Scott Turow - Limitations

‘What’s going to happen to me?’ John finally asked at the door.

That is no small question. The imperatives are the same as when he thought the culprit was Cassie: George cannot forgive this on his own. Marina, the county police, the FBI, and Bar Admissions and Discipline all have to be informed. John is facing a penitentiary term and loss of his law license at B.A.D.’s order. Now that his raging internal drama had leaked into the world of causes and effects, Banion appeared utterly bewildered.

‘John, I’m afraid you should find a lawyer,’ the judge said. That advice, unfortunately, constituted his good-bye.

With the Warnovits opinion out of his hands, and his tormentor dispatched, George feels the way he did years ago on the all-too-rare occasions when he won an acquittal. The sight of his client restored to freedom after the intense intellectual and physical exertion of the trial resounded not as evidence of justice-too often George knew the man was guilty-but as proof of the rattling power of his own will. In that mood, he became a whirlwind of high energy able to move through the mountain of neglected tasks that had arisen on his desk.

Now he trips downstairs to the chief file clerk for the court.

“I want to pick up my retention petition,” George tells him. He fills out the single-page form on the spot, asking for two copies, one of which he carries up to the Chief Judge’s secretary. Rusty, as it happens, sees George through the open door and waves him into his private chambers.

“Well, this is two pieces of good news in the same day,” the Chief says, holding the petition.

“What’s the other?”

“Nathan Koll resigned effective the end of term.”

“You’re kidding.”

“He says no job is worth death threats. He carried on as if it were my fault. Wants me to arrange a year’s police protection.”

“You think he’ll tell the cops where he lives or just ask them to blanket a mile-square sector?”

They laugh about Nathan.

“I’m afraid he doesn’t have as much to fear as he thinks, Rusty.”

As George explains about John, the Chief falls into a chair.

“What in the hell?” he finally asks. “What could he possibly have been thinking?”

“It’s the usual goofy story,” George replies. “The more John watched the tape, the more wound up he got, and the more he blamed me for making him do it. He was in that state one day when I stepped out for a second and on impulse he went to my computer and sent the first e-mail to some nonexistent address, knowing it would bounce back and appear on my screen.”

“ ‘You’ll pay’?”

“ ‘You’ll pay.’ After he’d done it, he had second thoughts, especially about getting caught. How many people could possibly have had access to my machine? So when I was out again, he erased the original message, and the copy in my Sent file, and then, in order to deflect attention from the message that had come from my computer, he resent it twice from his own through an open relay server.

“And that was basically the cycle. Raging, acting out, then remorseful and afraid of getting nabbed. Of course, I was too distracted about Patrice to pay much attention at first, which only honked John off worse and made the next messages more pointed.”

“And where was he when he was doing this?”

“He says he sent almost all of the messages from his laptop while he was in his office, maybe forty feet from me.”

“Help me here,” Rusty says. “Isn’t this the clerk who saw one of the early messages and told you to call Court Security?”

“Sure, he’d sent it, and while it was crossing the Internet he walked in to watch my reaction.”

“But why did he tell you to bring in Marina?”

“Well, first of all, he wanted me to be scared. He had to act as if we’d seen the reaper. And what better cover than to be the one who says ‘Call the cops’?”

Rusty gives a bitter snort: people.

“The other thing,” George says, “that really lit John’s fuse was the idea that I might let those kids get off. He was desperate for big-time punishment.”

“Teach me a lesson,” Rusty says, “by teaching them. Who says there’s no point to vengeance?”

The two friends by now are sitting side by side in wooden armchairs in the center of the Chief’s vast chambers and exchange the same rueful smile.

“Anyway,” George says, “as I kept giving him assignments on the case, John realized that I was bothered about the limitations question. Apparently, I said as much to him on the day of oral argument. That’s what inspired the death-watch message. And after the conference, Purfoyle’s clerk told him I seemed pretty serious about reversing. So he notched it up again and sent that e-mail to my home. But nothing flipped him out like talking to me face-to-face. There I was, this fellow he used to admire, ready to free the devil’s minions. So he got out his nuke. He had my cell phone by then.”

“And how did he get his hands on it?”

Apparently, George says, he’d dropped the cell in the rear corridor outside the Gresham’s ballroom. Hotel security found it the next day and called Banion, because he’d inquired only a few hours before on the judge’s behalf.

“John said he was always on the verge of giving it back and claiming the hotel had just found it, but he was already sending messages by then. I’m sure that as soon as he picked up the phone, he realized it would give him a great new way to scare the bejesus out of me.”

The Chief rakes a hand through his graying hair as he ponders.

“You think this guy hears voices, Georgie?”

“I think he’s a troubled, lonely guy. And I hit his crazy bone.”

“He would have gone off sooner or later.”

“I just don’t know.” That will remain the hardest part for George. “He told me I always want to be the best person.”

“Imagine that,” says his old friend.

“And that he was afraid to disappoint me.”

The Chief takes a second to consider George. He has not lost his good humor, but he has stopped smiling in favor of a one-eyed squint.

“George, this was not your fault.”

“I could have-”

“No,” says the Chief. “Sainthood is not required. You’re entitled to some limitations.”

George could say more. But Rusty, a rigorous man of the law, will never see this from anything but a legal perspective, which deems John a criminal and everyone else blameless. The two are silent for a second, each man with his own thoughts.

“Okay,” Rusty says eventually, “I understand why your clerk figured you did him wrong. But why start picking on Koll?”

“Oh,” says George. He’d forgotten that part. “The more John ratcheted up the threats, the more scared he was of the consequences. You’ve seen this weather pattern: daring to get caught, afraid he’ll get caught, afraid he won’t. The staff knew that Marina and the Bureau weren’t getting anywhere in their investigation. But the one suspicion I’d asked her to keep to herself was about Corazon-just to damp down any hysteria. When John sat in on that meeting with Marina and realized how committed she was to nailing Corazon, he became convinced he could skate. So he tried to gin up a little more evidence. He remembered that Koll had been on Corazon’s panel. And, given John’s feelings about reversing Warnovits, he was happy to stick it to Nathan anyway.”

“There you have it,” Rusty says about the threat to Koll, “it’s a law of nature. Even the bubonic plague did some good.”

“But now John was trying to do impressions of a gangbanger. Which was why that message looked like seventh grade.”

“He didn’t have anything to do with those thugs in the garage, did he?”