Was it legal?
That depends on how you feel about Machiavelli. Or, for that matter, about serial killers. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb, the enemy of evil must sometimes borrow from his foe.
“How does it feel to be back, Dyl?” asked Julian, finally looking up from his keyboard. By then, he was simply waiting for SARA to do her thing. We all were.
“Back?” I asked. “You mean in this office?”
Julian knew I was playing dumb. He also knew how to do a few impressions, although Al Pacino from The Godfather: Part III wasn’t necessarily one of them. Not that that was about to stop him.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!” he shouted.
“Always longing for the past,” I said. “What is it with the British? I told you, whatever this is…it isn’t that.”
“But you miss that, don’t you?” he asked. “I know you do.”
“Ah…who’s analyzing whom now?” I said.
“And that’s a nondenial denial,” he retorted.
I looked over at Elizabeth, sizing me up. Whatever she did or didn’t know about my past, it was as if she were seeing me for the first time. “What are you looking at?” I asked, doing my worst Jack Nicholson imitation.
“You tell me,” she said.
Suddenly the sound of Julian clapping filled the room. SARA had found something.
Or, rather, someone.
“Well, what do you know?” said Julian, staring at one of his monitors. “I do believe we have our answer.”
Chapter 74
I WAITED until we were back over the George Washington Bridge, well into Manhattan, before telling Elizabeth she could lower the mask covering her eyes. It was in keeping with the general theme developing for the day. John 9:25: Whereas I was blind, now I see.
“Can’t this damn thing go any faster?” she was soon yelling into my helmet.
Two things. First, complaining about the speed of a beautifully and painstakingly restored 1961 Triumph TR6 Trophy was—in my very biased opinion—like standing in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre and wondering why Leonardo didn’t use a bigger canvas.
Second, we were already pushing seventy.
Make that eighty as we got onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. Next stop, the Bronx and Riverdale, the neighborhood that contains the northernmost point in New York City. We were headed for the Hudson Hill section, to be exact.
If Riverdale is the diamond of the Bronx, then Hudson Hill is the diamond you get at Tiffany’s. About a mile past the Wave Hill House, where Mark Twain once lived, I pulled into the driveway of a sprawling Tudor home half covered in ivy.
“Do you mind taking your shoes off?” asked Arthur Kingsman, greeting us at the front door. “Its not a dirt thing—I just hate the sound of heels against my floors.”
Elizabeth and I promptly removed our shoes.
If Kingsman’s reputation for eccentricity preceded him, what he was wearing above his yellow wool socks all but confirmed it. Technically a red robe, it looked like the silken love child of a smoking jacket and a kimono. “I have tea. You want tea?” he offered.
“No thanks; we’re good,” said Elizabeth.
The words were polite. Her tone, though, was impatient. I couldn’t blame her; I was feeling the same way. It was as if our minds were still back on my bike, hovering near the redline. This was happening fast, yet there was no shaking the feeling. Was it fast enough? The Dealer’s game—did we finally catch up?
“Excuse the clutter,” said Kingsman, leading us into his study. “You know, I can still hear my wife’s voice telling me to tidy things up.”
Fact: Kingsman’s wife had died of breast cancer five years ago.
Somewhere underneath the stacks of files and books was the desk he took a seat behind while pointing us to a couch, the leather so worn and cracked it looked as if it were shedding. Not that Elizabeth noticed. We had barely sat down before she was rattling off the Dealer’s victims.
“Do you recognize any of those names?” she asked.
Kingsman, a lean sixty-two with a shaggy head of gray hair, rolled his eyes behind his thick black glasses.
“This will go a lot quicker, Detective Needham, if you simply tell me why I should,” he said. “For the record, you’re not the only one capable of impatience.”
And like that, he was no longer sitting at his desk. He was at the bench, and his study was now his courtroom.
The Honorable Arthur Kingsman. The rarest of breeds. A strict constitutionalist liberal judge. But that inherent contradiction—and his apolitical reputation, derived from it—had helped propel him from the New York State Supreme Court up to the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. At one point, he was even rumored to be on the short list for the highest court in the land. The fact that he was a former air force pilot with combat history only helped his cause.
The reason he ultimately was never nominated to the US Supreme Court, however, was no mystery. Kingsman was a self-professed atheist. Legal scholars would point to that as being an advantage for a judge, a marker of his objectivity, but try telling that to a red-state senator up for reelection. Or, for that matter, to a blue-state senator.
“All those names I mentioned? They’re all dead, Your Honor,” said Elizabeth. “And at one time or another, they’ve all been in your courtroom.”
Chapter 75
“I KNOW,” said Kingsman.
“Wait—what?” said Elizabeth. “How could you—”
“I mean, I recognize the names,” he said. “All of them except the woman’s, that is. Can you say her name again?”
“Cynthia Chadd,” said Elizabeth.
Kingsman shook his head. “I know the name of every person who has ever stood trial in one of my courtrooms,” he said. “There’s never been a Cynthia Chadd.”
He was right. Unlike all the other victims, Chadd had never stood trial in front of Kingsman. She had, though, been in one of his courtrooms. She had testified for the defense in a hit-and-run case involving the death of an elderly man mowed down in a crosswalk. As for the defendant’s name, the person she swore under oath she’d never met before? It was Rick Thorsen, the man shot to death with her in the hotel room at Tribeca 212 while in flagrante delicto.
Leave it to Julian—and SARA—to track down the witness list buried in the Manhattan DA’s 128-bit-encryption file server.
Sure. It was borderline Rain Man that Kingsman had retained the names of every defendant who had come before him over a nearly thirty-year career on the bench. Even more hard to believe, or so it seemed, was that he hadn’t already made the connection between himself and the victims.
Elizabeth squinted at Kingsman. “You’ve been following the news about this serial killer, right?” she asked. “The Dealer?”
“Following would be too strong a word,” he answered. “I’ve seen the headlines.”
Usually that’s a figure of speech. Not in Kingsman’s case. He literally meant he’d seen the headlines and nothing more.