba was a house cat—she never went outside. So he’d been inside my house.”

  “Dear God.”

  “Then he paid a visit to my mother, who was frail and on an oxygen tank. He unplugged her tube and left her gasping for breath. If I hadn’t gone to visit her that afternoon, she would have died.”

  “You must have told the police.”

  “The police chief at the time really had it in for me. Saw me as being on the other side. The cops wouldn’t lift a finger. Sure, I got one of those useless restraining orders. Changed all the locks. Didn’t matter.

  “Next night, I woke up in the middle of the night and saw him standing there, in my bedroom. And he said, ‘Not tonight. But soon. I’ve written your death sentence. It’ll come. Soon.’ That was what he said.”

  “Oh, Jesus. He wasn’t afraid you’d call the cops on him?”

  “He knew they wouldn’t do anything.”

  “Why didn’t he try to kill you then?”

  “Because he got off on my living in terror. Killing me would be too easy on me. This was about feeling the fear. The fear eating your soul. About knowing every day could be your last. You will die, but at a time of my choosing. It was mental torture. So I called Philip.”

  “Okay.”

  Martie paused for several seconds, shrugged. “And the problem stopped. It just . . . stopped.”

  “What—what did Philip do?”

  “I never knew. I never asked.” A long pause. “But I got my life back.”

  Juliana looked at her for a few seconds. “Yet you tell me to get off the trolley.”

  “I told you that several stops ago,” Martie said. “But you stayed on it. And now, you have no choice but to see it to its final destination. You play the game and you follow the rules. Like in tennis. But when the game changes, the rules do too.”

  Juliana nodded. “I’m scared,” she admitted. She sounded like a child saying it, a frightened child, because in some ways that was how she felt.

  Martie went on, “Someone’s lobbing a grenade in your direction; it’s not tennis any longer. Point is, honey, you do what you have to do. To stay safe. To keep your family safe. I love the law like my grandma loved scripture. You and I both swore to uphold the law. But a suicide pact we did not agree to. Am I clear?”

  “Crystal.” Juliana nodded, said nothing for a long time.

  “You want my considered judgment?” Martie said. “You get those bastards.”

  71

  Fifty Braintree Ridge Park was a generic red-brick office building in a generic office park in the suburbs of Boston, surrounded by plenty of parking and a lot of hulking round pruned bushes. Juliana took an elevator to the fourth floor. She walked past the radio station and the marketing company until she came to an office suite at the end of the hall. The door was marked THE NAZAROV COMPANIES.

  She thought: A criminal enterprise hiding in plain sight. She tried the door, but it was locked. She found a button on the door frame and pressed it and the door buzzed open.

  She entered a reception area that was utterly barren, just a couple of squared-off couches and chairs. No magazines. No TV. No framed maps or prints. Not even a receptionist’s desk. She stood for a minute, looking around, and finally decided to sit on one of the couches.

  She was waiting for Dmitry Nazarov, a man she knew to be in the higher reaches of the Russian mafia in America, the mafiya. He’d once appeared before her in her courtroom, six years earlier, when she was still new at judging. A Russian-American owner of parking lots had been charged with bribery of a state official. Dmitry Nazarov was the parking lot kingpin of Boston.

  When she imagined the Russian mafiya, she imagined scary-looking guys with large and exotic tattoos. Not the slump-shouldered man in a polyester bowling shirt who had been on trial. His attorney had been able to show that prosecutors had withheld something exculpatory: a statement of a witness that was inconsistent with his trial testimony. Juliana had no choice but to dismiss the charges. A Brady violation, it was called. Nazarov walked out of the courtroom a free man.

  And as he walked out, he shouted, “Thank you, Your Honor! Thank you!” He put his hands together as if praying. “Anything I can do for you, ever, anytime, I will do.” At the courtroom door he stopped and turned around, a stocky man in a black bowling shirt. He shouted, gesticulating with his hands, “Anything I can ever do for you, you have only to ask!”

  But locating Dmitry Nazarov six years later hadn’t been easy. Turns out that mafiya kingpins don’t have websites. Eventually she located an address for the Nazarov Companies in Braintree and a phone number that rang and rang and was never answered.

  Now she waited, uneasily, occasionally looking at her phone. Six minutes went by before someone appeared, a guy in his early twenties with a bodybuilder’s physique, wearing a gray suit, open collar, no tie. He approached Juliana and said, like a haughty salesman, “Yes?”

  Juliana fixed the man with her “objection overruled” stare. “I’m here to see Mr. Nazarov.”

  “Who?”

  “Dmitry Nazarov. Tell him it’s Judge Juliana Brody. He knows who I am.”

  The young guy stared malevolently. After a while he turned and left.

  He emerged about two minutes later, and now he was fawning. “Please to come with me, Your Honor,” he said with an awkward smile. “Mr. Nazarov is very happy to see you.”

  He led her along a corridor and then down a hall that ended in a set of double swinging doors that opened into a large, raw space—a big open area with bare concrete floors, steel girders, and a lot of exposed pipes. It looked as though they’d just stopped building the interior. Standing at a steel desk in the middle of the space was a stocky man wearing a black-and-white bowling shirt.

  Dmitry Nazarov was wagging his index finger at someone, a young Asian woman with chunky glasses. “No, you see, we bring these two lots together, with the entrances on these two blocks, here and here, and triple the revenue! Crunch the numbers, you see!” He looked up, pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and he saw her. His face shone. He suddenly extended his hands in the air, like a papal benediction. As he came toward her, he said, “Your Honor, it is my honor!” He laughed, delighted to have cracked a sort of joke. “A jurist of your eminence. To what do I owe this great pleasure?”

  The woman with the chunky glasses left the room. Juliana sat in a chair next to Nazarov’s desk and said, “You once told me that—”

  “Yes, that wish to be granted. Of course. I swore this on my babushka’s grave. Anything that’s within my power.” He placed a palm on his chest. “Is a burden
to carry a debt. A relief, always, to pay it off. Tell me, Your Honor, what can I do?” He was beaming, like a child who’d just been given a puppy.

  When she told him, his smile became a rictus of horror. He looked, Juliana thought, like a child whose puppy had just been run over.

  * * *

  —

  She turned her Lexus left onto Granite Street and looped around to 93 North, the artery that went straight through Boston, thirteen miles of highway. Four lanes of traffic headed north. Traffic was light. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun.

  She glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if she noticed anyone, any vehicle that seemed to be following. She saw a white car behind her, a Dodge, that she thought she’d seen in the Braintree office park. She saw the car’s snout, its aggressive grille.

  It was traveling a little close.

  Then the white Dodge changed lanes and came up on her left, far too close. She accelerated, and the white Dodge accelerated, and then she felt a heavy thud, heard a sickening metallic crunch.

  The Dodge had crashed into her.

  In panic mode now, she swerved away, to the right, setting off car horns, nearly colliding with a blue Toyota. But the Dodge had moved lanes and was immediately on her left, again, and moving in closer.

  She accelerated even faster, and now the Dodge had pulled up even with her, on her left, and far too close. She swerved her SUV one more lane, into the rightmost lane, but the white Dodge followed her over.

  The car was trying to force her off the road.

  Another loud crunch. The Dodge had driven right into her again. She swung the wheel hard right, away, into the breakdown lane, and the Dodge was on her again, and she spun harder to the right. With a shrieking of steel, she’d smashed into the steel guardrails, sparks flying, and she slammed on the brakes. A loud squeal and car horns blaring all around, and she came to an abrupt stop.

  The white Dodge sped away.

  She keyed off the ignition, sat there, breathing hard, trying to steady her heart rate.

  Then a beat-up red pickup truck pulled up ahead of her and also came to a stop, its emergency lights flashing. A large guy with long blond hair and a big potbelly, in his thirties or early forties, got out, wearing an old Carhartt work jacket and a “Make America Great Again” hat. He came over to her.

  “Hey, lady, you okay?”

  “I’m fine, thank you.” She was out of breath.

  “Looked like that guy cut you off. I saw that! I mean, what the hell?”

  “Unbelievable.” She was jittery with adrenaline, which had now flooded her system. Her heart juddered, and her face felt hot.

  “You want me to call the cops? Call you an ambulance?”

  Shaking her head, she said, “Don’t bother. No need.” The last thing she wanted was to be entangled with the police. She knew there was damage to the vehicle, but from where she sat she couldn’t really get a sense of how bad it was. Not without getting out of the car. Which she didn’t want to do, not in the middle of traffic where there was no shoulder and cars passing by all the time now.

  “But thank you so much,” she said.

  After another minute or so she’d calmed down enough to start the car back up, and she was on her way home.

  72

  She was driving on Beacon Street, a mile or so from home, when she pulled up to a traffic light and stopped. Glancing at the sidewalk, she saw a man sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. Something about the man—she looked more closely. If Calvin were still alive, that’s what he would have looked like.

  In her frayed, sleep-deprived state, she remembered their last argument, couldn’t turn her mind away. He’d been hitting her up for money, something he did more and more often. She was finishing law school, living at home with her parents. He was living with his girlfriend, freeloading. She said something about what a mess he was making of his life.

  He lashed back, talked about what phonies Mom and Dad were. At least they weren’t home to hear his rant. She said something about how he wasn’t too proud to take the checks Mom was always writing him. He’d even wheedled her into taking out a second mortgage, and when Dad found out, he practically exploded. And yet he couldn’t be bothered to visit her when she was in the hospital with the mastectomy. “Not once,” she said. “Not once. You take her money, and yet you couldn’t be bothered to visit.”

  “So what? I was touring. And she’s fine. She’s fine. I don’t hear Mom complaining.”

  “Oh, playing at Miller’s Ale House in Scituate is touring? You’re unbelievable. You damage people, Calvin. You damage the people who love you, and you don’t even know it.”

  He was wearing a filthy pair of jeans and his crappy leather motorcycle jacket that gave off that skunky pot smell. She looked with sadness at his bitten-down fingernails, one with a death’s head on it that his girlfriend had painted with black and white enamel.

  If she squinted she could see him as the bouncing eighth grader who led the lacrosse team to victory in the all-district tournament, hoisted up by his teammates to ride their shoulders as they whooped their elation. Neither Mom nor Dad could make it, but Juliana watched it all with a wide smile that seemed to own her face.

  But if she squinted again at his once-handsome face, now bloated, she could almost see him as the middle-aged barfly he was on track to be.

  The argument grew more and more heated. She said he didn’t appreciate the way she was practically a mom to him, all she did for him. “Yeah, and how’d that work out, sis?” he snapped. He called her “Der Führer” because she was such a control freak. It got ugly. By the end he was bellowing at her, red-faced. It was terrifying.

  “You’re nothing!” she yelled at him. “You’re nothing. You’re a goddamned waste of space.”

  He stormed out of the house and jumped into his beat-up Toyota. He raced off, leaving skid marks on the driveway.

  Her memory of what happened after that grew a little vague and disjointed. She remembered watching TV and the phone ringing. The call from the hospital in the middle of the night. They couldn’t save him.

  She remembered being brought in to see the body, which she wished to this day she hadn’t agreed to. Neither of her parents did.

  Later, in that hallucinatory night-into-day, she remembered the police telling her about how Calvin had driven his Toyota through a red light and right into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer.

  The truck driver was fine but shaken. He wasn’t at fault, no question about it. Calvin was drunk, but most of all he was drunk with rage.

  And—this was the most horrible thing of all—she had provoked him into doing it. Why the hell had she gotten it into her head to tear into him that way? She’d told herself she was staging a kind of “intervention.” But if it hadn’t been for her anger that night, Calvin might still be alive. It was her judgmental nature that had directly resulted in Calvin’s death.

  She was always bringing up Calvin with Jake, as if Calvin was some parable of all the reckless decisions he made. But now she realized there was more to it than that. It was really about a fateful decision of her own. About hurting those you love.

  Sitting in judgment upon herself, she found herself guilty.

  The tears were streaming down her face when she was startled out of her thoughts by the loud honk of the car behind her. The light had turned green.

  She took her foot off the brake and drove away.

  73

  My God,” Duncan said, standing at the front of her SUV in the garage, his arms folded. “What the hell happened?” He’d arrived home from work and was at first surprised to see her there, until she’d explained.

  “I told you. The guy tried to run me off the road.”

  “My God,” he said again, and he put his arms around her. “I’m just grateful you’re okay. You could have been killed.”

  She’d bee
n badly rattled, but by the time she got home, she was just weary and numb. “I don’t think he was trying to kill me,” she said. “Maybe just warn me off. There are easier ways to kill a person.”

  “Oh really?” He took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eye, visibly furious. “I think this way almost worked. You could have lost control of the car and spun out and—that would have been it.”

  He opened the door to the house, and she followed him in. “This—this thing with the car, this could just be the first attempt, right?” he went on. “They know where you live, they’ve already broken in once, next time they come back to finish the job.”

  They entered the kitchen. His eyes were wide. “We are not safe here. Where the hell is your CIA guy?”

  “I’ve been waiting for his call.”

  “Well, he’s taking his goddamned sweet time, isn’t he? We have to go to Nantucket tomorrow. We have, what, eighteen hours!”

  “I’ll call him,” she said. “I’ll figure out a way to make this work, with or without the CIA.” She realized she was still jittery from the incident on the highway, her nerves still taut. The numbness was wearing off. “Where’s Jake?”

  “I’m sure he’s upstairs,” Duncan said.

  “Can you make sure?”

  She set down her purse on the counter, took out her phone, found Paul Ashmont’s number among the recent calls in Signal, and hit redial.

  Ashmont answered the phone on the first ring. “Hey. I haven’t been avoiding you. I’ve been striking out all over the place.”

  “Striking out?”

  “Nobody in house wants to sign on to this. Nobody wants a piece of it. Nobody wants to play.”

  “Because of who it is—Protasov?” Even though their conversation was encrypted, she thought twice before saying his name.

  “Too many risk factors.”

  “I understand.”