Scott Turow - Personal injuries

"We're gonna catch plenty of bad guys," he called as she retreated.

She wheeled and pointed: "I thought we already caught one." I CALL HER EVON, because that's what she called herself She once told me that as a teenager she'd undergone a period of religious passion, in which her complete devotion to God seemed to remove her from normal life, as if she'd acquired the power to levitate or leave her body behind. And now she felt something akin, a limitless stake in being Evon Miller. She'd burned the details into herself. Thirty-four. Mormon family. Born in Boise. Three years of college at Boise State. Married to her high school sweetheart, Dave Aard, a flight mechanic for United with whom she'd moved to Denver. Divorced since 1988. She'd collected a hundred particles of an imagined past with which to spice offhand conversations. When she talked to herself, she called herself Evon. She ate the food Evon Miller liked, she window-shopped in the stores favored by Evon, whose tastes for shorter skirts, brighter colors, bigger earrings were, blessedly, just a little more daring than hers. And at night, she was certain, she dreamed Evon Miller's dreams.

Six weeks ago, the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agentin-Charge of the Des Moines Division, Hack Bielinger, had called her into his office. It was not really an office but a cubicle with a door. In his stubby hands he'd held a Teletype, on pulpy yellow paper. Bielinger was like a lot of the Bureau supervisors she'd had, hard to like, a guy who had moved up because he really wasn't cut out for the street and who still tended to resent the agents he oversaw who were good on the pavement. He was a small, fussy man-people always speculated that he'd fudged the height requirement -a born-again who didn't get what was wrong with bringing up Jesus at lunch.

"Got something interesting for you," he said.

Reading the Teletype, she felt as if somebody had hitched a generator to her heart. The message was from the DD, the office of the FBI's Deputy Director. PLEASE ADVISE RE WILLINGNESS REFERENCED SA TO ACCEPT ASSIGNMENT IN ORIGINATING UCO. K CTY DIV. TERM INDETERMINATE, EST. 6 MOS – 2 YRS. DEEP COVER.

Bielinger wasn't smiling. In fact, he was tense. The DD wanted this, so he had to deliver. That was Bielinger. He said he'd had a call a week ago, kind of unofficial. He'd told them she'd be good.

"They need somebody who's trained as a paralegal." Bielinger shrugged. Why was a mystery to him. But it meant he must have asked, Why her? What's so special about her? The men in the Bureau always had the same reactions: chicks these days get first lick on every lollipop.

The agent who was going to run the op had flown out to meet her. He said to call him Jim, no last name, everything on this deal was strictly need-to-know. But she liked him. Smart. Sober. Quiet. Somewhere on the sunny side of fifty. He was good-looking, despite some chunkiness as he steamed into his middle years, with big glasses and a full head of graying hair that dropped in a boyish sweep over his forehead. He didn't say where he was from, but she figured D.C. He had an HQ finish, and knew all the right names. From the breadth at his shoulders, the way he filled up his shirts, she could see he'd been a jock at some point in his life. She took that as a bond. He had that contained aura of well-being, an aspect of sporting success she'd observed in so many others, especially men, but which somehow had never settled in her.

"It's hard," he said about what he was proposing. "I was under almost a year once." He described the case. He had worked on Wall Street. He was supposed to be a bad guy who ran the back office operations at a big brokerage house, a quiet, sullen suit who manipulated the box count and fenced stolen securities. It was a big sting. They rolled up three LCN-La Cosa Nostra-capos. One more nail in the Gambinos' coffin. "I'm proud of what we did. And on Friday night other agents will always treat you like a hero, especially if you're paying for the beer." A droll grin lit up and passed, a momentary indulgence subject to quick discipline. "But it was hard. And lonely. And dangerous, People's lives depend on whether you get made, and so you're paranoid every minute, every hour. It wears." He repeated that. It wears.

She tried to take that in respectfully, but she told him what she knew she was going to before they started: she was ready. He wanted to know why.

"Forty-four caliber adrenal glands?" she answered. He'd probably already read that in her personnel jacket: first hand raised to help out on a bust, weekends, evenings, even with the local cops; still addicted to the instant of unthinking reaction she first experienced on the playing field.

"Must be something besides that," the man whom she now knew as McManis had said. "You're gonna be putting yourself through a lot." They were in a drab little conference room in the Des Moines Division, his quiet way somehow a contrast to the phones and commotion just beyond. His eyes, pale gray, didn't leave her. In the Bureau, they were always trying to get inside your head. When she'd taken the qualifying test after college, there was a psychological portion and one question still reared up at her at times out of the murky turbulence of nightmares. `If your mother and father were both drowning, which one would you save?' Someday, she'd have to find out the right answer.

She shrugged off his scrutiny now. It was tough to name any grand motive. She wanted it. Who knew why? But his response had rung something inside her.

"My bet,' he said. "is you'll find out."

In his initial debriefings, Robbie had confirmed what the government had already detected, namely, that at any one time there were only a few judges in Common Law Claims with whom he could `talk.' This seemed peculiar to Sennett, since Tuohey had veto power over all assignments to his division. Robbie regarded it as characteristic of Brendan, who had an exquisite instinct for avoiding being exposed. Tuohey wanted Common Law Claims to be known for its cadre of highly capable and unhesitatingly honest judges. Their reputations would armor him with an aura of integrity, while the few exceptions could be passed off as the typical Party debris inevitable with an elected judiciary.

Of the dozen judges to whom Feaver had passed money over the years, most were gone now, retired or transferred to other divisions. If Petros ran perfectly, Robbie would try to secure evidence against them as part of the endgame. But to start, the focus would be on the four judges currently sitting in Common Law Claims with whom Feaver was still doing business. With them, there would be a chance to stage bribes, which, when recorded, would provide the government with the best opportunity to leverage those judges against Tuohey.

When the names of the four judges emerged from Bobbie, I'd been shocked about two, because I knew both men. Sherm Crowthers had been one of the best defense lawyers in this city when I entered practice, a ferocious, angry advocate who, if not always liked, was deeply admired both for his abilities and for the obstacles he'd surmounted as a black man. Hearing Sherm's name had sunk my heart.

Silvio Malatesta, the other judge I knew on Robbie's list, inspired simple disbelief. Malatesta was a donnish, bespectacled Magoo, who never seemed to leave the universe of his own head, through which various elevated legal notions were always tracing like shooting stars. It was amazing to me that he even experienced the material appetites that led to corruption.

As for the other two names, I probably would have guessed them on my own, if I ever had the gumption to speak such slanders aloud. Gillian Sullivan was a lush who'd been coming on the bench loaded in the afternoons for at least a decade and about whom we'd received constant complaints during my term as Bar President. Wandering through her alcoholic wilderness, Sullivan probably thought little about right or wrong. Barnett Skolnick, the last, was the brother of the late Knuckles Skolnick, a former intimate of the departed County Executive, Augustine Bolcarro. Barney was the kind of old-time Party flunky who in my mind was typecast for envelopes of cash.