Limitations Read Free Page B

in anything worse than a couple of manacled ex-clients, glowering at him across a courtroom, where they were appearing after a new arrest.
    But the cool intelligence of #1’s messages makes them more difficult to discount. They are unsigned, unlike most of the threatening correspondence George has received over the years, its erratic authors always eager for him to recall exactly whom he wronged. And, of course, recent events in Cincinnati, where a state court trial judge and his family were found murdered, have left everyone wearing a robe feeling more at risk.
    The first returned message had simply said: ‘You’ll pay.’ George had taken it as a mistake and apparently deleted it. But there was a second and a third with the same words within hours. George imagined they were spam. You’ll pay-less. For car insurance. Mortgage payments. Viagra. Two days later, another followed: ‘I said you’ll pay. You will.’ Since then there have been several more, each adding a new phrase making their meaning unambiguous. ‘You’ll pay. With blood.’ And then: ‘Your blood.’ Then, ‘You’ll bleed.’ At last, ‘You’ll die.’ His permanent law clerk, John Banion, had just entered the judge’s chambers when the message mentioning death popped up on George’s screen, and he’d asked John to take a look. Banion appeared far more shaken than his boss and insisted on calling Court Security.
    Court Security has arrived again now, in the person of its good-natured chief, Marina Giornale, who barrels into the reception area while George is still behind Dineesha. Less than five one, Marina makes up for size in energy. She issues greetings to the accompaniment of her raucous, rattling smoker’s laugh and applies her usual robust handshake. She sports a black mullet, and no cosmetics. With the long khaki jacket that’s part of her uniform and a wide black belt circumscribing her middle, she has the hefty look of a freezer in a packing crate.
    “Is ‘Death Watch’ a real Web site?” the judge asks, as he shows her into his large private chambers. George closes both doors, one leading to the reception area, the other to the small adjoining office shared by his two law clerks.
    “Oh, yeah. I was on the phone with the webmaster all morning. He keeps telling me it’s a free country.” George Mason IV was one of the driving forces behind the Bill of Rights, and the judge often amuses himself by wondering how many hours it would take in today’s America before his famous forebearer gave up on the First Amendment. There is no liberty that is not also the pathway to vice. The Internet has bred defiant communities of lunatics who once huddled in shamed isolation with their unsettling obsessions.
    “So what did the Bureau say?” George asks when he’s behind his large desk. Marina has taken a wooden armchair in front of him.
    “They’re going to run forensic software on your drive,” she says, “when they get a chance, but they figure they have ninety-nine percent of what they’ll find from capturing the e-mail headers.”
    “Which is?”
    “Long short, there’s no way to tell who’s doing this.”
    “Great,” George says.
    “How much do you know about tracing e-mails, Your Honor?”
    “Not a thing.”
    “Me neither,” she says. “But I take good notes.” With another hacking laugh, Marina fishes a small notebook from her jacket pocket. Marina is a cousin of the legendary and long dead Kindle County boss, Augustine Bolcarro. Nepotism being what it is, George had once assumed she was overmatched by her job. He was wrong. A former Kindle County police detective and the daughter of another dick, Marina has the crafty intuitions of somebody tutored over a lifetime. She has responded personally whenever he calls and, even more admirably, realized that her own staff, stretched thin by constant County budget cuts, will require assistance. She’s involved the FBI, who are willing to help out since use of the