Джон Гришэм - The Judge’s List

“What kind of mistakes?”

“I’m not going to discuss this on the phone.”

“You called me.”

“Right, and I’m not sure why.” Her line went dead again.

Felicity suddenly appeared at her desk without making a sound and handed over a telephone message, an old-fashioned pink slip. “Better call this guy,” she said. “He was pretty rude.”

“Thanks,” Lacy said, taking the message and looking at her receptionist as if she could leave now. “Please close the door on the way out.”

Earl Hatley was the current chairman of the BJC. He was a former judge, a nice gentleman, and one of the few members Lacy had met over the years who actually cared about improving the judiciary. He must have been holding his phone because he answered immediately. He asked if she could drop whatever she was doing and hustle over to the Supreme Court building for an urgent meeting.

Fifteen minutes later, Lacy walked into a small conference room and was greeted by the four. Earl asked her to have a seat and pointed to a chair at the end of the table. He said, “I’ll skip the preliminaries, Lacy, because we’re running behind schedule, and we have a more pressing matter.”

She showed them both palms and said, “I’m all ears.”

“We met with Charlotte Baskin first thing this morning and she handed in her resignation. She’s gone, moving out today. It was a mutual parting. She was a bad fit, as I’m sure you were very much aware, and we were getting complaints. So, once again, we have no executive director.”

“Am I still employed?” Lacy asked, not the least bit perturbed.

“Oh, yes. You can’t leave, Lacy.”

“Thanks.”

“As you well know, Charlotte was the fourth ED in the past two years. I’ve heard that morale is quite low.”

“What morale? Everybody is looking for another job. We sit over there, year in, year out, waiting for the ax to fall. What do you expect? It’s hard to remain enthusiastic when our meager budget gets cut every year.”

“We understand this. It’s not our fault. We’re on the same team.”

“I know who’s at fault and I’m not blaming you. But it’s hard to do our work with weak leadership, sometimes no leadership, and fading support from the legislature. The Governor couldn’t care less what we do.”

Judith Taylor said, “I’m meeting with Senator Fowinkle next week. He’s chair of finance, as you know, and his staff thinks we can get some more money.”

Lacy smiled and nodded as if she were truly grateful. She’d heard it all before.

Earl said, “Here’s our plan, Lacy. You’re the senior investigator and the star of the organization. You are respected, even admired, by your colleagues. We’re asking you to become the interim director until we can find a permanent one.”

“No thanks.”

“That was quick.”

“Well, so was your request. I’ve been here for twelve years and know my way around. The big office is the worst one.”

“It’s just temporary.”

“Everything is temporary these days.”

“You’re not thinking about leaving, are you?”

“We all think about it. Who can blame us? As state employees, the law says we get the same raises as everyone else, if the legislature is feeling generous. So when they cut our budget, we have no choice but to cut everything but salaries. Staff, equipment, travel, you name it.”

The four looked at each other in defeat. The situation seemed hopeless and at that moment all four could walk out the door, resign, go home, and let someone else worry about judicial complaints.

But Judith gamely hung on and said, “Help us here, Lacy. Take the job for six months. You can stabilize the agency and give us some time to shore up the budget. You’ll be the boss and have complete authority. We have confidence in you.”

Earl added quickly, “A ton of confidence, Lacy. You are by far the most experienced.”

Judith said, “The salary is not bad.”

“It’s not about money,” Lacy said. The salary was $95,000 a year, a nice improvement over her current $70,000. She had never really thought about the director’s salary, at least not in a covetous way. But it was indeed a substantial raise.

Earl said, “You can restructure the place any way you want. Hire or fire, we don’t care. But the ship is sinking and we need stability.”

Lacy asked, “How do you plan to shore up the budget, as you say? This year the legislature cut it again, down to one-point-nine million. Four years ago BJC got two-point-three million. Peanuts compared to a sixty-billion-dollar state government, but we were created by the same legislature and given our orders.”

Judith smiled and said, “We’re tired of the cuts too, Lacy, and we’re going after the legislature. Let us worry about that. You run the agency and we’ll find the money.”

Lacy’s judgment was suddenly clouded with thoughts of Jeri Crosby. What if her suspicions were true? What if the killings continued? As director, interim or not, Lacy would have the authority to do whatever she wanted with Jeri’s complaint.

And she thought about the money, the not insignificant raise. She rather liked the idea of restructuring the office, getting rid of some dead weight and finding younger talent. She thought of her weekend with Allie and the reality that they had not made any progress in planning their future, so a dramatic change in scenery was unlikely, at least anytime soon.

The four smiled at her and waited, as if desperate for the right answer. Lacy kept her frown and said, “Give me twenty-four hours.”

In stalking Ross Bannick, she had learned to work with one crucial assumption: he was a killer with great patience. He had waited five years to kill her father, nine to kill the reporter, twenty-two to kill Kronke, and approximately fourteen to kill his scoutmaster. Finding the point at which his path crossed with that of Lanny Verno, if it happened at all, would require the usual painstaking and dogged digging through a mountain of public records that stretched back for years, even decades.

She was a tenured professor who lectured three days a week and kept somewhat regular office hours. The book she was writing was years past due. She managed to work just enough to satisfy her dean and her students, but she was far too occupied with crime to excel as a teacher like her father. She was divorced and attractive but had no time to even think about romance. Her daughter was doing fine with her graduate studies at Michigan, and they chatted or emailed every other day. Jeri had almost no other diversions from her real calling, her pursuit. She worked hours each night and early into the mornings chasing leads, pursuing wild theories, hitting dead-ends, and burning enormous amounts of time. “I’m wasting my life,” she said over and over in her loneliness.

Jeri guessed that, as an itinerant house painter, Verno didn’t bother to vote, but nonetheless she dug through the registration records for Chavez, Escambia, and Santa Rosa Counties. She found two Lanny L. Vernos. One was too old, the other was dead. Vehicle registration found another one, but he was still alive.

The online locators, both the free and the pricey, found five Lanny Vernos in the Florida Panhandle. The obvious problem was that Jeri had no idea, and no way to know, when her Lanny Verno had ever lived in the area, and, if so, when he moved on. He was definitely not living there when he was murdered. According to the bare-bones police report Kenny Lee obtained from the FBI clearinghouse, Verno’s female companion said they had “been together” for less than two years and lived in a trailer near Biloxi.

If he had a history with women then perhaps he had been through divorce court. Jeri spent hours online digging through those Florida records and found nothing helpful. If he had children scattered around then maybe he’d had support problems, but the court records yielded nothing. As a veteran sleuth with over twenty years of experience, she knew how precarious family and youth court records were. So much of the useful information was sealed for privacy reasons.