Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“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 .”

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—”