But the janitor kept walking toward her. “This will only take a minute, Judge Brody,” he said. She was surprised he knew her name. She felt a pulse of fear.
He leaned the broom handle against her desk, then picked up a delicate glass object, blindfolded Lady Justice holding up her scales.
“Judge of the Year,” he said. He had a pronounced, jutting jaw and was staring at her intently.
She felt the breath catch in her throat. He was a tall, powerfully built man wearing a tight, tan T-shirt. She could see the ropy muscles along his shoulders and his arms.
“I’m sure you were worthy of the prize.”
She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“It’s fragile,” he said. “Like everything we most love in life.”
He looked as though he could crush the glass statuette in his giant bare hands. Then abruptly he let go, and it smashed on the floor, shattering.
She gasped and stepped back, terrified, as he picked up something else from her desk, a silver picture frame. Her favorite picture, of her and Duncan and the kids in the middle of a pumpkin patch in autumn. He admired it for a few seconds.
“Excuse me,” she said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that back!”
“A precious thing, a family,” he said.
“Please,” she said quietly. Her heart hammered. “Put it down.”
“A lot of things are more fragile than you realize, Judge. It’s so much easier to break things than to put them back together.”
“What the hell do you want?” she said desperately.
“I know people like you; you think you can just turn the page, not be haunted by the past. What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago, right? But maybe that’s not how it really works.”
“What do you want?”
“Some people say who we are is the sum of everything we’ve ever done. In other words, no backsies. No hitting the Delete key in life, right? All you have is what you’ve done and what you’re gonna do. When you make one rash decision, the only way out is to make a smart one. You ready to make the smart choice?”
He tossed the frame toward her, casually. She surprised herself by snatching it out of the air, a perfect catch.
“Is there a problem?” he said in a soft voice.
Her heart was pounding wildly. She set down the frame carefully on her desk.
“I’d like to know if we have a problem.”
She just looked at him. He pointed at the broken glass strewn on the floor. He began to sweep it up. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “That’ll all be gone in a minute.” He swept the jagged pieces into one neat pile. “You have a decision to make,” he said. “You don’t want to make the wrong one.”
22
For a long while after the man left, she sat at her desk, heart racing, adrenaline pulsing through her body, as the sound of the janitor’s bucket thumped along the hallway, one squeaky wheel, faded away. She felt light-headed. She wondered whether the man had intended to go through her office, her files, after hours, when she was usually gone. Had they sent someone to go through her files and notes at home too? Or had he come here just to threaten her? Because if that’s all it was, it had worked perfectly. The guy hadn’t needed to pick up the picture frame; she’d gotten the message. They could go after her family. No longer was the threat just her public shaming, discrediting, through the release of a video. Now her family was in the crosshairs too.
She waited for her heart rate to steady, then picked up her phone, texted Duncan.
Just checking in. All good here, you?
She waited, staring at the phone, for the three little dots that meant he was typing a reply. A long time went by, but no return text.
Then she called Duncan’s phone.
“Hey, what’s up?” he answered.
She exhaled, long and hard. “Just checking in,” she said. “Everything good?”
“Sure, just making dinner.”
“Okay. See you soon.”
“Okay.”
She hit Philip Hersh’s number.
He answered after a few rings: “Judge Brody.”
She heard loud noises in the background, the cacophony of a crowd. “Can you run fingerprints?” she said.
“It’s not something I usually do, but theoretically I can. I’ve got a buddy on the police force. Why, what do you have?”
“A picture frame,” she said. “Some guy just threatened me. Threatened my family. If I don’t make the right decision.” Just telling him brought it back to her. It was starting to sink in, what had happened. She could almost see the man: the steel-framed glasses, the shaved head, the ropy muscles. Is there a problem?
“Physically?”
“Sort of. I mean, he didn’t touch me, but he could have. He broke some glass. Point is, they’re escalating, whoever these people are. Now it’s not just some video. It’s— I don’t know, you just—”
“Hey, Judge,” Hersh said quietly. “I’m here, okay? I’ll do anything I can.”
For a moment she thought she might burst into tears from the tenderness in his voice. “Thank you, Philip.”
He said nothing.
She said, “Did you find out anything about Mayfair Paragon?”
“No. No trace of it online. You say it’s, what, a company?”
“Must be. Wheelz’s general counsel said she needed ‘accredited investor forms,’ whatever they are, on something called Mayfair Paragon. But she kept getting turned down. Something about those documents she wasn’t allowed to see.”
“So it’s an investor in Wheelz?”
“I assume so, yes.”
“There’s no mention of Mayfair Paragon in any of the business databases, nothing in social media, nothing. Nada.”
“That’s not possible. There has to be a record of it somewhere.”
“Here’s what I know,” he said. “Five years ago Wheelz almost went out of business. Ran out of money. People talked about Uber, about Lyft, but no one ever mentioned Wheelz, because it was never a real competitor. Not even an also-ran. It was a company on its deathbed. Then three years ago, all of a sudden, everything turns around for Wheelz. Suddenly they’re loaded. Some British firm sinks a billion dollars into it in exchange for fifty-one percent of the company.”
“Which British firm?”
“It’s called Harrogate Capital Partners. A venture capital firm.”
“So they own Wheelz.”
“Right. Most of it.”
“And who are they? I want to know who they are. These people who are threatening my family.”
“Understood, Judge. I’m on it.”
Her phone chimed a text-alert sound. “I need to go,” she said. “Thank you, Philip.” After she ended the call, she looked at the text. It was from Duncan:
Don’t pick up J, he’s at home.
She was confused: the SAT prep class went on for another half hour. She called Duncan.
“Where are you?” he said when he answered.
“Courthouse. I forgot something. What’s going on with Jake — did the class end early?”
“Jake bailed.”
“Bailed?”
“He took an Uber home. Just showed up here. He says he doesn’t want to sit through it anymore.”
“He can’t — just do that.”
“I don’t know how we force him to take it.”
She sighed into the phone. “I’ll see you soon,” she said.
Half an hour later she arrived home, put down her stuff, then went up to Jake’s bedroom. She stood for a moment outside his closed door and tried to focus. She was distracted and tense and kept thinking about the man who’d threatened her. Is there a problem? How bizarre was her life, she thought, that she had to cope with such different problems at the same time, problems of such different scale. Jake and his apathy, whatever he was going through — and now a threat to her family, a matter of life and death.