Twenty minutes passed before Alex emerged, heading south on Oak. Rossi gave her a head start before following, puzzled when she didn’t turn into the garage where he knew she parked her car. He was even more curious when she crossed Twelfth Street, angling toward the Jackson County Courthouse. She wasn’t carrying a file or a briefcase, so he doubted she had a hearing. He couldn’t imagine a less likely place for Alex to go to lay down her burden.
He stopped on Oak, just north of Twelfth, standing in the shadow of a bail bonds office, and watched her enter the courthouse because he couldn’t follow her immediately without her seeing him.
Once she was inside, he trotted across the street, past the bronze statue of a mounted President Andrew Jackson, the county’s namesake, and up the stairs to the courthouse doors. Peering through the glass, he saw her standing in front of the lobby elevators.
When she disappeared into one of the elevators, he went inside, the deputies waving him through security, and watched as her elevator door slid shut. The number of each floor was displayed above the elevator, lighting up as the elevator reached that floor. The car in which Alex was riding made its first stop on the fifth floor. Rossi watched the numbers. When the car began its descent, he took the stairs to the fifth floor, coming out in the center of a wide, oval-shaped rotunda ringed by four courtrooms. Doors at each end opened into interior corridors leading to offices for each judge’s staff and chambers.
It was near the end of the lunch hour, and the expansive hallway was filled with lawyers, litigants, jurors, and courthouse personnel getting ready for their afternoon sessions. Alex wasn’t among them and she wasn’t in any of the courtrooms.
She could have gone into one of the interior corridors to see a secretary, law clerk, or judge, but that didn’t make sense if he was right about her reason for being there. And he couldn’t go prowling through those offices without having to answer more questions than he could ask.
There was another possibility. She could have realized he was following her, led him to the fifth floor, and jumped on another elevator, giving him the slip. Either he was wrong about her knowing something about Robin Norris’s death or she’d beaten him again.
Chapter Sixteen
Alex stood outside judge West’s courtroom, looking through the glass set in the upper half of the swinging double doors at the lawyers huddled in front of the bench. The court reporter had moved alongside them with her steno machine to capture what they were saying in hushed voices the jury couldn’t hear, while the jurors studied ceiling tiles and the handful of spectators checked their e-mail. It was twelve forty, well past the usual time for a lunch break, but Judge West was notorious for long sessions and short recesses.
Knowing that he had to break sooner rather than later, Alex decided to wait for him in his chambers, hoping his secretary and law clerk had gone to lunch so she wouldn’t have to make up an excuse for a private, unscheduled meeting with the judge. She let out a quick sigh of relief when she found their offices empty, sucking in a sharp breath as she stood in front of the closed door to Judge West’s chambers. She hesitated for a moment, debating whether to let herself in, deciding that Wheeler and Rossi hadn’t left her a choice.
She’d always felt uneasy in his chambers even before they became coconspirators. It wasn’t just his prickly gruffness or the perpetual dusk he maintained with drawn shades and muted lighting. And it wasn’t the dark woodwork and black leather chairs or the absence of any trace of kith or kin. It was how well the shadows suited him.
In her nightmares, he strode toward her on legs welded from steel prison bars, swinging arms made of long-handled gavels in punishing arcs at her head, his corpulent body bursting at the seams as a putrid discharge boiled over his collar. He kept coming at her, his eyes shrunk to red slits, his mouth torn in an executioner’s snarl, until she turned and ran, only to be caught by Dwayne Reed, who pinned her against the wall, one hand clamped around her throat, the other ripping at her clothes until she broke free, pulling a gun, both of them laughing at her until she pulled the trigger again and again and woke up screaming.
Alex never told her therapist that Judge West haunted her dreams along with Dwayne Reed. Physician-patient privilege was not a safe enough sanctuary for that confession. Nor did she tell Bonnie, too afraid that once Bonnie tugged on that thread, she wouldn’t stop until she’d unraveled her.
She understood why she couldn’t escape him in her dreams, but that wouldn’t stop her from confronting him about Robin Norris’s death. Had he told Robin how to handle Jared Bell’s case? Had she refused and unwittingly signed her death warrant? What would drive him to such extremes? She would demand answers, and if she wasn’t satisfied, she’d go to Rossi and tell him everything because there wasn’t room on her conscience or in her dreams for Robin.
The door from the hallway swung open, making her jump, clutching her hand to her chest, wondering how she would explain her presence in his chambers to Judge West’s secretary, until she realized it wasn’t his secretary. It was a wan-faced, slim-shouldered man dressed in a charcoal-gray suit, his silver hair buzzed close to his scalp, patchy in places. A round gold pin the size of a quarter was stuck to his lapel, an eagle perched at the top, its wings wrapped around the sides.
“Oh,” the man said, staring at her through his black-framed glasses, his eyes more curious than startled.
Before Alex could answer, Judge West came through the door from the courtroom, his black robe billowing around him like a storm cloud. He glanced at Alex and the man, then, hanging his robe on a coat stand, lumbered to his desk and dropped into his chair.
“Her I know,” he said, pointing at Alex, “but who the hell are you?” he asked the man.
The man chuckled and tugged at his collar, then shook his head. “I’m sorry. I get so turned around in these big buildings I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go or how to get there. I’m looking for the probate court and I’m guessing this isn’t it.”
“Next floor down,” the judge said.
“Thank you, and I’m sorry for intruding,” the man said and left.
“Who was that guy?” Judge West said.
“Beats me,” Alex said. “I’ve never seen him before.”
“Jesus fucking Christ! I’ve told the county a dozen times we need more money for courthouse security and they keep telling me I’m crying wolf. Well, mark my words, one of these days, some nutcase is going to waltz right past our five-and-dime security team of overweight and out-of-shape deputies and spray a few hundred rounds into a jury pool, and then we’ll see who’s crying wolf, by God!”
“He didn’t look too dangerous to me. He was probably an out-of-town lawyer who doesn’t know his way around the courthouse.”
“That’s not the goddamn point, Alex. The goddamn point is that a stranger walked right into my chambers and nobody asked him who he was, why was he here, and did he have an appointment.”
Alex nodded.
“For that matter, I could say the same thing about you, except for the part about you being a stranger. So what are you doing here?”
He was a bully and bluster was his natural state. At times, she let herself believe that he’d bullied her into joining forces to railroad her most heinous clients into a life behind bars, but in her honest moments she knew that wasn’t true. She’d been a willing partner. He’d exploited her guilt-driven weakness, but that didn’t make him responsible for what she’d done. She owned that, which made it easier to stand up to him in spite of his threat to ruin her life.