Final Appeal. Lisa Scottoline

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СКАЧАТЬ see how haggard she looks today. “Now ain’t that pretty?” he says, in a tone men usually reserve for touchdown passes and vintage Corvettes.

      Worrell grunts. “She’s all right.”

      Ray gives him a solid shove. “Listen to you, ‘She’s all right.’ Shit, man! She’s more than all right, she’s fine. And she’s mine, all mine. Right, Grace? Grace?”

      “Right,” I say, preoccupied by the scene on the TV screen, which shows Eletha walking down the hall and into chambers. Bingo. The camera would have seen whoever came into chambers last night, wherever they came from. “Where’s the tape?”

      Worrell looks at me blankly. “What tape?”

      “The tape. The tape of what the camera saw last night.”

      “We don’t tape.”

      “What?”

      “There’s no tape, lady.”

      “I don’t understand.” I look at Ray for confirmation.

      “I coulda told you that, Grace,” he says.

      I don’t believe this. “At the MAC machine they tape. Even in the Seven-Eleven they tape.”

      “Seven-Eleven’s got the money. This is the U.S. government. You’re lucky we got the goddamn judges.”

      Ray looks embarrassed. “Downstairs we tape. The monitors at the security desk, they tape the stairwell and the judges’ garage. Just not here.”

      “But somebody watches the monitors at night, don’t they?”

      Worrell leans back in the creaky chair, plainly amused. “Guess again.”

      “Maybe we should go,” Ray says.

      “Hold on. There’s no night shift?” I hear myself sounding like an outraged customer.

      “We got a fella walks around the halls,” Worrell says, “but that’s it. One marshal. The government don’t have the money for somebody to watch TV all night.” His face slackens as he returns to the screens.

      “All right. Who was the marshal last night, walking the halls?”

      “McLean, I think.”

      “McLean? Is he the big one with the mustache?” The Mutt of the Mutt-and-Jeff marshals I see in the mornings.

      Worrell nods. “Don’t you guys got some work to do?”

      “Let’s go, Grace,” Ray says.

      “Sure. Thanks,” I say, disappointed. So much for the short answer. We start toward the door but Worrell erupts into raucous laughter.

      “Holy shit, what a case this one is.”

      Ray glances at the monitor, then scowls. “I’d love a piece of that guy. He’s not crazy, he knows just what he’s doin.’ Jerkin’ us around.”

      I look back. One of the prisoners is smack in the middle of cell seven, standing on his head. “Jesus.”

      “What a country,” Worrell says. “That jerk’s gettin’ a nice bed for the night, and you know who’s gonna pay for it? You and me. The taxpayers. For him they got the money. For us, no. You talk to your boss about that, okay, lady?”

      But I don’t answer. I recognize the man in the cell. “Ray, let’s go.”

8

      “Shake and Bake is in jail?” Artie says, shocked.

      “Show me where, Grace.”

      “You can’t visit him.”

      “What do you mean I can’t visit him?”

      Eletha looks over wearily, dead on her feet against the bookcase in the law clerks’ office. “That lunatic is the last thing you should be worried about today.”

      “Grace,” Sarah calls from her desk, “what were you doing in the security office?”

      “I wanted to see the cameras.”

      “What cameras?”

      “You know, the ones in the hallways. I wanted to see who’s on the other side.”

      “Why?”

      “I was curious. I wanted to know if they saw anything peculiar.”

      “Is this about the noise?” Sarah asks.

      Ben looks up from the newspaper accounts of Armen’s death. “What noise?”

      “I heard a noise last night, so I wanted to see the tapes, only—”

      “Tapes?” Sarah asks. “You mean of what they see in the cameras?” She flushes slightly, and I play a hunch I didn’t even know I had.

      “Yes. They tape everything, for security reasons. Like at Seven-Eleven.”

      “They do?”

      “Sure.” I look at Eletha. “Right, El? They tape from those cameras.”

      “If you say so,” Eletha says, playing along. “They keep the tapes?”

      Thanks, El. “Yep, in a vault. They said they’d show me tomorrow.”

      Ben presses a button on his computer keyboard. The modem sings a computer song as he logs on to Lexis, the legal research database. “Surprised the government has the money.”

      “Safer, what the fuck are you doing?” Artie asks. “Are you working? Today?”

      “I’m going on Nexis, that okay with you?”

      “What’s Nexis?” Eletha asks, as Sarah suddenly busies herself making a full-fledged tea ceremony out of a single bag of Constant Comment. She has to be the one I heard last night, and she should never play poker.

      “Anybody gonna answer me? What’s Nexis?” Eletha plops into a chair like a much heavier woman. Her chin falls into her hand. “Forget it. Who gives a shit?”

      “Nexis is a database of newspapers,” I say. “It has magazines, newspapers, wire services. Everything.”

      “How do you like that?” Ben says, in his own world as he reads his computer screen. “We’re under HOTTOP. Hightower and the Chief.”

      “Christ, Safer!” Artie says.

      “I need a translation,” Eletha says.

      “HOTTOP stands for hot topics in the news,” I say, the words sour in my mouth. Without thinking twice, СКАЧАТЬ